Forbidden Music Regained - Stichting RMVD support the publishing of Dutch composer Henriëtte Bosmans

We are delighted to announce the Board’s decision to support the publishing of the remaining works of Dutch composer Henriëtte Bosmans, thanks to the Leo Smit Foundation’s Forbidden Music Regained project. Board members Bert Verhaar, Greg Lawson and Walter van Dijk joined fellow board member Paula Quint at the Nederlands Muziek Instituut archives to look at some of the unpublished handwritten manuscripts of Ms. Bosmans which the Dutch music publishers Donemus are undertaking to publish. We will update on the progress of this project as and when there is more news. An interesting curiosity is that Dutch composer Rudi Martinus van Dijk’s mother-in-law, writer and pianist Jeanne Koning-Coeterier, trained as a pianist with Henriëtte Bosmans at the Amsterdam Conservatory in the 1920’s which led to her very own concert tour of the Dutch East Indies and her book Loesjes kunstreis naar Indië.

In November 1915, Henriëtte Bosmans made her debut as a concert pianist with the Utrecht Municipal Orchestra, conducted by Wouter Hutschenruyter, performing Mozart’s ‘Piano Concerto’ KV 450 (1784). She performed in the major concert halls in the Netherlands with such internationally renowned conductors as Pierre Monteux, Willem Mengelberg, Eduard van Beinum, Sir Adrian Boult and George Szell. In 1922, she began teaching the piano at the Toonkunst Music School in Amsterdam. On March 12, 1952, she performs for the last time with orchestra, and on April 30 gives her last recital with Noémie Perugia. After the recital, she collapses and a month later she dies in the hospital.Henriëtte Bosmans is considered one of the most important Dutch composers of the first half of the 20th century. As a pianist and composer, she was affiliated with various chamber music ensembles in Amsterdam, with among others the violinists Louis Zimmerman and Francis Koene and the cellist Marix Loevensohn. Her first compositions, including her first orchestral piece ‘Poème’ (1923), for cello and orchestra, are written in a German-Romantic style. World War II puts her career on hold. Henriëtte Bosmans refuses to become a member of the Nazi’s Chamber of Culture and can perform only secretly. During the war, she develops a friendship with the reciter Charlotte Köhler. After a lengthy period in which Bosmans regularly performs but does not compose, because of the premature death of Francis Koene in 1935 and the war, she writes the ‘Doodenmarsch’ [Death March, 1945], on text by Clara Eggink. Marius Flothuis regards this as one of her best works.At the repeated request of Benjamin Britten, Henriëtte Bosmans sets Olive Schreiner’s poem ‘Dreams’ to music and dedicates it to Peter Pears, Britten’s partner. That same year (1948), she also meets the singer Noémie Perugia. In the last years of her life, while she is tormented by illness, comes a new creative period. The songs she writes, and performs with her friend Perugia, are among the best of that period.