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'The C[ritic]s can Drown in their Baths'

English pianist Myra Hess is the subject of Jessica Duchen's new biography, which will be published in February 2025

 

Jessica Duchen's new biography of English pianist Myra Hess (1890-1965) will be published by UK-based specialist classical music publisher Kahn & Averill on 25 February 2025 - the pianist's 135th birthday. Myra Hess: National Treasure is being published in hardback, with 424 pages, ISBN 9781068776205. This is the first new biography of Hess since Myra Hess (1976) by Marian C McKenna. It will be available in the USA in April 2025.

'Myra Hess: National Treasure' (2025). Jessica Duchen
Myra Hess: National Treasure (2025)
Jessica Duchen

This new biography follows the transformation of Myra Hess from a rebellious young woman into a powerful national heroine and international superstar. Through Duchen's research into previously unpublished material from Hess's correspondence and diaries, it encompasses the pianist's struggles for recognition and her stormy collaborations with musicians of her day, discusses rarely-told details of her personal life and tells the story of her National Gallery concerts and their controversial end. Her complex and exacting personality emerges at last from behind the myths, full of generosity, courage, humour and 'chutzpah'.

Throughout World War II, Hess ran lunchtime concerts at London's National Gallery. They became the stuff of legend, taking place every weekday for six and a half years, proving music's power to support the human spirit in the darkest of times. Londoners queued along Trafalgar Square for admission and the Queen Mother attended several times. The music continued through the Blitz, transforming chamber music into a symbolic act of national resistance.

I'll never forget, after one of the worst London air raids through which nobody slept at all, I drove to the Gallery down streets filled with debris of all kinds. Houses were demolished everywhere. 'There'll be a small audience today', I thought, but we had an overflow house of five-hundred people - a little pale from lack of sleep, but listening to our music, serenity returning to their minds and their faces. They had come, through streets littered with broken glass and reeking with dust and smoke, to get the spiritual strength more vital to them than physical rest - the healing power of music.

Myra Hess was born into a religious Jewish family in Victorian north London and studied at the Royal Academy of Music with Tobias Matthay. As a woman seeking to build a performing career before World War I, she faced a struggle for recognition, enjoying her first real breakthrough in the Netherlands, but often finding herself judged by critics' preconceptions of how female pianists supposedly played.

The c[ritic]s can drown in their baths (if they take any).

At home, a clash with her father led her to seek alternative ways of building a substitute family of friends. Stardom ensued when she reached the USA in 1922. Soon, with America at her feet from Carnegie Hall to Beverly Hills, her beloved transcription of J S Bach's Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring capturing the public imagination, and British artistic luminaries, politicians and royalty flocking to her UK performances, Hess seemed unstoppable, despite the arduous demands of touring.

There are not more female pianists because most women are too sensible to wish to spend their lives on trains.

Myra Hess in circa 1925
Myra Hess in circa 1925

During the war and through the National Gallery concerts, she became an unsung activist, helping refugee musicians from Nazi-occupied countries to find their feet in Britain. The National Gallery concerts, bringing live music to all comers at low cost - one shilling - while artistic life was circumscribed by the exigencies of war, powerfully impacted the future of music in the UK, including the formation of the Arts Council in 1946.

Hess encountered innumerable personal challenges, including some disastrous medical misdiagnoses. Though warm and giving, she did not hold back when faced with betrayal, cruelty or deception, or when others failed to meet the high standards she set for herself. A sociable woman who disliked being alone, she sacrificed her personal life in her determination to dedicate herself to music.

I'm afraid I would be too earnest about marriage, and in this business there is only one thing one can be really earnest about. That is playing the piano. One sacrifices a great deal, but there are compensations.

After the war Hess resumed her annual American tours, was the first pianist to perform at the Royal Festival Hall and made some of her greatest recordings. With declining health, she found fulfilment through teaching, her pupils including Yonty Solomon, the Contiguglia twins, Ann Schein and Stephen Kovacevich, who has written the book's foreward, and who commented:

She was not the girl next door.

By her last years, even the pianist's closest friends scarcely dared to stand up to her.

Jessica Duchen, author of Myra Hess: National Treasure, grew up in London and studied music at Cambridge, plus piano with Joan Havill. Based in London, she writes about music in multiple forms: journalism, biography, fiction, stage works and libretti. She was the founding editor of Britain's first independent piano magazine and wrote for The Independent for twelve years. Her previous books include biographies of Korngold and Fauré. Among her novels are Ghost Variations, the story of the suppressed Schumann Violin Concerto's discovery in the 1930s; Immortal, on Beethoven's 'Immortal Beloved'; and Alicia's Gift, about a child prodigy pianist, described by the Kanneh-Masons as 'the book that inspired our family'. Collaborating with composer Roxanna Panufnik, Duchen's libretti include the operas Dalia and Silver Birch, some large-scale choral works and a song cycle.

Further information: kahnandaverill.co.uk

Posted 30 January 2025 by Keith Bramich

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