Frieda Belinfante

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Frieda Belinfante and Henriëtte Bosmans in the 1920s

Frieda Belinfante (born May 10, 1904 in Amsterdam , † April 25, 1995 in Santa Fe , New Mexico ) was a Dutch- American cellist, conductor and resistance fighter against National Socialism. She was the first woman in Europe to conduct her own orchestra.

Life

Belinfante's father Ary Belinfante was Jewish and ran a music school, her non-Jewish mother was a housewife. (The German meaning of the surname is beautiful child .) From the age of ten Frieda learned to play the cello . She later studied at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam and made her debut at the Concertgebouw at the age of seventeen . She then studied with Gérard Hekking in Paris.

At the age of seventeen Belinfante met the composer and pianist Henriëtte Bosmans , who was nine years her senior , and was in a relationship with her from 1922 to 1927. Bosmans dedicated her second cello concerto to Belinfante, the premiere of which took place on October 10, 1923 with Belinfante as the cellist.

From 1924 she worked for two years as a cello soloist with the Haarlem Orchestra, quit because of poor earnings and instead worked in cinema orchestras and gave cello lessons. In the 1930s she turned to conducting: first she conducted a children's orchestra, then the women's choir and the Sweelinck orchestra of the University of Amsterdam .

After all, she founded her own orchestra together with women from the artists' association Kunst voor Allen (German: art for everyone ), the first female conductor in Europe. This chamber orchestra was called the Kleine Orkest and performed for the first time in 1938 in the Concertgebouw. At a conducting competition organized by Hermann Scherchen in Switzerland in 1939, Frieda Belinfante was the only woman in the competition to take first place.

When the German occupation of the Netherlands by the Wehrmacht began in 1940, Belinfante's brother and his wife committed suicide. Frieda dissolved her orchestra because she did not want to endanger some of the Jewish members of the orchestra. After the compulsory founding of the Dutch “Chamber of Culture ” based on the model of the German National Socialist “Reich Chamber of Culture”, all Dutch artists had to submit a so-called “Aryan declaration” or apply for an exception in order to continue working as musicians. Belinfante, who, according to Nazi racial ideology, was classified as a so-called “half-Jewish woman” , refused to apply for this exception because this type of human selection was out of the question for her. She eventually joined the resistance . Belinfante was involved in planning the attack on the Amsterdam residents' registration office in the autumn of 1942 in order to sabotage the persecution, forced labor and deportation of Jews as well as Sinti and Roma by destroying identity cards . She could not take part in the attack itself in 1943 because the group did not want women there. Belinfante single-handedly forged identity documents for many of the people threatened with deportation and forced labor.

After the attack, most of the resistance fighters were arrested and executed. Frieda Belinfante disguised herself as a man for several months to avoid arrest. At the end of 1943 she managed to flee to Switzerland and was housed in a refugee camp there. But she was discriminated against because of her sexual orientation. From 1944 she worked with Hermann Scherchen in Winterthur . After the war ended, she returned to the Netherlands in the summer of 1945, but no longer felt well and emigrated to the USA in 1947.

In the USA, she first taught conducting and cello at the University of California and worked on film music for Hollywood films. From July 1954 she led the Orange County Philharmonic Orchestra , which had just been newly founded. In 1961, however, the Philharmonic Society of Orange County decided to specialize in concerts by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the in-house orchestra was neglected. The orchestra was finally disbanded in 1962; Belinfante suspected that her sexual orientation as a lesbian woman might have been the decisive factor here. She moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico and gave private lessons.

The Pacific Symphony Orchestra , founded in 1978, named a program in which the orchestra works with elementary schools in Orange County after her.

In 1994, around a year before her death, Klaus Müller interviewed her about her life for the Oral History Collection of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum . The documentary ... But I Was a Girl: The Story of Frieda Belinfante , released in 1999 under the direction of Toni Boumans, documents her life.

Frieda Belinfante died of cancer in 1995.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k Frieda Belinfante. In: Fembio.org. Retrieved August 29, 2016 .
  2. ^ A b Claudia Schoppmann: Avoidance and survival strategies of lesbian women in the "Third Reich" . In: Bundesstiftung Magnus Hirschfeld (Ed.): Research in Queer Format: Current Contributions from LGBTI *, Queer and Gender Studies . transcript Verlag, 2014.
  3. ↑ a b c Chris Pasles: OC Musical Pioneer Frieda Belinfante Dies at 90: Obituary: She conducted the Orange County Philharmonic during 1950s. In World War II, she was in the Dutch underground. In: Los Angeles Times . March 7, 1995, accessed August 29, 2016 .
  4. ↑ a b Irmak Kamali, Boundless Courage and Resistance of an Extraordinary Cellist , in: Newspaper of the Hannoversche Frauenbündnis - Internationaler Frauentag, edition 2019, p. VII
  5. ↑ Frieda Belinfante . In: Berliner Zeitung , 20./21. October 2018, p. 28.
  6. ^ Oral history interview with Frieda Belinfante. In: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Accessed August 30, 2016 .
  7. ↑ ... But I Was a Girl: The Story of Frieda Belinfante in the Internet Movie Database (English)
personal data
SURNAME Belinfante, Frieda
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Dutch-American cellist, conductor and resistance fighter
DATE OF BIRTH May 10, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Amsterdam
DATE OF DEATH April 25, 1995
Place of death Santa Fe , New Mexico