Preview: Henriëtte Bosmans and "Lead, Kindly Light" in 1945

I had never heard of Henriëtte Bosmans until earlier this month! And I certainly did not know that she had composed a work for soprano and either piano or orchestra based on Saint John Henry Newman's poem "Lead, Kindly Light"--and that it had premiered in 1945, thus 80 years ago. With that date, however, I knew this was a topic for our Son Rise Morning Show 2025 Anniversary series. 

Therefore, on Monday, September 22, I'll be on the air at my usual time around 7:50 a.m. Eastern/6:50 a.m. Central to discuss this anniversary and its background. Please listen live here or catch the podcast later here.

Bosmans was born in Amsterdam on December 6, 1895 (130 years ago); her father was Catholic and her mother was Jewish--and her father died when she was six months old. It was a musical family as her father had been the principal cellist of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and her mother, Sarah Benedicts, was a piano teacher at the Amsterdam Conservatory.

Henriëtte studied piano with her mother and other instructors at the Conservatory and taught piano herself; then she began her concert and composing careers as this website explains:

Bosmans debuted as a concert pianist in 1915 in Utrecht. She performed throughout Europe with among others Pierre Monteux, Willem Mengelberg and Ernest Ansermet. She gave 22 concerts with the Concertgebouw Orchestra alone between 1929 and 1949. She played one of her own compositions at a concert in Geneva in 1929. In 1940, one of her compositions was performed in concert by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, with Ruth Posselt as the soloist. In 1941, Posselt again performed work by Bosmans, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

The BBC Music Magazine recounts a terrible event in her life even as she was forbidden from publishing or performing her works because her mother Jewish and because Henriette refused to cooperate with the Nazi cultural authorities in occupied Netherlands:

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.

The same article explains how she turned from composing for the piano, cello, and other stringed instruments after the end of World War II and to composing for the voice, including Newman's "Lead, Kindly Light":

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 England]. 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.

The date of that concert was November 3, 1945, just six months after the liberation of The Netherlands on May 5 when the Germans officially surrendered at the demand of the Royal Canadian Regiment (thus the song about the Canadians coming!). 

Unlike the hymn settings by John Bacchus Dykes (Lux Benigna), William Henry Harris (Alberta), David Evans (Bonifacio), Charles H. Purday (Sandon), or Arthur Sullivan (Lux in Tenebris), this is a work for a professional vocalist with either orchestral or piano accompaniment. The piano score is marked throughout as "Adagio sostenuto" for the keyboard and either "piu tranquillo" or "poco animato" for the soprano soloist, so it is delicate and subdued, in spite of its hopeful ending.

Henriëtte died on July 2, 1952. May she rest in the peace of that Kindly Light.

Saint John Henry, pray for us!

Image Source (Public Domain): Photograph of Henriëtte Bosmans (1917) by Jacob Merkelbach (1877-1942)