Henry Hugo Pierson

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Henry Hugo Pierson

Henry Hugo Pierson , originally Henry Hugh Pearson (born April 12, 1815 in Oxford , † January 28, 1873 in Leipzig ) was a German composer of English origin. He was also known under the pseudonyms Edgar Mansfeld , Edgar Mansfeldt and then, living in Germany, as Heinrich Hugo Pierson .

Life

Pierson was the son of an Anglican clergyman who at the time of his birth at St John's College (Oxford) worked and later Domdekan of Salisbury Cathedral was. In 1836 he enrolled at Trinity College (Cambridge) . In 1839 he came to Central Europe to study music and studied primarily with Christian Heinrich Rinck , Václav Jan Křtitel Tomášek and Carl Gottlieb Reissiger . From August to October 1842 he took Mary Shelley and her son Percy Florence Shelley, whom he knew from Trinity College, on a trip from Dresden via Prague, Linz, Salzburg, Innsbruck, Verona, Venice and Florence. On his return to Great Britain he was appointed Reid Professor of Music at the University of Edinburgh in 1844 . Since there were disputes, however, he resigned from this office in 1845 and went entirely to Germany in the same year. From 1863 he lived in Stuttgart . In his adopted home he was particularly successful with operas and songs. In particular, his incidental music for Goethe's Faust II , premiered on March 25, 1854 in Hamburg , was performed repeatedly until the first years of the 20th century. From 1860 he composed a number of pieces for male choir . He is also known in Germany because of a melody that he originally composed for Thomas Campbell's Ye mariners of England and then in 1860 for Ludwig Bauer's national anthem Persevering! had been revised, to the melody of the German nationalist song O Deutschland, which was very popular during the First World War . Hubert Parry took lessons from him in 1867.

At the beginning of the 1840s, Pierson had an affair with the then very famous improvisation (impromptu poet) Karoline, geb. Leonhardt (1811–1899), who was still married to Johann Peter Lyser at the time. He married her after her divorce from Lyser in 1844. The couple had three sons and a daughter; also two sons and a daughter from Caroline's first marriage to Lyser; one of the sons, Reginald Henry Holmer Pierson (1846–1906), ran the Lindenhof sanatorium (today Coswig Specialist Hospital) in Coswig (Saxony) from 1880 . The other two sons Edgar Mansfield Pierson (1848–1919) and Henry Pierson (1851–1902) founded the then well-known Pierson'schen Verlag in Dresden after their studies , which Edgar later successfully ran alone and in 1889 Bertha von Suttner's Die Arms down! appeared.

Pierson was buried in Sonning, Berkshire .

Works

  • Incidental music for Faust. The second part of tragedy (1854) Complete piano reduction with German and English texts. Schott, Mainz [approx. 1858]
  • Macbeth. Symphonic poem for large orchestra; op. 54. (1859) Schuberth, Leipzig [approx. 1890]
  • Romeo and Juliet

Operas

  • The Elf Victory , 1845
  • Leila. Hamburg 1848
  • Contarini. Hamburg 1872
  • Fenice. (posthumous) 1883

Oratorios and sacred music

  • Jerusalem. 1862
  • Hezekiah . 1869 (fragment)
  • The Office of Holy Communion. Simpkin, Marshall, London 1870

Songs

  • Characteristic songs of Shelley . Novello, London c. 1835; Breitkopf & Härtel, Leipzig approx. 1839
  • Six songs by Robert Burns . Leipzig 1842

Fonts

  • “Ludwig van Beethoven's studies in figured bass, contrapoint and composition theory, collected from his handwritten estate and edited by Ignaz Ritter von Seyfried. Second revised edition with completed text by Henry Hugh Pierson (Edgar Mansfeldt), qd Professor of Tonkunst at the University of Edinburgh. “Schuberth, Leipzig / Hamburg / New York 1853 (also English edition)
Digitized version of the German edition in the Google book search
Digitized version of the English edition in Google Book Search

literature

  • Alice Pollin, Burton R. Pollin : In Pursuit of Pearson's Shelley Songs. In: Music & Letters 46 (1965), No. 4, pp. 322-331.
  • Karl Reisert: O Germany in high esteem: the German Trutzlied: its poet and composer, its origin and tradition; with portraits, manuscript samples, musical and other additions. Stürtz, Würzburg 1917.
  • Nicholas Temperley: Pierson [Pearson], Henry Hugo [Hugh] , in: New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians 2nd edition, XIX, pp. 731-733.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Nicholas Temperley: Henry Hugo Pierson, 1815–73. In: The Musical Times 114 (1973), No. 1570 (Dec. 1973). Musical Times Publications Ltd., pp. 1217-1220 ( online ).
  2. ^ Temperley (lit.): German composer of English origin .
  3. ↑ Alice Pollin, Burton Pollin: In Pursuit of Pearson's Shelley Songs. Music & Letters, Vol. 46, No. 4 (Oct. 1965). Oxford University Press, pp. 322-331 ( online ).
  4. ^ Franz Brümmer:  Pierson, Karoline . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 53, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1907, p. 58 f.
  5. ↑ Reviewed by Robert Schumann in Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 8 (July 1842), p. 32ff.
personal data
SURNAME Pierson, Henry Hugo
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Pearson, Henry Hugh; Mansfeld, Edgar (pseudonym); Mansfeldt, Edgar; Pierson, Heinrich Hugo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German composer of English origin
DATE OF BIRTH April 12, 1815
PLACE OF BIRTH Oxford
DATE OF DEATH January 28, 1873
Place of death Leipzig