Chieko Hara (, Hara Chieko; December 25, 1914 [Taishō 3] – December 9, 2001 [Heisei 13]), known after her second marriage as Chieko Hara de Cassadó, was a Japanese pianist who later took Spanish citizenship. Trained in Paris from the age of thirteen, in 1932 she became the first Japanese pianist to graduate from the Conservatoire de Paris with a premier prix, where she studied under Lazare Lévy and Alfred Cortot. In 1937, she and Miwa Kai became the first entrants from an Asian country in the International Chopin Piano Competition.
Hara reached the final of the 1937 competition, enthralling the audience and performing in a kimono, but placed only fifteenth. The Warsaw audience protested her omission from the prize list, and a wealthy spectator endowed an "audience award" for her on the spot. The episode made her famous in Japan, where she was among the most widely admired concert pianists of the pre-war and wartime years. Her assertiveness and her European manner nonetheless set her against the Tokyo critics, a conflict that hardened over two decades and eventually cost her a place in Japanese musical life. She returned to Europe in 1953, married the Spanish cellist Gaspar Cassadó in 1959, and toured widely with him as the Duo Cassadó until his death in 1966.
In 1969, she founded the Gaspar Cassadó International Violoncello Competition in Florence, organizing ten editions before ill health forced her to end it in 1990. By the 1970s, Hara's name had been dropped from Japanese reference works on pianists, and she spent her last decade in Japan in obscurity. A biography published within days of her death revived public interest in her life and work, and her musical recordings were reissued to a new audience. She was awarded the Order of the Precious Crown in May 1987.
Early life and education Kobe and Tokyo Hara was born in the Suma-ku ward of Kobe on December 25, 1914, the fourth child of Kumetarō and Hisako Hara. Her father had studied engineering at Harvard University as a young man, acquiring a taste for classical music there, and was chief engineer of the Kawasaki Shipbuilding Corporation at the time of her birth. Her mother taught the koto and shamisen at home and had been educated at Kobe College. The family's friends included the novelist Takeo Arishima and his brother, the painter Ikuma Arishima.
From the age of seven, Hara studied with the Spanish pianist Villaverde, who had settled in Kobe and who taught in the French tradition. Villaverde's teaching style differed from the German one then standard in Japan, where instruction was built on Ferdinand Beyer's exercises and prized accuracy and speed above expression. Villaverde introduced her to Debussy, Ravel, Chopin and the Spanish repertoire, and took her to hear visiting artists including Jascha Heifetz and Mischa Levitzki when they performed in Kobe. Convinced of her ability, he urged her father to send her abroad.
The family moved to Tokyo in 1924 in search of better opportunities. Having no musical contacts of his own, Kumetarō asked Ikuma Arishima for help; Arishima assembled a group of leading critics, among them and , to hear her play. They were struck by her expressiveness and, believing that further study in Tokyo would blunt it, advised that she be sent to Europe for instruction. In 1925, the touring French pianist Henri Gil-Marchex heard her and invited Hara to study with him in Paris.
Paris In the spring of 1928, Hara sailed from Yokohama to Marseille with Arishima and his seventeen-year-old daughter Akiko. Gil-Marchex began teaching her at once, but her lack of solfège and poor understanding of French made progress difficult. He suggested she enroll instead at the École Normale de Musique de Paris, where he taught. Hara left his studio, and Arishima placed her with the Chatenays, a wealthy banking family whose daughter agreed to prepare her for a conservatory entrance examination.
Over the two years that followed, the Chatenay daughter drilled her in solfège, dictation, and French language. She rebuilt Hara's technique, concentrating on wrist movement and on producing dynamic range through the speed of the arm rather than muscular force. Hara practiced at least six hours a day. She also attended concerts constantly, paying particular attention to how women performers carried themselves on stage.
Hara had intended to study with Alfred Cortot at the École Normale, but changed course when Sylvain Lévi, the indologist who directed the research institute at the in Tokyo, urged her to sit the examination for the Conservatoire de Paris and introduced her to Lazare Lévy. She entered in the autumn of 1930, placing second among 150 candidates, of whom twelve were admitted. Japanese students at the Conservatoire were then almost unheard of; the first had been the composition student Tomojirō Ikenouchi, who became a close friend to Hara.
Lévy taught her in thirty-minute weekly lessons, emphasizing fingering as the route to an unlabored technique and pressing her to read widely and live fully in order to mature as a musician. Finding the lessons too short, she resumed regular work with Chatenay alongside them. At the Conservatoire, a student had to take a premier prix at the annual competition in order to graduate. In June 1932, at her second attempt, Hara played Schumann's Symphonic Studies before a jury and audience, sight-read, and was judged the best of the field, becoming the first Japanese pianist to take the prize.
Custom held that a premier prix winner would stay on as an assistant to a senior artist while preparing a début recital, and both Cortot and Lévy offered to support her if she remained in Paris. Her parents and Arishima, who had already arranged a Tokyo concert, took a different view; a telegram informing her that her passage had been paid settled the matter, and she returned to Japan in the autumn.
