Helen Fry
Music and Men: Unveiling the Life of Harriet Cohen, Part 1

Helen Fry - Music and Men: Unveiling the Life of Harriet Cohen, Part 1

- I’m going to be talking today about a concert pianist who in her day was one of the most famous concert pianists of the 20th century. She was Harriet Cohen, and this is part of a two part lecture series on her. So part one today and part two next week. So do tune in for both parts. So I dunno how many of you, whether you are of that generation where you will have heard of Harriet Cohen, her friend and cousin, Myra Hess was much more famous now and being remembered for her World War II concerts. But in actual fact, in her day, Harriet Cohen was even more famous. So I’m going to look at her life up to the 1920s today, and then from part two next week I’m going to look at the 1930s and into World War II when she makes a trip to Palestine as it then was her involvement in Zionist causes. But I want to look at the early Harriet today, and I’ve written her biography. I’m the only one to have written her biography and it is titled very aptly “Music and Men.” Now, I’m a historian. I’m known for being a historian and not a musician or a historian of music. But what I discovered about Harriet’s life was so intriguing that I absolutely had to write her biography. And it was about 20 years ago that I was researching on Jewish refugees that had come to the United Kingdom, and I wanted to know about a number of refugees who’d settled in the southwest of England in a region known as North Devon, which was an area where I’d grown up. And somebody said to me one day, “Well, what you need to do is you need to look at Harriet’s cousin.”

And Morris Prince, her cousin, owned the local cinema in Barnstable in a town, an old market town called Barnstable. And he was involved in saving refugees. “So hopefully you’ll get something because I’m sure Harriet,” they said to me, “will have linked up with her cousin.” Harriet was based in London. Her cousin was running a number of theatres and cinemas in North Devon and beyond. So I made contact with his executor because he’d already passed away himself. By the time I got the story, Morris Prince had passed away. And the executor said to me, oh, because he tied it up, all of Morris’s estate and some of the bits and pieces regarding Harriet, he said to me, “Oh, well no, I don’t know of any involvement with Harriet and refugees, but did you know Harriet’s archive is held in the British Library in London?” And I thought, “Oh my goodness,” because I’m actually based in London and it doesn’t come up easily, or at least it didn’t 20 years ago, didn’t come up easily. We’re in the days pre-internet, but in any basic searches in library databases, it didn’t really come up. So now I knew this, I was on a mission. So I contacted the Department of Rare Manuscripts of Music, which is where it was all deposited because she was a famous musician.

But what did I discover? I discovered this enormous archive of over 3,000 letters between Harriet and her long-term lover of 40 years between each of them that were both parts of the letters to each other, but also this incredible archive of letters from famous composers from all over the world, famous, not only musicians and composers, but ballerinas, cultural worlds, famous authors like George Bernard Shaw, prime ministers, Zionist figures, Heim Weisman. I’m mean incredible, and I was so hooked on this archive that I very quickly realised that somebody should do something with this. And so the two lectures are a result of this unexpected journey. So I focus more on her life rather than the technicalities of music of which as I say, I’m not an expert, but if I look at her from the point of view of a biographer and her character, she was an incredible character, stunningly beautiful as you can see. And I think it’s still true to say, it was certainly true when I was writing the book, which came out about 10, 15 years ago at the time of writing the book, she is the single most figure, certainly female figure with the most photographs and portraits in the National Portrait Gallery in London. How extraordinary. Next slide, please. So what about this woman? I mean her legacy is just incredible. So we’ll go back to the beginning so you can have a little bit of a background to her. So she’s born on the 2nd of December, 1895, to Florence and Joseph Cohen. She’s born in Brixton, which is in South London. Then a very poor part of London, very modest.

The refugee presence were not quite like the East End, but it was certainly working class. Today of course, Brixton has had a complete make around and it’s very trendy, a lot of young people and shops and trendy things. But back then it was a very, very different world. And she’s one of four children. So her siblings, Olga, Eric and Mayra, her grandfather Wolf Cohen, came from Vilnius in Lithuania. And Harriet would quite often, when she was so small, age of three four, she used to love hearing tales of Lithuania from her grandfather. And he taught her to speak Russian, something which she hid for a very long time. And as we’ll see next week, she does make a trip to Russia. Now, the early Cohens in her family, her grandparents, and her great-grandparents who settled, moved to Aldershot, which is even further south out of London, in a region called Surrey that became a military garrison for until at least the Second World War. A few leftover military things now, but it was very well known in the 20th century as, a military garrison. Next slide, please. And Harriet’s love of music comes even when she’s just three years old. She just was drawn to music and she becomes the youngest student to enter the Royal Academy of Music at 13. And she enters in 1909, just at the age of 13. And because she’s from a poor background, she’s very lucky to receive a scholarship. So it is funded. She has a natural gift. Next slide, please. She studied under some very famous tutors of her day, Frederick Corder. You can Google these names if you are interested.

