Helen Fry
Music and Men: Unveiling the Life of Harriet Cohen, Part 2

Dr. Helen Fry - Music and Men: Unveiling the Life of Harriet Cohen, Part 2

- Welcome to part two of the life of Harriet Cohen, titled as per my biography of her, “Music and Men.” We saw in part one that her life was very much a balance. Well, her life I suppose was some degree to some excess, but in a way a balance between music and the men in her life. She inspired, as we saw in the 1920s, some of the greatest composers who were her friends in her closest network. Harriet Cohen, the concert pianist who spanned much of the 20th century, who had a long-term love affair with Arnold Bax, who went on to become Master of the King’s Music. And if it wasn’t for her, we saw pretty much, he would’ve just hidden his music in a drawer. She was the success behind him. But he was a married man. And in 1918, finally as the first World War is in its final stages, he makes a personal decision to leave his wife and two children for Harriet. But in that world, they couldn’t live together unless he’d been divorced. And his wife, Elsa, who was a devout Roman Catholic, a devout Christian, did not believe in divorce and refused to divorce him. And so, Harriet and Arnold Bax embark on this quite turbulent at times relationship in the 1920s. Today, we’re going to look into the relationship and the music in the 1930s where she so-called conquers America and other places too with her music. And because she was so closely connected as personal friends of a lot of the composers, she would say to them, “I’m going to Vienna in a few months time,” or “I’m touring Europe. Write me a concerto. Write me” whatever. And they would. So you have a lot of music. Vaughan Williams, Willie Walton, Bartók, a whole raft of them, pretty much all of the famous musicians of her day and composers dedicate music to her. And as we saw, and we’ll look again today, some of the novelists of the time actually dedicated their books to her.

This figure, which, 50, 60 years later we barely know anything about. She kind of have gone into oblivion really in terms of her legacy. But as we’ll see, by the end of today, her legacy was in fact quite extraordinary. And you can see from the photograph I’ve chosen here, that drama, she was stunningly beautiful. That much we talked about last time. But this portrait on the right hand side is in the National Portrait Gallery in London. It’s in their private collection. I don’t know if there’s a single portrait of her actually on display for the public to see, but if you go make a special arrangement, I’m pretty sure they will bring the collection out to show you. But as of writing the book, about a decade ago, she was said by them, at the Royal Portrait Gallery, to be the most photographed personality in their collection. There are 30 to 40 portraits by some of the most famous photographers of her day. So she’s very conscious. Although she was largely quite poor, she had very little income, she didn’t make much money on her music. So Arnold Bax would support her financially, alongside another lover we’ll see shortly. But she was always concerned to spend her money and his on an appearance, being able to take the room really by storm wherever she went. And she travels across Europe, she travels across continents and is deeply aware of how she looks, and wants to almost provide a lasting legacy as well. So what we’ll see today are more photographs of her, which just kind of capture her, she’s quite theatrical, quite dramatic. But there’s something about her, as you can see in the right hand photograph.

And on the left, the photograph that we used for one of the versions of the cover of my book has almost very sad eyes. And we will see that there was a depth of sadness too in her life. During the 1920s, she has a struggle with tuberculosis. Tuberculosis, which you might remember, it’s believed, I believe she caught from DH Lawrence. As you would, where else are you going to catch tuberculosis? Why not DH Lawrence? Who of course died of TB. He planted a kiss on her and that is believed to be the moment that she caught TB. And that plagues her for the rest of her life. So although she spends a good couple of years in a sanatorium in Switzerland, she never really shakes off that weakness of the chest. And when she begins to work incredibly hard, as she does in the 1930s, she does have patches of ill health. And amongst that, she still has her very close circle of friends. Next slide, please. One of whom we saw last week was George Bernard Shaw. Famously penned “Pygmalion” and other stories. He fictionalised Harriet in one of his short stories. And he wrote to her at Christmas 1928. We have all the correspondence. Harriet kept everything. She kept the correspondence that she received from Arnold Bax, and they wrote once or twice a day. When he died, her letters to him end up with her collection. But also, all the famous people that she mixed with of her day, there are letters in the archive, of her particular archive, that was bequeathed the British Library in London.

