ON February 19, it’s Frieda Belinfante Day. In Orange County, just south of Los Angeles, it has been an official day since 1987, especially in the city of Laguna Beach. Dedicated to Amsterdam’s Frieda, the woman who brought music to the county. She was the founder and first conductor of the Orange County Philharmonic, now known as the Pacific Symphony.
Laguna Beach has a thing with the Dutch arts, with its Rembrandt Drive and Van Dyke Drive in the city, which is why Frieda felt right at home when after WW II she emigrated to the US. In Holland she did no longer fit in. She was one of those unsung resistance heroes, a member of Gerrit van der Veen’s sabotage group. She helped blow up the population register of Amsterdam, and the only reason why the Nazis didn’t get to her was because for months on end she made herself look like a man. She did this so well that the barber asked if he should “cut or shave,” and she walked past her own mother a few times without mom recognizing her own daughter.
It wasn’t until 1987, with Frieda already in her eighties (she passed in 1995 at age 90), that they finally realized in California who and what she’d been: she had founded that philharmonic orchestra, she also started an orchestra for Hollywood musicians, with whom she gave open air concerts, she played with a band at the Los Alamitos race track, and she went from school to school teaching children how to tell stories with music. She conducted in a white dress, but suddenly she was fired, because men insisted they didn’t like to be conducted by a woman, and certainly not by someone who was openly a lesbian.
SO when the moment arrived for Frieda to have her own Belinfante Day, she told the Los Angeles Times, “It doesn’t matter to me.” Was there nothing to be proud of? “I never did anything popular. I don’t like to cater to public taste, and I was always ready to bear the brunt of it.” And that attitude they kind of liked in Orange County. Hence the Day. Jot it down: February 19th.
