Ernst Hoffmann

Who was Ernst Hoffmann?

Ernst Heinrich Hoffmann was an American conductor who served as the music director of the Houston Symphony for eleven years.

Hoffmann was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His father was a violinist in the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Although Ernst was an accomplished musician in his youth, during which he studied piano with the noted Harold Bauer, he enrolled in the anthropology program at Harvard University. Hoffmann was graduated cum laude in that discipline, whereupon he was offered a position on the Harvard anthropology faculty. He chose instead to go to Germany in 1920 to study music at the conservatory in Berlin. During this time he met Annemarie Clara Hoffmann, a native German teacher of mathematics and languages, whom he married in 1922, and with whom he had one child, a son, Clifford.

Following his Berlin studies, Hoffmann performed as a violinist in Berlin theatre orchestras, often under the baton of the eminent Richard Strauss. In 1924 he was appointed conductor-in-chief of the Breslau Opera and Philharmonic, a position he held for ten years until, under the advent of Hitler's regime, he was declared unacceptable for the position because of his American citizenship.