Harriet Cohen

Harriet Pearl Alice Cohen CBE (2 December 1895 – 13 November 1967) was a British pianist.

Harriet Cohen was born in London.

Her younger sister was the singer Myra Verney (1905-1993) and she was a distant cousin of the pianist Irene Scharrer.

She studied piano at the Royal Academy of Music under Tobias Matthay, having won the Ada Lewis scholarship at the age of 12 followed by the Sterndale Bennett Prize in 1913.

She made her debut at a Chappell's Sunday concert at the Queen's Hall a year later.

At this stage Cohen also had ambitions to be a composer: her Russian Impressions for piano (composed circa 1913) became her only original compositions to be published.

Her first major appearance was in 1920 when she appeared at the Wigmore Hall in a joint recital with the tenor John Coates.

She became particularly associated with contemporary British music, giving the world premiere of Ralph Vaughan Williams' Piano Concerto (which was written for her) and recording Edward Elgar's Piano Quintet with the Stratton Quartet under the composer's supervision.

A number of composers wrote music specifically for her, including John Ireland, Béla Bartók, Ernest Bloch and E. J. Moeran, and particularly Sir Arnold Bax (Cohen's lover), who wrote most of his piano pieces for her.

She gave the first 'all-Bach' recital at the Queen's Hall in 1925.

She also cultivated Spanish music, and gave the second performance of Manuel de Falla's Nights in the Gardens of Spain, a work which became especially associated with her.

She became strongly associated in the 1930s with publicising the plight of German and Austrian Jews and even played a concert with the scientist Albert Einstein (Alfred's cousin) in 1934 to raise funds to bring Jewish scientists out of Germany.

She became a close friend of Eleanor Roosevelt and Ramsay MacDonald as well as the first president of Israel, Chaim Weizmann.

Cohen was also a close friend of many leading figures of the time.

These included not only musicians such as Jean Sibelius, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Sir Edward Elgar and Sir William Walton, but also writers such as Arnold Bennett, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells and D. H. Lawrence as well as politicians or entrepreneurs such as Max Beaverbrook and Leslie Viscount Runciman.

Cohen became one of the most talked-about and photographed musicians of her day.

She was vice-president of the Women's Freedom League, and was for several years associated with the Jewish National Fund and the Palestine Conservatoire of Music at Jerusalem.

Harriet Cohen met the American journalist Dorothy Thompson in 1930 on her first tour of America, a tour which took in New York, Washington and the Library of Congress and Chicago, thus finally establishing a name for herself on the International stage.

It was a meeting that was to change Cohen's life and awaken her Jewish consciousness.

In 1933 Harriet Cohen travelled to Vienna to play a number of concerts, staying with Dorothy Thompson.

She was profoundly moved by the plight of refugees, both Jewish and non-Jewish, who were pouring into the city from Germany.

Thompson and Cohen were to correspond about the plight of Jewish refugees in Austria and Germany.

Cohen was then able to pass on information from Thompson directly to the British Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, who was at this time her intimate friend.

Cohen met Thompson every time she went to America thereafter.

From 1933 Cohen committed herself to work in Britain and the United States on behalf of refugees.

This would result in a concert in America with Albert Einstein in 1934 to raise funds to bring Jewish scientists out of Germany.

She was also an early exponent of music of the Soviet Union in Britain, and visited Russia in 1935 to broadcast from Moscow and Leningrad, including works by Shostakovich, Kabalevsky and Leonid Polovinkin.

These composers later sent her further compositions.

Cohen's influence went well beyond that of a musician.

Cohen was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1938.

This includes the music for David Lean's 1948 film version of Oliver Twist.

He also composed Concertino for Left Hand for her after she lost the use of her right hand in 1948.

The last six pieces in the collection Mikrokosmos by Bartók are dedicated to her.

Harriet Cohen dedicated an important effort to the performance of the Tudor composers at a time when this was unusual, and gave recitals of works by William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons and also of Henry Purcell.

She was considered one of the finest performers of J. S. Bach's keyboard music, winning outstanding praise from the musicologist Alfred Einstein.

Pablo Casals, also, invited her to play Bach with his orchestra at Barcelona, and Wilhelm Furtwängler extended a similar invitation on hearing her in Switzerland.

The Harriet Cohen International Music Award was introduced in her honour in 1951.

She was the subject of This Is Your Life in 1959 when she was surprised by Eamonn Andrews at the BBC Television Theatre.

She died in London.

Her ashes rest in the Memorial Gardens at Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire.