Background
Antony Heinrich was born on March 11, 1781, at Schönbüchel, Bohemia, Czech Republic. He started composing only at 36.
Antony Heinrich was born on March 11, 1781, at Schönbüchel, Bohemia, Czech Republic. He started composing only at 36.
Antony Heinrich emigrated to America in 1805, as he claimed in 1850, “actuated by curiosity, ” although it is more than likely that he came for financial reasons. About 1810 he was director of music at the Southwark Theatre in Philadelphia. Before 1814 he revisited Europe by way of London, returning to America in 1816. After acting in Philadelphia and Baltimore as agent for a Trieste merchant, Heinrich retired in 1818 to Bardstown, Kentucky, where his career as a composer seems to have begun. A few years later he reappeared at Boston after having published at Philadelphia in 1820 The Damning of Music in Kentucky, or, The Pleasures of Harmony in the Solitudes of Nature. Opera Prima. This collection of compositions for piano, voice or voices, violin, and other instruments, the most ambitious American publication of its kind and time, was reviewed at length in 1822 in the Euterpiad of Boston where Heinrich in 1823 is known to have been organist at the Old South Church. As late as 1910 a reviewer in the Musical Times of London pronounced the music almost equal to that of Sir Henry Bishop.
Some time after 1826 Heinrich made a second visit to England where in 1831 he was a violinist at the Drury Lane Theatre. In 1832 he reappeared in Boston. From 1834 to 1837 he revisited Europe, giving a concert of his works at Gratz in Styria on June 9, 1836. Soon afterward he settled in New York where he presided in 1842 at the meeting for the foundation of the Philharmonic Society. He left America in 1856 or 1857 for a last professional trip to Europe where, at Prague, on May 3, 1857, a concert of his works took place as “Vater Heinrich’s Concert. ”
After his Kentuckian “opera prima” Heinrich produced an amazing quantity of works, small and large, but only a few of his “fugitive pieces” and “occasional compositions, ” of which he presented two volumes on September 23, 1857, to the National Museum in Prague, were published. Among the unpublished apparently was the very bulky “Sylviad or Minstrelsy of Nature. An old Work, Vocal and for the Pianoforte” which he listed as “lost by fire in Boston” and as ”№ 72” in die “Nomenclature” of his works. This list, compiled about 1857, forms a part of his voluminous book of “Memoranda” which is now a principal source of information about his career. It was acquired by the Library of Congress with many of his major works, the majority in his own hand. Most of them employ an unusually large orchestra. Nevertheless, while these works, even in their own day of somewhat obsolete style have lost their musical interest, historically they retain their significance because Heinrich, an odd mixture of simple-minded sincerity and freakish eccentricity, presumably was the fitted composer deliberately to essay “Americanism in music, and to build many of his works on American subjects. Occasionally he employed Indian themes for the purpose.
Heinrich was twice married. His second wife, an American, died in Boston in 1817.