On my dining table there are a few random scraps of homework for a lesson that never happened. The scraps include sheets of music paper on which I wrote out the first scene of the first act of “Macbeth.” At the beginning of each line, there’s a time signature, and under each word I notated a pitchless metrical value, as in a musical score but without any indication of the actual tones. On the back of one sheet—Was I short of blank paper? My whole life seems to be written out on innumerable scraps of this or that—I took some notes on Arthur Lovejoy’s “The Great Chain of Being,” and, for some reason, I wrote a few random terms in no discernible order. It’s clear that even a week after I’ve done this, my attempt at note-taking has failed, for I have no idea what any of these terms mean: “nominalistic motive”; “metaphysical pathos”; “the tacit assumption of each age.”
These notes were in preparation for a lesson at the harpsichord with someone who died before we could meet again—Zuzana Ruzickova, with whom I studied in the last six years of her life. To explain her would mean explaining how music is more than entertainment, how every faculty of the mind and the heart devoted to music is energy well spent, and how I would be willing to plan and, if needed, change the course of my life to come closer to the ideals that she represented.
I first met Zuzana in 2011, when I had gone to Prague to play some chamber music with a friend. I had played the harpsichord concerto by her late husband, the composer Viktor Kalabis, at the BBC a year before, and through various channels I had gotten ahold of her phone number, to ask her a few questions about the piece. At the time, I was somewhat discontent as a musician. I felt family pressure to get on with a career and avoid the fate of the stereotyped “failed artist,” and yet I knew that I had much left to learn. I knew that I was terribly incomplete as a harpsichordist, and since coming to Europe from America I had grown frustrated that the discourse around my instrument was mostly centered on what is called the “authenticity wars.” I was tired of the idea that historical inevitability dictated that I should imitate, say, an old Dutchman playing the harpsichord, rather than finding an artistic voice that came from within.
I had always admired Ruzickova’s recordings, and her strongly characterized interpretations and fearlessness—these ran contrary to the anodyne morals of what she and I would come to call “Harpsichordland.” Armed with that phone number, I pestered her for a lesson even after she said several times that she had no intention of coming out of retirement. Later, she’d say that she finally agreed to meet after hearing me play Haydn (on the piano) during a song recital in Prague, but I think she really responded to my annoying persistence.
The trend of historical inevitability—the idea that the current style of playing on period instruments is unassailably correct and a result of natural progress—had come to see Ruzickova as hopelessly passé by the nineteen-eighties. The political connotations are not difficult to detect here. The prewar, more expressive style of playing, say, Bach was considered at best unfashionable or belonging to Dante’s circle reserved for the good but unlucky pagans, and there was no serious interest in what was going on behind the Iron Curtain. With the collapse of the Soviet bloc in the early nineties, not far behind the Western reformers and election observers came West European musicians eager to save and educate the East with the “right way” to play. (In other words, “Be one of us.”)
So, as a magazine editor sneered to me over coffee in Paris shortly after I had decided to be a student again, “Why did you decide to study with her? I didn’t even know she was alive.” Well, the answer was quite simple—for me, at least. With her strange, hybrid modern harpsichord with steel strings and a style of playing lazily called “romantic,” Ruzickova and her playing just spoke to me. When I listened to her, I knew that this was the instrument I wanted to play, and that this was how I wanted to play it.
I started coming to Prague from London about once a month to study with Ruzickova. At first, I brought the music of J. S. Bach, the composer who has given my life its entire meaning; I soon learned how central he was to Zuzana’s life, as well. Study sessions were long, and they were intense. My first and hardest lesson was that public applause does not validate empty playing. You could occasionally squeak something half-baked by the public, but nothing got past Zuzana. We had endless discussions over all those years of articulations, tempos, phrasings, ornaments. Amid these secrets of music, I came into contact with a human being whose entire life was fully woven into her interpretations.
