Finding Heinz Moehn

Composer, music editor, choral and orchestral director - Heinz Moehn’s musical life was multifaceted.

As a music director, he cultivated musical life in the German cities of Wiesbaden and Mainz, from before the Second World War to long afterwards. As an important music editor for the publishing companies Bärenreiter and Schott from the 1940s onwards, he contributed to editions of scores by Mozart, Haydn, Handel, and many other canonic composers. Since he was interested in new styles of composition, he also worked with major figures in early and mid-twentieth-century music, including Hans Werner Henze and Ernst Krenek, helping to rebuild a modern German musical legacy that had been suppressed by the Third Reich.

Fascinatingly, Moehn’s career as a composer was fragmented. He composed the majority of his forty or so works in the 1920s and 30s, added a handful in the 1940s, and wrote a few more near the end of his life. Given this fractured trajectory, it might be fitting that his Music for Violin and Orchestra, which enjoyed its North American premiere and second ever performance in a concert by the Saskatoon Symphony Orchestra on 23 March 2019, has been rediscovered in such a distant time and place from its premiere.

For this project, Dr. Amanda Lalonde, the Saskatoon Symphony Orchestra, and a team of University of Saskatchewan students researched the life and work of Heinz Moehn and created the first recordings of his music.

Acknowledgements

The project director, Dr. Amanda Lalonde, would like to thank Johannes Dyring and family for access to Heinz Moehn's manuscripts and other materials, and for their great interest in the project. She would also like to thank Dean McNeill for introducing her to Johannes Dyring and sparking this project.

Dr. Amanda Lalonde is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.