Heinrich Henkel

Heinrich Henkel was a German composer and music educator born in 1822 in Fulda. He was the son of the city organist Michael Henkel, a student of Johann Gottfried Firlung, and received his first musical training from his father. Until the age of seventeen he studied with him and gained practical experience in organ performance in a local church.

Henkel later continued his education in Frankfurt under Alois Schmitt, studying piano, and subsequently with Johann Anton André, with whom he learned harmony, theory, and composition. André developed a close relationship with Henkel, employing him as an assistant in work on the archive of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. As André’s eyesight deteriorated, he dictated to Henkel a counterpoint textbook, which Henkel published after his teacher’s death with a preface of his own.

Henkel worked for some time in Fulda and Meiningen, and between 1846 and 1847 improved his piano skills in Leipzig under Julius Knorr. From 1849 onward he was based in Frankfurt, where he composed piano pieces and songs, taught music, and in 1860 founded a piano school together with I. C. Hauff. He also established a choral society that initially focused on church music but later expanded its repertoire, presenting the first Frankfurt performance of Robert Schumann’s oratorio "Paradise and the Peri".

His compositions included songs, piano works, and several choral pieces, among them a Te Deum dedicated to Kaiser Wilhelm in 1870. Henkel published biographies of both his teachers, André and Schmitt, although many of his pedagogical works, including a History of Music and a Method for Teaching Keyboard Instruments, remained in manuscript form.

In 1890 Henkel received an honorary doctorate from the University of Marburg. His son, Karl Henkel, later became a noted violin pedagogue and author of a collection of exercises. Henkel died in Frankfurt am Main in 1899.

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