Myra Hess: "Solace to Combat the Evil"

At 4:00 in the afternoon on September 7, 1940, 348 German bombers filled the skies of London, escorted by 627 fighters. They bombed England's capitol for two solid hours. Every day for 57 days, in what came to be known as The London Blitz, the bombers returned, sometimes at night, sometimes in broad daylight. This was Adolf Hitler's attempt to terrorize and cow England. It successfully destroyed large portions of the city, leveling buildings and reducing streets to rubble, but it failed in its mission to demoralize England, and a certain degree of the credit for that failure goes to a woman named Myra Hess.

"We are facing the annihilation of everything we hold important," she wrote, "and this wonderful opportunity to give spiritual solace to those who are giving all to combat the evil seems, in some mysterious way, to have been given into my hands."

How did Myra Hess combat the evil? With music.

Myra Hess was one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century. She had been scheduled for a large concert tour in the United States when World War II broke out. Her agent urged her to keep her commitment there: besides making a great deal of money, she would be safe from the danger. But Myra would not hear of it. A London-born Jew, she chose to remain in the city for the duration of the war and raise the spirits of the war-deprived city dwellers with music. All concert halls and theaters were closed at night for the black-outs, causing the city to endure a "cultural black-out" as well. Myra Hess arranged to put on chamber concerts at The National Gallery art museum in the middle of the day. The ticket price was extremely inexpensive, so that almost any Londoner could attend, from an office boy to a bobby to a shopkeeper. Beginning on the 10th of October in 1939 at 1:00 p.m., Myra Hess organized a concert every day for six years--1,698 concerts! She gathered any musicians she could for the programs and performed at 146 of them herself. Over 800,000 people attended the concerts during the war.

People lined up around the corner and into the square to get tickets, hundreds of them, sometimes over a thousand. There were so many that the concerts were made casual with standing-room allowed, and people coming and going as they wished. Some brought their sandwiches and ate their lunches while they listened. People from every walk of life took a break in their day to hear the music. One day a bomb went off in one of the rooms of the gallery, but the string quartet kept playing and the audience remained seated. Diplomat Sir Paul Mason said, "Her serenity was invigorating, not disarming. You did not go to her to be soothed, but to be braced."

Each day during the London Blitz, "audiences picked their way through streets strewn with glass and rubble," the National Gallery website reports, "skirting bomb craters and smoldering ruins, to find the National Gallery still standing and the performers at their posts." When the main gallery was bombed, the musicians simply moved downstairs to the bomb shelter. Only 300-400 people could fit, and the heat and cold were extreme in that room, but that did not deter either the musicians or the audiences. In the winter, Myra played wearing a fur coat, and stoves were placed on the stage to keep the instrumentalists' hands from turning blue. In the summer, audience members would faint with heat. But they would keep coming.

One of the most popular concerts was held on New Year's Day 1940 especially to entertain the children. Schumann's "Carnival" was played by nine concert pianists who played musical chairs on two pianos as they each took their turn. Then Haydn's "Toy" Symphony was performed with "regrettable frivolity" as the various pianists played toy instruments along with the symphony. This was not in keeping with Myra's serene stage presence, but it certainly fit her persona among family and friends. After performances she would entertain them with tricks such as lying on the closed lid of the grand piano to see if she could play it upside down, or doing her impression of Queen Victoria, complete with dour expression and doily cap. "Aunt" Myra was a great deal of fun.

As the war continued, the cost of keeping the concerts going became prohibitive and for a time it appeared they would have to end. But then donations began coming in from around the world, particularly from organizations in Canada and the United States, and also from individuals, like the great Italian conductor Toscanini and the great Russian pianist Rachmaninoff (who had emigrated to California), and hundreds of ordinary people who had heard of Myra Hess and her indomitable musicians.

Myra Hess continued to perform after the war and into old age. She played her last concert in September 1961 at the age of 71, and died in 1965 as not only one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century, but as one of the most beloved.

Watch Myra Hess play a Lunchtime Concert in 1945.



Sources:

Eye Witness to History

Naxos Music

The National Gallery