Eileen Alannah Joyce (21 November 1912 - 25 March 1991) was an Australian pianist. Eileen Joyce was born to an Irish father and a Spanish mother in a tent in Zeehan, a mining town in Tasmania. Despite their poverty, her parents encouraged her musical development. The family moved to Western Australia when she was very young. Percy Grainger and Wilhelm Backhaus were impressed by her talent and encouraged her to study in Europe. The people of Western Australia contributed to her studies by holding fundraisers to enable her to travel to Germany. In the 1920s she studied at the Leipzig Conservatoire under Artur Schnabel, and at the Royal College of Music in London under Tobias Matthay. In 1930 she made her debut in London at a Henry Wood Promenade Concert and went on to perform with the leading orchestras of Europe and the rest of the world. Eileen Joyce contributed to the soundtracks of four films. She was the soloist in Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2, used to great effect in David Lean's film Brief Encounter (1945). She also provided the playing for the piano music in the 1945 film The Seventh Veil, but this was uncredited in the film. This music again included the Rachmaninoff 2nd Concerto, and also the Grieg Concerto; as well as solo pieces by Mozart, Chopin and Beethoven (the slow movement of the Pathétique" Sonata assumed a particular importance in the film). Wherever She Goes [1] was a 1953 black-and-white Australian feature film based on Eileen Joyce's early life in Western Australia. She briefly appears as herself in this film, as she does in the 1946 British film A Girl in a Million [2]. She had a straight acting role as the Aunt in Paul Cox’s 1983 film Man of Flowers [3]. Eileen Joyce died in Westerham, England on 25 March 1991.
Legacy
In the days of her greatest fame, the critical climate was still stuffy, and her mass appeal and her succession of glamorous frocks provoked snobbish reaction and led to her being underrated musically. Her surviving recordings show that such patronising judgments were misplaced: she was a fine musician and a technically magnificent pianist. For example, her 1941 recording of the Étude in A flat, Op. 2, No. 1 by Paul de Schloezer (1841-1898) is considered unsurpassed. This brief three-minute work is so demanding that few pianists 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.
