Overdrive by William F. Buckley Jr. Read Free Book Online Page B

and it is the burden of my unpublished book that a) no one appears to care; but b) people should care. And when Time suggests my brother committed fraud, I care enough to risk receiving a scathing letter from the managing editor to set the record straight. So there we are, my friend. . . . There was a day, and I genuinely regret its passing, when people genuinely guilty of fraud were ostracized. The dissipation of the social sanction has its convenience but I doubt that it is altogether healthy.
    In New York, we live uptown, on Seventy-third Street, and Jerry got me there only minutes before our six guests convened for a drink and sandwiches (we would dine later). We piled into the car to go hear Rosalyn Tureck perform the second of her three scheduled fall concerts at Carnegie Hall. I have managed over the years to hear her perform publicly a dozen times (she presumes to perform even when I am out of town). For one whole season she stayed abroad, doing her scholarly editions; another season, for a month or so, she was ill. Two years ago she played five concerts, repeating works she had performed forty years back when, as a young woman, she began her New York career. I met her nearly twelve years ago, when I asked her to do a program with me for "Firing Line" at which we would explore the question, "Why are they afraid of Bach?"
    I tease her sometimes, because it's fun to do so when two people absolutely agree on the same proposition, in this case that she is the best piano interpreter of J. S. Bach at large. She likes to hear a compliment, but is never quite surprised by it. I suppose in this respect she is like many artists. I remember returning from our honeymoon in 1950 and finding that my father's graduation present, a Challis clavichord, was—I feared fatally—constipated by the moisture in northwest Connecticut where I had left it. In desperation I took it to the house of the legendary harpsichordist Wanda Landowska, off neighboring Lakeville Lake. I had never met her, but assumed she would share my distress and give me counsel. She palmed off the instrument on Denise Restout, her musician-assistant, and proceeded to chat with me, her very first question being, Had I heard her new recording of The Well-Tempered Clavier? I was able truthfully to reply, Yes. She closed her eyes, and said: "Magnificent, no?" I agreed.
    Rosalyn combines self-esteem with great artistic maturity. I think it safe to say that if she were not good, she wouldn't think she was . Along the line, sometime in the late thirties, she resolved to abandon her vast repertory and play only the work of Johann Sebastian Bach. I read somewhere that the great Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau once calculated that he held in memory enough music to play forty two-hour concerts. That would be eighty hours. It is only a guess, but it is reasonable to assume that it would take about forty hours to play all the works of Bach written for keyboard, but some of these works are of absolutely terrifying complexity. It is one thing to commit to memory Grieg's Concerto, another to remember a couple of Bach's English Suites. Or, for that matter, the first six preludes and fugues in the second volume of the forty-eight preludes and fugues. The problem is that the story line is totally polyphonic, with two, three, and four melodies pursued in counterpoint. To play romantic music can be horrifyingly difficult (one thinks of the Transcendental Etudes of Liszt), but I think that memorizing them would be easier than memorizing much of Bach.
    In any event, it isn't a secret that there is a certain amount of professional resentment of Tureck because of her single-minded focus on one composer. Her reputation as an artist in other literatures was well established, and I have heard cassettes of her doing remarkable things with Paganini, Chopin, Liszt. But her devotion to a single composer, while certainly idiosyncratic, can hardly be judged as narrow, for the reason that we are dealing