Johanna Müller-Hermann (1868–1941) was an Austrian composer. The daughter of a high-ranking civil servant, she received music lessons at an early age, but in accordance with the circumstances of the time, she was not able to pursue her musical ambitions any further, but graduated from a teacher training college and taught for several years at a Viennese elementary school.
With her marriage in 1893 to Otto Müller-Martini, she was no longer required to work and could continue her musical studies - which she did with a vengeance. Her teachers included Alexander Zemlinsky, Josef Bohuslav Foerster, and Franz Schmidt. Her Opus 1, Seven Songs, was printed in 1895. Public performances of her works took place at the Vienna Musikverein and at women's composition evenings. In 1918 Johanna Müller-Herrmann succeeded her teacher Joseph Bohuslav Foerster as professor of music theory at the New Vienna Conservatory.
[Image from Dutch-language Wikipedia]
She left behind an extensive body of work: songs, chamber music, large-scale works for solos, choir and orchestra, mostly on a literary and programmatic basis. After her death, Wilhelm Furtwängler, among others, championed the preservation of her work. 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, which may be due to 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.
The String Quintet has the following movements: (1) Allegro moderato ma energico, (2) Allegro Vivace, (3) Adagio con espressione and (4) Introduzione Adagio–Allegretto grazioso. It is played by Pawel Zalejski, Violin; SongHa Choi, Violin; Klaus Christa, Viola; Danusha Waskiewicz, Viola, and Kajana Pačko, Violoncello.