Prague to Mark Centenary of Harpsichord Legend Zuzana Růžičková

Prague will mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of Zuzana Růžičková on January 14, 2027, with a yearlong program honoring the harpsichordist who survived Terezín, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen and became the first musician in the world to record Bach's complete works for keyboard instruments.

The Viktor Kalabis and Zuzana Růžičková Endowment Fund is organizing the commemorations under the banner Růžičková100. The project includes concerts at the Academy of Performing Arts (HAMU) in Prague, an exhibition at the National Museum—Czech Museum of Music and a parallel online exhibition, a discussion with British author Wendy Holden, and the opening of a specialized library.

Holden, author of the memoir One Hundred Miracles, will take part in a program featuring a screening of the award-winning documentary Zuzana: Music Is Life.

Růžičková, who died in 2017 at the age of 90, is remembered as the "first lady of the harpsichord." According to her official biography, she returned from the camps with the tattooed number 73289 and severely damaged fingers. Doctors and teachers doubted she would ever sit down at an instrument again.

She proved them wrong. Růžičková went on to become one of the world's most prominent harpsichordists and played a central role in the instrument's renaissance on concert stages across Central Europe. At HAMU she established a separate degree program for the harpsichord and taught at the Academy for a full 50 years.

Her career unfolded under conditions that might have ended it before it began. The communist regime long dismissed the harpsichord as a "relic of feudalism and the church." Because she refused to join the Communist Party, she was denied the title of professor until the Velvet Revolution in 1989.

Her husband, the composer Viktor Kalabis, was a steadying presence throughout. Their marriage lasted 54 years and was, in the words of her biography, "a model of extraordinary devotion." Kalabis supported her return to German concert stages, where she performed for the first time as an artist a little over ten years after the war.

In Terezín, as a teenager, she helped maintain the children's faith in a normal world, according to the biography. In her later years she began to speak openly about her wartime experiences and spoke out against Holocaust denial.

The Růžičková100 project positions her centenary as both a musical and a moral commemoration. The combination of live concerts, museum exhibitions, film and a permanent library suggests the fund intends the celebrations to secure her legacy for audiences who never heard her play.