Anthony Philip Heinrich

Heinrich was the first fully professional American composer, and the first to establish a European reputation. He was an arch-Romantic whose Berliozian orchestration and idealistic instrumental demands kept his 38 orchestral scores from being heard except on rare festival programs during his lifetime, though these occasions were always greeted (both here and in Europe) with great interest and enthusiasm. "The War of the Elements" is explicitly programatic only in its coda, a tone-painting of Niagara Falls in which continuous flurries of 16th-notes in the violins and woodwinds (led by reinforced flute and piccolo lines) are punctuated by reeling syncopations from the brass and 6 independent percussion lines, culminating in an fff soli for timpani and bass drum just before the final chords.