There are few pianists more lovingly remembered than Myra Hess. If her name has become synonymous over the years with her legendary wartime National Gallery concerts and her arrangement of Bach’s ‘Jesu, joy of man’s desiring’, this reputation has arguably blurred a closer look at her actual playing. Yet it is still necessary to be reminded of those uplifting and morale-boosting concerts, given during the Blitz and the horrors of the Second World War, a testament to her courage and determination to see through what might have seemed more of a dream than a possible reality. Understandably, these concerts – 1693 performances attended by 824,152 listeners – will always be remembered as her most widely celebrated achievement. The bombs fell, the sirens wailed, but the music continued, and whether by German composers or others, there was a sense of defiance, of ‘man’s inhumanity to man’. ‘Wohin?’ may have been changed to ‘Pourquoi?’, but this was a marginal concession to nationalist concerns.

It is important to recap familiar knowledge, but no less important to rethink Hess’s place in the musical Parthenon, which was far more wide-ranging than is often suggested. The true stature of her greatest performances is not part of general critical currency. Again, critically speaking, the quality of her artistry, particularly during her later years, was often compromised. As her one-time student Stephen Kovacevich put it, she became something of a Queen Mother figure, a ‘gracious lady’ with too little granted her beyond ‘national treasure’ status. A perception that she was universally admired is tempered by the realisation that so many contemporary compliments were hedged with qualifications: the feeling was that she went far, but not far enough. For Virgil Thomson, waspish doyen of American critics, Hess possessed the quality that the French called ‘musicalité’, the gift of making music sound like music. But terms such as ‘taste’ and ‘refinement’ took on a pejorative edge: ‘what she lacks is temperament’, Thomson continued; ‘she plays intelligently and she has a most natural nobility, but she doesn’t “give” as the young people say’. More specifically, he found her way with Beethoven’s Op 110 Sonata ‘pretty but distant’, much of it reminiscent of ‘a restful lullaby’. Things may have perked up with his response to Brahms’s F minor Sonata, but the damage was done. Harold Schonberg offered a similarly mixed response, but a more damning and assertive reaction came from Abram Chasins in his Speaking of Pianists, where he wrote that ‘on only a few occasions has her playing been that of a great pianist. She has warmth rather than burning temperament. She plays easily but carefully. Of soaring declamation and technical daring, there is almost none. But never has she sounded less than a great lady … When she plays, she seems to be saying: “Isn’t this a lovely work? I am so very glad we can share it together.”’ Chasins makes a more general comment on British pianists, describing them as a ‘gracious assemblage [who] have long breathed the reposeful air of England’.

When you consider Horowitz’s dictum, ‘without temperament, nothing!’, such comments begin to resemble the descent of an executioner’s axe. Disregarding the quaint cliché regarding England and its implied contrast with a vibrant and fast-paced America, you sense a touch of irritation at an assumption that European pianists are superior to Americans. The suggestion of a contrast between a speculative inwardness and the more bracing qualities of physicality and athleticism – and, again, ‘temperament’ – reminds me of a review, this time by an English critic, that opened, ‘this is what I would describe as a very English performance of the Chopin Études’; the idea of different national styles and expectations was further exemplified when an American pianist was advised, on entering an English piano competition, to ‘take your quiet pieces with you’.

Revisiting Myra Hess’s recordings (the majority of them live performances) has led me to a radically different view of her artistry. Unlike Horowitz, to take an extreme example, she never sought to stun and bemuse, to leave her audience more exhausted than elated, or to create an impossibly wide chasm between artist and listener. Hers was a voice that ‘connected’, leaving her audience refreshed and, as she would have wished, conscious of the miracle of great music. The spotlight was always on the music, not on the performer. She played only one work by Liszt, and if it is hard to imagine her playing, say, Prokofiev’s piano sonatas, late Scriabin or Ravel’s ‘Scarbo’, this was less because such music lay outside her comfort zone than that it went against her fundamental musical sensibility. I recall my single experience of hearing her live – playing Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, a work that became her virtual calling card – and my sense that her immense popularity rested on a rare communicative gift, as natural as it was mysterious, that took you to the heart of the musical matter. As Eileen Joyce once put it to me, ‘Myra played with love, and I think that’s important’. She may have lacked the dazzle and charisma of other big names – and she remembered with amusement her early appearances in Liszt’s E flat major and Saint-Saëns’s C minor concertos. She bypassed all attempts to make her appearance more attractive (the late addition of a red sash was her only concession to glamour). Yet she became the epitome of fame and, to use a term she would have loathed, a superstar. It is no accident that musicians of the stature of Toscanini, Bruno Walter, Pablo Casals and Thomas Beecham sought her out as a dearly loved and respected musical partner.

