Lina Coen, was a French-American musician of Dutch descent. She won acclaim as a pianist and vocal coach and became known as the first woman in the United States to conduct an opera.
Life
Lina Coen was born as Caroline Marie Cohen in Paris on September 21st, 1878. Both of her parents were citizens of the Netherlands. Her grandfather, Eliasar Levij Cohen, was a Dutch painter who worked in Paris while her father, Hippolijte Cohen, was a diamond merchant, based in Paris and later in Berlin. Coen married Dutch cellist Jacques van Lier in Berlin in 1899. They had one child, Felicia Anne van Lier, born in 1901. The couple divorced in 1907 but stayed in Berlin until the outbreak of World War I. While her ex-husband and her daughter moved to Eastbourne, England in August 1914, Lina Coen settled in New York City in October 1914. In 1925, Caroline Marie Cohen obtained US citizenship under the name of Lina Coen, renouncing her French and Dutch citizenship in the process. After her father's death, Coen returned to Paris in 1921 to take her mother to New York. Her mother passed away at age 93 in New York in 1942 and Coen moved to Miamito live with her daughter Felicia “Sousie” Van Lier Browne, residing with her daughter’s family that included her daughter’s husband Van M. Browne and their children Carolyn Browne, Roger E. Browne and Peter V. Browne
Career
Pianist
Having graduated from the Conservatoire de Paris, she gave her first known concert as pianist in the Kurhaus in Scheveningen in 1896. At 17 years of age, she played the Hungarian Rhapsody no. 11 by Franz Liszt and the Capriccio Brillante by Felix Mendelssohn, accompanied by a Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Frans Mannstädt. Her future husband, Jacques van Lier, played 2nd cello that afternoon. Shortly afterwards, she moved to Berlin. Coen was solo-pianist in a concert of the Berlin Philharmoniker conducted by Josef Řebíček, performing the Piano Concerto by Robert Schumann. The next year, Coen obtained a contract for a series of 45 concerts throughout Germany. With her fiancé, she was part of a chamber music trio, with violinist Margarethe Baginsky. The German newspaper "Neuen Zeitschrift für Musik" found it a worrisome sign of possible times ahead, should women´s rights activists get their way, that the two women overpowered the man. Coen also tried her hand at composing: between 1896 and 1906, three of her compositions were published in Paris in the series "Pensée: pour piano". Soon, Coen would find the role that would define her career: accompanying opera singers on the piano. As early as 1908, she accompanied Alexander Heinemann on a tour through the Netherlands and England. Her debut in New York was in Carnegie Hall in January 1915, when she supported Olive Fremstad on the piano. One year later, she was the official pianist of Leon Rothier of the Metropolitan Opera with whom she toured Canada. In 1920, Coen spent nine weeks on tour with Marie Rappold, including Texas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Kansas. In addition to serving as Mme. Rappold’s accompanist on the piano, Coen performed as a soloist, playing compositions by Dubois and Liszt, music that she frequently performed, that was sometimes complemented by encore performances of C Sharp Minor Waltz by Chopin and Gluck's Gavotte by Johannes Brahms. In 1929, she accompanied Marie Rappold for concerts in the Netherlands, the birthplace of Coen's parents and grandparents. They played the Koninklijk Concertgebouw and Diligentia.
Opera conductor and vocal coach
Lina Coen is best known for being the first woman in the US to conduct an opera, as described in the New York Review in an article entitled, “Woman Conducts ‘Carmen’ Performance at Garden Theatre: Mme. Coen is First of Sex to Wield Baton in Grand Opera in America” which includes a quotation of Coen's response to the apparently unavoidable question about her dress: Among the singers who coached with Coen are Marion Telva, Julia Culp, Jeanne Gordon, Carl Jorn, Orville Harold, Marie Tiffany, Geneviève Vix, Claire Dux and many others. Her career as conductor continued in 1921 when she worked with Leon M. Kramer and conducted "La Juive", at the Lexington Opera House in New York under the auspices of the Jewish American Opera Company, the first time a Grand Opera was performed in the US in Yiddish. After this, Coen focused on her role as vocal coach until in 1944 when she became the musical director for her third opera, Engelbert Humperdinck´s Hansel and Gretel, presented by the University of Miami School of Music, where she had worked since 1943 as a vocal trainer. She died in Miami in 1952, at age 73.