So it is extraordinary. And George Bernard Shaw wrote, Christmas 1928, “You may love me to distraction in perfect safety: at 72,” age 72, “at 72, I walk the plains of heaven and you can be nothing to me but an angel.” So the letters, next slide, please, are imbued with all kinds of very memorable quotations like that from George Bernard Shaw. Here he is with Harriet on the left, older, not long before he passes away. And a very sweet one of Harriet with her dog. She’s in her 50s at this point. Next slide, please. But always in the background. She has these brief love affairs, and Arnold Bax is aware of that. They can’t live together still because Elsa absolutely refuses a divorce. And she’s worried by now already that he might have met somebody else. And it’s not that it’s a quick fling because he has had one or two nights where he’s had a fling and she’s sort of forgiven him. Maybe one rule for another, who knows. But she’s got a sixth sense that he’s got another long term relationship in the background. And that’s what she fears most. It’s not the one night stands, it’s the long-term relationship. Because she thinks, believes that she is his sole partner. And there is something about her that inspires his music. He dedicates music to her. He cannot compose without her. So for all the turbulence of their passionate love affair, which spans 40 years, there is something about her that sparks the composition of music in him. But he does say to her, this is in 1929 in one of the letters, and I worked through hundreds of letters between them.

They’re all in a in date order, which is helpful. And you’ve got both sides because of course when he dies, Harriet managed to retrieve all of the letters. So you’ve actually got both. He says, “I’m not a monk or an ascetic, and still believe that the body can yoke with a soul in equal partnership.” So he tends, with her, to be much more ethereal, much more otherworldly if you like, and tries to reassure her that she is the only woman in his life. He says, “I never cease to think of you. I miss you dreadfully, darling, and the world seems dark without you.” So the letters capture the emotion of the moment. And that might sound quite obvious, but very often as historians, we are working on papers that are written later, maybe memoirs. Harriet penned her own memoirs, “A Bundle of Time.” And these were written two decades or more after the events that had happened. But what is extraordinary about the letters, and friends not only with Arnold Bax, is that they are capturing the emotion at the moment. And it does get to you actually. Because you can’t help but internalise when you’re reading all of these emotional letters. And then one day, quite extraordinarily, when I was working on one of the letters, they’re in boxes in terms of of the years, I opened one of the letters, it never happened before, and I’d worked through hundreds of them; this piece, this lock of hair fell out, this jet black lock of hair. It was quite a creepy, extraordinary moment. It’s the only physical evidence of Harriet that survives. She was later cremated at Golders Green Crematorium. We have nothing left of the physicalness of Harriet, apart from this lock of hair, jet black lock of hair, and it just sort of fell out on the desk. And because it fell out of the letter, I actually had to pick it up. Very strange, you never really know how you’re going to react when you find things like this. Never happened to me since, but it was an extraordinary moment, but quite a chilling moment as well. Next slide, please.

As I mentioned last week, there is something about Harriet; her character, she’s larger than life. She is quite self-centered, conscious of her image, of her portrayal, of being the first to play music across Europe and elsewhere of the composers. She wants that prime position, she adores the concerts, the public eye, the fact that she gets to meet European royalty, she’s moving in literary and cultural circles, she’s a close friend of Rebecca West who pens this novel “Harriet Hume.” And it is entirely based on her friend, Harriet. I didn’t know that until I worked on Harriet Cohen’s biography. And William Gerhardie, who we rarely think about today, he’s kind of become quite obscure. He wrote “Pending Heaven.” And if you remember the quote from last week, he puts it in one of his characters, who is Harriet actually says, “If he can’t have her, his soul will be destroyed,” words to that effect. Next slide, please. She seems to evoke such a strong emotional response in the men that she meets who all fall desperately in love with her. Many of them, she does have very brief, brief, brief encountered relationships. HG Wells was one of them. She actually had a very brief affair with HG Wells after he was not dating Rebecca West anymore. He had a long-term relationship with Rebecca West that ended in the late 1920s. But he wrote, HG Wells wrote to Harriet something in Rebecca’s book, he’s writing about “Harriet Hume.” “Something in Rebecca’s book makes me feel I once spent a wonderful afternoon with you and then deserted you in favour of success, but really I’m not that sort of man, and there is much else in this book that is misleading. Go on making music on earth.” Next slide, please. And here we go, the exact quote from Gerhardie in “Pending Heaven.”

