Rosalyn Tureck: A Life with Bach

Rosalyn Tureck: A Life With Bach Rosalyn Tureck was the first twentieth-century artist to make the Goldberg Variations and all-Bach recitals popular, earning recognition and praise for bringing Bach to the world. Now we have an autobiography by Ms. Tureck (1913–2003), the renowned keyboard artist and scholar who dedicated her life to the works of Johann Sebastian Bach. The book, written with intelligence, candor, and wit, recounts her childhood in Chicago as a piano prodigy; her years at Juilliard—where the seventeen-year-old Rosalyn blacked out in a rehearsal room and came round with a revelation that she needed to create a new and different type of keyboard technique geared specifically to the playing of Bach; her 1932 Carnegie Hall debut (performing Bach on a theremin!) and remarkable 1937 all-Bach Town Hall concerts; her studies with Arnold Schoenberg; and her galvanic career performing and lecturing on Bach in far-flung cities, along with her founding of several musical and research societies including the Tureck Bach Research Institute. There are vivid travelogues about her extensive work in Great Britain and tours to Russia, South Africa, and India, and richly rendered tales of her friendships with Myra Hess, Robert Oppenheimer, James T. Farrell, Saul Bellow, Dylan Thomas, Bertrand Russell, and Arnold Schoenberg, among others.