The Curious Case of Miss Rosalyn Tureck

I seem to have been aware of Rosalyn Tureck all my life—just as, down in the Delta country, looking up from the fields and across the levee, and seeing the smokestacks of steamships gliding past the trees, one is aware that there’s a mighty river over yonder. But now the analogy collapses, for the relation between The River and the people of the Delta is totally different from the relation between Miss Tureck and the world of music. In the Delta, The River dictates the conditions of your life and sometimes of your death; the relation is enforced, intimate, total. In music you can enjoy a satisfactory career as listener, performer, teacher, or composer without ever having to “deal with” Miss Tureck, unless you possess a certain special taste for Sebastian Bach, a taste further specialized and limited to those works of Bach that can be played on a grand piano. It’s a safe bet that Miss Tureck has spent 95 per cent of her career on piano-Bach; her recordings are legion; she is An Authority.

Now there are several things to say about being An Authority on the performance of piano-Bach. The first is of course that piano-Bach authorities, like economists and theologians, are a quarrelsome lot. No two agree on very much; one gathers that there is no such thing as a received truth, no body of knowledge transmitted from the fountainhead. Yes, there is a traditional way of playing Bach—a French tradition, a north German tradition, a Viennese tradition, a Swiss tradition, an American tradition. The Swiss organist Lionel Rogg once told me, “When I play Bach in Switzerland I am accused of being too strict, when I play him in Germany they say I am too free.” Is there no expertise to which one may repair? I say no.

WR

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William F. Rickenbacker

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I seem to have been aware of Rosalyn Tureck all my life—just as, down in the Delta country, looking up from the fields and across the levee, and seeing the smokestacks of steamships gliding past the trees, one is aware that there’s a mighty river over yonder. But now the analogy collapses, for the relation between The River and the people of the Delta is totally different from the relation between Miss Tureck and the world of music. In the Delta, The River dictates the conditions of your life and sometimes of your death; the relation is enforced, intimate, total. In music you can enjoy a satisfactory career as listener, performer, teacher, or composer without ever having to “deal with” Miss Tureck, unless you possess a certain special taste for Sebastian Bach, a taste further specialized and limited to those works of Bach that can be played on a grand piano. It’s a safe bet that Miss Tureck has spent 95 per cent of her career on piano-Bach; her recordings are legion; she is An Authority.

Now there are several things to say about being An Authority on the performance of piano-Bach. The first is of course that piano-Bach authorities, like economists and theologians, are a quarrelsome lot. No two agree on very much; one gathers that there is no such thing as a received truth, no body of knowledge transmitted from the fountainhead. Yes, there is a traditional way of playing Bach—a French tradition, a north German tradition, a Viennese tradition, a Swiss tradition, an American tradition. The Swiss organist Lionel Rogg once told me, “When I play Bach in Switzerland I am accused of being too strict, when I play him in Germany they say I am too free.” Is there no expertise to which one may repair? I say no.