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SPOTLIGHT ON HISTORYSPOTLIGHT ON HISTORY
Anthony Philip Heinrich: America’s
Log House Composer
A
mong the musicians who played in the New
York Philharmonic Society’s fi rst concert
in 1842, one member of the viola section
could lay claim to being the nation’s chief composer
of orchestral music. A nthony Philip Heinrich had by
that year written at least a dozen such works, most of
them still unperformed.
Born in Bohemia (today the Czech Republic) in
1781, Heinrich visited the United States in 1805 as a
merchant and part-time musician and returned in- After the Napoleonic Wars wiped out his family’s
fortune, Heinrich, at the age of thirty-six, decided to
embark on a musical career—on the western frontier,
rather than in the cities of the East. From Philadel-
phia he traveled in 1817 to Kentucky, where he lived
alone in a log cabin near Bardstown and, inspired
by his encounter with the wilderness, began to com-
pose: at fi rst songs and violin pieces, then piano
pieces, and from the 1830s on, pieces for orchestra. In
1820 he published The Dawning of Music in Kentucky, a
collection of vocal and instrumental pieces.
In 1823 Heinrich left Kentucky for Boston, where
he served as a church organist, probably played in
theater orchestras, taught, and published a new col-
lection: The Sylviad, or Minstrelsy of Nature in the Wilds
of N. America. A Boston reviewer, John Rowe Parker,
praised the music’s “boldness, originality, science,
and even sublimity,” arguing that Heinrich “may
be justly styled the Beethoven of America.” To Parker,
Heinrich “seems at once to have possessed himself
of the key which unlocks to him the temple of sci-
ence and enables him to explore with fearless secu-
rity the mysterious labyrinth of harmony.”
Heinrich’s orchestral works draw Romantic
inspiration from nature; some attempt to depict
American Indian life, such as Pushmataha, a Venerable
Chief of a Western Tribe of Indians (1831), The Wild Wood
Spirit’s Chant (1842), and Manitou Mysteries (1845).
Little performed in the composer’s day or since,
these works evince Heinrich’s conception of him-
self as an artist striving not to please audiences but
to serve the art of music. “Possibly the public may
acknowledge this, when I am dead and gone. I must
keep at the work with my best powers, under all dis-
couraging, nay suffering circumstances.”K This image of Anthony Philip Heinrich (1781–1861)
as the Log House Composer of Kentucky is found in his
The Sylviad, a collection of pieces for keyboard, voice, and
other instruments.172028_05_106-131_r3_ko.indd 124 23/01/13 8:21 PM