Koenig Sheet Music and Biography
Herman Koenig was born in Germany in 1815. After leaving his homeland and travelling to London he became famous as a cornet soloist.
We have a few versions of his Post Horn Galop for you to try out.
He was also a successful composer, publisher, music educator and heavily involved in designing cornets, specifically the Koenig Cornet.
Career
Koenig was part of Louis Jullien’s famous Drury Lane Orchestra in the early 1840s.
In 1853 Louis Jullien handpicked twenty-seven musicians including Koenig to form an orchestra to tour the United States. This was the first major tour of a European Orchestra in the New World. They incorporated a further one hundred American musicians during their travels.
Herman also became involved in instrument making and collaborated with the instrument dealer Pask to form Pask & Koenig. In 1855 he became highly involved in designing, developing, and marketing the Koenig Cornet in F for the French instrument-maker Antoine Courtois. Over the next couple of years, he was busy developing two further cornets for Courtois.
Only a few of his compositions exist today, his most famous being the Post Horn Galop. Herman was the soloist when he premiered the piece at a winter concert in Covent Garden in 1844. The Galop is still played today at hunt balls and wedding receptions, marking the ending of the event.
Watch this performance of the piece by the Band of Royal Lancers.
Herman’s preference was the sound of the German post horn. However, as a teacher, he advised his students to practise on the smaller English horn to enable their improvement of lip flexibility and technical agility.
Herman was supposedly of the opinion that a cornet could challenge the human voice if it was “skillfully played and similarly treated”.
Koenig Sheet Music Downloads and Further Reading
On music-scores.com we have a few arrangements of Herman Koenig sheet music in PDF format for you to download.
There is little biographical writing on the internet about this composer but angelfire have a few words to say.
