An Irishman’s Diary on a ‘Brief Encounter’ with pianist Eileen Joyce

Anyone who has ever seen Brief Encounter, David Lean's 1945 classic about a doomed romance, will know that piano music features prominently in the soundtrack. Extra marks if you can recall that the score was Rachmaninov's Concerto No 2. But you probably need to have a specialised interest to remember the person who played it for the film, a woman called Eileen Joyce.

Largely forgotten now, she was one of the world’s best-known pianists then and famous for her flamboyant live appearances, involving regular dress changes with colours to match the various composers, red for Tchaikovsky, green for Chopin, blue for Beethoven, and so on.

Critics sometimes scoffed at her style, but there was no denying her musical brilliance, and the combination brought her great success, including an apartment in London’s Mayfair, with a reported seven grand pianos, and an English country residence to boot.

She lived most of her life in Britain, although she was Australian by birth. And as you’ll guess from her name, which was “Eileen Alannah Joyce” in full, she had strong connections with this country which helped feed the myth that surrounded her.

Her Irish-Australian father, Joseph Joyce, was a gold-miner, and one persistent legend is that she was born “in a tent” in Tasmania, a claim repeated in her obituaries. The Tasmania bit was true, at least. But disappointingly for romantics, it seems more likely she was delivered in a district hospital.

Soon afterwards, the family moved to Boulder, Western Australia. And although miners were often well paid, it seems her father wasn’t. Her impoverished childhood became a vague but indelible part of Eileen Joyce’s story. Far from the glamorous dresser of later years, she was known to school-friends as “Raggedy Eily”.

Her path to greatness is said to have started with a battered piano in a miner’s saloon.

But the local nuns had a big part too, eventually referring her to other, better connected nuns in Perth.

Those arranged a visit from the Australian maestro Percy Grainger, who declared Joyce “the most transcendentally gifted young piano student I have heard in the last 25 years”.

When another visitor, the touring German pianist Wilhelm Backhaus, suggested she be sent to Leipzig to continue her studies, the miners of Boulder and other admirers helped pay her way. From Leipzig she went to London, and by the time she returned to Australia for a 1936 tour, she was an established star.

Her growing mastery of the classics was not quite sufficient to impress her father.

When he asked her to play his favourite piano tune, Thomas Moore's Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms, and she couldn't, he considered her musical education a failure. She quickly filled in that gap.

But it was for Mozart, Bach, Rachmaninov, Grieg, and many other composers of the classical tradition that Eileen Joyce was better known. She mastered them all. And driven by a humble upbringing, she worked as hard on stage as in rehearsal, once performing a series of marathon concerts involving up to four concertos in an evening.

She was a regular visitor to Ireland at her peak. But one night in 1960, after a performance in Scotland, she closed the lid on her piano and a full-time career, pleading burn-out. She made occasional returns to concert in 1967 and afterwards, but led a much lower-key existence for the rest of her life, which ended in 1991.

I mention all this because the aforementioned Brief Encounter is now 70 years old, and to mark the milestone it will be given a special screening in the National Concert Hall next month, on August 29th. You won't hear Eileen Joyce's performance in it, however, because this is live performance of the score.

So stepping into her shoes (not literally, I hope) will be the young British soloist Leon McCawley, backed by the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, with John Wilson conducting. A review of a London performance of the show praised the “eye-watering beauty” of the cinematic and live-music combination.

As for the Joycean original, you may have to download it yourself or hope the local cinema revives it. The film is often considered a peculiarly English love story, in that (spoiler alert!) the protagonists, after teetering on the edge of an extra-marital affair, bow to social conformity in the end and don’t do the bad thing. Even so, they thought about it too long for the liking of the Irish censor. It was banned here until 1962.

@FrankmcnallyIT