Emil Hartmann

Emil Hartmann
(b Copenhagen, 21 Feb 1836; d Copenhagen, 18 July 1898). Composer and organist, son of (2) Johan Peter Emilius Hartmann.

He was taught music theory and the organ by his father and the piano by Anton Rée. A series of songs written during his childhood was later published under the title Smaasange for ungdommen. He made his public début as a composer in 1858 with the Passionssalme. In 1859 he collaborated with his future brother-in-law August Winding on music to Bournonville’s Fjeldstuen, emulating the success of Et folkesagn, the ballet his father had written with Gade for Bournonville. He studied in Leipzig in 1860 and on his return in 1861 became organist of St John’s, Copenhagen. In 1871 he moved to the Christiansborg Palace church, where he remained until his death.
Although he was by profession a church musician, Hartmann wrote a great deal for the theatre. His early stage works of the 1860s and 70s failed to equal the success of his first ballet, but his later compositions of this kind made a much stronger impression. Nevertheless it was his instrumental music that established his reputation, including symphonies and concertos, and works inspired by Scandinavian subjects, for instance the overture to Ibsen’s Haermaendene paa Helgeland and the symphonic poem Hakon Jarl, a subject immortalized by his father. His arrangements of Scandinavian folksongs and dances, Skandinavisk folkemusik, gained an established place in the musical repertory in Denmark and abroad.

In Denmark Emil Hartmann was inevitably overshadowed by his father. However, he often travelled abroad conducting his own works and achieved a recognition that he felt he was denied at home. Walter Niemann (1906) observed that it was due primarily to Emil, and especially through Haermaendene paa Helgeland, that the name Hartmann was known in Germany. It is evident from the subjects of many of his works that he shared the national feelings of his father and Gade, but his style and expression, shaped no doubt to some extent by the Mendelssohnian atmosphere at Leipzig, is nearer to that of Gade than to the more profound nationalism of his father.