Felix Swinstead and Tobias Matthay, all in that pre-World War I period. And in this period she interestingly meets Anna Pavlova. I mean really, I think it would be easier to write a list of the people she didn’t meet. And she meets Picasso. Picasso gave her a painting actually that ended up in the Royal Academy of Music, but was stolen about 20 years ago. But she met the most incredible people of her generation, the cultural, intellectual, elite, really of society at that time. And she had this incredible personality. She was just adored, it did not make her an easy person, as we will see. She certainly was not very, very easy. She was very forthright in a time where women were struggling for their rights to vote because before then, as she was growing up, women didn’t have the right to vote in the UK. So anyway, she meets Anna Pavlova, she goes to see her in the Palace Theatre and she wrote in her memoirs, Harriet wrote a couple of memoirs. The most famous was called “A Bundle of Time.” And that was published just… She wrote it during her lifetime. It was published posthumously. So about six months after she passed away.

And in that memoir, that autobiography, she couldn’t talk about her love affairs, she couldn’t talk about the people and the letters that I was able to stumble across. Anyway, she did say of Anna Pavlova, “Her arms were full of red roses.” She said, “There were beads of perspiration on her delicate forehead for she’d just come off the stage.” And Pavlova went over to the young Harriet and said to her, “I think you should become a dancer.” Well, Harriet was actually destined not to become a dancer, but a really influential musician as we’ll see. Next slide, please. And Edward Elgar, who’d seen her as a young pupil, as she’s coming up through the Royal Academy of Music, he says to her at one point, “Oh, grown up at last.” And what I found in these letters, which was so above the time, it’s not like Harriet’s memoirs that are written later in her life looking back and heavily censored by her because there’s a lot, as I said, she couldn’t write about, the letters are of the moment. And that’s really exciting because she kept every letter. So we have a really detailed correspondence between all of her friends, politicians, musicians, composers, particularly literary elite journalists. Incredible. Next slide, please. She said, ‘cause Elgar, she would go and see, occasionally said, “As a friend, Elgar was supremely loyal and full of loving kindness. Of course, as I grew older, I could see that he’d come to regard me as an attractive young woman.” She was really aware of her beauty. I mean, men found her absolutely stunningly gorgeous. She just had that charisma. She just had something. She didn’t even have to open her mouth, She just had that attraction and she had them falling at her feet quite literally in that era. And it is said, and she does admit that she did have a brief affair with Elgar.

And George Bernard Shaw, who is a very close friend of hers from Hampstead days, and from about the end of around 1910, 1912. He writes to her and says, “I’m very huffy, Elgar finds you far too beautiful for my liking. He calls you 'The nymph.’” And it’s just so of its time. Next slide, please. But during her time in the Royal Academy of Music, I’ve listed there, I’m not going to read them all out, but she had a wealth of recognition through various prizes each year. This is a young Harriet taken at a picnic party during her time as a student at the Royal Academy of Music. And she’s honoured as an associate at an incredibly young age in 1916 as an associate of the Royal Academy of Music. Now everything changes for her on the day that she meets Arnold Bax. In his day, he was very well known, certainly in Britain. And if it hadn’t been for Harriet, he probably would’ve rested in obscurity because he was quite happy to compose music and just leave it in a drawer. And she would say to him, “I’m going to play your music all over Europe.” And she forced him in a way into the public domain. And he goes on to become Master of the King’s Music. So this would be King George VI. Next slide, please. So the young Arnold Bax, they meet, he comes into the Royal Academy of Music. So he’s a very well known composer. You can Google some of the music, and we’ll come to that shortly.

But he comes into the Royal Academy of Music one day, and he hears, he goes through the corridor, beautiful, beautiful old building, and he hears this exquisite playing. She plays piano. She played a bit of violin, but pretty much her forte was piano. And in his own memoirs, he writes this, “I became aware of a small dryad face beneath a cloud of jet black hair.” I mean, he’s just spell bound by her, by her music. And then when he sets eyes on her, “And a pair of bright eyes brimmed with mischief peering at me and the flame of beauty,” he wrote, “burning through me, stinging my overwrought nerves, makes the great massive lights in the ceiling overhead swing backwards and forwards.” He says, “Damn this heart of mine, it’s pounding like a piston.” And these are the very poetic things I found not dissimilarly in their letters. And I’m not really going to quote from the letters. You can read more in the biography that I wrote, if you like. There is not a single mention by Harriet of her long term affair with Arnold Bax in her own biography. It was just too sensitive even after her death that a lot of people still around and particularly Bax’s family who did not approve that it couldn’t be talked about. And that was one of the questions that was posed to me. “You’ve got these letters, are you going talk about did they have an affair?” Well, it’s quite clear now that they did. Next slide, please. So what about Bax? He himself was born in South London, 1883. So he’s about 12 years older than Harriet. He comes from a very different background. He’s not Jewish. He’s from a incredibly wealthy family that has a house in Hampstead in Fitzjohn Avenue, if I’m not mistaken. I think the house has been demolished now, but they had, it was nothing to have 10, 15 servants, this huge three story house with grounds at the back.

