Sex & Bach

The supreme masters of Bach interpretation today are men like Helmut Walcha, Ralph Kirkpatrick, Glenn Gould and Karl Richter. But curiously enough, it is the women who always seem to win the Johann Sebastian Bach International Competitions, which are held in Washington, D.C.; in the last six Bach contests, women took first prize four times and tied once for first-place honors.

Last week the girls cleared the field again. When the eleven men and twelve women had finished playing their way through the single contest piece--Bach's monumental Goldberg Variations--the judges gave the first prize of $1,000 to Toronto Pianist Mari-Elizabeth Morgen, 23. Mari-Elizabeth was so sure that she would not get past the semifinals that she brought only one dress to Washington. That was her only mistake; at the piano, she was flawless--poised, professional, and in full control of the knuckle-crunching requirements of the Goldbergs.* Second and third prizes were given to Austrian-born Claudia Hoca of Kenmore, N.Y. ($500), and Kiyoka Takeuti of Tokyo ($250).

While the results of the competition .did nothing to challenge male pre-eminence in Bach, they did indicate that the ladies, whose number has included such superb stylists as Wanda Landowska and Rosalyn Tureck, may know something about Bach's music that men don't. Contest Founder-President Raissa Tselentis does not go so far as to say that Bach, the father of 20 children, was not a manly composer. But she does suggest that "we women tend to be more spiritual. It is the spiritual side of women that responds to Bach."

Whatever the explanation, it was clear that sex played no part in the judges' considerations. They sat on the stage of Lisner Auditorium behind screen partitions; the performers were identified for them only by number. Clearly, as Washington Post Music Critic Paul Hume said, it took the Goldbergs to separate the women from the men.

*Bach composed the aria and 30 variations for his pupil, Johann Gottlieb Theophilus Goldberg, who wanted a little bit of night music to play for his patron, Count Hermann Carl von Kaiserling, a sickly insomniac.

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