The pianist Harriet Cohen has had a mixed press since her lifetime. She was a star of the classical music world in the early twentieth century, and we owe much of the pianistic output of British composers at the time to her direct influence. If one searches for her on Google, the first page of results demonstrates this perfectly. Alongside the descriptions of her as “distinguished”, and “internationally acclaimed”, there are other threads, including the adjective “alluring”, calling her “the piano-witch” (a nickname that was indeed conferred upon her), and the rather backhanded description of the Cohen-Bach album as a series of pieces by “12 of the composers who most admired her (or her playing).”
Like so many of the women who have already featured on these pages, her reputation has been overtaken by her association with a famous man (as I remarked about Helen Perkin, the man who is “the male composer who confers recognition on [her] name by his patronage […] but which then means we don’t ‘see’ the rest of her life”), particularly as this was a romantic liaison that always seems to be seen to add several layers of complexity to the issue of creative authority.
I actually came to know Cohen first through her writings, long before the age of YouTube and other means of easily accessing historical recordings. Music’s Handmaid was the first book of hers that I read, and I was immediately fascinated by the opening paragraph:
“I have often been asked why it is that I, who have devoted so much of my time to making known the beauty of early keyboard music, choose also to include in my programmes so many modern pianoforte works. Behind this question lies the often expressed opinion that modern composers are destructive of all that loveliness which the sixteenth and seventeenth-century music contains.”
The book is divided into two sections, the first titled “The Composer”, and the second “The Performer.” A large part of the first chapter takes the form of several dialogues - or rather, fierce argument - between opposing medieval and renaissance musicians. The first is between two fourteenth-century composer-theorists; Johannes de Mauris (now more commonly spelled Muris), arguing for conservatism, and Philippe de Vitry, on the side of innovation. It is a gentle revelation of just how musically knowledgeable and literate Cohen was, both in the choice of these two medieval thinkers and writers, and in the reasoning she puts into their mouths (later she will quote from Tristan Tzara’s Dada manifesto of 1918, demonstrating the astonishing breadth of her expertise). While of course she is firmly in de Vitry’s camp, she is sympathetic to the reservations of de Mauris, and does not fall into the trap of caricaturing him, although she has him raise his voice on at least one occasion, and in the end he “stamps out, muttering ‘cacophonous stuff! Modern Music indeed!”
Thus, it’s easy to see that Cohen is concerned with answering this opening question, from the inside out as it were. She demonstrates her belief that these old composers are innovative with musical techniques in exactly the same way as ‘modern’ composers, finding new routes into harmony and form. She is insistent, however, that all new technique must be “the servant of emotion”, and several composers catch the full force of her disapproval. Poor Stravinsky is dismissed as “a pre-Russian, a Scythian” – I am not sure here why this is a bad thing, given Herodotus’s claim that the warriors of this tribe were “invincible and unapproachable”, but sidelined he is, along with Schoenberg, who according to Cohen, discloses “an absolutely non-musical kind of interest, which if persevered in could only lead to barren intellectualism.” It is an interesting insight into what matters to Cohen at the keyboard, and the idea of “an expression of feeling” is paramount. Cohen clearly sees this as synonymous with the idea of sincerity; she is wary of music that, for her, appears to hide behind innovation and dazzlingly new ways of writing – composers that confuse ‘idiom’ with ‘idiosyncrasy’, to use her own words.
The second half of the book is devoted to unpicking some of the repertoire for which Cohen was well-known, starting with Elizabethan composers, and moving from there through Bach, Mozart, Chopin and Brahms, to de Falla and Bax. It is a detailed account of how Cohen translates the scores of specific pieces – “the secret of how to approach and how to prepare and master the technique of a piece will be found in that piece. There is no need to bring anything to it from outside” – and as such, is much more about Cohen herself than it is about the pieces of which she writes, something of which she is clearly well aware. For me as a real fan of Cohen’s Bach playing, unidiomatic as many modern ears might find it, her commentary on the first prelude and fugue sheds considerable light on her tempo and pedalling decisions. Rhythm is clearly a priority at all times, being much of the focus of every chapter in this section. And it is surprising to read of just how small her hands were, with a ninth only being possible if she put the thumb down first.
While it’s great that we talk about women’s lives, putting their biographies under the microscope, it often seems to me that many writers in the world of general music scholarship forget to do the same to their music making. This is of course especially difficult for performers, whose musicianship, especially pre-recording is at best ephemeral, and at worst invisible. Cohen presents a wonderful opportunity through the existence of both her word and her sound. This book enables us to insert a scalpel between the limpid world of Cohen-at-the-keyboard and the at-times deafening chaos of the narrative often drawn as her life story. She shines a light on a bygone performance practice, a past aesthetic for which we should be nostalgic.
Here she is playing some of the Elizabethan music for which she was so well-known at the time.