“Her beauty had driven him mad with longing. By God, unless I have that woman, I shall be cheated out of my heaven.” And what Gerhardie’s summarised there in the words of Max, the character Max, who’s fallen in love with Helen Sapphire, those are the two main characters in the book, he has really summarised what all the men felt about her. They were absolutely driven mad with longing by her beauty, by her charisma, she was a good conversationalist, self-educated largely, she had a very basic education. But self-educated, she was widely read on all the literature of the day. And she impresses the men in her circle at that time. And another extract from that book, I believe again, he’s fictionalising something which probably happened between him and Harriet. “He went up to her and took her in his arms. But when he made amateur efforts to remove her blouse, she looked at him wide-eyed of being aghast. ‘I am too young,’ she said.” But it is known, and again, if you’re interested, you can read more in the book, it is known that he tended to be a little bit too brutal in their relationship. And so, she kind of ended the sexual side of that relationship. He had various fantasies and things which she found quite tricky. Next slide, please. We come to one of her other close friends, Albert Einstein. They crossed paths in the 1930s. He called her “my beloved piano witch.” She first met him in Berlin. In the 1920s she’d already been right across Europe in all the capital cities and into parts of what is now Eastern Europe, playing the music of the composers of the day, most of them, all of them, her very close friends. And she goes to Berlin in 1933, just before ‘33, and she meets Albert Einstein. And this is just before he escapes Nazi Germany.

And they struck up a friendship. It’s a rather wonderful friendship. He actually leaves Berlin and travels and then doesn’t actually come back with the terrible events in Nazi Germany. And he then links up with Harriet again in Oxford in England. And they’re walking along the banks of the river in Oxford, which is very famous for the riverboat races between the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, but they’re strolling along there one day and he turns to her, and he’s actually smoking his pipe, and he teaches her how to smoke a pipe. I mean, extraordinary story. That Harriet learned and she did smoke occasionally, not very often, but occasionally. She learned how to smoke the pipe from Albert Einstein. Of course. In the late 1920s, 1930s. Next slide, please. But he wasn’t the only one at this time who was flattered by her. Berlin, in the 1920s, late 1920s, it was a place to visit. She loved Berlin. It’s not clear actually if she ever learned German or what languages she could speak other than Russian. But at the time that she’s visiting Albert Einstein in Berlin, actor, Tracy Holmes writes to her while she’s in Berlin. “I flatter myself to the extent of thinking that perhaps you are missing me. I send you a very long kiss. Angel.” So theirs was a very brief relationship. And then, excitedly on the 9th of February, 1929, the letter that she pens to Gerhardie, the author who’s written “Pending Heaven.” “ Albert Einstein!” So that day, she’s with Albert Einstein.

But Einstein recognises a depth in Harriet. And he says to her, he quotes Bruno Lessing, he says to her, “The search for truth is more precious than its possession.” “You are incandescent, you have a light within.” And thereafter, as I said, in the early 1930s when they met again, he taught her to smoke the pipe. She found out that he actually played violin. I’m not sure how many of you know, but Albert Einstein was a really keen violinist. So she had the idea that they could play music together. Next slide, please. And so, in the early 1930s, in 1934, they played together in concert to raise funds for refugees, for Jewish refugees who are fleeing Nazi Europe. Unbelievable. Next slide, please. So into the 1930s, this is a period defined by her success, her increasing success in Europe. And she’s going to hit America for the very first time. January, 1930, she premiers form Williams’ famous piece “Hymn-Tune Prelude” on ‘Song 13.“ It’s quite a well-known piece. And he is concerned that not only will she love America, but the Americans will love her and she won’t come back. And he writes to her in 1931, "I fear the Americans will love you so much that they won’t let you come back.” She travelled on the Queen Mary. So she went transatlantic on the ship. It was several day’s journey. She didn’t travel terribly well on the ship, but she did play piano to the guests on the ship, of course. And at one point I uncovered a letter, and we don’t know the content, but all it says it was from the ship’s captain, and all it says on this little card is, “You left this in my room last night.”

So, who knows what that was. But Bax, meanwhile, who is in London is concerned that the huge tour of America, given her past history of TB and now she’s prone to pleurisy and bronchitis, particularly in the wintertime, he’s really concerned that the punishing schedule and the social life that goes with it will absolutely wear her out. And he says to her, “Do be careful not to be so engulfed in social life that one day you’ll find that you are quite worn out.” But it didn’t deter her. She loved it. And it’s while she was in America that she became friends with Eleanor Roosevelt. And she would correspond with Eleanor Roosevelt on the fate of refugees in Europe. Next slide, please. Yeah. I’ve put the quote with that wonderful photograph. This again exists in the National Portrait Gallery. I just love the drama of these photographs that she has consciously dressed and scheduled these portraits. Next slide, please. So she’s initially, and will continue to be an incredible success in America. But you can see from this photograph here, there is a tinge of sadness in her life because for all the success, she’s at the pinnacle, or certainly near the pinnacle of her career as a concert pianist. When she travels abroad, she’s going into embassies, she’s meeting royalty, she’s meeting composers, Hungarian composers, Finnish composers like Sibelius. She’s really having a wonderful life. But there is this deep, deep sadness, which is reflected in photographs like this. You can see it in her eyes. There’s that pain. But the 1930s, a really interesting period.

