Ode to Henriëtte Bosmans | Love is a rebellious bird, sings Carmen, no one can tame it

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Borders, restrictions, curfews, professional bans, fascism, patriarchy, homophobia, death. She was shackled in every possible way, but Henriëtte Bosmans did not let herself be shackled. Her lust for life sloshed over the edges. ‘And I long for freedom and binding at the same time, and also - well, I don't know exactly, but always something too,’ she wrote to composer friend Benjamin Britten. Always something too, freedom and bonding, male and female lovers, playing the piano and composing, German romanticism and always French impressionism. She wanted to live, but often longed for death too.

Yes, of course Carmen by Bizet was her anthem, the work pur sang of life and death, freedom and bonding. L'amour est loin, tu peux l'attendre;

Tu ne l'attends plus, il est là ! Love is far away, you can wait for it; You no longer wait for it, there it is! ‘If I die (unexpectedly or hopelessly), they may play the whole Carmen on my grave,’ she once wrote to another friend. ‘It's uncanny, the power that music has, almost unassuming that one human being just wrote it down, at a time’. She once had herself photographed as a kind of Carmen. With a raised eyebrow, she looks down at the camera, her hands clasped together on her forward left hip. She radiates freedom and authority, but also vulnerability and softness, always something too.

She did not have the calm for obedient study. Reviewers wrote about her piano performances that she played sloppily , that she made mistakes. Why keep repeating something over and over again, she thought, why hammer in the same tune every day; every time I play it's different. Freedom and bonding. This is the ‘always something too’: instead of always doing the same thing, always wanting to add something new, to keep going, not get stuck. A male reviewer wrote, ‘she plays Brahms with masculine control and feminine dedication’, and with Bosmans this is no paradox.
 

She was known as a chaotic person. For daily chores, she had no patience. She called her lover Frieda Belinfante, conductor and cellist, ‘daddy and mommy’ (always something too), because she could hammer and hang frames. Even though Frieda was nine years younger.

What some call chaotic can also zest for life.

Her father was first cellist of the Concertgebouw Orchestra. A Roman Catholic. Her mother was a pianist - Henriëtte's first and only piano teacher - and Jewish. Thanks to this ‘mixed’ heritage, she was spared deportation during the Holocaust, although she did lose her income during the war years because she refused to join the Kultuurkamer. Frieda, now her ex, and resistance fighter, helped her with odd jobs during those years. She played recitals at illegal house concerts, at rich people's homes. Sometimes the gathering was discovered by the police and Henriëtte escaped through the back garden. She did not compose in those years, maybe she could only do so in peace and freedom, maybe there was no point because her work was not allowed to be played anyway.
 

After the war, she met French mezzo-soprano Noémie Perugia, a new love, which heralded a new creative period. Henriette composed 11 songs for her, which sound very French, with echoes of Debussy, Fauré, Ravel. Songs about death and farewell, despite her country's newly regained freedom. Yet they never sound heavy, thanks to the lyrical suppleness and transparency, the staggered time signatures that seem mercurial. Just as she herself always slips out of your hands when you try to describe her, because she is always something too.
 

Henriëtte Bosmans lived intensely, loved intensely. Her music, for a long time somewhat underrated, is gaining appreciation. She died young, in 1952, of undiagnosed stomach cancer. Shortly before, she was appointed a Knight of the Order of Orange-Nassau. Carmen, as far as we know, was never played on her grave at Zorgvlied. Love is a rebellious bird, sings Carmen, no one can tame it. Something of that spirit lives on in Henrietta's music, which we can still listen to, as that rebellious bird.