OBITUARY: Rosalyn Tureck, R.I.P

National Review, August 11, 2003

She died (finally) on July 17. As it happened, only a few minutes after a Tureck tribute at the Mannes School in New York at which the audience-more accurately, the congregants-heard her playing on video and tapes, listened to a lecture or two about her accomplishments, and on to two young pianists who tried to communicate her authoritative style. They played, of course, J. S. Bach. She and Bach devoted their lives to each other.

I approached her in the late Sixties, inviting her to appear on Firing Line to discuss a recent jab at Bach by a young protester in Los Angeles who had raged at a public rally that Bach had nothing to say to modern life. I knew her, as everyone who listened to Bach did, as the greatest living interpreter of his works. She had played the whole piano repertory, old and new-David Diamond wrote a piano sonata for her. Her first public performance in Chicago was done at age nine, and after intensive studies with fine artists in Chicago and at the Juilliard School, she began her exhaustive career, giving, gradually, only all-Bach programs. She played in every part of the world, earning, always, standing ovations, and taught music and musicology at Oxford, Yale, and Cal Tech.

We became friends, and she appeared five times on Firing Line programs, on one of them defending the role of the performing artist against the claim that technology had anachronized the live recital, a claim flamboyantly advanced by Glenn Gould. There was nothing here to be confused with fuddy-duddyism: She was receptive to explorations at every level, even mastering the (New Age) Theremin after some years of study with its developer. She performed on the harpsichord and, indeed, on the clavichord and organ, but was supreme on the piano, writing, collaterally, technical papers and books on performance and musical structure.

In 1977, she undertook at Carnegie Hall to play the Goldberg Variations before dinner on the harpsichord, and to play them after dinner on the piano, intending to display the strengths and individuality of the two instruments, at her singular hands. To do that one thinks of singing Tristan in the afternoon and Siegfried in the evening. At a reception- held at our quarters after the event-she declined to shake hands (dear Rosalyn could sometimes be attracted to personal drama). The Goldbergs are thought of as her signature piece. When she was 17, she undertook to learn this formidable work (I once timed her in it-118 minutes). After seven weeks she agreed to perform it for fellow students at Juilliard. Her teacher simply assumed that she would rely on the music, but she didn't even bring it to the piano, tucking away only a few three-by-five cards giving the beginning bar of each of the 32 variations. "I never actually looked at them," she told me.

But playing the Goldbergs at my house (for the second time), seven or eight years ago, she told me she would want the music in front of her, in the event she wished to consult the score on one or two variations; though she never in fact did. She was then 80, so it was for over 60 years that she carried the music in her head, that and 35 hours of other music of Bach. That performance was the last of seven she gave for me. The first, in 1975, was "a birthday present." It was recorded, and, with two later recitals at home in Connecticut, combined to produce two CDs, "great works of J. S. Bach," which still circulate. But the surprise came when in 1995 she called to ask whether I would like her to play for me and my wife and guests the program of Romantic music she would perform a week later in Buenos Aires. Her audience was flabbergasted as she went through without music an hour of Mendelssohn, Brahms, Schumann, and Debussy, music she hadn't played for 40 years, playing it now faultlessly and masterfully, from that huge repertory she carried in her head.

Four weeks ago I had a telephone call from a friend of Mme Tureck. He spoke from the hospital to tell me that she was dying and probably would live only another day, in the event I wanted to send her a farewell note, which he would take her from his e-mail. "She has just finished her autobiography and will have the manuscript sent to you before the weekend. But if you want to write to her you need to do it in the next half hour, because I have to go out, and she isn't expected to survive." I completed a hasty note, which, via her attentive friend, she acknowledged warmly.

"I don't know the details of your incarceration," I wrote, "not even whether there is any music at your bedside. There is, if you are interested to know, music at my bedside: the 48 [Preludes and Fugues] performed by Rosalyn Tureck. The recordings are truly sublime, and every time I experience any of it I am reminded of your incomparability. How fine to know that you have been of service to the greatest genius of all time, and how proud he'd have been to hear you perform."

She lived another eight weeks-not, really, a welcome extension of life- with the assertive cancer that killed her.