Jessica Duchen: Myra Hess and Me

SLAGIATT, in my home, stands for ‘Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time’. Writing a biography of Dame Myra Hess (1890-1965) was definitely SLAGIATT. The past five years, however, have involved a catalogue of calamities that might be appropriate for a pianist indelibly associated with World War II, but nearly turned me into a government statistic.

Dame Myra Hess was, in my view, the greatest pianist ever born in Britain. She became a national heroine for the daily lunchtime concerts she ran in the National Gallery throughout World War II. Those concerts not only bolstered Londoners’ morale; they also proved palpably that great music is a human need in times of trouble, with the power to comfort, encourage and show us a better world (just for starters).

The resulting recognition of the arts as a necessity, not a luxury, underpinned the UK’s cultural policy post-war. It has endured – if a bit battered – until the present day and it’s not a moment too soon to remind people of it. Yet only two books about Myra Hess ever appeared and both are long out of print. It was high time for another.

In the earliest weeks of 2020, I signed a contract with the music books specialist publishers Kahn & Averill. Most UK publishers treat classical music as the kiss of death, but K&A was the perfect home. Nobody there would tell me to write less about her recordings or to spell out the meaning of ‘allegro’. Everything looked rosy and 2020 was going to be the most amazing year ever...

Whoops. Virus. Lockdown. Boris Johnson. OK, we could walk in Richmond Park every day. But all the libraries shut. Myra’s archive is in the British Library; I’d not yet had a chance to go in and for months there was no sign of when it might be possible again.

I started instead with interviews, first by phone, and soon by Zoom. Myra’s surviving pupils – Stephen Kovacevich in the UK and, in the US, Richard and John Contiguglia and Ann Schein – all spoke wonderfully about their studies with her, and I enjoyed an epic conversation with Stephen Siek, author of the definitive biography of Myra’s teacher, Tobias Matthay.

When lockdown began to ease, I was able to visit Myra’s niece, Libbie, at her home (we had to have lunch outside). She showed me memorabilia that began to bring me closer to the indomitable, intense, complex personality of Myra herself: a woman for whom the sky was very far from being the limit.

As soon as the BL opened again, I dived into the Rare Books room and drank up as much of the Myra archive as I could. But there is always more to see, and I noted down which items I wanted to look at again later. Then the library suffered a massive cyberattack. It knocked out all the BL’s digital systems, rendering much of the collection impossible to access. I wonder if people outside understood the level of disaster that this assault on our cultural heritage represented. Nobody could research for many months; things are still not back to normal.

Myra’s great-nephew, the composer Nigel Hess, my right-hand man throughout, came to my rescue. He entrusted me with his private Myra archive, bringing two crates of it round to my house, which I then stored carefully in the blanket box. They were full of photographs, programmes, documents of many shapes, sizes and hues, including her passport, and, not least, her post-war American diaries. They are typed on fine sheets of air-letter paper, which she posted home for her friends’ delectation.

In these previously unread and unpublished pages I found innumerable gems about her life on tour, her feelings about performing and practising, and her working relationships with Toscanini, Stokowski, Bruno Walter, Pablo Casals and more, galloping through the pages like the characters in Schumann’s Carnaval.

There was a lot of book to write, but everything was coming together – until, dear reader, I got bloody Covid. The fever felt as if an electric cable had ploughed through my veins. I couldn’t think and I couldn’t write. Mustard tasted weird, not that I wanted to eat. It was May 2024 and the government had denied my age group further vaccination, something I will never understand. Look at the number of people signed off sick with Long Covid…

© Wikimedia Commons

In mid-August, my husband and I did a three-hour Myra Hess walk, beginning outside her house on Wildwood Road, Golders Green, passing her various homes in south Hampstead and St John’s Wood and finishing by the back of Lord’s Cricket Ground. Afterwards I couldn’t catch my breath.

Two months later I still couldn’t. Exhaustion, dizziness, brain fog, breathlessness. Typical symptoms, apparently, of Long Covid. Also of burnout. My doctor offered to sign me off work, but I’ve been self-employed for 30 years. Eventually an old friend who had become a burnout counsellor persuaded me that, whichever problem I had, I needed to take better care of myself.

Myra, a truly formidable character to find living in your blanket box, had taken me over. She gave everything for her art. She sacrificed her personal life to remain single-minded about music; later, she sacrificed her health too. She set astronomical standards for herself and for those close to her. I’ve tried to be worthy of her. But as I finally waved off Nigel, taking his crates home, I’ve had to acknowledge that I am not as tough as she was.

At last, though, Myra Hess – National Treasure is finished, exquisitely produced by K&A. And if it keeps her memory alive, and the spirit of the National Gallery concerts, then it will, hopefully, have been worth it.

Myra Hess – National Treasure, by Jessica Duchen, is published by Kahn & Averill and available to buy now