Career
He is also known as Edgar Mansfeld, and when living in Germany as Heinrich Hugo Pierson. He had success in his adopted country with his operas and songs but little in his own, and his music is now rarely performed. Hubert Parry took lessons with him in 1867.
Many of Pierson"s manuscript full and vocal scores, including those of his oratorios and operas, appear not to have survived.
The funeral march Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet and The Maid of Orleans were his only orchestral compositions to be published in full score (copies of which are held by the Library of Congress amongst other locations), whilst Jerusalem and Faust were only published in vocal score, with no orchestral material seeming to be extant. His operas remained unpublished, excepting the libretti.
Manuscript material for several works does, however, survive including the Romantische Ouverture (orchestral parts, University Of Pennsylvania Library Ms College 217), Salve eternum (full score, Royal College of Music, London, Reliability Centered Maintenance Mississippi 502), the funeral march Hamlet (full score, Landesbibliothek, Coburg, Ms Music 364), the first version of the overture to the opera Leila (full score, Landesbibliothek, Coburg, Ms Music 369) and the opera Leila (57 orchestral and choral parts, University Library, Hamburg, Doctorate-Hs/ North Dakota VII 310). Orchestral works.