Ernst Heinrich Hoffmann (June 18, 1899–January 3, 1956) was an American conductor who served as the music director of the Houston Symphony for eleven years.
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.
During this time he met Annemarie Clara ("Mini") Hoffmann (her maiden name), a native German teacher of mathematics and languages, whom he married in 1922, and with whom he had one child, a son, Clifford (born in 1927).
Hoffmann was a popular figure in Houston, and his tenure on the podium there was the longest of any music director to that point.
En route to Indiana following a Christmas 1955 visit to their son in Houston, Ernst and Annemarie Hoffmann died in an automobile accident near Clarksdale, Mississippi, on January 3, 1956.