Because it’s the first time that it awakens her Jewishness in her. In '33 she goes to Germany. In 1934 to Vienna. And in 1933, she sees what’s beginning to happen. And by 1934, the British government writes to her. In fact, it’s the Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, writes to her, her close friend, Ramsay MacDonald, and says to her, “You mustn’t go to Germany anymore because we cannot protect you.” Because you’re Jewish, we cannot protect you. And she begins to see exactly what is happening to the Jews of Europe. And although she’d been conscious, of course she knew she came from a Russian/Jewish background, she used to enjoy those tales as a child from her Russian grandfather, but it didn’t really touch something deep within her. But what she witnesses in Berlin in 1933, and this is before things get particularly horrific for the Jews of Europe, it sparked something in her. And now it does two things: it means that she starts working for the cause of Jewish refugees and it will be one that she would continue. Eventually crossing paths with Chaim Weizmann. But it also meant that she took up Zionist causes. For the first time, she started to actively support the desire for the foundation of the state of Israel. She has this concert, as I said, with Einstein to raise funds for Jewish refugees and also to get Jewish intellectuals out. She’s very close friends with the American journalist, Dorothy Thompson. Dorothy Thompson has visited Berlin and Vienna in this time and together, particularly when they’re in Vienna in 1934, Harriet’s playing concerts.

But in the daytime, she’s meeting in the cafes where the journalists are talking about the political situation. They’re discussing the rise of Nazis Germany and what’s happening in Germany. And at that point, the fact that Austria itself is at risk, and there’s fights on the streets of Vienna between the communists and the Nazis. It’s just that whole mix. For her, it suddenly dawns on her and she connects. It’s her Jewish identity, becomes a deep connection. And at this time, her family, her brother, sister, parents actually changed their surname from Cohen to Verney. And she’s advised to do the same. But she refuses, typical Harriet style. She totally refuses to disavow her Jewish roots. She says, “I am not changing my surname.” And she continues to successfully carry off a career at a time of rising antisemitism in Europe and she refuses to change her surname. Next slide, please. Ramsay MacDonald actually says to her when she’s going on one of her key concerts, “To take America by storm, but to carry everything with you and triumph.” And that’s what she does. But already, by the late 1920s, and we see into the 1930s, another key player on the scene, Viscount Leslie Runciman becomes a really, he’s a socialite, figure. An aristocrat. He falls in love with Harriet and they do have a bit of a brief love affair, but they become long-term companion friends. And he actually finances some of her accommodation in London because Bax can’t afford to totally keep her.

It costs him a fortune. And he sort of pays the lease on the little muse house that she’s staying in. So they have a very interesting and close relationship. Their letters are in the national archive. Sorry, in the British Library in London. And he becomes a sort of secure anchor through her life until her death in 1967. Next slide, please. But she is travelling across Europe, as I said. On one occasion, and I love this, we don’t know which photograph Willie Walton’s referring to, but you come across, occasionally, amongst these papers, you never know what you’re going to find, but there’s just this very brief letter in the 1930s from William Walton, the composer, British composer, who says to Harriet, “Thank you for the sex appealing photograph.” So, I just wonder if it’s that long photograph where she’s kind of got almost nothing on underneath that I showed you last week. I should have put it up again. That, she sent to George Bernard Shaw. And he said, “Oh, my goodness! Men have died for less.” So I personally think it’s the same photograph she’s been sending, she just signs a little message on the back. And it’s quite provocative, really. Well that’s an understatement, but it is provocative. But she doesn’t want these men in her life to forget her. And there is this devotion, such that they are quite prepared to dedicate their music to her. I’m not sure that any other concert pianist of her day had quite the same chutzpah, if you like. They just didn’t seem to ask the composers to compose this music. And he dedicates a really famous piece to her, “Sinfonia Concertante.” And I’m not sure how many of you’re aware of that, but when he gives it to her, he gives her a copy of the manuscript, of the music manuscript. He says to her, “I know it is safe in your hands.”

