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 having lost most of her family, and then to withstand the persecution of communism 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.
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