Bernard van Dieren

Who was Bernard van Dieren?

Bernard Hélène Joseph van Dieren was a Dutch-born composer, critic, author, and writer on music, much of whose working life was spent in England.

Van Dieren was the last of five children of a Rotterdam wine merchant, Bernard Joseph van Dieren, and his second wife, Julie Françoise Adelle Labbé. Details of his education are unknown but it seems that his early training was as a scientist, as a research assistant in a laboratory. Gifted both in science, extremely intelligent and with a phenomenal memory, he was also well-versed in literature as well as an able violinist and amateur artist. His career as composer began when he was twenty when some of his early works were published in the Netherlands. His early music was influenced by Delius.

In 1909 he relocated to London with his wife-to-be, Frida Kindler, a very gifted concert pianist whom he married on 1 January 1910. By this time he had decided to study music seriously. A son, Hans Jean Jules Maximilian Navarre Benvenuto Bernard van Dieren, was born the same year.

He was largely self-taught, though he spent 1912 in Europe where he met the composers Busoni and Schoenberg. His early contact with the music world was as a musical correspondent for several European newspapers and periodicals. During the First World War he was for a short time involved in secret service in the Netherlands, as a cypher expert in the Intelligence Department.