Asger Hamerik [Asger Hammerich] Biography

Danish composer, conductor, and educationist. In spite of parental opposition to his musical career (his father was a theologian), he studied with Gade and J. P. E. Hartmann in Copenhagen, with Bülow in Berlin, and finally ( 1864 – 9 ) with Berlioz in Paris—he seems to have been Berlioz's only pupil. His Hymne à la paix, written for the World Exposition in Paris in 1867 (and now lost), showed his teacher's influence: it was scored for wind band, chorus, two organs, and 12 harps. After Berlioz's death, Hamerik visited Italy and Austria, where the American consul in Vienna proposed that he take up the directorship of the Peabody Institute in Baltimore. Hamerik moved to Baltimore in 1871 , returning to Copenhagen only in 1898 .

Although Hamerik was the most prominent Danish symphonist between Gade and Nielsen , the early focus of his career was on opera (he wrote four). With the move to the USA, where he had an orchestra at his disposal, he began to concentrate on orchestral music, and many of his works—seven symphonies (excluding a youthful, unnumbered effort from 1860 ) and five Nordic Suites—were written for himself to conduct; he wrote little after his return to Europe. His music, which emerges from that of Gade and Hartmann , and has a hint of Schumann , often uses the Berliozian idée fixe; his Requiem ( 1886 – 7 ) echoes Berlioz's in its sense of scale and space.

Martin Anderson