And what he means is that he trusts her to play it according to his composition. That moment. It’s like what she said in her autobiography. There is that want, that moment that the composition comes to the composer. And she says, as a concert pianist she had to capture that sense of the want. She had to capture the moment of creativity of these composers. She’s quite extraordinary, she really is. And they knew, it’s as Elgar said to her, “Our music is safe in your hands.” And Walton says something not dissimilar, writes to her, “I know it is safe in your hands.” Next slide, please. But what other music, I’ve just picked out a few, apart from the music that’s dedicated from Arnold Bax to Harriet? And there’s a good number of those pieces. But did you know, for example, that the following pieces are also dedicated to her? Elgar’s dedicated a piece to her before he dies. In fact, it’s the last composition, unfinished composition that Elgar composes. Harriet has a version of it, it was posted to her the day before he dies. And by the time she receives it, he’s already dead. And that is dedicated to her. Sibelius. Beg your pardon, I said it was Elgar. It’s Sibelius who says to her, “Our music is safe in your hands.” John Ireland, his famous piece, “Legend.” Vaughn Williams “Hymn-Tune Prelude.” Bartok, “Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm.” Who knew that they were dedicated to Harriet? He writes on the script, “Dedicated to Miss Harriet Cohen.” And they’re not the only ones. There was a wonderful story that was told to me actually by one of the music critics.

They were fascinated at the time. They were fascinated by the character of Harriet. And Harriet visits Finland and plays the music of Sibelius. And she’s quite close to Sibelius, but by now the journalists we’re talking about, in the 30s and the 40, the journalists are actually who follow her. And the photographs of items in the newspapers. They’re concerned to know, who are her lovers at this time? It’s a bit equivalent to the royalty today or the paparazzi following Hollywood and the actors and actresses. In her day, she caught a lot of attention because of the famous men that she was rumoured to have had brief affairs with. So, the journalists in the hotel in Finland at breakfast one morning, they’re thinking, “Right, now who’s going to interview Harriet?” And they send this young journalist and say to him, “You got to find out; has she slept with Sibelius?” You can’t ask her outright. But this young journalist is sent to interview her. And he’s quite clever, he says to her, “How close were you to Sibelius?” And she replied, “As close as I was to Elgar.” I love her whit. I love her response. Make of that what you will. Next slide, please. So she’s premiering more pieces for William’s Concerto in C major for Pianoforte and Orchestra. Many of her performances in the Queens Hall in London. She’s giving the first performance of Bax’s new piece, “Winter Legends.”

That she first performs in America. During her performances in the 1930s, she says to Bax, “I have another trip to America.” She went most years, actually from the middle 1930s, to America, primarily staying in New York. And he wrote “Winter Legends,” which she premiered, I believe in New York. Next slide, please. But at this time, in parallel, she’s got this huge social life, as I’ve said, that kind of follows her almost with all the concerts that she’s premiering. She has weeks and months, sometimes two to three months, away from London, away from Arnold Bax. She’s got a punishing career, performances, cocktail parties, she’s active in the day, she’s got her friendships. But with this, she’s holding together her Zionist causes. And at the time, the Zionist Review writes, she’s pictured there with Dorothy Thompson, “At a time when the British foreign office was still clinging to the comfortable belief that there was no need to worry about the Nazi beast, so long as it stayed at home, Harriet Cohen and Dorothy Thompson were jointly addressing lengthy and pungent memoranda on the German menace to unresponsive officials.” Both of them, both women, extraordinary positions where they have a voice, a public voice where they can be heard. And Dorothy Thompson uses her position as a journalist. Harriet, as a famous concert pianist. And if I’m not mistaken, Dorothy Thompson had the ear of Eleanor Roosevelt. Both women were in friendship and met Eleanor Roosevelt. Harriet has an affair with two British Prime Ministers actually.

One of them was Lloyd George; very, very brief relationship. But in this period, Ramsay MacDonald, he’s a largely unknown British Prime Minister, but in the mid 1930s she’s writing to him. She has this personal ear and appealing to him to do something about the Jewish crisis that’s unfolding in Nazi Germany. Next slide, please. Their letters survive between Ramsay MacDonald and Harriet for a whole period beyond when he’s Prime Minister. From 1930 to '37. And again, just with this little anecdote from one of the letters, he called himself Ishbel to just mask his identity. Because of course, if this came out, it would be a scandal. He was widowed by the way. “Many thanks,” he writes to her “for your angel face and your dear little hanky to wipe my angel face.” So she’d put one of her handkerchief in with a letter. It’s kind of a subtle, no, not so subtle reminder. It’s kind of an emotional connection with them. It’s imbuing an emotional connection, which he can’t avoid, as many of the other men can’t also with the photographs that she sends them. Here is another angel face. “I’m in great haste because I have piles of letters to write.” Love, Ishbel. Next slide, please. Into the 1930s, she takes, as I said, Europe and America by storm. Next slide, please. In 1935, she makes her first visit to the Soviet Union. A quite extraordinary mission, if you like.