But in 1911, so just a year or two before he met Harriet, that scene in the Royal Academy of Music, where he walks in and hears her playing and sees her. But he’s been married for a couple of years to Elsa Sobrino, who’s from a very, very cultured background. They’ve already got two children, Dermot and Maeve. Maeve is just a few months old. So a boy and a girl, Dermot and Maeve, these are Irish names. Bax was very, very drawn to Ireland. And they lived in Ireland in a place called Rathgar for two years. And by the time he meets Harriet in London, they’ve just come back, he and Elsa have just come back to London to settle. Next slide, please. And he starts writing to Harriet very tentatively. And in December, 1913, he says to her, “I often feel that one’s friendships and the time in one’s life in which they occur are not by chance, but a predetermined thing.” And in one of his letters he refers to her as “Daughter of Wild Spring.” I mean, she was certainly very wild. You couldn’t tame a character like Harriet. And then one day he writes to her and says, “I think I should be alone in London, the own inhabitant of Cavendish Square,” which is where he lived for a number of years before moving out to Beaconsfield, which is about 20 miles outside London in Buckinghamshire. But for a while there he and his wife lived in Cavendish Square and she was away with the children. And he said, “I think I’m going to be alone.” And Harriet goes over there and what he says to her… They do talk music, but of course it goes beyond that. They embark on the most passionate love affair. And it has its ups and downs of course, but you can tell from the letters it’s imbued with this deep emotional expression. And some of the letters are really quite graphic.

He says to her at one point, “You have the gem of deep emotional expression in your music,” and what happens, and it wasn’t just with Arnold Bax, she befriended as we go into the 1920s, and we’ll see a number of very famous composers who were so drawn, so attracted to her that they were inspired to write, to compose music. And they dedicated a lot of their music to her. And Arnold Bax was no different. Next slide, please. On one case you can feel the passion. He says, “I adore the ‘Roundel.’” She’s playing a piece of his, an early piece of his. “Yours on tiptoe, Tania.” He says, “An elfin kiss to you.” So he’s courting her now. And of course later it’s a little bit more graphic, but we won’t touch on that. But Tania, so they’re mixing now in Russian circles as well in London. Really interesting. The Russian ballet. They’re mixing with Picasso who’s actually painting some of the design sets for the Russian ballet. And they’re mixing in all these circles. And so he nicknames her “Tania,” and thereafter in his letters, he refers to her, says, “Dearest Tania,” always, very rarely Harriet from here on. And at one point, I mean he’s so stricken with her, he says, “Be my friend always or I shall die.” And the intense emotion in their relationship. But of course he’s married, he soon feels trapped in his own marriage. Next slide, please.

So writing “Dearest Tania,” in his letters. Frederick Corder, one of her tutors, invites her to a party and she turns up in this beautiful, plain white dress. And it’s March, 1913, if I’m not mistaken. It’s certainly March time. And she pins a daffodil, just a simple daffodil, yellow daffodil to her beautiful white, just plain-ish white dress. And of course it sends Bax into one of these creative almost trances really, because after the party, he’s completely smitten by her. After the party in the next few days, he composes three pieces of music, “The Maiden with the Daffodil,” which in the end he’d originally dedicated to her. But he crosses it out because he doesn’t want anyone to know that he might be in love with her and he dedicates it to someone else. “The Princess’s Rose Garden” and “In the Vodka Shop.” So three major pieces of music within just a week or so. Next slide, please. And with this, it was very popular in those days with the music, it was usual to compose a tone poem, so the lyrics that go with it. So he did under another name actually, compose poetry himself, and that’s not necessarily widely known. But anyway, but this went with a piece of music, for “The Maiden with a Daffodil.” “This for the maiden with the daffodil whose fingers intricate enchantments fill our ears with far-strayed echoes of romance. Let us forget all churlish circumstance and gather aught we may have said or sung of life’s most honourably remembered days and while dreams burn, and she is fair and young, bring her each one his need of love and praise.” Next slide, please.

