Eileen Joyce

Australian classical pianist

Eileen Alannah Joyce CMG (died 25 March 1991) was an Australian pianist whose career spanned more than 30 years. She lived in England in her adult years. Her recordings made her popular in the 1930s and 1940s, particularly during World War II. At her zenith she was compared in popular esteem with Gracie Fields and Vera Lynn. When she played in Berlin in 1947 with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, an eminent German critic classed her with Clara Schumann, Sophie Menter and Teresa Carreño. She became even better known during the 1950s, when she played 50 recitals a year in London alone, which were always sold out. She also performed a series of "Marathon Concerts", playing as many as four concertos in a single evening. Her Mozart was described as "of impeccable taste and feeling", she was a Bach player "of commanding authority", and "a Lisztian of both poetry and bravura". but a search of Tasmanian birth registrations shows she was born on 1 January 1908. (NOTE: It was common practice for birth dates to be registered as 1 January when the birth does not occur in a hospital and thus not registered on the exact date, but rather later, which means if 21 November was indeed her date of birth, she was likely born in 1907.) She was the fourth of seven children of Joseph Thomas Joyce (born 1875), grandson 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. 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 Joyce: 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. Joyce entered the 1925 and 1926 Perth Eisteddfods, winning the Grand Championship in 1926. Schilsky continued to make her name known, and wrote a letter to 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 Joyce's future career. In August 1926, Percy Grainger, on a concert tour, was introduced to 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". In 1932, she attended Artur Schnabel's masterclasses in Berlin for two weeks. In 1934, for the Proms' 40th season, Joyce played Busoni's Indian Fantasy. and she appeared regularly at the National Gallery concerts organised by Dame Myra Hess. Although small in stature, Joyce was strikingly beautiful, with chestnut hair and green eyes. She changed her evening gowns to suit the music she was playing: blue for Beethoven, 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, She toured in 1948, and 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, and 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. 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. 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, Gordon Watson, Roger Woodward and others. 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. 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. a 1945 docu drama about the struggles of the London Philharmonic Orchestra during the war, in which a number of prominent composers and performers appeared as themselves. (released in the US as Kisenga, Man of Africa, and re released as Witch Doctor) includes a section for piano, male voices and orchestra, titled "Baraza", which Bliss said was "a conversation between an African Chief and his head men". Joyce played this for the film, with Muir Mathieson conducting. Bliss also wrote this out as a stand alone concert piece, which Joyce both premiered in 1945 and recorded in 1946. This recording was more favourably received than the film was. She was in the 1946 British film A Girl in a Million, in which she plays a part of Franck's Symphonic Variations. In 1947, her playing of Schubert's Impromptu in E flat is heard in the segment "The Alien Corn" in the Dirk Bogarde film Quartet.) and Parrett's performance double was Pamela Page. Joyce briefly appeared as herself at the start and end of the film, playing the Grieg concerto. The film was much less successful than the book on which it was based, although it was one of the very few Australian films made before 1970 to be given a (limited) release in New York. Tim Drysdale, son of artist Sir Russell 'Tas' Drysdale, played the role of Joyce's brother in the movie when he was age 11.

In 1971, Joyce was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Music by the University of Cambridge. She was extremely proud of that and insisted on being referred to as "Doctor Joyce". While happy to accept the award, she made no secret of her disappointment that she was not made a dame. Modern virtuoso pianists such as Stephen Hough have expressed amazement that 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 Reserve. 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 Wittenoom Terrace, Boulder, has a commemorative plaque. In 2011, Appian Publications & Recordings issued a 5 CD box set, Complete Parlophone & Columbia Solo Recordings, 1933–45. In 2017, Decca Eloquence released a 10 CD box set, The Complete Studio Recordings. This release coincided with the publication of Destiny: The Extraordinary Career of Pianist Eileen Joyce, an examination of Joyce's career in concerts, films and recordings, by David Tunley, Victoria Rogers and Cyrus Meher Homji.

On 16 September 1937, Joyce married Douglas Legh Barratt, a stockbroker. Their son, John Barratt, was born on 4 September 1939, the day after the start of World War II. The marriage failed and they separated. when his ship HMS Gossamer was bombed and sunk. For reasons she never explained, Joyce always maintained he had died off North Africa but, in 1983, she corrected the record. Her second partner was Mayfair Film executive Christopher Mann. They lived together from late 1942 until his death in 1978. Mann had previously been married to the Norwegian actress Greta Gynt, and had been Madeleine Carroll's publicist and manager. Mann died at Chartwell on 11 December 1978, aged 75.