Heinrich, Anthony Philip (1781–1861)

Bohemian-born US composer. Popular throughout the main US music centres of the time, New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, he became known as the ‘Beethoven of America’. Heinrich's experiences of the frontier included a deep awareness of American Indian music, and in The Jubilee (1841), a work for soloists, chorus, and orchestra, he depicts the story of the British colonists in America.

He emigrated to the USA in 1810, settling first in Philadelphia then moving to Kentucky in 1817; in Lexington he conducted the first known performance of a Beethoven symphony in America. His first compositions date from 1818; they include the collection of songs and violin and piano pieces entitled The Dawning of Music in Kentucky, or the Pleasures of Harmony in the Solitudes of Nature. His orchestral music, often for huge forces and developing from models by Haydn and Beethoven, dates from 1831 with Pushmataha, a venerable Chief of Western Tribe of Indians; later such works include The Treaty of William Penn with the Indians (1834), The Ornithological Combat of Kings (1847), and The Wildwood Troubadour (1834–53). He visited Europe from 1827 and his Ornithological symphony was performed in Graz, Austria, in 1836. Other works include The War of the Elements and the Thundering of Niagara (c. 1845), for orchestra, and A Chromatic Ramble of the Peregrine Harmonist, for piano. His status in the history of American music is suggested by his nickname, ‘Father Heinrich’.