Then there’s the poster for the summer of 2001, when she and Victor put on ten weeks of ballet and opera at Covent Garden, with companies from London, St Petersburg, Milan and San Francisco. Across the top it says Victor Hochhauser presents. Lilian’s name is nowhere on it, though she’d done much of the work that got those companies there. I’d have wanted my name on the poster and I’d have had views about the size of the lettering. I ask her about that summer and she’s straight back to the pleasure of what they managed to put on.
For the Hochhausers, getting a great orchestra onto the stage was only half the job. At their weekend concerts at the Albert Hall there was no government subsidy to fall back on, so they kept tickets affordable and gave people something they’d want to come out for. The 1812 Overture, for one. “Nothing to be ashamed of,” she says. Quite. She and Victor trusted a big audience with the best music and the best musicians they could get. Thousands of people discovered they loved classical music or ballet because a Hochhauser ticket put it within reach.
She knew what it meant to count out the price of a seat. She was born in Bethnal Green in 1926, the youngest of six. Her father, a cabinetmaker from Poland, made a beautiful wooden case for the family’s wind-up gramophone. In that flat, where eight people shared two bedrooms and the hot water came from a copper over a coal fire, there was Beethoven’s Fifth. Lilian has no idea how it got there. Her mother, who’d come from a village in Ukraine and had never been to school, fell in love with Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade.
Lilian won a scholarship to grammar school. Then came 1939 and evacuation to Bishop’s Stortford, where she caught fleas and decided she’d had quite enough. She took herself back to Liverpool Street in the dark with sixpence and knocked on her mother’s door. “I’m coming home, and I’m never going to leave you again.” She remembers the sky over the burning docks turning red, and how dull it was to be a teenager in the Blitz. She went to the pictures for Bette Davis and Joan Crawford and found ninepence to hear The Barber of Seville from the balcony at Sadler’s Wells. What she remembers most clearly is how proud she was to have taken herself. She wanted to learn the piano. There was no money for one, so she learnt shorthand.
By fifteen she was earning £2 a week at the British Film Producers Association. When her boss fell ill, she took the minutes, made the tea and dealt with studio claims and clothing coupons. The adults eventually hired to help took exception to being told what to do by a girl. She had the considerable disadvantage of knowing exactly what needed doing. When I ask where she got that confidence, she says, “I knew how to negotiate. I really did. What I didn’t know is what would happen if it didn’t work.”
She met Victor after a bout of tuberculosis had sent her to a Swiss sanatorium, where she read Thomas Mann and looked out at the snow. Back in London she took a part-time job in the office of Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld, who had rescued Jewish children from Nazi Europe. Victor was organising benefit concerts and had taken to sitting on the corner of her desk. Would she like to meet some ballet dancers, he asked. “Would I? I’d like to meet anybody.” They met in January, were engaged by June and married in 1949. She still remembers trying to find a coat, a dress and a hat under rationing.
They had four children. Once the youngest started nursery, she went into the business full-time. Victor took care of the money and had the nerve to risk it. Lilian was a fearsome negotiator who could get people to trust her, which mattered enormously when the people in question included both the Soviet Ministry of Culture and the artists it controlled. When she talks about those years, she starts with David Oistrakh, whom they brought to Britain in 1954. The authorities kept most of the artists’ fees, so the couple quietly helped them out. She speaks of him with particular affection. For years, she says, hardly a month went by without her seeing him.
The pianist Sviatoslav Richter avoided flying, so she once spent three days bringing him to London from a village on Lake Como. She remembers the length of the journey almost as vividly as the way his fingers made the piano become “something else”. When Rostropovich left the Soviet Union, the Hochhausers gave him a flat in their Notting Hill house, rent-free, for nearly a year. “He was lost,” she says. “He was really lost.” I ask whether she was ever starstruck. She says she used to get nervous. Then she says, quite simply, “We just liked each other.”
Russian composer and pianist Dmitri Shostakovich, Lilian Hochhauser, Victor Hochhauser and Russian cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich in London, September 21, 1960. (Image: Getty Images)Getty Images
There was Britten, whom she and Victor helped introduce to Shostakovich, and Rudolf Nureyev, with whom they worked for years. By the 1970s they were at the Foreign Office in talks with a Chinese delegation that barely trusted anybody, and the next thing London knew there were Chinese acrobats at the Coliseum. She calls them the biggest sensation of all.
The Hochhausers were shomrei Shabbat and kept a kosher home. I asked how that worked when they had a whole ballet company in town. “Well, if you’ve got the Bolshoi here, you can’t say you can’t dance because it’s Shabbos.” They walked miles to performances and, with a little ingenuity, somehow made it work.
When I ask about antisemitism, she grows reflective. Her family took the name Shields in the 1930s because of it. She was a child then. I find it painful, after all she’s given to British life, to sit with her in her own home and ask whether she feels hopeful about Jewish life here. “You should just fight on, hope for the best,” she says quietly. She means both parts of that. Her family is all over the world now, including in Israel, and she talks about her great-grandchildren and the prospect of a great-great-grandchild. “Baruch Hashem,” I say when she tells me. You can hear how much she has to worry about and how much she has to look forward to.
Victor received his CBE in 1993. Lilian received hers in 2018, 25 years later. Victor died the following year, in their 70th year of marriage. When she talks about him, she keeps coming back to courage. There’s such affection in the way she says it that I can picture the young man on the corner of her desk, trying his luck. He was right about her.
Lilian Hochhauser with her husband Victor after receiving her CBE in 2018 (Image: Royal College of Music)[Missing Credit]
On Saturday night, the worlds of ballet and music will come to the Royal Opera House for her 100th birthday. There’ll be music from young players at the Royal College of Music, where the foundation she and Victor set up pays for scholarships. She tells me with undisguised delight that one of her scholars has become an assistant conductor. “It’s in a way a selfish thing,” she says. “It gives me so much pleasure.”
I keep thinking of that girl in the ninepenny seats who wanted a piano her family couldn’t afford. She found her own way to music then she and Victor made it easier for children like me to find ours. There are children today who will go all the way through school without once sitting in a hall and hearing what an orchestra can do. Lilian understood what could come of that first evening and she spent decades making sure more of us had one. It’s quite something to look at the old posters and think of all the lives she changed without ever needing to see her name on them. When the quartet starts, I want to see her face.