And this is one of one of my favourite photographs. She loved to be photographed like this, effectively with nothing on but that long hair. And this is in the National Portrait Gallery, in their collection and a lot of the famous photographers of the day, a whole string of these, there’s nearly 50 portraits, photographic portraits. And you can just see this young Harriet there. She’s growing into, this beautiful woman here in her twenties, that moody sensualness that just sent those around her crazy. Next slide, please. And Bax, of course, being just not able to live with her in those days… Of course you couldn’t. Well, it was frowned on to have a relationship and you couldn’t live with another woman out of wedlock. But then they’re very quickly thrown into the First World War. And the First World War, we have those images, don’t we? Of wartime of the horror, the slaughter, the waste of human life of those soldiers’ lives on an unprecedented scale, millions of soldiers. And the deep mud in the trenches of Flanders, it was just horrific. And it affected the composers around her, not just Arnold Bax. And it deeply affected their writing. It affected Arnold Bax’s ability to compose, at least for most of the first couple of years of the war. He found this creative block. Next slide, please. And he writes to her, they’re seeing each other pretty much every day in secret. And the wife doesn’t find out at this point, not yet. She does eventually, but they’re seeing each other every few days.

Every couple of days they’re writing to each other, sometimes two or three times a day. And he says to her, “I’m often thinking of you in these days with our careers smashed up and the awful restlessness, which prevents one’s concentration on any kind of work.” Harriet herself would actually help Belgian refugees, because we had around 180,000 Belgian refugees that were fleeing occupied Belgium, particularly there’s a flood coming in just before 1915. And she starts to play in concert to raise money for Belgian refugees. So this sees her beginning a lot, what will become a lifetime actually of charitable causes. Next slide, please. And then Arnold Bax and his wife move out to Beaconsfield, as I mentioned earlier. And now they have to have stolen moments together. And she travels from London on the metropolitan line right out into the countryside, to Amersham. And he cycles from Beaconsfield from his big estate. He’s got quite a nice house and estate near Beaconsfield. He cycles to Amersham and he’s very well off. So money’s not a problem for him. He rents a room in the hotel, in old Amersham, in the King’s Head, The Crown, sorry, at Amersham. And so they have these stolen afternoons, these passionate afternoons together. And then one day in November, 1917, the war is not looking as though it’s anywhere over. There’s intense emotion. They’re meeting when they can. And he cycles to meet her off the underground station.

At this point it’s above ground, the station, even though it’s part of the underground network. So the metropolitan line, she gets out and suddenly there’s this all mighty downpour and they start hand in hand. They run down through the woods from the station, which is quite high up, down to the old part of Amersham, really old quaint market, very small market town to The Crown, this lovely quaint pub, which is a bit like a pub hotel where you can actually rent rooms. And he is so just inspired by this, that he actually composes a piece quite famous in its day, called “November Woods” composed in 1917, but she actually premieres it in 1920. Now what we find now is that she is the inspiration for pretty much everything that he composes, hereafter. So way back from “The Maiden of the Daffodil,” from now all the way to his death in 1953. She is the inspiration to all his major pieces of music and she premieres them. And there are times when she says to him, “I’m touring next year,” we’ll come to this shortly, “I’m touring next year. Write something for me.” And he does. And I think without her, I’m not sure who would’ve premiered his music. But with “November Woods,” comes this tone poem, which he called “Amersham,” but it’s really inspired. It’s what inspires his piece, his music, “November Woods.”

And it’s this and it’s them. It’s them. “Like frightened children, silent, hand in hand down the wet hill. We stepped towards the flare,” this is thunder and lightning, deep, dark, raging black sky. “Storm, a mad painter’s brush swept sky and land with burning signs of beauty and despair. And once rain scourged through shrivelling wood and brake, and in our hearts tears stung. And the old ache was more than any God would have us bear.” And we know from the letters between them at this time that he is really struggling to hold down his married life, because they’re soulmates. In actual fact, I think… Well I won’t give away what happens. That wouldn’t be fair. So I’ll hold back, I’ll hold back. But whether they practically really could have lived together because they’re both… He’s quiet, but intense in his own way. She is completely intense, every other moment, passionate in her relationships, but also passionate about the causes that she later goes on to support. Next slide, please. And then in 1917, actually this is just before he composes “November Woods.” So towards the end of the summer of 1917, he says, “I just can’t cope with this, let’s go to Cornwall.” And she says, “I don’t know if I can.” He’s already in Cornwall on a holiday with his family and his wife’s going back, coming back towards London and he says, “Come down with me.”