She travels largely by train. She travels at one point with George Bernard Shaw. Interesting, with a group of friends. It’s a pivotal moment for Russian music. Because for her, she is the first musician the first concert pianist, to bring back, to smuggle out the music of some of the foremost Soviet composers of the day. Hugely risky. She’s going into Russia, she’s actually searched, her music case is searched because the Russians think she has codes and that she’s possibly a spy. We don’t know for sure. It is said that she offered herself at one point to the British to work as a spy. We have no evidence to suggest that she was. But the Russians were suspicious of the music that she had, British music. So she was premiering some of our composers in Russia. But she meets the likes of Shostakovitch and Kabalevsky. And she smuggles their music out at a time when their music is forbidden. She smuggles out “Twenty-Four Preludes” by Shostakovitch. “Sonatina” by Kabalevsky. And Polvinkin’s “Suite.” When she gets back to the UK, she premiers it. It is extraordinary. I’m pretty sure I’m correct in saying that of those three composers, she premiers their music in London. Now, one wonders what would’ve happened if she hadn’t managed to smuggle this music out. It’s not an iron curtain like the Cold War, not in the same extent, but in the 1930s, that repression of everything creative, of composers, of literature that we know so well. Shostakovitch was described as the outstanding genius among the new Soviet composers.

And at the heart of it, Harriet has visited them and she smuggles their music out and brings it to the west. And whilst it’s banned in the Soviet Union, their music is having a life in the west. I think that’s a quite extraordinary thing to do on the part of Harriet. And not without its risk. It’s lucky she wasn’t searched as she came out of the Soviet Union. Next slide, please. So we come to Palestine. She makes her first visit to Jerusalem, what was then Palestine in 1939. It’s around May, 1939, so war has not broken out yet. She’s deeply aware, of course, of the crisis and what is leading towards the final solution, annihilation of her people. And she goes to Palestine to play, to play music. But again, the land deeply affects her and it cements even further her Jewish identity. She is proud and she publicly speaks about her Jewish identity. She supports Zionist causes in London. And Asaf Grasovsky, who is a diplomat in Jerusalem, writes to her, “I’m sure even the walls of Jerusalem were moved by your music. Play on, Tania, play on.” Remember, Tania was the play on the Russian affectionate name that was given to her first by Arnold Bax when the whole Russia, Anglo circle. That love of all things rushing in the 1920s. So Asaf was actually close enough to call Harriet, Tania. And Bax says to Harriet, writes to her in Palestine, he’s in London, “I hope you are being a good babe and resting as much as you can.” Well, of course she’s not. She’s visiting various settlements in Ein Harod, she’s playing music outside with piano, with desert atmosphere. And this completely for her feels like she’s come home. And she actually gives a concert for the British High Commissioner and Golda Meir. She meets Golda Meir. And it’s in Palestine at this time that she first meets Chaim Weizmann. And when Chaim Weizmann subsequently visits London, she’s always visiting him and they become really quite close friends. Next slide, please.

And he shapes as well some of her Zionist thinking. And they start to argue over the Hansard paper and to petition the government over the quota of refugees that are being allowed, or the lack of sufficient quota of refugees that are being allowed into Britain. So she’s very much now taking up, not only the refugee causes, this on top of her professional career as a concert pianist where she’s still travelling to Europe to play. She’s now in Palestine. She still has her concerts in America until just before the outbreak of war. And she would after the war. In her memoir she wrote this, “I had been closed to Dr. Weizmann in disaster and rejoicing, in disappointment and triumph: never did my respect for him by one iota diminish.” Next slide, please. So there’s a lot we could talk about in terms of that, in terms of her Zionist causes. Next slide, please. And a lot we could talk about during the 1940s. She continues to play concerts for the war effort. Most people in the United Kingdom will remember the war concerts of her cousin, Myra Hess. And very little recognition given to what Harriet did during the war itself. She was incredibly active in raising funds for the war effort in helping refugees. But I want to turn now to the latter part of her life. Because she does continue in the 1940s and into the 1950s to play abroad. She’s still premiering. She’s the foremost concert pianist who’s premiering the greatest composers of the day. Premiering their music all over the world. She’s internationally recognised. And we come to 1948. No, back on, please. We come to May, 1948. Just one back if we may, please. Thank you. In May, 1948, she’s actually recording the music for a new film. Bax has composed the background music for the film, “Oliver Twist.” And this photograph is taken on the 16th of May, 1948. And it’s a very poignant moment because this photograph is taken just before a personal bombshell is about to hit Harriet.

