Zuzana Ruzickova; harpischordist, survivor of Nazi concentration camps

Zuzana Ruzickova, a Czech survivor of the Nazi concentration camps who rediscovered beauty in life through the music of J.S. Bach, a canon to which she dedicated her life as one of the world's premier harpsichordists, died Sept. 27 at a hospital in Prague. She was 90.

The cause was pneumonia and exhaustion, said a cousin, Frank Vogl.

Ruzickova achieved international renown as the first soloist in history to record Bach's complete keyboard works. The collection, originally made for the French label Erato from 1965 to 1974, filled 35 records and was rereleased last year by Warner Classics in advance of her 90th birthday.

A documentary about her life, "Zuzana: Music Is Life," directed by the Bethesda, Maryland-based Harriet Gordon Getzels and Peter Getzels, was released earlier this year.

Ruzickova trained initially as a pianist but became best known as a virtuoso of the harpsichord, a principal instrument for which Bach composed, and one whose sound she helped revive in modern concert halls.

Her devotion to the German composer, whose life spanned the 17th and 18th centuries, was deep and almost primal. She said she had loved his music since she was an 8-year-old in prewar Czechoslovakia and credited Bach's restrained intensity with helping her endure the horrors and memory of the Holocaust.

In the Baroque perfection of his preludes, fugues, toccatas and fantasias, she said, one could find the order that is not always visible in the melee of human life.

"I needed Bach," Ruzickova told BBC Music Magazine. "Unlike Beethoven, who shakes his fist at the heavens, Bach could help me after everything I'd been through.”