Bach to the rescue

One of the great joys of the 18th-century novella La petite maison is the way Jean-François de Bastide matches the proportions and shape of the book to the architecture of the exquisite country house at the story’s heart. Zuzana Ružicková, the outstanding Czech harpsichordist who died in 2017 while working with Wendy Holden on this touching memoir, analyses Bach, a composer she more or less made her own in the second half of the 20th century,  in very similar terms:

I have a tectonic rather than a visual memory, and as the melodies begin to build, in my mind I imagine a building… I instinctively know how it is built. I understand the architecture and where it is heading — the corridors leading to rooms; stairs leading to upper levels, and ultimately to a final melody that completes the structure perfectly.

It is a lovely description. And it is no exaggeration: her performances were always beautifully structured — the corridors, stairs, and rooms all perfectly delineated, making Ružicková a most inspiring guide. One of the miracles she refers to in her book’s title is that she could do all this with hands badly damaged on her tortuous progression from the ghetto at Terezín to the camp at Auschwitz, and then Bergen-Belsen, from where British soldiers liberated her in April 1945.

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Another is that she survived the camps at all — and before them the sanctions and privations, the curfews and violence, the ban on Jews owning radios or using public transport or swimming anywhere other than in the ‘Jewish lake’. She almost didn’t: the Normandy landings of 6 June 1944 threw the Germans into a panic, and gassings scheduled for Auschwitz that day — to include Ružicková, she was quite certain — were cancelled so that healthy prisoners could undertake forced labour and perhaps stave off the Allied advance.