“It is night. A young girl and her mother have just been transported to Auschwitz,” writes Michael Beckerman in Thursday’s (9/12) New York Times. “ ‘In my right hand, numb with cold, I still gripped Bach’s beautiful Sarabande from the English Suite,’ she would recall years later.… Her mother is barred from going with her. Hysterical, the girl lets go of the Bach score…. But her mother … ‘somehow plucked the score from the air and ran to our truck, offering it up to me inches from the tailgate.’ This story appears in Zuzana Ruzickova’s recently published autobiography, ‘One Hundred Miracles: A Memoir of Music and Survival,’ based on interview transcripts and written with Wendy Holden. Ruzickova, who died in 2017 at 90, was one of the world’s leading harpsichordists and a specialist in Bach; indeed, she was the first musician to record his complete keyboard works.… The memoir offers more evidence of the significance of her art to her stability in terrifying times, taking her from her earliest memories through the camps to Stalinism, the Velvet Revolution and beyond…. ‘The music in my head was more important to me than ever,’ she writes.”
Posted September 16, 2019
