[1][2] She studied piano at the Royal Academy of Music under Tobias Matthay,[3] having won the Ada Lewis scholarship at the age of 12 followed by the Sterndale Bennett Prize in 1913.

Harriet Cohen dedicated an important effort to the performance of the Tudor composers at a time when this was unusual, and gave recitals of works by William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons and also of Henry Purcell.

She was considered one of the finest performers of J. S. Bach's keyboard music, winning outstanding praise from the musicologist Alfred Einstein.

She also cultivated Spanish music, and gave the second performance of Manuel de Falla's Nights in the Gardens of Spain, a work which became especially associated with her.

She was also an early exponent of music of the Soviet Union in Britain, and visited Russia in 1935 to broadcast from Moscow and Leningrad, including works by Shostakovich, Kabalevsky and Leonid Polovinkin.

She became a close friend of Eleanor Roosevelt and Ramsay MacDonald as well as the first president of Israel, Chaim Weizmann.

These included not only musicians such as Jean Sibelius, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Sir Edward Elgar and Sir William Walton, but also writers such as Arnold Bennett, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells and D. H. Lawrence as well as politicians or entrepreneurs such as Max Beaverbrook and Leslie Viscount Runciman.

She was vice-president of the Women's Freedom League, and was for several years associated with the Jewish National Fund and the Palestine Conservatoire of Music at Jerusalem.

[6] In 1958 Cohen was awarded the Pro Finlandia Medal of the Order of the Lion of Finland for her services to Finnish music.

In 1933 Harriet Cohen travelled to Vienna to play a number of concerts, staying with Dorothy Thompson.

Cohen was then able to pass on information from Thompson directly to the British Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, who was at this time her intimate friend.

This would result in a concert in America with Albert Einstein in 1934 to raise funds to bring Jewish scientists out of Germany.

In 1935 Ramsay MacDonald warned Cohen not to travel through Germany because the British Government would not be able to provide immunity for her.

Soon after, Adolf Hitler passed the Nuremberg laws totally excluding Jews from public life.

[11] It was not until 1939 when she first met Chaim Weizmann, the future first President of Israel, that she began to support the Zionist cause and a Jewish homeland.

Blanche Dugdale, Arthur Balfour's niece, a fellow diner, prophetically said in an agonised voice, "What will happen to the millions fleeing from Hitler?

Not only was Cohen bringing British music to the USSR by playing pieces by Vaughan Williams, Bax, Bliss and Ireland, she also performed Shostakovich's Preludes, Kabalevsky's Sonatina, and the Soviet premiere of Leonid Polovinkin's Suite from manuscript.

Bax was creatively inspired by Cohen and in 1915 wrote for her within 13 days three pieces including "The Princess's Rose Garden", "The Maiden with the Daffodil" and "In the Vodka Shop".

[16] Some believe that their time together inspired his famous tone-poem Tintagel, in which he may have in part expressed his anguish at "the dream their world denied".

In 1936, for example, they travelled together to Stockholm and Helsinki and met Jean Sibelius, a composer who had long influenced Bax's music.

A greater shock followed, when Bax revealed his secret twenty-year affair with Gleaves and his intention not to remarry.

[19] Harriet Cohen became close to MacDonald during the period when he was Prime Minister from 1929 to 1935, at a time of economic instability and depression which saw the rise of Nazism and Fascism in Europe.

Cohen was also close to Max Beaverbrook, the founder of Express newspapers and an important entrepreneur of the day.

Beaverbrook was instantly charmed by Cohen and invited her to dine regularly with him from 1923 and through him met Lord Rothermere and Lloyd George.

Rosa Newmarch introduced Harriet Cohen to Jean Sibelius in London 1921 and they spent some time together.

[21] In the summer 1936 Cohen travelled in Finland with Arnold Bax and they had long discussions with Sibelius both in Helsinki and Ainola.

"Arnold Bennett, dear friend and mentor of my youth died on 27 March 1931" wrote Cohen in her autobiography.

Dearest Tania, a words-and-music programme telling the story of Cohen, written by Duncan Honeybourne, premiered in 2006, performed with actress Louisa Clein.

It is awarded by the Musicians' Company for the most deserving pupil at the Royal Academy of Music in the field of Bach piano playing.

Cohen was an art collector, and left over 40 paintings to the Royal Academy of Music, including works by Marc Chagall and Camille Pissarro, as well as British artists such as Duncan Grant, J. D. Fergusson, C. R. W. Nevinson, and Edward Wolfe.