The legendary wartime concerts that lifted the spirits of bombed out Londoners are reimagined as part of an immersive exhibition marking 200 years of the National Gallery.
NG Stories, which opened on Friday (October 4) is a free digital experience which uses rich archival material to bring to life the people associated with the gallery.
Stories told in the audio-visual and online display range from the first housemaid, and Keeper of paintings, to the porters who lived in the basement keeping the artworks safe, and the 14 children of Ralph Nicholson Wornum, who lived there in Victorian times.
The concerts dreamed up by pianist Dame Myra Hess are recreated with projections combining archive footage and a soundscape that transports visitors back to the wartime gallery.
Then living in St John's Wood, the pianist was devastated when London's theatres, galleries and museums closed at the outbreak of war, and within weeks approached National Gallery director Sir Kenneth Clark about using it as a concert venue.
The priceless collection had been moved to safe storage outside the capital by September 1939 and the building was empty. Sharing her view that culture plays a powerful spiritual role in the health of the nation, he swiftly agreed.
Myra was already famous. Born in 1890 to a Jewish family in South Hampstead she started piano lessons aged five, earned a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music, and made her debut at 17 playing the Queen's Hall.
It was decided the concerts would take place daily at 1pm, and 5pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays, costing one shilling at lunchtime and two for the afternoon.
An octagonal gallery beneath a glass dome - Room 36 - was chosen and a small wooden platform installed. Chairs were rented or donated - including by Buckingham Palace - and Steinway and Sons delivered a concert grand piano which Hess tested with the Moonlight Sonata and declared the acoustics to be magnificent.
She gave the first concert herself thinking she would play to 50 or so friends.
But by midday on Tuesday 10 October 1939 the queue stretched down the gallery steps and around Trafalgar Square. In the end around 1,000 heard sonatas by Scarlatti, Bach Preludes and Fugues, Beethoven’s Appassionata, Schubert’s Dances, a Waltz and Nocturne by Chopin, and Myra's famous arrangement of ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’.
Seeing the audience, Kenneth Clark asked: "What sort of people were these who felt more hungry for music than for their lunches?
"All sorts. Young and old, smart and shabby, Tommies in uniform with their tin hats strapped on, old ladies with ear trumpets, musical students, civil servants, office boys, busy public men, all sorts had come."
A canteen was set up to offer lunches, and over the next six and a half years Hess and her colleagues played popular works by Beethoven, Mozart, Bach and Brahms to 750,000 culture-starved Londoners Monday to Friday.
During daytime bombing raids the concerts were often delayed while audiences took shelter. At one point they moved to the freezing basement with Dame Myra wearing a fur coat, and heaters on to keep the players' fingers moving.
On October 15, 1940 a time bomb fell on the gallery that required immediate evacuation. Within half an hour Myra had found a new venue and a boy was positioned in Trafalgar Square to redirect the audience to the library of nearby South Africa House.
On 23 October at 1.30pm, in the middle of a Beethoven quartet, a device exploded under the Gallery's old board room, some way from Room 36. There were no casualties and according to one account, the audience didn't stir and the Stratton Quartet continued without missing a beat.
With the danger, audiences dropped off and the concerts ran into financial trouble until generous donors including celebrated composers Toscanini and Rachmaninoff contributed to keep the famous concerts going.
Some performers were famous, others unknown - with audiences including The Queen (later the Queen Mothe. The last concert took place in April 1946 - Londoners campaigned to keep them going but the paintings returned and it was once again a gallery.
Hess died in November 1965 at home in Wildwood Road. Myra Hess Day is now an annual event at the National Gallery with performances by her pupils, including pianists Stephen Kovacevich and Richard and John Contiguglia.
NG Stories includes both a wealth of online material about the human stories behind the gallery and an audio visual digital journey bringing its rich history, staff, artists, conservators to life.
They include the people who made Hess' concerts happen, composer Howard Ferguson, who helped with programming; Hess’s niece Beryl Davies who assisted with correspondence; and actor Joyce Grenfell, who worked in the canteen and later wrote: "We made sandwiches that became justly famous for being complementary to the music."
NG Stories is free and runs from October 4th to January 12th 2025.
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