And in the end she relents. It takes a couple of weeks and she relents and she takes the train down to Cornwall and they stay near Tintagel. I’m not sure how many of you have been to Tintagel on the Cornish coast, on the northern coast of Cornwall. It is allegedly the birthplace of King Arthur, his knights, of course the round table, a very famous legend of King Arthur. These are the ruins now, which you can go and see, but it’s up high. It’s just so stunningly beautiful, just breathtaking. And in those days, not many tourists when they were there. So they pretty much had the hills and that around them to themselves. And they had obviously an incredibly passionate time when they were there. And they see themselves as this mediaeval legend of Tristan and Isolde. And these two lovers you can see depicted in the painting above, they have to hide in a cave, allegedly a secret cave under Tintagel. And it’s a mediaeval legend about love, which was forbidden. And that’s exactly how Bax sees his relationship now. It’s really a relationship that’s forbidden because he’s married and he married Elsa. They weren’t in love in the same way with Harriet. It was really a kind of two families getting them together, just marrying someone with good breeding. And she was lovely. I mean Elsa was educated but she didn’t inspire music in a composer in a way. There was just something that Harriet had that just sparked his creativity that never happened for his wife. She didn’t inspire a single piece of his music. That’s not a criticism, it’s just to understand, who we’re discussing here. Next slide, please. And of course that passionate couple of weeks they’re together and it’s not the only time they go out down to Tintagel to spend time together.

He composes his famous piece, “Tintagel.” And with it there is another tone poem. And this extract that I’ve given you here really, really underpins their thinking, their feelings at this time. “They stared out even as we do across the silken tide and sought in sundown splendours the dream, their world denied.” So that time they were denied the love, the relationship that they wanted. Next slide. But at this time, Harriet actually is beginning quite a close relationship with D.H. Lawrence. Does she sleep with D.H. Lawrence? Answer, yes. They do have a brief fling. And it is interesting because Harriet took a number of very, very brief lovers, and Bax knew that and was quite accepting later on and in this period. And that really kicks in when they can’t be together, when they can’t live together because of the social norms. He can’t really divorce. In the end he does contemplate it. But D.H. Lawrence, is a wonderful scene, where he’s in his home in Hampstead and Harriet arrives for afternoon tea and hears this awful shouting and D.H. Lawrence is basically arguing with his wife Frieda. And he’s got his boots on. He’s been gardening in his straw hat thing. It’s quite hot. And Harriet strolls in. Frieda’s gone back inside. Absolutely distraught and they’ve had his argument.

And Harriet just pushes him in the lily pond and he comes out completely soaking wet. And that is the inspiration for one of his scenes. I believe it’s in “Sons and Lovers.” Next slide, please. So they start up a correspondence, D.H. Lawrence. There are lots of letters between them. In 1918, it’s a momentous year of course in the wartime. We have the last German offensive that’s trying to push and turn the tide of the war. In the end of course the allies do manage by the autumn to turn the tide again. The German offensive doesn’t succeed. And in November, 1918, 11th hour of the 11th day, the guns fall silent and there’s peace across Europe , or there’s reconstruction and peace is being brought to Europe. But on a personal level it becomes really difficult for Bax. He’s decided he cannot cope anymore with living a married life. So he actually, incredibly rare for his day, he leaves his wife and children to go and be with Harriet. But the social norms of that time mean that they cannot live together until he is divorced. Elsa Bax, his wife, is a highly devout Catholic, a Roman Catholic, and she refuses to divorce him. And for the rest of her life she refuses Bax a divorce. And so now he’s distraught. He still hopes in 1918 as they’re getting through 1918, he leaves his wife in the spring of 1918, and towards the end of the year when the war is ending and is ended, he writes to Harriet and they’re seeing each other nearly every day. But he writes to her and says, “I really hope…Elsa seems in a better mood. I’m hoping she’ll grant a divorce.” But she actually doesn’t.

And he begins to realise as the years go on, and at one point he writes to her, to Harriet, “I shall fight for the right to love until the end of my life.” He will fight for the right to love Harriet. Next slide, please. So he replies to her, “One day I will let my music give itself up to love, love without strife or fret or circumstances, just the praise of you.” Another wonderful atmospheric portrait of Harriet there. She loved dressing up in all these outfits. And when she went out, she’d always been told by her mother, “You must dress the part.” So she had an incredible wardrobe, most of it funded by Arnold Bax. And she would soon be on the international stage as one of the most significant concert pianists of her day. And she was always well turned out, incredibly impeccably dressed, although she herself was really quite poor, Bax supported her. And so at this time he’s got Elsa in the background, whom he’s left and the children. And now he’s living apart from his wife, but not with Harriet. But he funds Harriet’s… She lives in various places in London, in Central London and little mews and flats and things. And he funds all of that. But the irony, I think of this quote, he says, he’ll give up his music and he can laugh at the music without any strife and fret. But actually I think it’s the fact that their love was denied and the whole intense passion, which is why his music became so intense, why it’s an expression of their fraught relationship, a love denied. And I personally think if they had lived together, he probably wouldn’t have had the same creative births that come where you dig deep through tragedy and emotion. So it’s ironic. But anyway, next slide please.

