Heinrich Kaminski
Heinrich Kaminski was a German composer. He was born in Tiengen, the son of the priest Paul Kaminski, who took part in the formation of the Old Catholic Church in Bavaria. Kaminski attended an Old Catholic boarding school and later studied philosophy and political science at Heidelberg University.
He subsequently decided to devote himself to music and began taking lessons in Heidelberg with Philipp Wolfrum. From 1909 to 1914 he studied in Berlin at the Stern Conservatory with Pavel Juon, Wilhelm Klatte, and Hugo Kaun in composition, and with Severin Eisenberger in piano.
After completing his studies, Kaminski returned to Upper Bavaria and taught piano in Benediktbeuern. His first pupil was the wife of the painter Franz Marc, and he was also friends with Emil Nolde. He later returned to Berlin, where he led a composition class from 1918 to 1933. His best-known pupils included Carl Orff and Reinhard Schwarz-Schilling.
Kaminski lost three children but continued to work until the end of his life. In 1945 he completed the opera The Game of King Aphelius, which was staged in 1951.
Many of Kaminski's works are connected with the church tradition and tend toward polyphony and, in part, neoclassicism, as in Music for Two Violins and Harpsichord (1931). He was interested in theosophy and in a synthesis of different religious and philosophical views; his 1929 motet The Earth was written to a text by Zoroaster.