True, in common with all great pianists, Hess had her less successful concerts, ones where the candle burnt just that bit too low and the playing lost something of its inner spark, momentum and vitality. But we should start by celebrating those performances that show her at her greatest, those whose indelible mark remains long after the work has finished. For me there is no more poised or ineffable recording of Beethoven’s E major Piano Sonata, Op 109. In the third-movement variations there is that feeling of transcendence, of looking above and beyond the printed page. The playing, which appears to ‘do’ so little, ends by achieving everything. This performance, created in the recording studio and coupled with Beethoven’s Op 110, reaches for the stars. Yet for Hess, the world of red and green lights, of editing, of endless takes and retakes and most of all the business of listening back, was an alien and mechanical process. She missed the warmth of an essential connection with her audience, the warm cross-current of personal contact. In her own words, ‘listening to my records is like going to my own funeral’. When pressed, she reluctantly admitted that perhaps a few bars of Beethoven’s Op 109 Sonata and Schumann’s Carnaval were acceptable, but only if heard by accident, in passing on the radio. More lengthy listening and discussion were out of the question. Ronald Smith quipped that her performances of such music came to seem somewhat Victorian; his eye and ear were already on what was becoming a more ‘modern’ approach. Hess’s humanity was not for everyone and listening to, say, Pollini’s recording of that same Beethoven sonata makes one immediately aware of rapidly changing times, for better or for worse. Hess’s recording of Schumann’s Carnaval, unlike her Beethoven Op 109, was caught live, as dextrous as it is affectionate, each guest at the ball providing a vivid sense of contrasting presences, of the composer’s dearly cherished fictions, Eusebius, the man of dreams, and Florestan, the man of action. And what ebullience in the final pages, a photo finish that leaves you in no doubt that David has routed the Philistines from the field of battle.

Then there is Hess’s Bach. Her D major Partita – again live, this time from an Illinois recital in 1949 – is a wonder of sensitivity achieved with a consummate yet natural play of light and shade. This is Bach radically different to the periodically wilful and eccentric Glenn Gould or the later pedantry of Rosalyn Tureck. This is Bach far from the dusty realm of academe. Even Delius (‘Bach always bores me’) might have capitulated had he heard Myra Hess’s rendition, including her propulsion and buoyancy in the concluding Gigue (qualities heard again in the G major Gigue from the French Suite No 5). Always there is air round the sound, and even when the pace is fast there is no sense of rush or constriction, no temptation to shout ‘vive le sport’ as Hess was inclined to do when she heard what she considered speed merchants.

This brings us to performances where these qualities rise to heroic proportions and again contradict notions of Hess as a cautious or restricted player. Her Chopin F minor Fantaisie is among the most dramatic (and in the concluding recitative, moving) on record, making you grateful for the limited Chopin we have from Hess, while sorely missing her in the B flat minor Sonata, which was for a time in her repertoire. After hearing Hess’s responsiveness to every bar of Chopin’s high drama in the Fantaisie her stature in Brahms’s B flat major Piano Concerto is unsurprising, proof that her playing could storm the heights when required. I know of few more powerfully individual performances – given in partnership with Bruno Walter and the cellist Leonard Rose – of a work sardonically referred to by the composer as a concerto no woman could play. Here is confirmation that Hess possessed qualities far beyond the conventional view of her musicianship and pianism. There is a moment of confusion at the climax of the first movement, but this is a live performance mercifully free from corrections. For me this performance is a truly heroic confrontation.

Hess’s repertoire, like those of many other great pianists, narrowed over the years, but she maintained an assortment of miniatures and encores, such as Griffes’s ‘The White Peacock’, Debussy’s ‘Poissons d’or’, Palmgren’s ‘Refrain de berceau’, Granados’s ‘The Maiden and the Nightingale’ and Falla’s ‘Ritual Fire Dance’. Nor was she a stranger to the modern: I would count her reading of Howard Ferguson’s epic and emotionally fraught Sonata among her triumphs. Here she captures the rhetoric and anguish, the elegiac nature of a sonata composed in memory of the pianist Harold Samuel, whose early death caused Ferguson immense grief. And here, once more, is confirmation of Hess as a pianist who could ‘let go’ and achieve the necessary grandeur as well as her more widely credited intimacy.

Hess’s daunting schedule at the height of her career left her little time for teaching. But when she did find time to teach she could be surprisingly severe, as Peter Katin found when he played to her as a teenager already celebrated for his facility. Awaiting customary praise, he was told that he was more a piano-player than a pianist, devoid of anything approaching musical interest or communication. Left desolate and humiliated, he later confessed that he became grateful for her criticism, an incentive to think and feel beyond the notes on the page. Ann Schein, also accustomed to praise, was deflated by Hess’s response to her performance of Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy: ‘Well, it wasn’t quite perfect, was it?’ Like Katin, she felt little beyond a chill of disapproval.

So let us end on a joyful note, with Hess’s ability to exhibit precisely those qualities that she found missing in so many young, aspiring pianists. Her selection of Schubert dances, given after a witty introduction, is played as to the manner born, dancing, as it were, on air. Finally, revisiting Myra Hess’s legacy and experiencing afresh the range and depth of her artistry has left me with a renewed sense of the art of re-creation, of how even the most familiar work can seem newly minted, as alive as the day it was composed. The clutter and patina of more self-conscious and strenuous performances are so often magically erased by a freedom and light and, perhaps above all, a sheer joy in sharing her love of music-making. In this, she was the reverse of Michelangeli, who was renowned for his patrician disdain (he claimed he played only for himself, his audience no more than a necessary evil). She would, I think, have listened with awe and attention to more flamboyant and theatrical pianists, including Horowitz, fully aware that they inhabited a different world with different aims. Few pianists have remained truer to their own nature, vision and inner light. She was indeed, as Chasins put it, a ‘great lady’ but she was also a great artist. 

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of International Piano. Never miss an issue – subscribe today