He’s not the only composer. We now find there’s a whole raft of composers. Bax has been going backwards and forwards now and again for a holiday in Ireland. And in 1919 Harriet goes too for a very, very short break. But at this time too, she meets the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla. And I’m not sure if you’re aware, but his famous “Night in the Gardens of Spain,” is dedicated to Harriet. It’s dedicated to Harriet. He had a number of Irish friends Yeats, Dr. Douglas Hyde, George Russell, Mabel Reynolds. And these become part of Harriet’s widening circle of friends as well. So they’re accepted as a couple. They’re invited to events and occasions together. But it is also a time of personal tragedy for Harriet, because she starts to display the first signs of tuberculosis. And what I didn’t tell you actually, because I didn’t want to spoil the plot. That day that she’d pushed D.H. Lawrence into the lily ponds, he’d planted a kiss on her and they’d had a brief affair. And of course D.H. Lawrence had TB and of course didn’t know it at that point. So it’s not proven, but it’s likely that Harriet got her TB from D.H. Lawrence. Well that’s quite a line, isn’t it? “I got my TB from D.H. Lawrence.” Next slide, please. But Bax is still composing in this time. One of his major pieces, “Symphonic Variations,” is premiered in 1920 in the Queen’s Hall in Central London. And it’s premiered by Harriet. He has promised her that she and no other female composer, sorry, concert pianist, and there were a number of rivals at the time, not least her own cousin, Myra Hess.

But Bax had promised her, “You will premiere my music.” And she did. She was given exclusive right and the “Symphonic Variations” was overtly dedicated to Harriet. Now Bax didn’t have to worry. He’d openly left his wife. Yes, they still couldn’t live together, but now he could dedicate music to Harriet. Everybody knew, they were the talk of the social circles. Everybody knew, but they were still accepted, interestingly, in those high ranking circles. Next slide, please. We go into the 1920s then. She becomes very friendly with George Bernard Shaw, of course, George Bernard Shaw pens “Pygmalion,” very famous author and a novelist. In January, 1922, he writes to her, “Nothing flatters a very elderly gentleman, more than having the handkerchief thrown at him by a young and beautiful artist.” And she’d dropped her handkerchief at his foot, I suppose it seems quite, yeah, naive now. But in those days that was her world. But in the 1920s she met Busoni, Arthur Bliss, Henry Wood, the famous conductor, and this chap here who becomes her confidant, Arnold Bennett. And it’s clear that she also has a brief affair with Arnold Bennett and their letters survive in the British Library. He always signed his letters. “AB” for Arnold Bennett, not to be confused with “AB,” Arnold Bax. Next slide, please. And in this period she becomes friendly with a number of composers. So she’s friendly with George Bernard Shaw. In the literary circles, as you see, he’s a much older man, Ralph Vaughan Williams, a very famous composer, English composer. She would go to him in concert, Lambert.

She would go to them, they were part of their party circle, they would go to cocktail parties together. They would go to her home and have dinner. And she would say to them, to Ralph Vaughan Williams, “I’m going to Paris in three months time. I want to premiere your music.” Or “I’m going to,” as we’ll see, “America.” This is in the 1930s. “Write me something and I will premiere your music.” So she becomes the mouthpiece for these high, well highest level composers of her generation. She’s in that circle. But not only does she inspire them, but they actually write pieces of music ‘cause she’s asked them to and they dig deep in their creativity. They compose and she premieres their music all over the world eventually. And we said earlier, she’s a bit cheeky, and Arnold Bax called her “His elfin” at times. Well, the next photograph will show you just what we mean because Harriet had this photograph… Next slide, please. Taken of herself. She just used to love these incredible dresses. I mean look, she’s got nothing on under this beautiful dress. And George Bernard Shaw wrote to her, “My God, men have been divorced for less.” And what it transpires she’s done, is she had a series of these photographs printed, signed, as you can see, she signed them, “Tania.”

She signs 'em on the back, “Tania,” sometimes “Harriet.” But she was known in the whole of her circle, not just by Arnold Bax as Tania, she sends them, it’s quite provocative really. She sends them to all her, well the male friends that she’s closest with, maybe some she’s already had a fling, and just flaunting her beauty. And she loved the attention, really loved the attention. Next slide, please. But her health is really beginning to suffer. The TB is kicking in, she’s getting pleurisy, she’s getting pneumonia. She has got a punishing schedule in the 1920s. She’s having concert tours to Italy, to France and she’s premiering music in Spain, France. So she’s in Paris, she’s in Italy, she’s going to Vienna. Eventually she goes to Berlin and Prague and sometimes they’re back to back. She’s travelling from one to the other or sometimes she’ll come back to the UK and then a week or so later, she’s off again. And it becomes punishing when she’s trying to really fight her tuberculosis and it does finally get diagnosed. And she spends almost three years in a sanatorium in Switzerland. And this is the longest period that Arnold Bax and she don’t see each other. And it’s a very, very tricky period for her. And there are moments when you see, you think she’s actually not going to pull through.

