Johanna Müller-Hermann

Johanna Müller-Hermann (15 January 1878 – 19 April 1941) was an Austrian composer and pedagogue.

She gave up her career as a primary school teacher after her marriage and became a composer. She studied under Alexander von Zemlinsky and Josef Foerster, and took over from Foerster as a theory and composition tutor at the New Vienna Conservatory in 1918. She was one of the foremost European female composers of orchestral and chamber music in her day. Despite her contemporary fame, not much has been written about her.

According to Dr Carola Darwin, "The contribution of women to Vienna’s creative life at this period has been largely forgotten as the result of Nazi ideology, as well as the general destruction of the Second World War... Johanna Müller-Hermann’s works deserve a much wider hearing, not only because of their intrinsic quality, but also because they were an integral part of the Vienna’s extraordinary creative flowering."

Müller-Hermann wrote an oratorio, Lied der Erinnerung: In Memoriam, to a text by Walt Whitman, and a symphonic fantasy on the Ibsen play Brand. Her Lied der Erinnerung: In Memoriam (1930) is a work of grand scale. It employs a large orchestra, a chorus, and solo voices. This piece follows the tradition of Arnold Schoenberg's Gurre-Lieder. Müller-Hermann may have been directly acquainted with Schoenberg, as suggested by a letter she wrote to him in 1911.