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Zuzana Růžičková in 1969. She was the first performer to record Bach’s entire output for the harpsichord.
Zuzana Růžičková in 1969. She was the first performer to record Bach’s entire output for the harpsichord. Photograph: Alamy
Zuzana Růžičková in 1969. She was the first performer to record Bach’s entire output for the harpsichord. Photograph: Alamy

Zuzana Růžičková obituary

This article is more than 6 years old
Czech harpsichordist and Auschwitz survivor who was determined to bring her instrument out of the museum and into the modern world

When the Czech harpsichordist Zuzana Růžičková, who has died aged 90, left the Nazi labour camp at Terezín in a truck bound for Auschwitz, she wrote down a passage from one of JS Bach’s English Suites “as a sort of talisman, because I didn’t know what was awaiting us”. She came to think of his music as being “above human suffering”.

It gave her a force of faith that helped her survive and recover from the experience of the camps, despite losing most of her family, and then to withstand communist persecution in postwar Czechoslovakia. In a performing career of more than half a century she went on to make more than 100 recordings of works from the Renaissance to the present day. In the course of doing so, she became the first performer to record Bach’s entire output for the harpsichord.

Had war not intervened, Růžičková planned to go to France to study with Wanda Landowska, whose pioneering work she continued in her aim “to rid the harpsichord of its museum nature and make it a living instrument”. As a tireless performer and teacher, she transcended scholarship in pursuit of the essence of the music.

Born in Plzeň (Pilsen), western Bohemia (now the Czech Republic), Zuzana was the daughter of Jewish parents, Jaroslav Růžička and his wife, Leopolda (nee Ledererová), who owned a toy shop. She showed considerable promise on the piano, discovering early her affinity with Bach. Her musical progress was interrupted by the German occupation in 1939, and three years later she was sent with her parents to Terezín, north of Prague, where her father and grandparents later perished. Zuzana and her mother were transferred to Auschwitz, then to hard labour in Hamburg, and finally to Bergen-Belsen until liberation in 1945. She twice escaped being gassed.

Setting her sights on a life in music, Růžičková practised the piano up to 12 hours a day to restore the strength to her hands that she had lost through slave labour. At the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (1947-51), her encounter with the harpsichord was “love at first hearing” and her ensuing success in changing the perception of it as an instrument that had had its day spurred her on to greater recognition.

In 1952 she married the composer Viktor Kalabis. He urged her to be “the Jew who brought Bach back to Germany”, and four years later she won an international competition in Munich. An invitation to study in Paris followed, and her international career was launched – though by special dispensation of the state, which recognised the benefits of exporting Růžičková’s talent, not least in sequestering much of her foreign earnings. The communists, many of whom were also antisemitic, had seized control in 1948: she and her husband did not join the party and were kept under surveillance.

Alongside her performances with many major orchestras throughout Europe and in the US, Canada and Japan, she formed associations with musicians such as the flautist Jean-Pierre Rampal and cellist Pierre Fournier, as well as other harpsichordists in performances of the Bach multiple harpsichord concertos. Among them was the Australian Valda Aveling, who recalled Růžičková as her favourite musician to work with, “a human being first, and a musician second”. In Prague she worked with the conductor Václav Neumann and the violinist Josef Suk, above all in sonatas by Bach.

She recorded almost continuously throughout the 1960s and 70s: the Czech label Supraphon awarded her a gold disc, and many of her recordings have recently been reissued. Her recordings of 20th-century harpsichord works included not only the popular concertos of composers including De Falla, Poulenc and Martinů, but also works written for her, including many by Kalabis. She was also one of the first artists to record the music of the early English virginalists alongside the major Baroque repertoire, and “the best years of my life” came between 1965 and 1975 with her complete Bach on the French label Erato, reissued last year as a 20-CD set.

From being a student at the Prague Academy, in 1951 she became one of its teachers, though the title of professor was not conferred on her until after the fall of the regime in 1990. Her many students there and elsewhere included János Sebestyén, Borbála Dobozy, Christopher Hogwood and Mahan Esfahani. After retiring from playing in 2006, the year that her husband died, she remained active in Czech musical life, not least through the foundation established to promote his music.

A documentary film by Harriet and Peter Getzels, Zuzana: Music Is Life, was premiered two days before her death. She maintained: “Bach tells you: don’t despair – there is a sense in life and in the world.”

Zuzana Růžičková, harpsichordist, born 14 January 1927; died 27 September 2017

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