In accordance with the circumstances of the time, however, she was unable to pursue her musical ambitions; instead she graduated from a teacher training college and taught for several years at a public education school in Vienna.

Public performances of her works took place at the Vienna Musikverein and at women's composition evenings, where she also met Mathilde Kralik von Meyrswalden.

In 1918 Johanna Müller-Herrmann succeeded her teacher Joseph Bohuslav Foerster as professor of music theory at the New Vienna Conservatory.

Müller-Hermann wrote an oratorio, Lied der Erinnerung: In Memoriam, to a text by Walt Whitman, and a symphonic fantasy on the Ibsen play Brand.

[2] According to Dr Carola Darwin, "The contribution of women to Vienna's creative life at this period has been largely forgotten as the result of Nazi ideology, as well as the general destruction of the Second World War... Johanna Müller-Hermann's works deserve a much wider hearing, not only because of their intrinsic quality, but also because they were an integral part of the Vienna's extraordinary creative flowering.