Hello all! It’s been a while since I last posted — and I want to stay thank you for sticking with this newsletter while I’ve been away. I’ve been on leave, but have now very much returned and will be posting fortnightly again. I’m really looking forward to being back with this wonderful Substack community!
A lot has happened in the last few months and more on that later, but perhaps the biggest thing is that the first draft of my next book is FINISHED. It seemed like I might never get there, but it’s done! The book’s about women musicians in World War II and I can’t wait to share it with you all. Publication day isn’t for a while — March 2027, put it in your diaries please — but I’ll post updates about the book’s progress as it makes its way towards the finish line.
By way of a teaser, I made a documentary about two of the women in the book for BBC Radio 3 which you can listen to here. These women are the pianists Myra Hess and Elly Ney, whose stories fascinate me. In many ways they were completely different, almost opposites. Myra (born 1890) was British and Jewish, Elly (born 1882) German and Catholic. Myra was unobtrusive on stage, Elly styled herself as a priestess. Myra was self-effacing and had a filthy sense of humour, while Elly was proud, stubborn, and accepted no contradiction of her many opinions.
But in other important ways they’re a distorted mirror image of one another. Both were hailed as being among the most important pianists of their generation. They had international careers, and were well received in the United States and Europe, as well as in their home countries. They both specialised in Austro-German music, especially Beethoven. And they believed, above all, that classical music mattered. They both felt that the “great” works — mostly by Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, Bach and Schubert — were among the most profound utterances ever produced by humanity, and that it was their duty to bring these works to as many people as possible.
This powerful sense of responsibility, combined with their extraordinary talent, led them to become cultural leaders during the war. When war was declared in September 1939, London’s entertainment venues shut down, leaving the capital in silence. With little direction from either the government or the BBC, Myra took it upon herself to organise a chamber concert series at the National Portrait Gallery in Trafalgar Square, whose paintings had been evacuated into storage for safekeeping. Held during lunchtime (with afternoon repeats) and costing just a shilling for entry, the series was a phenomenal success. Thousands of Londoners turned up for the first concert, and the large audiences continued throughout the war, even during the Blitz.
A wide social spectrum attended the concerts, from volunteer soldiers and office girls to the Queen herself. To Myra and her many admirers, the series’ broad appeal seemed to prove beyond doubt that the music played at the Gallery had something important to say. Classical music was not “elitist” or out of touch, as many accused it of being. Anyone could appreciate it. It was just a matter of access. If concerts of “great” music were offered at affordable prices and accessible times, people from all walks of life could and would enjoy them.
If these ideas sound familiar, it’s because they have since become standard in discussions about the arts and who they belong to. Inclusivity and accessibility are now central to the way most institutions run, based on the belief that the arts are important and should be available to and for everyone.
Myra was not the first person to build a concert model based on this idea. The relatively low ticket prices and laid-back atmosphere of the Proms, for example, founded in 1895, came from a desire to expand the listenership for classical music. But Myra and her Gallery series were certainly among the more influential promoters of this ideology. She was in the right place at the right time. The war heightened enthusiasm for making “high” culture into “popular” culture, galvanising others who believed as Myra did. ‘It is for the preservation of this vaunted culture of ours that we are waging this ideological war’, as one journalist put it. In 1940, for the first time the British government provided funding for the arts via the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts — which later became the Arts Council, still running today. Myra was among those who sat on its first panel, influencing the way arts funding was conceived in the UK.
Myra and her Gallery concerts have become an often-repeated, heart-warming tale about the power of music in troubled times, and the inherent importance of “great” classical music. But similar events that played out in Germany throw a different light on this story.
Many musicians who continued to work during the Third Reich did so despite their personal feelings about the Nazis, finding themselves in an almost impossible situation when the party came to power. Elly Ney was not one of those people. She wholeheartedly supported the Nazis, becoming a party member in 1937. And one of the main reasons she was drawn to them was their stance on the arts.
Having produced some of the world’s most celebrated composers, classical music was one of the areas in which Germany and Austria were unquestionably culturally dominant. So the Nazis devoted a lot of attention to promoting classical music that they felt fitted their idea of “Germanness” — especially music by Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Mozart and Wagner. This was the music that Elly loved, and she believed it ought to be supported and promoted by the state. When she heard Hitler speak about the power and importance of German music, she was captivated. ‘Hitler expressed exactly what I feel in my soul about music’, she wrote to her partner.
Elly eagerly signed up to give concerts for the Kraft durch Freude (Strength Through Joy, KdF) programme, which provided government-funded leisure activities for workers. As part of their remit, they set up classical concerts to try to widen the audience for German classical music, believing that anyone and everyone could and should be able to appreciate the classical “greats”. Through the KdF, Elly gave concerts for workers and soldiers, playing Beethoven everywhere from factories to department stores. The KdF reveals the dark side of a vehemently hierarchical model of “great” classical music, and shows the damage that can be caused by linking classical music to ideas about nationality and race. Elly Ney’s performances were fascist just as surely as Myra Hess’s were not — but the music, and underlying ideas about its greatness and inherent value, remained the same.
Myra and Elly’s stories show just how mercurial musical meaning can be, and how much the stories we tell about music matter. In different contexts, with different stories surrounding it, the same music can “mean” completely different things to different listeners. Elly played, in many cases, exactly the same repertoire as Myra. Beethoven’s gargantuan ‘Appassionata’ Sonata was one of their staples. British listeners heard it as a plea for peace, but German reviewers described it as a battle-cry. Elly herself described Beethoven’s music as expressing ‘a relentless readiness to fight and an overwhelming confidence in ultimate victory.’
Does this change how we hear Beethoven’s music, knowing that it was capable of being used in such a way? Should we change the language we use about “great” classical music? And what do we do now with Elly Ney’s recordings of Beethoven sonatas, knowing her Nazi history? In short, how should this musical history change how we act in the present, if at all?
I’m exploring these questions and more in this documentary — and of course in the book too. I was lucky enough to get to speak to both Myra and Elly’s family, including the first interview that Elly’s granddaughter and great-granddaughter have given to English-language media. I hope you enjoy listening!
You can listen to ‘Conscripting Beethoven’ here, on BBC Sounds.