The pianist (Julia) Myra Hess was born on this day in 1890. Dame Myra, as she became, is rightly remembered for her extraordinary achievement in staging lunchtime concerts at the National Gallery throughout the Second World War, when evening concerts were impossible. These performances undoubtedly did much to boost wartime morale, and gave a platform to promising newcomers as well as established artists. Dame Myra herself performed (for no fee) in 150 of them. But there was more to Myra Hess than the National Gallery concerts – including a surprising association with the family of Ivy Compton-Burnett.
Ivy herself deeply disapproved of music, as of so many things, but at least two of her sisters, Vera and Judy, were seriously talented, and Myra was their friend and teacher. The sisters chafed against the domestic tyranny imposed on the family by Ivy after their parents' death, and were desperate to escape and live independently. In the end, unlike so many of the victims in ICB's novels, all four sisters managed to get their way, and escaped to set up house in St John's Wood – with Myra Hess. The house was, as Ivy's biographer Hilary Spurling puts it, an 'art house ... with music, painting, modelling, eurhythmics, all activities that Ivy flatly deplored'. Vera and Judy thrived in this environment, took up Theosophy, and went on to become Steiner teachers, but it seems the other two sisters, Primrose and Topsy, became increasingly detached from reality, and ended up dead in their shared bedroom in an apparent suicide pact.
There is a passage in Samuel Butler's Notebooks that Ivy marked with no fewer than six heavy pencil lines in the margin:
'The Family – I believe that more unhappiness comes from this source than any other – I mean from the attempt to prolong family connection unduly and to make people hang together artificially who would never naturally do so. The mischief among the lower classes is not so great, but among the middle and upper classes it is killing a large number daily.'
[The image above is of Myra Hess in her youth, looking very different from the Dame Myra of later years.]
No comments:
Post a Comment