Peter Arnold Heise, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death
TweetPeter Arnold Heise
Danish composer
Date of Birth: 
Place of Birth: Copenhagen, Capital Region of Denmark, Denmark
About Peter Arnold Heise
- Peter Heise (11 February 1830 – 12 September 1879) was a Danish composer, best known for the opera Drot og Marsk (King and Marshal). Heise's parents tried to press him into becoming a lawyer, but he scored highly in music at school, so he changed direction.
- He began writing songs at the age of 19.
- As a young man he collected several hundred folk songs directly from ordinary people.
- He used these tunes in Tornerose (Sleeping Beauty) and Bergliot (A Danish historical romance).
- He studied under Niels Wilhelm Gade, who was a major influence on his style.
- From 1857 to 1865 he was a teacher and organist at Sorø Academy.
- He did a setting of Hans Christian Andersen's poem Jylland mellem tvende Have (Jutland between two seas) in 1860. The opera Drot og Marsk tells the story of the murder of a medieval king, and contains some folk ballads.
- It shows a Wagnerian influence.
- His setting of the Shakespeare song When I was and a little tiny boy and Five Erotic songs are also in print.
- Many of his songs, usually for soprano and piano, concern dreams, folk-tales and the Middle Ages.
- Although his instrumental works are almost uniformly excellent, because of the tremendous popularity of his songs, they were overlooked.
- Among his chamber music works are 6 string quartets, a piano trio, a piano quintet, and a number of instrumental sonatas His Piano Quintet in F Major, composed in 1869, was widely regarded as the best Danish piano quintet.
- Unfortunately, the work remained in manuscript for 140 years.
- However, in 2009, the world premiere edition of the parts to the Quintet was published by Edition Silvertrust.
- They have also reprinted his Cello Sonata (1867) and his Two Fantasy Pieces for Cello and Piano.
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