Chieko Hara

Hara was born in Suma-ku in Kobe, Empire of Japan, in 1914. Her father, Kotaro Hara, was an alumnus of Harvard University and the chief engineer of Kawasaki Shipbuilding Corporation. Their family friends included novelists Takeo Arishima and Ikuma Arishima. At age seven, she began to learn piano under Pedro Villaverde, a Spanish pianist who lived in Kobe. She witnessed performances by Mischa Levitzki and Charles Munch. After her family moved to Tokyo, Hara began attending the Sacred Heart School in Tokyo. Her talent at piano was noticed by Ikuma Arishima, who had music critics listen to her play at the Hara family home. She was the first Japanese person to graduate from the French conservatory. Returning to Japan in October of that year, her first recital at the Hibiya Public Hall on February 9, 1933, was reported on widely by Japanese newspapers. Later that year, the former French Minister of Education André Honora noticed her talent while visiting Japan and invited her to study in Paris as a scholarship student sponsored by the French government. ==Career==

In 1937, Hara competed in the III International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw. Hara performed in a kimono and enchanted the crowds. When the jury did not award her a prize, the audience nearly revolted. The Polish music critic Jerzy Waldorff wrote: Her receipt of the Audience Award marks the only time in the history of the competition that such an award was given. She returned to Japan on September 3, 1938, and gave a triumphant performance tour around the country. Around this time, the Japanese composer Tomojirō Ikenouchi, her fellow student abroad, proposed to her in marriage, but she declined. Hara performed duets with him across Europe and continued recitals as a soloist. She also accepted a professorship at Kobe College from April 1957 to March 1961 after refusing offers from universities in Tokyo, including the Tokyo University of the Arts. She established the Gaspar Cassadó International Violoncello Competition, which was held ten times in Florence until 1990 and produced cellists including Mischa Maisky, Noboru Kamimura, and Kaeko Mukoyama. In 1997, she donated her piano, harpsichord, and Cassadó’s music scores and materials, including his arrangement of Franz Schubert's Arpeggione Sonata, to Tamagawa University in Tokyo. Hara passed away on December 9, 2001, in Tokyo, of natural causes, aged 86. ) In 2004, a manuscript score of Bach’s Wedding Cantata (BWV 216) was discovered in her estate. The manuscript had been purchased by Cassadó from Felix Mendelssohn's family and was confirmed to be authentic by Tadashi Isoyama, a professor at the Kunitachi College of Music. In 2012, Tamagawa University launched a project to catalogue the donated materials of Gaspar Cassadó and Chieko Hara, and hosted a special exhibition in 2016. ==Personal life==

On November 25, 1938, she married her fellow student from her time abroad, Hiroshi Kawazoe (born Shiro Kawazoe; illegitimate grandson of the Japanese samurai Gotō Shōjirō). Kawazoe later founded the upscale Chianti restaurant in Tokyo, the oldest Italian restaurant in the city. In 1941, she gave birth to her eldest son, (1941–2024), who later became a Japanese producer, and in 1943 had a second son, Mitsurō. In 1958, after Kawazoe began having an affair, he pressured Hara for a divorce. She left for Italy before the divorce was finalized. Although the Cassadó Competition finished after its tenth iteration that year, she expressed a wish for the competition to be revived in Japan. The competition was reestablished in Hachiōji in November of 2006. ==References==