Semicommuting and Commuting Operators for the Heun Family

We derive the most general families of first- and second-order differential operators semicommuting with the Heun class differential operators. Among these families, we classify all the families that commute with the Heun class. In particular, we find that a certain generalized Heun equation commutes with the Heun differential operator, which allows constructing a general solution of a complicated fourth-order linear differential equation with variable coefficients whose solution cannot be obtained using Maple 16.