The end of an era: Rosalyn Tureck dies at 88

Rosalyn Tureck, a pianist and harpsichordist who devoted more than six decades to performing, researching, teaching and writing about the works of Johann Sebastian Bach, died on Thursday, July 17 at her home in Riverdale, the Bronx.

Early in her career, she was an avid interpreter of contemporary music before deciding to focus entirely on Bach. She had an insightful outlook on the music of Back. She felt that it was crucial to understand Bach not as a modern thinker, or as the beginning of music as we know it today, but as the peak of musical development from medieval times through the Protestant Reformation. She would also enthusiastically speak about performances of Bach on electronic instruments.

Rosalyn Tureck was born on Dec. 14, 1914, and became interested in the piano when she was 4. Her first teacher was Sophia Brilliant-Liven, a Russian pianist who had been a teaching assistant to Anton Rubinstein. In those days, Bach was widely considered to be primarily didactic music, good for developing students' hand muscles but too dry for the concert hall. She was fascinated by Bach's work. When she was 16, Ms. Tureck moved to New York to study with Olga Samaroff at the Juilliard School. When she entered the Naumburg Competition, she made it to the finals and presented an all-Bach program as her closing recital. As she told the story years later, the members of the jury said they could not give her the award "because they were sure that nobody could make a career in Bach."

Since 1947, she had been spending more time in Europe, where the demand for her Bach concerts was greater than in the United States. In 1957 she moved to London, where she formed a chamber orchestra, the Tureck Bach Players, as well as the International Bach Society, meant to be a forum in which musicologists and performers could exchange ideas. In 1981 she started another organization with a similar mission, the Tureck Bach Institute.

Ms. Tureck returned to New York in 1977, after 20 years abroad, and announced her arrival with a 40th-anniversary celebration of her Town Hall Bach series, performed at Carnegie Hall. She opened the series with two performances of the "Goldberg Variations" in one evening: first on the harpsichord, then on the piano. The focus of her career, however, continued to be Europe, and in the 1980's she moved back to England, returning to New York only in the fall of 2001.

She continued to make recordings, including a series for the VAI label, as well as one of her signature pieces, the "Goldberg Variations," for Deutsche Grammophon in 1998. In recent years, Deutsche Grammophon also reissued some of her classic Bach recordings, including her 1953 account of "The Well-Tempered Clavier." She published numerous articles on Bach, as well as a three-volume collection of studies, "An Introduction to the Performance of Bach."

She was scheduled to perform on Thursday evening at the International Keyboard Institute and Festival at Mannes College of Music in Manhattan, but had to withdraw when she became ill. Instead, the college presented a tribute to her, which she was unable to attend. A friend, Rabbi David M. Posner, said she died a few minutes after the tribute ended.