Eileen Joyce - Biography

Biography

Eileen Joyce was born in Zeehan, a mining town in Tasmania. She was born in Zeehan District Hospital and not, as many reference works claim, in a tent. She frequently claimed her birthday was 21 November in either 1910 or 1912, but a search of Tasmanian birth registrations shows she was born on 1 January 1908. She was the fourth of seven children of Joseph Thomas Joyce (born 1875), son of an Irish immigrant, and Alice Gertrude May. One of her three elder sisters (all born in Zeehan) died shortly after birth, and one of her three younger brothers died at age two.

The family had moved to Western Australia by 1911. They lived firstly in Kununoppin and later in Boulder. Despite their poverty, her parents encouraged her musical development and she began music lessons at age 10. She attended St Joseph's Convent School in Boulder where she was taught music by Sister Mary Monica Butler. When she was aged 13, her family's financial circumstances meant that Eileen had to leave school. However, they managed to find enough money to pay for piano lessons with a private teacher, Rosetta Spriggs (a great-grandpupil of Antonín Dvořák). She made Eileen known to a visiting Trinity College examiner, Charles Schilsky, a former violinist with the Lamoureux Orchestra in Paris. Schilsky was extremely impressed with Eileen: he later wrote "There is no word to explain Miss Joyce's playing other than genius. She is the biggest genius I have ever met throughout my travels". He approached the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Perth and arranged for Eileen to be sent to Loreto Convent in Claremont, Perth, to continue her schooling. Her music teacher there was Sister John More. She entered the 1925 and 1926 Perth Eisteddfods, winning the Grand Championship in 1926. Schilsky continued to make her name known, and wrote a long letter to the Perth newspapers urging her to be sent to Paris to study. In May 1926, the Premier of Western Australia Philip Collier set up an "Eileen Joyce Fund" with the aim of collecting ₤1,000 to help Eileen's future career. In August 1926, Percy Grainger, on a concert tour, was introduced to Eileen Joyce by Sister John More. He heard her play, and then wrote an open letter to the people of Perth: "I have heard Eileen Joyce play and have no hesitation in saying that she is in every way the most transcendentally gifted young piano student I have heard in the last twenty-five years. Her playing has that melt of tone, that elasticity of expression that is, I find, typical of young Australian talents, and is so rare elsewhere". He suggested she would have the same celebrity as Teresa Carreño and Guiomar Novaes. Grainger recommended she study with an Australian master so that her playing would not become "Europeanised" or "Continentalised", and in his view Ernest Hutcheson, then teaching in New York, was the best choice. A short time after Grainger left, Wilhelm Backhaus arrived for a tour of Western Australia. He also heard her and suggested the Leipzig Conservatorium, then regarded as the mecca of piano teaching, would be more suitable (Hutcheson himself had studied there).

From 1927 to 1929 she studied at the Leipzig Conservatorium, firstly with Max Pauer and later with Robert Teichmüller. Here she learned unusual repertoire such as Max Reger's Piano Concerto and Richard Strauss's Burleske in D minor. She then went to the Royal College of Music in London where, with assistance from Myra Hess, she studied under Tobias Matthay. She also had lessons with Adelina de Lara for a short period in 1931.

On 6 September 1930 she made her professional debut in London at a Henry Wood Promenade Concert, playing Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 3. Her first solo recital in England was on 23 March 1931. In 1932 she attended Artur Schnabel's masterclasses in Berlin for two weeks.

In 1933, she made the first of her many recordings. This session produced Franz Liszt's Etude de Concert in F minor and Paul de Schlözer's Etude in A flat, Op. 1, No. 2. Her recording of the latter piece can be heard on this YouTube link.

In 1934, for the Proms' 40th season, she played Busoni's Indianische Fantasie. She became one of the BBC’s most regular broadcasting artists, as well as being in demand for concert tours in the provinces. In 1935, she was a supporting artist for Richard Tauber.

Eileen Joyce was the first pianist to play Shostakovich's piano concertos in Britain - the First on 4 January 1936, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Sir Henry Wood; and the Second on 5 September 1958, with the same orchestra under Sir Malcolm Sargent, at the Albert Hall.

