The son of a publisher from Bonn, Friedrich Cohen began his higher education in 1922, studying at the Leipzig Conservatory and the universities of Berlin, Cologne, and Leipzig. In 1924 he accompanied dancer Yvonne Georgi on piano and accepted a position as director and conductor at the Münster Stadttheater. It was there that he met the choreographer Kurt Jooss, which led to a fruitful collaboration. Cohen composed music for Jooss’s choreography and provided piano accompaniment at his dance company, the Neue Tanzbühne. In 1928, after a short engagement as senior stage director at the Würzburg Opera, he joined Jooss at the newly founded Folkwang School in Essen. In 1930, the two went to Bayreuth with Jooss’s ballet company to rehearse the choreography for the Venusberg bacchanal in Tannhäuser, in which Cohen’s wife, Elsa Kahl, was a dancer. International success came in 1932: Cohen composed the music for Jooss’s pacifist work The Green Table, a pioneering contribution to dance theater that combined classical ballet and expressive dance and earned them first place at the most important international dance festival in Paris that same year. A series of performances around the world followed in the subsequent years.
The Nazis’ rise to power in 1933, however, spelled the end of Friedrich Cohen’s career in Germany. By then serving as senior stage manager at the Städtische Bühnen in Essen, Cohen became the target of the Nazi press’s smear campaign because of his Jewish background. “The current mood among large swaths of the public,” the mayor of Essen informed him on March 29, 1933, “has given me reason to relieve you of your duties for the time being.” Cohen was fired.
Fearing arrest, Cohen—along with Jooss and most of the dance company—fled to Holland in September of 1933. They toured throughout Europe in the subsequent months before going into exile in England in 1934. There, Jooss founded a dance school at Dartington Hall, while Cohen toured with the company. While they were on tour in the United States, World War II broke out, which had dire consequences for the group’s German nationals, including Cohen and his wife. Refused entry into Great Britain as Germans, they found themselves stranded in the United States. A tour through South America and various performances in the United States proved insufficient to sustain the company, and so in 1942 they disbanded. In the subsequent years, Cohen made ends meet as a teacher at the progressive Black Mountain College in North Carolina and at the Berkshire Music Center in Massachusetts. It wasn’t until 1946 that he was able to secure a permanent position at the Juilliard School in New York, where he taught, directed, and later headed the opera department. Friedrich Cohen died on March 9, 1967, in New York.
1904 Bonn
1967 New York