Hilda Sehested
Hilda Sehested was born on 27 April 1858 into a noble family at the Broholm manor on Funen and died on 15 April 1936 in Copenhagen.
As part of the general education that was required of women of Sehested’s social class, she was taught piano and music theory as a child. Sehested did not attend the conservatory, but began receiving private piano lessons from the composer C.F.E. Horneman as a 15-year-old in 1873. From 1886 she studied composition privately with Orla Rosenhoff.
Sehested expressed a desire to free herself from her home environment and her social duties at Broholm and in 1892 moved to Copenhagen. There she was closer to the musical life of the capital and like-minded, aspiring musicians and composers.
Sehested became engaged to the archaeologist Henry Petersen, who, however, died shortly before their planned wedding in 1896. Following this, she stopped both her lessons with Rosenhoff and composing. In the following years, she tried to find a new path in life and trained as an organist. She obtained her graduation certificate in 1899, but is not known to have held office as an organist afterwards.
It was not until 1900 that she returned to her old musical circle and began to compose and publish music again. In 1903 she published the works Piano Sonata in A Major and Intermezzi for Violin, Cello and Piano, and the following year began composing for wind instruments. In 1905 she wrote Suite for Cornet in Bb und Piano, which in 1915 was adapted into the Suite for Cornet and Orchestra. The compositional style of the piano sonata was described by her teacher Orla Rosenhoff as “hyper-romantic,” believing that it was influenced by her love of Wagner and Schumann.
In 1913!–!1914 she wrote her first and only opera Agnete og Havmanden, to a text by the author Sophus Michaëlis, and which was accepted for performance at the Royal Theatre. Due to the 1st World War and the shortage of materials caused by the war, the staging had to be cancelled.
By the 1910s, she had achieved recognition as a composer, and her works were performed by several soloists and ensembles. The orchestral pieces Lygtemænd and Mosekonen Brygger were both performed at a composition concert in 1915, where Politiken’s reviewer wrote that Sehested proved to be a “really talented lady.”!
Sehested’s penchant for composing music for wind instruments continued, and in the mid-1920s she wrote the two major works for trombone Morceau pathétique pour trombone avec accompaniment de piano in 1924 and Course des athlètes du Nord. Morceau symphonique pour trombone avec orchestra ou piano in 1925.
In the last ten years before her death in 1936, Hilda Sehested suspended her career as a composer.
By Maria Claustad
