Bernhard Heiden

Biography

Bernhard Heiden (b. Frankfurt am Main, August 24, 1910; d. Bloomington, Indiana, April 30, 2000) was a Jewish emigre from Nazi Germany and a German-American composer who taught as a professor at the Indiana University School of Music from 1946 until his retirement in 1981.

The son of Martha (née Heiden-Heimer) and Ernst Levi, Heiden was originally named Bernhard Levi and later changed his name. Drawn to music as a youngster, he composed his first pieces at age six. When he began formal music lessons, he learned music theory in addition to three instruments: piano, clarinet, and violin. Following his secondary schooling at Frankfurt's noted Goethe Gymnasium, where a classmate was the later émigré author Richard Plant, Heiden enrolled at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin in 1929 at the age of nineteen and studied music composition under Paul Hindemith, one of the foremost German composers of the twentieth century. In 1933, his last year at the Berlin conservatory, he was awarded the Mendelssohn Prize in composition. He was subsequently employed as an orchestral clarinetist.

In 1934 Heiden married pianist Cola de Joncheere, who had been a classmate at the Hochschule für Musik. In 1935 they left Nazi Germany and emigrated to Detroit, where Heiden taught at the Art Center Music School for eight years. During this time he conducted the Detroit Chamber Orchestra in addition to giving piano, harpsichord, and general chamber music recitals. After being naturalized as an American citizen in 1941, he enrolled in the United States Army in 1943 and served as an Assistant Bandmaster of the 445th Army Service Band, for which he made over 100 arrangements. After the close of World War II Heiden enrolled at Cornell University and received his Master's degree in 1946. That year he joined the faculty of the Indiana University School of Music, where he served as chair of the Composition Department until 1974. He was named an emeritus professor in 1981 and continued composing music up until his death at the age of 89 on April 30, 2000.

Heiden's music is described by composer Nicolas Slonimsky as "neoclassical in its formal structure, and strongly polyphonic in texture; it is distinguished also by its impeccable formal balance and effective instrumentation." Much of Heiden's music is for either wind or string chamber groups or solo instruments with piano, though he also wrote two symphonies, an opera (The Darkened City), a ballet ("Dreamers on a Slack Wire"), and vocal and incidental music for poetry and several of Shakespeare's plays.

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