You do wonder if she’s going to pull through. Next slide, please. She’s already now by the time she’s desperately ill and her friends are writing to her, I say her friends, all those famous composers and literary characters. H.G. Wells, as I said, D.H. Lawrence, George Bernard Shaw, some women amongst them as well. Rebecca West we’ll see, she becomes very close friends with Rebecca West, but she’s already established herself as an expert, an exponent of Bach. She plays Bach’s music like no one else. She’s also become an expert and revives early Elizabethan keyboard music. No one’s really been interested before. And she brings this whole revival of Elizabethan music. And we’re talking about Elizabeth I. So we’re talking about 500 year old music. And Harriet said in one of her books, “You must know your composer. Each work of a great composer came to him just once. You must get into the mood of the 'once.’” And that was something she did in all her tours across Europe at this point into the 1920s. It’s only across Europe that would change in the 1930s. And she always gave a performance as if it was the first time she played that piece of music live. So she always thought it was important for her audience to appreciate that sense of the composer’s own creativity, that sense of what’s come to him just once. And we are talking about male composers here.

And at this point she’s not, and I’ll talk about this more next week, she’s not really tapping into her Jewish heritage. She is secular, assimilated family. Her great grandparents were more religious. Her grandparents went to a little synagogue in Aldershot. But she is not a religious Jew. Not at all. And she has no consciousness really of her history. She’s had her grandfather’s tales of Russia and their fleeing from Russia and she loved the tales, but really there’s no connection. That’s just hearing your grandparents’ great stories. There’s no real connection with her Jewishness. But that will come. Next slide, please. So we’re into the 1920s. She’s desperately ill in Switzerland. Elsa still refuses a divorce. And in this period, in the letters between Harriet and Bax, there’s still a hope that Elsa might change her mind. But Elsa is absolutely stubborn in this. And in the time that she’s in Switzerland, that Harriet’s recovering in Switzerland, she begins to fear. There are very few letters between them in this period. She’s out there alone. She does eventually have a couple of visitors when she’s well enough, but it’s a very difficult period for her. And she starts to write to him and fears that Bax has “Strayed,” as she said in her language.

And then she says to him, quite cheekily, “I hope you keep my letters young man.” And he does “Think of the romantic reading, our epistles will give young and ardent music lovers when we are dead.” Well, I have to tell you, when I first went in to the Royal Academy of Music to use these letters, there was a “wink, wink,” coming from the staff and of course some of them knew what was in the letters. Nobody had really worked on these letters, but they had an idea what was in them. Nothing had ever been published. So yeah, they thought I was in for quite an interesting time. Next slide, please. And I’ll leave this bit hanging really. And we get to it in a moment. So during her time in TB, Arnold Bennett “AB,” as he was, writes to her regularly and is really concerned. “Are you still working too hard? What a pity God didn’t add the power of self-management, to your other qualities.” She’s still thinking, writing about how she can do concerts, trying to practise piano. “Still you make the world more interesting than it would be without you. That’s something. However naughty you may sometimes be.” So “That’s something. However naughty you may sometimes be.” And Bax says to her, don’t forget she’s in the sanatorium in Switzerland. “I’ve learned to love you so much more since the beginning of this year.” And they are apart. It’s difficult. “I’m not in love with anyone else,” he says. “So don’t suppose it. Of course I long for love and passion.” Next slide, please.

There is this chance meeting with a 23-year-old, Mary Gleaves, and this is in the Haymarket in central London. Bax’s biographer, Lewis Foreman wrote, “Although Bax may not have given any particular significance to this coincidence at the time, it was later to assume a special importance for both of them. Bax was preoccupied and he did not meet Mary again until the following year.” So I’m going to leave Mary Gleaves and Bax at this point. I’m not going to say anymore if that’s okay. Next slide, please. So home at last, in 1929, Harriet is deemed well enough, although she’s always going to be fragile with regard to her chest, particularly when she starts overworking. But she feels strong enough and she’s back, and she says to Bax, “I’m going to play your music all over Europe.” And that’s precisely what she does. Next slide, please. So she’s home by 1928 and Bax writes to her. “We have a really happy time. We’re very happy together, aren’t we? Much more so than we ever were at any other time. I believe.” Harriet then embarks on a month’s concert tour of Europe and it takes it out of her. She comes back and she has a few residual symptoms and recurrent pleurisy, an occasional little bit of relapse with her TB going forwards. But she is determined to make the success of her career. And she goes to Budapest and she plays Bax’s “Piano Quintet,” she premieres it. She meets Zoltan Kodaly and Bartok. Bartok goes on to dedicate music to her. And at this time she’s travelling, she goes into Germany, German newspaper wrote, “So deeply has the master spirit entered into her that she has few, if any, equals as a Bach player.” So she’s mixing her concerts with a bit of Bach and a bit of contemporary new compositions. Next slide, please.