Bax, as you can see, quite a bit older now. He’s composed this music for the film “Oliver Twist” and Harriet’s going to play it, of course she is. So she’s the pianist playing the music on the film. But there is about to become a personal bombshell. Because around this time, she sees in the Times newspaper notification that Bax’s wife, Elsa, her will, her estate has been finalised, and we call it her proved, her will has been proved. And she died. Elsa, Bax’s wife, Elsa that refused to give up the husband that she’d married, refused a divorce, went to her death, never granting Bax a divorce. And she died about eight, nine months prior to this photograph. She died in '47, autumn of '47. Bax knew that Elsa had died. But he doesn’t tell Harriet. And Harriet only finds out, next slide, please, when the will, Elsa’s will is made public and published in the newspaper. Here during one of the practises, she’s looking desperately sad. She’s just had the news and she confronts Bax. She says to him, she’s surprised she’s just not been told, but she says to him, “Well, Elsa’s dead, now I can become the Lady Bax.” Because backs had been knighted. He was by now Sir Arnold Bax. And Elsa, although they were not living together, was Lady Bax. And she says to Bax, “Now I can be your wife. We can get married.” And he says, “No, we can’t because I have another long-term lover companion.” And that’s Mary Gleaves. And if you remember, I ended part one with Mary Gleaves.

In the late 1920s when Harriet is travelling at that point all over Europe, in the 1930s into America as well, in the periods that she’s away, and sometimes when she’s in London, he’s spending time in Ireland and in Scotland with Mary Gleaves. Mary Gleaves, much younger than Harriet, she was not particularly intellectual, she was a kind of stable housewife kind of figure at that time. And I don’t think I’m being too unkind. She was a lovely, lovely woman. But she was the kind of person that was quite happy to do the cooking, to wash Bax’s socks and shirts kind of thing. Something that was never on Harriet’s radar. And it was almost as though Bax needed that less turbulent relationship. And by now, by May, 1948, he had had a relationship with Mary Gleaves for 20 years at the same time that he was having this passionate, rather turbulent relationship with Harriet. And the problem that Harriet had, because although she knew he wandered, she wandered, to her, what mattered most was that she was the one true soulmate, love of his life. And that the only thing that stopped him from marrying her was the fact that he was married to Elsa. And now he’s free, she still can’t marry him. And it’s utterly devastating. And for the next five years, Bax dies in October, 1953, for the next five years he manages to keep both women. And Harriet can’t give him up. She’s been his lover for 30 something years. But what differs between her and Mary Gleaves as well is that Mary Gleaves does not inspire a single piece of music from Bax’s hand. And that he knows. She’s not the creative inspiration. Whatever she is, he must have loved her in some kind of way. She’s a sort of stability. But he loved both of them. But Harriet found this almost impossible.

And two days later, well, we know it’s within a range of two weeks, but I’ve actually managed now to piece together with some recently discovered diaries of Harriet, where she makes a coded reference. But on the 18th of May, 1948, she’s in her little Gloucester Park muse, a little muse house in Central London. Not far from Oxford Street. Tucked in around the back. And she’s carrying a tray of glasses and she falls. And when she falls she cuts her wrist and calls out. I believe she makes a telephone call, her maid has already left, she makes a telephone call, plea for help. And she finds herself in hospital for about a week. She has several stitches to her arm. It’s her left arm, her left wrist, but what’s extraordinary is that she can never play again. She’s so damaged the tendons in her hand that the one thing that binds her, if you like, to Bax, their music, she can’t play his music again. And what I uncovered during my research was that it actually wasn’t an accident. It was reported in all the newspapers that she’d had this tragic accident with a tray of glasses. Bax comes to visit her and he knows, she’s open, he knows that was a suicide attempt. She doesn’t totally go through with it, but what she’s done, because she’s called for help, but what she’s done is she has severed, very physically. It’s so dramatic and so of Harriet. She has physically severed the deepest connection between them. So what does Arnold Bax do? He composes a piece of music for her.

