It was the first performance in the Warburg’s new lecture hall in which Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde was accompanied on Gombrich’s Grotrian-Steinweg piano, newly restored like the Institute itself.
Gombrich’s mother had been trained as a concert pianist and knew both Mahler and Schoenberg.
He married one of her pupils, Else Heller, in 1936, the year that they moved to London so that he could take up a post as a research assistant at the Warburg Institute. They took the piano with them, not an easy thing to transport. In later life they would play chamber music together.
Else died aged 96 and so the family donated the piano to the Warburg, to which Gombrich had devoted his life.
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
And Gombrich’s grandson Carl is a former opera singer who is now a professor at the London Interdisciplinary School (LIS) which is based just along from the Whitechapel Bell Foundry. (I only know of him because of links between LIS and my daughter’s secondary school.)
He’s quite a remarkable person, obviously, like his grandfather (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Gombrich). Charles