For most of his career he was known as "Father Heinrich," an emeritus figure of America's small classical music community.

[2] Born in modest circumstances in Schönbüchel (now Krásný Buk, part of Krásná Lípa), Bohemia, Heinrich was given into the care of a rich uncle, whose thriving business empire he inherited in 1800.

The sights and sounds of the new American frontier inspired some of the most original, if not strange, program music of the nineteenth century.

[citation needed] Settling in a log cabin near Bardstown, Kentucky (1818),[3] he began to produce a body of work unlike anything being written in Europe at the time.

[8] Heinrich was successful in his European tours, undertaken because of a lack of competent orchestras in the United States in the period before the American Civil War.