Bach Chromatic Fantasy (Liselotte Selbiger, 1949)

Bach: Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, BWV 903 Liselotte Selbiger, harpsichord Recorded December 13, 1949, in Copenhagen, Denmark, on Columbia matrices CCX 1381 through CCX 1383. Issued on three sides of Columbia LDX 7014 and LDX 7015, the extra side being the Gigue from Bach's Partita No. 1 in B-Flat, which I have uploaded separately. Born in 1906 as the only child in a well-to-do German family of Jewish lineage, Liselotte Selbiger had to escape the Nazis not once but twice - first in 1935, when she relocated to Denmark, then again in 1943, when she escaped to Sweden in the bottom of a fishing boat, carrying poison with her in case of capture. We are fortunate that she survived, because on the evidence of her all-too-few recordings (the first of which was made after the war), she was a very fine musician. She actually trained as a cellist, then switched to piano, then, just before leaving Germany for good, acquired a Neupert harpsichord, with which she became the first person to give a full-length harpsichord recital in Denmark. Danacord, that indefatigable purveyor of historical Danish recordings, has issued several CD's of her extant commercial and broadcast recordings, but this earlier version of the Bach Chromatic Fantasy (she recorded it again in 1956) is not among them.