Hausfrau at the Harpsichord

To Germans, the music of Johann Sebastian Bach is a jealously guarded possession, and judgments of any new Bach performer are sharply critical, especially if the performer is a foreigner. But last week a Munich audience applauded a harpsichord recital played by a middle-aged American housewife. As Virginia Pleasants performed Bach's French Overture and a Rameau suite, cognoscenti listened attentively, demanded seven curtain calls.

For much of her life, 45-year-old Virginia Pleasants, an Ohio-born graduate of the Cincinnati College of Music, was a modest and unassuming concert pianist. Her careful, reflective playing of 18th century music was well received in Europe, but Pianist Pleasants' lack of temperament and color made her unsuited to the more popular romantics. Then her husband played a hunch. Henry Pleasants, onetime music critic for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin and since 1952 a Foreign Service officer in Austria and Germany, thought that Virginia's real forte might be the harpsichord, which lacks dynamic range (it sounds almost the same whether whacked or stroked) and mainly requires delicate, precise fingering. It also requires good care: the slightest humidity change in the Pleasants' Bonn home makes their instrument go sharp in summer, flat in winter. In winter they boil as much as two gallons of water daily to keep it in tune.

Last May. after two years of practice and water boiling, Harpsichordist Pleasants made her debut in Essen. Response was staggering. "She opened the door to the world of Johann Sebastian Bach," said one critic. Others acclaimed her "sovereign manipulation of tonal line," the subtle clarity of her rock-solid rhythm, taste and imagination. Wrote one fan: "It seems that the dry, tinkling sounds emanating from this delicate box satisfy an inherent longing for an orderly perfection which has long been lost in our vulgar present day." Last week, as Germany's "Hausfrau at the Harpsichord" continued her triumphant tour, she said wonderingly: "Everyone makes me feel like something of a missionary."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.