Eileen Joyce - Legacy

Legacy

In the days of her greatest fame, the critical climate was still stuffy, and her mass appeal and her succession of different-coloured glamorous gowns (some designed by Norman Hartnell) provoked snobbish reaction and led to her being musically underrated. Her surviving recordings show that such patronising judgments were very misplaced: she was a fine musician and a technically magnificent pianist. For example, her 1941 recording of the Étude in A flat, Op. 1, No. 2 by Paul de Schlözer is considered unsurpassed. This brief three-minute work is so demanding that few pianists even attempt it; Sergei Rachmaninoff was said to play it every morning as a warm-up exercise.

Modern virtuoso pianists such as Stephen Hough have expressed amazement that Eileen Joyce is not more highly rated among great 20th century pianists than she is. In the foreword to Richard Davis's biography Eileen Joyce: A Portrait, Hough writes "she displayed all the dazzle and scintillating virtuosity of many great players of the past ... she has to be added to the list of great pianists from the past".

In Zeehan, Tasmania, there is a small park called the Eileen Joyce Memorial Park. The University of Western Australia maintains a collection of her documents and some personal effects, as well as a collection of antique instruments in a facility named after her. The house where she grew up at 113 Wittenoon Terrace, Boulder, has a commemorative plaque.