Zuzana Ruzickova, Leading Harpsichordist and War Survivor, Dies at 90
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Version 0 of 1. Zuzana Ruzickova, who survived Nazi concentration camps and a Communist dictatorship in the former Czechoslovakia to become one of the world’s most renowned harpsichordists and a leading interpreter of Bach, died on Sept. 27 in Prague. She was 90. Her death, from pneumonia, was confirmed by a cousin, Frank Vogl. When she was 9, she was rewarded for recovering from pneumonia with the music lessons that began her career. Ms. Ruzickova (pronounced rouge-ITCH-ko-va), is widely credited as the first harpsichord soloist to record Bach’s complete works for keyboard instruments — passionate and spirited music that was the one constant in a turbulent life in which she survived the gas chambers, devastating disease, slave labor and crippling hand injuries. “Bach provides a sense of order in a world of disorder,” Ms. Ruzickova said in “Zuzana: Music Is Life, a documentary film, by Harriet and Peter Getzels, that had its premiere in Europe two days after her death. (It opens the Aspen Film Festival in Colorado on Tuesday.) Theirs might have seemed an unlikely collaboration. Bach was an orphan, born in Germany, who composed much of his music for the Lutheran Church in the 18th century, and whose burial site was destroyed by Allied bombing in World War II. Ms. Ruzickova was born in Bohemia, the daughter of a prosperous Jewish family. She secretly carried a handwritten snippet of Bach’s music to a concentration camp as a talisman, performed slave labor for the Germans in Hamburg, returned home with her hands too enfeebled to strike a keyboard, and survived renewed anti-Semitism in Communist Czechoslovakia. Moreover, the Czech regime condemned the harpsichord itself as a feudal and religious instrument. In 1956, Ms. Ruzickova won the ARD International Music Competition in Munich, which began her international career. She was not yet 30 but lucky to have survived until then, and she had been reluctant to return to Germany for the festival. Her husband, the composer Viktor Kalabis, urged her to be “the Jew who brought Bach back to Germany” and to “play Bach to make them realize that there is another Germany, that Hitler didn’t destroy all the great culture,” she told The Times of London last year. Mr. Kalabis died in 2006. Ms. Ruzickova was born on Jan. 14, 1927, in Pilsen to Jaroslav Ruzicka and the former Leopolda Lederova. Her parents owned the city’s leading toy store. As the Nazis threatened Czechoslovakia, her father, who had worked at a Chicago department store in the 1920s, could have left, Ms. Ruzickova recalled in an interview for the documentary, but he believed that “one doesn’t leave one’s country when it’s in dire straits.” She could have fled, too, in 1939, on a Kindertransport train organized by a 29-year-old Briton, Nicholas Winton. But she preferred to remain with her parents, who had agreed to give her piano lessons when she recovered from pneumonia. “I was not a strong child, but I was in love with music from the beginning,” she told the BBC last year. Her teacher recommended that the harpsichordist Wanda Landowska, who lived near Paris, take her as a student, but that prospect was dashed by the German occupation. When Ms. Ruzickova was 15, the family received what the Germans called “an invitation” to Terezin, which the Nazis considered a model concentration camp for the cultural elite. Her grandparents and father died of disease there. Within six months, she and her mother were shipped to Auschwitz in German-occupied Poland, where she survived the gas chamber twice — first after lying about her age, and then when the camp’s routine was upset by the Allied invasion on D-Day. She and her mother were then transferred to bomb-ravaged Hamburg, where she repaired oil pipelines, worked in a cement factory and dug tank traps. Early in 1945 they were shipped again, this time to Bergen-Belsen, a German concentration camp, where tens of thousands died from malnutrition and disease. She weighed 70 pounds and had malaria when the camp was liberated that April. With her hands badly damaged during the war, Ms. Ruzickova practiced 12 hours a day to catch up after it was over. She attended the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague from 1947 to 1951, when she gave her first harpsichord recital. After Czechoslovakia became part of the Soviet bloc, she refused to join the Communist Party. But the country’s Soviet-backed regime indulged her, content with confiscating much of the foreign currency she had earned. She never defected because she and her husband feared for their relatives in Czechoslovakia. Ms. Ruzickova made more than 100 recordings. Her monumental project of recording Bach’s complete keyboard works took a decade, starting in 1965. She stopped performing publicly in 2006. Mr. Vogl and other cousins are her only survivors. Speaking to the BBC last year, Ms. Ruzickova reflected on how her all-consuming love for music, and not just her talent to play it, had sustained her over a long and often buffetted life. “It is not enough to be an extraordinary musician,” she said. “You have to be crazy. You have to have the feeling that you cannot live without music.” |