Career Tokyo début and return to Paris Hara's arrival in October 1932 was covered in every newspaper. She was reluctant to be rushed onto a stage, having told Arishima that she feared the Japanese press, which in her view seized on novelties and tired of them quickly, and she bridled at being described as a prodigy. Her début at the Hibiya Public Hall on February 9, 1933, drew a capacity audience for a programme of Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, Schumann and Liszt.
Most notices were favorable, but two lines of criticism appeared that would follow her for the rest of her Japanese career: Jiji Shinpō faulted her program for want of display, and another reviewer complained that she looked too much at ease on the platform, where a young woman was expected to appear modest. Japanese taste of the period favored velocity and cleanness over interpretation, and her manner of playing—and of presenting herself—cut against both mores.
Determined to return to Europe but without the means to do so, Hara was rescued by two encounters. In 1933, she played at a farewell reception for André Honnorat, a former French Minister of Public Instruction then visiting Japan, who spoke to the French ambassador and arranged a scholarship for her. In April 1935, she met Arthur Rubinstein on his first Japanese tour and was invited to call on him if she ever needed assistance.
After returning to Paris, she became Cortot's student. His teaching was as much about breadth of experience as about the keyboard: he sent her to exhibitions and operas and told her that reading and living would do more for her playing than practice alone. Her Paris début in December 1936, in which she played Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto under the baton of Paul Paray, was a success, and it prompted Lazare Lévy to suggest that she enter the Chopin Competition in Warsaw.
1937 Chopin Competition
Preparing her program for the competition, Hara struggled with the mazurka and took up Rubinstein's offer of assistance. He explained the dance forms underlying the genre and played the piece for her, and she found afterwards that she could hear the grief in it more directly.
The III International Chopin Piano Competition ran in Warsaw from February 21 to March 13, 1937, the largest edition at that time. Of the 250 applicants, eighty were admitted, and a jury of thirty drawn from a dozen countries. Among the jurors were Wilhelm Backhaus, Emil von Sauer and Hara's own Paris teacher, Lazare Lévy. Hara and Miwa Kai were the first Japanese entrants in the competition's history and, according to its organizers, the first from any Asian country. Hara performed in a kimono and became an audience favorite.
She reached the final, but when the results were read out, she had placed fifteenth. The hall, which had waited until the small hours of morning for the verdict, erupted, and security was called in. Order was restored when Stanisław Meyer, a wealthy industrialist in the audience, endowed an award for Hara there and then, framed as a prize for the best non-European competitor. The Fryderyk Chopin Institute records her as having received a distinction. During the competition, the participants were received by President Ignacy Mościcki at the Royal Castle, where Hara played.
The result was reported in Japan as a national success. However, it would later be written out of the record: when Kiyoko Tanaka became the first Japanese pianist to win a prize at the competition, Japanese musical authorities described her as the first Japanese to have entered it at all.
War and post-war Japan Hara married Shirō Kawazoe in Japan later in 1938 and returned with him to Paris, where an agent taken on after the competition kept her in concert engagements touring Germany, Italy and Poland. At the same time, the Japanese press began setting her against , a younger pianist raised in Paris who had entered the Conservatoire at eleven and studied with the same teacher. The comparison, encouraged by the rival Japanese circles of the Left and Right Banks, would shadow both women for decades. The couple stayed in Paris until the German invasion of France and left in July 1940, weeks before the occupation.
Settled in a Meguro house provided by Kawazoe's father, Hara gave a comeback recital within a month of arriving and was received warmly. Kawazoe, unable to establish a career of his own, marketed hers, at one point advertising her as the winner of the Chopin Competition rather than its fifteenth-placed finalist, a distortion she found humiliating. She bore two sons, Shōrō in 1941 and Mitsurō in 1943, and continued to perform throughout the war, latterly confined to appearances at the German embassy and on national radio. In May 1945, she and her sons fled the Bombing of Tokyo to the foot of Mount Fuji, where she met the soprano Tamaki Miura, then in her sixties and singing to encourage refugees. Hara, whose own career had drawn the same charge of putting art before family, took the older woman as a model.
After the surrender, the occupation authorities encouraged new radio formats, among them a request program for which the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) chose Hara as its first performer; still grieving her father, she played the Moonlight Sonata, the piece listeners had asked for most. Her career recovered quickly, but her standing among critics did not. She declined a chair at the Tokyo University of the Arts, which then went to Kazuko Yasukawa. Kyoshi Takahama, whose son Ikenouchi she had refused in marriage, used his authority in the arts against her, and when NHK gave its 1950 New Year concert to Yasukawa instead of her, she cancelled her involvement altogether. Lazare Lévy's month-long visit to Japan that year gave critics a fresh opportunity to compare the two pianists to Hara's disadvantage, and Nomura, who had championed her since childhood, published a magazine attack on her playing shortly afterwards.
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