Cécile Hartog

Cécile Sarah Hartog (1857–1940) was an English composer and pianist, born in London. She was the daughter of French school teacher, author and editor Marion Moss Hartog, and her husband Alphonse Hartog, and her siblings were the artist Héléna Arsène Darmesteter, natural historian Marcus Hartog, mathematician Numa Edward Hartog, and the chemist Philip Hartog. The mathematician and engineer Hertha Ayrton was her cousin. She studied music with Charles Salaman, and later at the Royal Academy of Music, where she took the gold medal for composition in 1889 and had a piano quartet performed, as well as an orchestral Andante and Gavotte. Her teachers there and elsewhere included Frederick Cowen, Woldemar Bargiel, Oscar Beringer, and (in Berlin) Karl Klindworth. She was active as a soloist and sometimes conductor from the 1880s until the First World War. She also taught harmony at the Maida Vale High School for Girls in London. While conducting the orchestra for the play Beethoven’s Romance at the Royalty Theatre on 1 December 1894, the sleeve of her muslin dress was set alight by one of the lamps on her music desk. A member of the orchestra managed to extinguish it quickly with an opera cl