Biography (read more)
Julia Myra Hess was born on 25 February 1890 in South Hampstead, London, the youngest of four children of a Jewish family whose paternal grandfather had come from Alsace. She began lessons at five, studied at the Guildhall School of Music, and in 1903, aged twelve, won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music, where she worked with Tobias Matthay. Her debut came in 1907 in Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto under Thomas Beecham; she played with the Concertgebouw under Mengelberg in 1912 and made her New York debut on 24 January 1922. She died in London on 25 November 1965.
When the London concert halls were blacked out in 1939 she organised lunchtime concerts at the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, five days a week for six and a half years: 1,698 concerts attended by 824,152 people, of which she played in 150 and took no fee for any. Performers were paid a flat five guineas whoever they were, and young musicians appeared beside established ones — Eiluned Davies gave the British premiere of Shostakovich’s Piano Sonata Op. 12 there on 31 May 1943. She was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1941, and her piano transcription of Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring remains the piece most often associated with her name.
Sources: