Johanna Müller-Hermann on BBC Radio 3

[Droosbury]

I don't think that this has been flagged up yet, but Johanna Müller-Hermann is to be Composer of the Week on BBC Radio 3 beginning on Monday 6 March. Her teachers included Labor, Zemlinsky and Foerster and she went on to a distinguished teaching career of her own at the Neues Wiener Konservatorium. Full details of the five programmes (including much music that I've not yet heard) can be found here:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001jlgh

[Wheesht]

Thank you for mentioning this. I wonder why the wrong birth year 1878 (instead of 1868) keeps cropping up, albeit this time 'only' in the title and not the body of the text on the BBC website. (I also wonder what can have happened to my reply when I first posted it yesterday... it disappeared as if I had never entered it.)

[Droosbury]

It would seem that Wikipedia might be the culprit here (an ever-useful reminder to take its entries with a pinch of salt):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johanna_M%C3%BCller-Hermann

[Ilja]

Wikipedia is no more or less susceptible to repeating errors than any work of reference in my experience, but it does have the huge advantage of users being able to correct them.

[Gareth Vaughan]

Quite right, Ilya. I am sure we can all point to egregious errors in very reputable works of reference (Grove, for example).

[Ilja]

As an aside (sorry, Alan), the institute where I work has digitized several biographical works of reference over the years; the earliest from the 1710s, the latest from the 1980s, totaling about 120,000 biographies. I've yet to find the first person whose biography is presented consistently and without contradictions across all of them. 

That is not necessarily an accusation against the editors of biographical works of reference: lives are complicated and multi-faceted, new information can reveal itself, and an eighteenth-century person is bound to set different priorities than someone from the twentieth century. But it does emphasize how a medium like Wikipedia, where information cannot only be adjusted but adjustments can always be tracked, is so valuable.