Read on to discover the remarkable story of the fearless Dutch-Jewish composer Henriëtte Bosmans...
Who was Henriëtte Bosmans? The composer who saved her mother from the Nazis...
Much about Henriëtte Bosmans’s life and music is remarkable. But one event stands out as emblematic of her character and strength. Our scene is Amsterdam in 1944, when the Nazis’ grip was on the Dutch capital. Bosmans, now nearly 50, had been born to a Catholic father, Henri, who had died before she turned a year old, and a Jewish mother, Sara, now 83. One day, in a climate of constant threat, the worst happened: Sara was arrested by the Gestapo. Taken to the Westerbork transit camp, the last stop for many before they were deported and murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau and Sobibor, her fate seemed sealed.
Bosmans went to the Gestapo HQ in Amsterdam to plea for her mother’s life, apparently confronting the officers. She also turned to Willem Mengelberg, conductor of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, to ask his help. Astonishingly, five days after arriving at Westerbork, Sara was freed and sent back to Amsterdam. We will probably never know exactly how Bosmans pleaded her case. When her biographer Helen Metzelaar appeared on Radio 3’s Composer of the Week in 2022, she explained she’d only been able to find one source confirming the event, plus an oblique thank you letter to Mengelberg. Yet we might imagine the fear, desperation and courageous determination Bosmans must have felt in that moment – not least as her status as the daughter of a ‘mixed marriage’, as the Nazis called it, meant her own safety was far from guaranteed.
Henriëtte Bosmans... a famous concert pianist
Conviction and passion are two of the qualities that cellist Gemma Rosefield, a champion of Bosmans today, hears in her music. ‘Bosmans was a real tour de force, a real trailblazer, who stuck to her guns and was determined and impassioned. She fell in love very deeply, had deep friendships and didn’t feel the need to conform,’ says Rosefield. ‘She was an incredible female concert pianist, then lost her career during the war – and got it back again; she stuck up for what she knew was right; she fought for her mother. It’s an overwhelming force, really, when you’re playing her music.’
Bosmans composed a wealth of orchestral, chamber and instrumental works and songs, but during her day was best known in the Netherlands as a leading concert pianist, with her repertoire including Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, Grieg and Debussy. Born in December 1895, she took up the piano as a child, taught by her widowed mother, who was herself a pianist and teacher at the Amsterdam Conservatoire and had played piano duets with Brahms. The young Henriëtte immediately showed a talent for music and worked away until, at 19, she made her debut in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 15 with the Utrecht Municipal Orchestra. A year later, in 1916, she appeared with the Concertgebouw itself as the soloist in Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto. As a pianist she was, reported one critic in the Algemeen Handelsblad, ‘shrewd, intuitive, with pure, vibrant and noble musicianship’.
Henriëtte Bosmans... burgeoning composer
Alongside her blossoming piano career, Bosmans began to flex her compositional muscles. Her early pieces are piano and chamber works including the Drie Klavierstukken (1914), a set of Preludes (1918) and, that same year, a Violin Sonata. In 1919, she was commissioned by the cellist Marix Loevensohn, and the result was her Cello Sonata, a work with real heft and serious purpose.
A love of the cello
The cello was an instrument loved by Bosmans, whose father had been principal cellist of the Concertgebouw. Loevensohn was a friend, but even closer to her was Frieda Belinfante – one of the bisexual Bosmans’s great loves. Belinfante was, if anything, even more of a fighter than Bosmans, a cellist who would become a conductor and part of the Dutch resistance, eventually escaping on foot to Switzerland. Belinfante wrote of Bosmans as her ‘best friend, girlfriend… I was a high admirer of this wonderful, beautiful-looking girl, composer’.
Bosmans completed her First Cello Concerto in 1921, exploring music on a larger scale than ever before. ‘It turned out to be extraordinary and full of many colours,’ reflected the cellist Raphael Wallfisch in a recent interview, ‘[and] full of invention and unique details.’ And by 1923, when she wrote her Second Cello Concerto, for Belinfante, Bosmans was in even greater control of her craft. ‘It gave evidence of much talent,’ wrote The Musical Times. A Poème for cello and orchestra followed in 1926, dedicated to Loevensohn. The Musical Times,again, described it, much later in 1935, as ‘very delightful’, though not entirely distinctive. Rosefield agrees you can hear the ‘slightly youthful writing’ in Bosmans’s orchestration, but feels it is an ‘incredibly tender and impassioned’ piece.