In 1938, Eric Fenby said he was thinking of writing a concerto for her, but this did not happen. On 18 July 1940, the London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO) presented a "Musical Manifesto" concert to raise funds, after its founder, Sir Thomas Beecham, said he could no longer afford to fund it. The author J. B. Priestley, a longtime supporter of the orchestra, made a speech, which was widely publicised and which helped attract public support. Three conductors – Sir Adrian Boult, Basil Cameron and Malcolm Sargent - took part, and Eileen Joyce played Grieg's Piano Concerto in A minor (under Cameron's direction). During the war she performed regularly with Sargent and the LPO, especially in blitzed areas. She was a frequent performer in Jack Hylton's "Blitz Tours" during the war, and she appeared regularly at the National Gallery concerts organised by Dame Myra Hess.

Though small in stature, Joyce was strikingly beautiful, with chestnut hair and green eyes. Because of a then-common prejudice against pianists with British-sounding names, her advisors had long urged her to adopt a name with a continental flavour, but she stubbornly refused. Perhaps partly in compensation, but perhaps simply as a natural expression of herself, she enjoyed and exploited the glamour of celebrity. She changed her evening gowns to suit the music she was playing: blue for Beethoven, red for Tchaikovsky, lilac for Liszt, black for Bach, green for Chopin, sequins for Debussy, and red and gold for Schumann. She also arranged her hair differently depending on the composer - up for Beethoven, falling free for Grieg and Debussy, and drawn back for Mozart. The critics sneered, but her audiences loved it. Up until 1940 she designed her own gowns, but in August she volunteered as a firewatcher, which revived her chronic rheumatism, so on the LPO tours she had to wear a plaster cast encasing her shoulder and back. She bought gowns specially designed by Norman Hartnell to cover the cast, and she often wore Hartnell thereafter. Richard Bonynge was a music student in Sydney during her 1948 tour, and he said: "She brought such glamour to the concert stage. We all used to flock to her concerts, not least because of the extraordinary amount of cleavage she used to show!".

She had numerous recital programs and over 70 concertos in her repertoire, including such unusual works as the Piano Concerto in E flat by John Ireland and Rimsky-Korsakov's concerto. In 1940 she made the first recording of the Ireland concerto, with the Hallé Orchestra under Leslie Heward, and was chosen to play it at a 1949 Proms concert celebrating Ireland's 70th birthday, with the LPO under Sir Adrian Boult. This performance was also recorded and released commercially.

However, there were three concertos that Eileen Joyce played more than any others, and were her firm favourites: the Grieg Piano Concerto in A minor, the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1, and most of all, the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2. She never played any other Rachmaninoff concertos. She studied the 3rd Concerto but, far from being unable to play it, she simply did not like it.

She appeared with all the principal UK orchestras as well as many overseas orchestras. She toured Australia in 1936, during which she was the soloist at the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra's first Celebrity Concert, conducted by William Cade; and in 1948, during which she performed the Grieg concerto at the gala opening concert of the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, under Joseph Post. In June 1947 she appeared at Harringay Arena in the Harringay Music Festival with Sir Malcolm Sargent. She had planned to tour the United States in 1940 and 1948, but both tours were cancelled, the first one on account of the war. She finally appeared in Philadelphia and Carnegie Hall, New York in 1950, with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy (she had earlier appeared with them in Britain in 1948, on the orchestra's first major overseas tour). While her Philadelphia concerts attracted excellent reviews, the New York critics were much less impressed. This was possibly due to the conservative repertoire she chose on Ormandy's strong advice (Beethoven's "Emperor" Concerto and Prokofiev's 3rd), rather than the works she would prefer to have played (the Grieg concerto, Rachmaninoff's 2nd and Tchaikovsky’s 1st). She was never particularly popular or even well known in the United States, and she never returned.

Her other tours abroad were to New Zealand in 1936 and 1958; France in 1947; the Netherlands in 1947 and 1951; Germany in 1947 (where she played for Allied troops; she was the first British artist for more than a decade to give concerts with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra), 1949 and 1958; Italy in 1948; Belgium in 1950 and 1952; South Africa in 1950; Norway in 1950 (she had planned to tour Sweden on this trip, but she fell down a flight of stairs after performing the Grieg concerto in Oslo, and the remainder of her trip was cancelled); she did, however, visit Sweden in 1951 and 1954; Yugoslavia in 1951, visiting Belgrade (now in Serbia), Zagreb (now in Croatia), and Ljubljana (now in Slovenia); Brazil and Argentina in 1952; Finland in 1952; Spain and Portugal in 1954; the Soviet Union in 1956 and 1958; Denmark and other Scandinavian countries in 1958; and India and Hong Kong in 1960.

