On October 8th, the World Doctors Orchestra will perform this work of Henriëtte Bosmans in Utrecht. The concert is sold out. With the support of the Leo Smit Stichting and the Rudi Martinus van Dijk Foundation, Donemus published a new edition of this work. More than 70 years after her death, this edition could be realised.
In April 2018, the Concertgebouw Orchestra played Doodenmarsch, a short but powerful piece by the prominent Dutch composer Henriëtte Bosmans (1895-1952). Despite being labelled by former artistic director Marius Flothuis as one of her best compositions, the orchestra had never performed it before.
On the other hand, the orchestra played the Concert Piece for Violin and Orchestra eight times during Bosmans’ lifetime. It first premiered on 31 October 1935 with concertmaster Louis Zimmermann and conductor Willem Mengelberg, and it last performed in September 1951 under the baton of Eduard van Beinum, with the renowned musicologist and violinist Willem Noske as soloist. Noske had already included this work in his repertoire in 1938.
Bosmans’ Concertino for piano and orchestra was performed more than double the number of times with the orchestra than the Concert piece for violin and orchestra. She even soloed the piece herself, an unusual feat for an orchestral work during her lifetime. It is surprising that the Concertino had to wait so long for a reprise and that after the performance of the Concertino for flute and orchestra in 1953, shortly after Bosmans’ death, no work by this composer has been played by the orchestra with which she had such a profound connection.
The relationship between Henriette Bosmans and the Concertgebouw Orchestra goes back to her father, Henri, who was appointed the first solo cellist when the orchestra was founded in 1888. Henri had been married to Jewish pianist Sara Benedicts since 1886. Sara was also a prominent pedagogue who taught Henriette and would significantly impact her life.
Henriette started composing early on and was mainly self-taught as a composer, apart from a brief mentorship from the pioneering composer Willem Pijper. She drew attention to herself as early as 1918 with contemporary harmonies and oriental melodies in a violin sonata and the Danse exotique. In the 1919 Cello Sonata, we find for the first time the five-quarter time signature she often used. The cello played a significant role in her works, probably in memory of her father, who had already died in 1896.
During the war, her origins got her into trouble. She refused an offer to travel to America and did not want to abandon her Jewish mother. However, she managed to get them to return from Westerbork through Willem Mengelberg’s intervention. She was labelled a ‘Jewish case’ in the Kultuurkamer, and public performances were forbidden to her from 1 April 1942. Through Charlotte Köhler, with whom she was intimate friends, Bosmans became involved in clandestine concerts. Through Frieda Belinfante, she received support from the artists’ resistance.
After the war, Bosmans resumed her concert career, and her liberation song Daar komen de Canadezen even became a hit. On 13 September 1945, she was already playing again with the Concertgebouw Orchestra (Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto), which gave the world premiere of her orchestral song Lead, Kindly Light on 3 November. For Köhler, she wrote the poignant Doodenmarsch for spoken voice and orchestra.
Despite receiving wide recognition, Bosmans’ last years of life were difficult. Dutch musical life developed a preference for foreign musicians, and she failed to connect with the up-and-coming generation of modernists as a composer. After not a single Dutch work was performed at the sixtieth anniversary of the Concertgebouw Orchestra in 1948, she wrote an article for Vrij Nederland titled ‘There were seven little frogs,’ in which she argued that the Netherlands was leaving its artists out in the cold. Without support, there can be no healthy national musical life.
Bosmans experienced a series of physical ailments, possibly due to exhaustion during the war. In 1951, when the Concert piece for violin and orchestra was played by the Concertgebouw Orchestra once more, she had to listen to it on the radio from her sickbed. Critic Matthijs Vermeulen wrote: ‘One rarely hears anything today, which without falling into conformism anywhere, or without wanting to avoid conformism, is so perfectly flawlessly and impeccably realised in sound.’
Composers in the crosshairs of our attention