So if we look at this period, she has a very interesting series of personal relationships, which if you are interested in, you can read more in my biography, “Music and Men.” H.G. Wells. Of course, H.G. Wells had a long-term relationship with Rebecca West, which finished, and H.G. Wells does embark on a love affair with Harriet. It’s very brief, but he does embark, we know that on a love affair. Ralph Vaughan Williams, this is more controversial. His own biographer believes that they never had an affair. I think from what I’ve read and the letters, it is clear that there was something between them, and the chap in the far right hand corner, you might not recognise now, but he was quite well known in his own day. Gerhardie, William Gerhardie, very famous novelist. And he would go on to write a novel “Pending Heaven,” and we’ll look at that next week, which actually fictionalises Harriet. Next slide, please. And I’m going through this whole trench of letters and you never know, they’re all pretty much in chronological order and according to who she’s writing to. So all the Bax letters are together. The ones from other people, composers are across, well, there’s several boxes of course takes a long time, to troll through this archive. But it soon becomes really clear that there is a reference. And she does, I found the evidence now she does have a miscarriage, because one thinks that she’s having all these affairs, how it’s possible really in a day before contraceptive pill.

But they had ways to to do this. But she does actually start to carry Bax’s child. And this is earlier, just earlier in the 1920s, and I came across this note scribbled in her handwriting, which said, “Holy mother, we believe that without sin thou didst conceive. Grant to thy daughters so believing sometimes to sin without conceiving.” And I thought to myself, “Yeah, I wonder if she ever did.” And I did find the evidence quite late in the research that she’d actually had a miscarriage. There are some veiled references in the letters between her and Bax. And I think he’d been quite excited that she was carrying his child, but it wasn’t to be. And as far as we can tell, that was the only pregnancy. Next slide, please. I’m just going to begin to round up for today. But Harriet is still plagued. She’s got this sixth sense that something’s not right. She begins to suspect that Bax has got someone else. And I don’t know if it’s just that she’s testing him or she really thinks he has. And he writes that he’s in Scotland. He would spend two or three months in Scotland and she wouldn’t go up to Morar. And she begins to think, I really feel, I can feel he’s got somebody. And he writes to her, “What needless obsession you have about my not being here alone here. Indeed the first two days at Arisaig were almost too solitary in that bitter cold.” Photograph of her there on the Queen Mary going across to America. We’ll come to that next week. Next slide, please. So we have set the seeds, if you’d like, of betrayal. And I don’t want to go into what’s coming next week, but Harriet already has her suspicions that she might not be the only woman in Bax’s life.

Now you might be thinking, look, next slide, please. She’s had a series of love affairs. They both had the odd fling and she knew about the odd fling and she said, “I forgive you.” She’s had the odd fling, but it’s only when they’re both having the odd fling that it goes that way before that they aren’t. And she now thinks that there’s something more than that, that potentially Bax has somebody more long term. That’s something that she wouldn’t have been able to cope with. And look on the right there, another of these stunningly beautiful dresses that has come to define our Harriet. And I just want to leave you with one thought. It’s not something that I can prove definitively, or I even know is true, but I have often been asked, and we might come back to this next week, was Harriet a spy? Of course, you’ve got sitting in front of you, a historian who’s done so much on spies, espionage, and intelligence. Harriet does write when she’s later performing for the BBC, particularly in the 1930s, she does write a letter to one of the directors and something is said about she’d offered herself as a spy but had been turned down. Now when we come into the 1930s, she’s got some very interesting travel.

Was she a spy? I don’t know. I don’t know. She would make a perfect one. Whether she was unwittingly a spy, who knows. But I’ll leave that question with you and next time we’re going to look at how her legacy just escalates. She builds on an incredible career. She’d been so young in the early twenties to take on the music in her own twenties and thirties, to take on the music of these giants of their day, to premiere their music all over Europe. And as a part of that, she’s invited to embassies, she’s invited to dinner with European royalty. She’s moving in so many interesting circles. She has an interesting social life. And against that backdrop, she’s now beginning to struggle with her own health with the TB. But she would go on into the 1930s, where her career would really pinnacle and we will see her forging some very interesting new relationships. Thank you.