A Torch Kept Lit by William F. Buckley Jr

Author:William F. Buckley, Jr.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2016-10-04T04:00:00+00:00

A classical pianist and harpsichordist, Rosalyn Tureck was Bill Buckley’s favorite performer—in any artistic medium, any genre. That was because she had been, as he put it in her eulogy, “the greatest living interpreter” of the works of the composer whom Buckley termed, in a note he dispatched to Tureck’s deathbed, “the greatest genius of all time”: Johann Sebastian Bach. WFB’s boundless adoration of Bach and by extension his enthusiasm for Tureck—a Chicago native and five-time guest on Firing Line, usually at the piano—offer a window into one of the many childlike attributes Buckley determinedly carried into adulthood and, ultimately, old age. Hero worship on this scale bespeaks—I know from experience—a stubborn refusal to part with that facet of the childhood imagination that idealizes athletes, entertainers, and others who perform feats we know we could never replicate, on stages we know we could never ascend. Having debuted at Carnegie Hall in 1932, Tureck devoted her life almost entirely to playing, recording, and evangelizing on behalf of the works of Bach and other classical giants. She married at fifty, only to see her new husband, an architect, die that same year, and never remarried. WFB’s friendship with Tureck spanned decades, and she made special recordings, and even the pianist’s version of house calls, for him and Pat. Though his eulogy focuses on her art, Buckley makes a point of recalling Tureck’s eccentricities. “Rosalyn could sometimes be attracted,” he writes, “to personal drama.”

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