The filthy side of Dame Myra Hess

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The photograph on the cover of Jessica Duchen’s magnificent new biography of Dame Myra Hess shows a statuesque lady sitting at the keyboard, hair swept back into the neatest of buns. Add a pair of half-moon spectacles and she could be Dr Evadne Hinge, accompanist to Dame Hilda Bracket. This isn’t to imply that Dame Myra looked like a man in drag, but then neither did the ‘Dear Ladies’ played by George Logan and Patrick Fyffe, some of whose fans thought the singing spinsters actually were women.

In their 1980s heyday Hinge and Bracket were national treasures – and so, on a far grander scale, was Dame Myra, who lifted Londoners’ spirits with her National Gallery concerts during the second world war. If a bomb shattered windows and let in piercing winds, she wrapped herself in a fur coat and played on. When she died 60 years ago she was deeply mourned – but there was also a feeling that her ‘romantic’ interpretations of Beethoven and Schumann had been superseded by those of Maurizio Pollini and other poker-faced modernists.

Was that fair? Stephen Kovacevich, Hess’s pupil during her final lonely years in St John’s Wood, says that ‘unfortunately the English started treating Myra like the Queen Mother, and she started playing accordingly. In America she did not play like the Queen Mother.’ The American Steinways ‘released something in her… The English dried her up. She had a demoniac side… she was not the girl next door.’

Indeed not. Brought up in an orthodox Jewish family in north London, young Myra acquired a phenomenal technique and a range of party tricks.