One morning, we worked on the fugue paired with Bach’s D-minor “Chromatic Fantasia,” a long-winded and slightly relentless piece that I wasn’t quite getting the hang of. Her rebukes still ring in my ears. “Your counter-subjects rush—how sloppy! Don’t you realize this material is as important as the main theme?” She began drawing comparisons with novels or plays that we’d both discussed. Then, at a cadence where I was having trouble, she went on a tangent about accents in German versus those in French. She always insisted on starting the fugue with the last few bars of the preceding fantasia. “Sforzando in the first and third beats!” she’d cry. “Slower and slower as Bach goes down the chromatic scale, down into the lowest pits of despair.” (She then quoted the last few lines of Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality.”) And, as I’d start the fugue, just as the dust was settling from the final low chord of the previous movement, she said, “Every crotchet is strictly equal! This is now the law come from above, the Word coming to rescue us in our darkest hour. As the tones rise, Bach opens the gates and light rushes through.” It was only then that I noticed the crudely tattooed number on her right forearm.
Zuzana Ruzickova’s life, just two and a half months short of ninety-one years, spanned the great upheavals of modern European memory. The happy childhood of a talented and precocious pianist was interrupted by the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, and the subsequent transport of her family to the concentration camp at Terezín; Ruzickova herself later was interned at Auschwitz, and then at Bergen-Belsen. She returned to her native Bohemia accompanied by her mother—the only other survivor of her family—and what attempts were made to return to normalcy were again interrupted, this time, by the Communist takeover in 1948.
Amid all of this, as though the decision to become a musician weren’t difficult enough, she decided to answer the calling of the harpsichord (she always framed it in these spiritual terms). Against the backdrop of all her later triumphs—from competition victories to concert tours in parts of the world that had never seen a harpsichord to hundreds of recordings (including the first complete traversal of J. S. Bach)—the most remarkable thing is how she persisted through the most trying of circumstances. The first few years, she did not even have an instrument of her own. In the Stalinist period, she, her husband, and her mother lived in a communal apartment with three other families; “My mother slept under the piano,” she’d say as she pointed to that corner of her living room. In the same period, her début with the Czech Philharmonic was put on hold by an anti-Semitic party official. She was always accompanied by a Party minder through thirty-five years of touring. Once, she was offered a new book by Solzhenitsyn in a bookshop in Paris, and, for the subsequent two decades, every phone call was monitored. Her last recording of the famous cadenza from Bach’s Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, in 1990, was rushed while engineers and musicians started fleeing the studio amid rumors of Soviet tanks coming to squash the protests during the ferocity of 1968.
I found a kindred spirit in Zuzana because she was someone who played the harpsichord simply in order to exist as a human being. Ask too many harpsichordists why they play the instrument, and they’ll say something about historical accuracy, or because Bach (or whoever) isn’t “right” on the piano. A few will talk about the beautiful sound of the instrument. (And, yes, a few couldn’t wing it at the piano.) Not many are bothered about their instrument “living”—most are content with the revival of what they believe has been before. Mixed in with all these half-explanations is any of one of a host of tribal statements of the day, relevant only to the harpsichordist, which enforce a loose party line of sorts. What instruments Zuzana could play behind the Iron Curtain were really neither accurate nor particularly beautiful, but what she did with music seemed to evade the shifting sands of fashions and schools of playing. She was a true artist, an open-minded and flexible human nonetheless, with deep musical convictions. This is what is meant, I suppose, when people say music is timeless.
Zuzana Ruzickova, too, is timeless. She suffered few illusions about ignoring everything between her and the past. The idea that a piece should sound the way it did three hundred years ago was laughable to her—she always said, when we were studying them, “It took me ninety years to understand Bach’s Goldberg Variations. If only I had ninety more; I’d still not know what to do with them.” Her intellectual rigor and curiosity were peerless. The regular references to her reading Caesar’s “Gallic Wars” at Terezín, and Freud on the roof of her barracks at Auschwitz, as recounted in her Shoah testimony, bring chills to me as I read them. She was a close friend to the great pianists of her day, in particular the Russian giants Emil Gilels and Sviatoslav Richter, who respected her urbane wit and formidable musicianship. She had little time for musical tribalism, and I think that she played the harpsichord mostly because it was the instrument she found that expressed everything within her. I have no doubt that she would have been as great had she played anything else. Above all, she demanded of herself, and of others, to think, and to think deeply. If that meant weathering criticism from the moralists, so be it. As she said when I once threw up my hands in frustration over some piece by Bach, “Music has so many secrets—but I’ll ask Bach when I see him.”
