Myra remembered

Transcript

Libbie Foster: If she hadn’t loved her music so much she would have loved a family, and my brother and I, she sort of took on as surrogate children. She was a wonderful, fun aunt to be with. She would play games with us, crawling-on-the-floor sort of games, when we were little obviously, but then as we got older, card games. She was an inveterate card player.

She would make funny faces with us. Have you ever made orange-peel teeth? You cut up an orange, take the peel off and turn the peel inside out, and then make it into teeth, put it in your mouth, and they are called orange-peel teeth. She was really wicked, she would do that, put them in and if we had visitors coming she would go and answer the door with these teeth in. Well, of course as children we thought this was absolutely wonderful, and the visitors who were coming were expecting Aunty Myra to be staid and serious, and she wasn’t at all. But there was never any ‘treat me with respect because I am a great concert pianist’. It couldn’t have been further from the thoughts of anybody.

In fact, when I was working in London, a girl in my office came to me one day and said ‘I had overheard somebody saying in conservation that you have an aunt who’s a dame’, and I said ‘yes, that’s right’ and she said ‘how wonderful, a dame in a pantomime’. And I said, ‘yes it is wonderful, isn’t it?’ and didn’t explain to her. Aunty Myra would have loved that, she wouldn’t have thought that was anything anybody shouldn’t have said. She would have laughed at that, she had a wonderful belly laugh.

Read more recollections of Myra Hess from her friends and family

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Nigel Hess: I met her a couple of times although we didn’t live in London when I was a child, we lived down in the West Country, and she died when I was 12. So there wasn’t a huge amount of crossover, which I’ve always regretted because I’m the only person in the family that has gone into music professionally after her, and it’s always been a regret of mine that we never knew each other better.

But I met her a couple of times and she used to write to me too, and of course when I was doing Eisteddfods in Wales and festivals when I was very, very young, she always used to write and say that she was thrilled to hear that there was another pianist in the family, you know. We came up to London a couple of times and we saw her, and I remember going to her house in St John’s Wood where she lived for the last… that was her last house. She was great, she was quite frail by the time I met her. I remember playing the piano to her, ‘cause she had two Steinway Concert Grands in the living room, on either side of the living room, which had been given to her by Steinways, which by the time I met her she could hardly play at all because of the awful arthritis. So I sat down and played a piece to her, it was not a classical piece I think and I shudder to think of it now. It was a thing that was in the charts at the time called ‘Walk in the Black Forest’ or something, ‘cause I really liked it. I don’t think she knew – she said I made a nice noise so that was okay, I cherish that.

There were two things I remember about her house. The first was because it backed onto Lord’s Cricket Ground; she actually said to me she loved living there because when she heard the applause at the end of each cricket over it reminded her of the applause she used to get in her concerts. So she loved listening to the applause of the crowd.

The other thing I remember is the shape of the lawn. I had only been there about an hour and I remember looking out of the window, and thinking, ‘the lawn is in the shape of a grand-piano lid’ and it was actually cut out. It was her one little bit of campery in the house. She never pointed it out to anybody but obviously it was designed to look like the top of a grand piano. She was a great joker so that was probably one of her little twinkle-in-the-eye moments.

Read more recollections of Myra Hess from her friends and family