Henriëtte Bosmans... Embracing impressionism
While her roots in the German Romantics stood her in good stead, Bosmans wanted to develop her craft. In the 1920s, she began studying with Dutch composer Willem Pijper, who felt she should be more forward-looking. New creative horizons opened up, and French impressionism left its mark. Her String Quartet of 1927 is one of her finest works: deft, atmospheric and unexpected.
The Concertino for piano and orchestra (1928) and a Concertstuk for flute and orchestra (1929) followed. Ravel helped present the Concertino at the Geneva Festival in 1929, although this time The Musical Times’s critic was sniffy, saying Bosmans ‘translated Ravel into terms of drawing-room music’. Still, when she played it with the Concertgebouw a few years later, another of the journal’s critics was impressed. In particular the instrumentation was, he noted, ‘extraordinarily skilful, modern in its freedom yet restrained and free from eccentricities’. He hoped it would find a place in the repertoire.
Personal tragedy... the death of her fiancé
The 1930s were a breakthrough decade. As a pianist, she regularly appeared with the Concertgebouw, playing with top conductors including Pierre Monteux, Eduard van Beinum and Mengleberg. It was also a period marked by tragedy. In 1934, she became engaged to the violinist Francis Koene, concertmaster of the Dresden State Opera, but he fell ill and the following year he died of a brain tumour. Bosmans was heartbroken, later reflecting that ‘I died a little bit then’.
The Concertstuk for violin and orchestra, written in 1934, is, perhaps unsurprisingly, questing and brooding. In 1938, the violinist Willem Noske played it abroad, in Prague and Paris, and three years later, Ruth Posselt introduced the piece to the US. The work put Bosmans on the international map.
Henriëtte Bosmans and World War II... persecuted by the Nazis
But then World War II erupted. Bosmans was initially able to continue working, even jumping in when pianists visiting from abroad had to cancel their plans. But the Nazis’ plans for annihilating the Jews in the Netherlands gathered pace. Jews were banned from public services in 1940, forced to register in 1941 (including both Bosmans and her mother), and forcibly relocated to Amsterdam in 1942 and made to wear the yellow star. Deportations began that summer.
Also in 1942, Jewish musicians were required to sign up to the Nederlandse Kultuurkamer, and those who didn’t were banned from public performance. Bosmans had never particularly identified with her Jewish heritage, but that made no difference. She was not allowed to play, the Concertgebouw dropped her and her income dwindled. Instead, she performed at ‘black evenings’, secret underground concerts in private houses, to make ends meet. Composing had to wait.
The end of the war... an era of song
Her creative spirit was rekindled by the end of the war. ‘Oppression is crushed and freedom begins,’ cries her liberation song Daar Komen de Canadezen (Here come the Canadians). She dedicated both this and Gebed (Prayer) to Jo Vincent, a famous Dutch soprano who had appeared at the Proms. In 1945, Vincent appeared in Amsterdam with the Concertgebouw and Sir Adrian Boult to sing Lead, kindly light, Bosmans’s setting of a hopeful English text by Cardinal Newman.
And this post-war period became an era of song for Bosmans. Earlier, in 1940, she had met the French mezzo Noémie Pérugia, and she went on to compose and dedicate 11 of her 25 songs to her. She also struck up a (sort of) friendship with Britten, who had performed in the Dutch capital with the tenor Peter Pears. Letters and postcards between the two survive, although it appears the relationship was rather one-sided. She sent him eggs and chocolate and confessed she felt like he was her son; he kept his distance.
Henriëtte Bosmans... a legacy
Establishment recognition came in 1951, when Bosmans was knighted in the Royal Order of Orange Nassau. But by then, she was ill with stomach cancer and, after her final recital with Pérugia in April 1952, she died in Amsterdam on 2 July. What of her legacy? Several streets in the Netherlands have been named after her, and in 1994 a composition prize was set up in her name by Nieuw Geneco, the Society of Dutch Composers. Although the Concertgebouw programmed her flute Concertstuk three years after her death, her music fell out of fashion and out of mind.
It wasn’t until 2018 that the Concertgebouw returned to Bosmans, programming the Doodenmarsch (March of the Dead) for narrator and piano or orchestra. In 2022, Vesko Eschkenazy, concertmaster of the Concertgebouw, played the Concerstuk for violin in three concerts. Gemma Rosefield has been performing Bosmans’s music for a few years now and has found the audience response to it has been overwhelmingly positive: ‘People are touched by it. She has an ability to reach you. It’s music within human reach. She knew what she was writing meant something.’