“Concertante for the Left Hand” he calls it. And she struggles, she can no longer span piano. She can no longer play like she did. But she can just play with one hand. And she premieres it finally a couple of years later. I mean, her life was so full of drama. But I was brave enough to go out publicly because one of the authors said to me, “Wow, what are you going to do about the accident? I wasn’t brave enough to put it in my book,” says this person. And I thought, wow, okay, you’ve got to tell what you find. And that kind of sums up really the whole tragedy of her life that she kind of lived. Next slide, please. She’d lived for Bax really from such a young age. He died in Ireland. They were together actually. She’d premiered or played a piece of his music with just the one hand. And she’d been to one of the other concerts of his in Ireland. And on the 3rd of October, the following day, he’s staying with friends, they’re not staying together, she gets a message that he was feeling unwell and he’s actually died. And she arranges for a death mask to be made. I’m not sure, I think this is somewhere in a museum in Ireland which is the last cast of his face. And he’s buried in Cork in Ireland. He loved Ireland. And Harriet would live then from 1953 to her own death in 1967 without him. She had a few brief love affairs, but nothing was really the same for her without him. She herself had just come back from Rome. She’d played in concert in Rome in November, 1967.

And it was the chest again, it got to her. The pleurisy, the pneumonia set in, she’d had several bouts of pneumonia over the years. And that had set in and she dies at UCLH, UCL Hospital finally on the 12th of November, 1967. And her close friend, was there, visited her just a day or so before she died. But what was her legacy? Well, I think it is quite extraordinary. And that emerges in her own will after her death. She had a funeral service at Golders Green Crematorium in Northwest London. And I went, as you do, to the crematorium, thinking there’ll be a plaque to her. There were lots of famous actors, musicians, Sigmund Freud for example, lots of famous figures and not so famous figures who have plaques in the Golders Green Crematorium. And I thought there would be a plaque to her. It took me several years to discover that her ashes are interred in the countryside in Buckinghamshire. About 20 miles outside London in a place called Stoke Poges. Stoke Poges is a sort of very tiny village where there’s this extraordinary, I don’t want to say garden cemetery, it’s kind of like a mini estate with trees and rockeries and there’s a lake. And in amongst the trees, it took me quite a while to find her, there’s a stone where it’s engraved. I must go back and photograph it, with her name and dates. And it’s like tiny rockery of water, almost like a tiny pond. It’s almost, if you fast forward to Princess Diana, lady Diana Spencer as came, first wife of now King Charles, she of course buried on that island on the old estate. And Harriet herself has got her own little island at Stoke Poges. Always the drama. And even in death. But there, she’s largely forgotten, which I think is sad. So, just to wrap up, and what about her legacy? What did she bequeath?

Well, in her will, and there can’t be a will like it, there were 79 beneficiaries. She had allotted very special jewellery, which was given to her by a number of lovers over the years. Really expensive jewellery, beautiful jewellery. And that went to godchildren or whoever and some of her closest friends. She bequeathed a number of music manuscripts to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. So there are original, rare manuscripts from Vaughn Williams Arnold Bax, Willie Walton, amongst a number of them. Whilst her will’s going through and being sorted, there was a private service of celebration of her life in the crypt of none other than St. Paul’s Cathedral, one of our foremost national places in London of worship. St. Paul’s Cathedral in the crypt underneath. But 79 items. Extraordinarily, these manuscripts. But she left her letters, as I said, to the British Library. But she had also this amazing collection of paintings from some of the most famous artists of her generation. One wonders how she acquired them. She certainly didn’t have the money or means to buy them. One Picasso, which was stolen about 20, 25 years ago. But her these incredible paintings were bequeathed to the Royal Academy of Music in London. And amongst them is a Chagall, Mark Chagall, Carlo Levi, Andre Durand. In fact, one of the paintings amongst the most valuable in the Royal Academy of Music. Pissarro and as I said, Picasso. So she’s had this extraordinary personal life.

But what about her legacy on the music stage? And perhaps I’ll end here. Because it’s sad that her legacy has really gone into some kind of obscurity. Because without her, some of the greatest music composed by the greatest composers of the 20th century would never have been composed without her. Because she inspired their music. She asked them to write music for her. To play, not necessarily to dedicate it, but of course they did. She championed music across Europe, not just British composers. She brought Russian music out of the Soviet Union and gave it its time in the 1930s when we might never have heard some of these greatest pieces. But she also was a huge figure and a voice for Zionism. And thankfully, she did live, of course, to see the foundation of the state of Israel. So hers is a very mixed, diverse legacy. An interesting, turbulent personal life. A very complex woman. Certainly a very difficult woman. But I think she is a character of the 20th century that deserves to be remembered. Thank you.