ABSTRACT
As Malcolm Sargent wrote in his foreword to Robert Elkin's wartime book tracing the history of the Queen's Hall, 'London, and music, and England are still with us, flourishing far more than we could have imagined or dared to hope'. The major casualty in London's musical life was this very hall, destroyed by German bombers on 10 May 1941, and a venue which had been popular with audiences and familiar to musicians since its opening on 25 November 1893. When war was declared at the beginning of September 1939, the Prom season was curtailed, the BBC Symphony Orchestra left London for Bristol (and later Bedford when Bristol proved equally vulnerable to bombing raids), and all public music-making ground to a halt. But after a month, as far as music was concerned, the phoney war came to an end when two Ibbs and Tillett artists gave concerts, Lamond in a recital at the Wigmore Hall (7 October) and Myra Hess as soloist in Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto with the LSO the following day. Two days later, on 10 October 1939, Hess launched her series of National Gallery Concerts which became not only a morale booster for performers and audience alike, but virtually the mainstay of wartime-London's musical life. The haste with which Hess undertook this project meant that she had to cancel an American tour, which left her agent there, Annie Friedberg, most displeased. The help of Ibbs and Tillett was enlisted and the following lengthy telegram sent, probably by Emmie, in two parts (British Library Cup.404.c.l to l/ll).
