Royal Academy of Music Launches Helen Fry's Music & Men

The life and career of the pianist Harriet Cohen, a fascinating figure who inspired much of the core British piano repertoire of the early 20th century, is celebrated this Friday evening at the Royal Academy of Music's Concert Room from 6.30pm (tickets free). The evening will also comprise an interview with Helen Fry about her new biography Music and Men: The Life and Loves of Harriet Cohen (The History Press, £20). Classical music performances during the evening will include the Elgar Piano Quintet, the première of which was given by Cohen, and other chamber works by composers close to the pianist including Arnold Bax.

It was during the turbulent decade of the First World War that the intensely gifted and beautiful Harriet Cohen established herself as a pianist. Enjoying huge success in her professional life over three decades, she was the first person outside the Soviet Union to play the music of the modern Soviet composers. She championed the revival of Elizabethan keyboard music of Purcell and Byrd, as well as premiering the new pieces of Britain's leading contemporary composers. During the 1920s and 1930s she became a huge success throughout Europe and in America. Her beauty and talent made her one of the most talked-about and photographed musicians of her day.

Yet it is in her private life that the story of this extraordinarily gifted young woman becomes one of the greatest love stories of all time. Her passionate love affair with the composer Sir Arnold Bax, a married man, later Master of the King's Music and one of the very few millionaire composers, spanned more than thirty years. Their infatuation was played out against the backdrop of the First World War, and was peppered with betrayal, lust and tragedy. Their letters, published here for the first time, are among the most explicit of any written during that time and are staggering in their passion and poetry.

Helen Fry PhD is an honorary research fellow in the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College, London. Previous books include Jews in North Devon during the Second World War (Halsgrove, 2005) and The King's Most Loyal Enemy Aliens (The History Press, 2008). "I stumbled across the archive of 3,000 letters by accident and was immediately struck by the depth of the passion between Harriet Cohen and composer Arnold Bax. What love that it should inspire such intense emotion in his music and poetry? This was a story which had never fully been told because the letters had a 30-year embargo on them - such was the sensitive nature of their contents, not just of Bax but other famous lovers too", Helen Fry.

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For more information, visit www.MusicandMen.com and http://www.BritishLocalHistory.com/historyweb/harrietcohen/