Louis Coerne

Who was Louis Coerne?

Louis Adolphe Coerne was an American composer and music educator. He was born in Newark, New Jersey, and was educated at Harvard University, where he studied under John Knowles Paine, and in Europe.

Coerne wrote a number of pedagogical pieces for piano, and also composed a number of orchestral works, one of which, the tone poem Excalibur, was recorded by Karl Krueger with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in the late 1960s, and reissued on CD in 2006 by Bridge Records. His cantata, Hiawatha, was premiered in Munich in 1893 and performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1894.

Coerne's opera, Zenobia, premiered in Bremen, Germany, in 1905, and was the first opera by an American composer to be performed in Germany. Earlier that year, Harvard had conferred on Coerne the degree of Ph.D., with the score of Zenobia and his book, The Evolution of Modern Orchestration, serving as his thesis.

Other operas composed by Coerne:

A Woman of Marblehead

Sakuntala

The Maiden Queen

Coerne taught at Smith College, Harvard, and Connecticut College. He died in Boston, Massachusetts, on September 11, 1922.