In November 1948, Eileen Joyce broke the previous record of 17 appearances at London's Royal Albert Hall in a single calendar year. She had often performed two concertos in a single concert, and in the late 1940s and early 1950s she gave a series of "Marathon Concerts", in which she played up to four concertos in a single evening. For example, on 10 December 1948, in Birmingham, she played César Franck’s Symphonic Variations, Manuel de Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain, Dohnányi’s Variations on a Nursery Tune and Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A minor. On 6 May 1951 at the Royal Albert Hall she performed Haydn’s D minor Harpsichord Concerto, Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, John Ireland’s Concerto in E flat, and Grieg’s concerto, with the Philharmonia Orchestra, under conductor Milan Horvat. On another occasion, she played Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 1, Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2, John Ireland's concerto and Beethoven's "Emperor" Concerto.

She expressed a new-found interest in the harpsichord, receiving lessons from Thomas Goff, and in 1950 she gave the first of a number of harpsichord recitals. In the 1950s she also gave a series of concerts featuring four harpsichords, her colleagues including players such as George Malcolm, Thurston Dart, Denis Vaughan, Simon Preston, Raymond Leppard, Geoffrey Parsons and Valda Aveling.

In 1956 she was Gerard Hoffnung's first choice as soloist in Franz Reizenstein's Concerto Popolare, to be played at the inaugural Hoffnung Music Festival. She declined, and the job went to Yvonne Arnaud. She appeared as soloist at Sir Colin Davis's debut as a conductor, with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (RPO), on 22 September 1957, playing Tchaikovsky's Concerto No. 1. On 28 November 1957, she participated in the premiere performance of Malcolm Arnold’s Toy Symphony, Op. 62, at a fund-raising dinner for the Musicians Benevolent Fund. This work has parts for 12 toy instruments, which were taken by Eileen Joyce, Eric Coates, Thomas Armstrong, Astra Desmond, Gerard Hoffnung, Joseph Cooper, and other prominent people, all conducted by the composer.

In 1960, during her tour of India, her Delhi recital was attended by the Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. During that tour, which also included Hong Kong, she announced she was retiring, and her final recital was at a festival in Stirling, Scotland on 18 May 1960, where she played two sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti, Beethoven's Appassionata sonata, and works by Mendelssohn, Debussy, Chopin, Ravel, Granados and Liszt. She did, however, return to the concert platform a handful of times over the next 21 years, the first not until 1967, when she played Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 with the RPO conducted by Anatole Fistoulari, at the Royal Albert Hall. This was the work that had made her famous in the film Brief Encounter in 1945, and it was to be her last concerto performance. Also in 1967 she appeared with three other harpsichordists and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields under Neville Marriner. In 1967 she started to foster the career of the ten-year-old Terence Judd. In 1969 she appeared alongside fellow Australian pianist Geoffrey Parsons in a two-piano recital at Australia House, London. In 1979 she gave a two-piano recital with Philip Fowke. She appeared again with Geoffrey Parsons on 29 November 1981 at a fund-raising concert at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. This proved to be her very last appearance as a pianist (another one was scheduled in 1988 but had to be cancelled).

In August 1981 Eileen Joyce served on the jury of the 2nd Sydney International Piano Competition of Australia (SIPCA), alongside Rex Hobcroft, Cécile Ousset, Abbey Simon, Claude Frank, and Roger Woodward. In 1985 she conducted preliminary auditions in London for the 3rd SIPCA, and attended the competition in Sydney as Music Patron and deputy chairman of the jury. She gave Rex Hobcroft an anonymous donation of $20,000 for the competition. She was also Music Patron for the 4th SIPCA in 1988.

On 21 March 1991 she fell in her bathroom, fracturing her hip. She was taken to East Surrey Hospital, where she died on 25 March. On 8 April she was cremated and her ashes were interred at St Peter's Anglican Church, Limpsfield, next to Sir Thomas Beecham. On 7 June, a memorial service was conducted at St Peter's Church. Other musicians also interred at the same churchyard are Frederick Delius and his wife, Norman Del Mar, Jack Brymer and Beatrice Harrison.