Johanna Müller-Hermann was an influential Austrian composer and educator of early 20th century Vienna. Her style is often described as lively and expressive, with a uniquely rich sense of harmony. She was born in Vienna in 1868 and her father was a high-ranking civil servant. Müller-Hermann and her two sisters lived comfortably and received the best possible education, which included music lessons. Although her musical aptitude was obvious at a young age, her father decided that she would pursue a career in education, and he sent her to a college for teachers. After her graduation in 1890, she began teaching at a public school in Vienna. In 1893, she married Otto Müller-Martini, who was a successful transportation engineer. His financial status made it possible for her to leave her appointment as a teacher, and she resumed her music education with lessons from Joseph Bohuslav Foerster, Guido Adler, Alexander von Zemlinsky, and Franz Schmidt. She published Seven Songs for voice and piano, Op. 1 in 1895, and through performances at the Vienna Musikverein, her reputation as a composer quickly grew. Over the next ten years, she composed two additional song cycles and several pieces of chamber music such as the Violin Sonata, Op. 5, String Quartet, Op. 6, and String Quintet, Op. 7. She began teaching music theory at the New Vienna Conservatory in 1918 after her former teacher Foerster resigned and traveled to Prague. She was part of a significant women’s movement in Vienna that included many other major talents, such as the educator Eugenie Schwarzwalk, writer Else Kotanyí-Jerusalem, and artist Teresa Ries. Müller-Hermann’s music was performed alongside the works of icons such as Berg, Mahler, and Schoenberg, but several circumstances have pushed her into obscurity. Nazi forces of the late 1930s didn’t allow women to contribute to society as artists and musicians, and they closed the school where she taught, which ended her teaching career. Also, her tonal style wasn’t popular with the modernist movement that composers of the time and academia embraced. Müller-Hermann was active as a composer until around 1940, and she passed away in 1941 in Vienna. Much of her worklist remains unrecorded, but in 2023, her music was featured on the albums Befreit: A Soul Surrendered, Johanna Müller-Hermann: Piano Quintet Op. 31; Violin Sonata Op. 5, and Burnished Gold. ~ RJ Lambert, Rovi