The Story Behind Arguably the Greatest Recording Ever Made

One of the greatest pianists who ever lived, Dinu Lipatti, was born 100 years ago yesterday, on March 19, 1917. Lipatti was a child prodigy, a virtuoso pianist and a Romanian who died at 33, just 15 years after his career began. Of course there are many child prodigies who become virtuoso pianists; a number of them have died young, and no doubt there are several who came from Romania. What sets Lipatti apart is that he gave the single greatest piano performance ever recorded.

In 1641, a virtuoso violinist named Johann Schop wrote a tune called “Werde munter, mein gemüte"—"be cheerful, my love." Eighty years later, in 1723, Bach heard it, liked it, and rewrote it as his 32nd cantata, "Herz und mund und tat und leben"—"Heart and mouth and deed and life." Herz und mund und tat und leben is famous for its final movement, one of the two or three most famous songs ever written, generally known by the English title, "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring."

In the same way Shakespeare borrowed a story called "The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet," Bach took Schop's (already very pretty) melody and turned it into something so extraordinarily beautiful that every last person in the Western world loves it. But while Bach's Jesu was an upbeat, cheerful, joyful choral piece with an accompanying recitative lyric, the version that everyone knows and loves is slow and poignant. In fact, in its original springy style, you can almost miss its intense beauty. It's possible Bach did—it was one of about 30 cantatas he wrote in 1723, and Bach didn't always take his cantatas too seriously. (A few years after Jesu, Bach wrote his cantata "Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht,"—"Shut up, stop chattering," about a girl who drinks too much coffee and her father who just doesn't understand. Bach directed its performance in one of his favorite Leipzig haunts, Zimmermann's Coffee House.)

Beautiful as it was in 1723, Jesu didn't reach peak form for another 200 years, until 1926, when Myra Hess got her hands on it. Miss Hess was a British pianist, a virtuoso who famously helped keep London's spirits up during the blitz by arranging a series of lunchtime concerts in the National Gallery. She began the concerts in 1940; they became so popular they continued the duration of the war, totaling more than 2,000 performances, of which she personally played 150. King George was so fond of them that he made her Dame Myra Hess. Nonetheless, Dame Myra's greatest contribution to art was her still-famous arrangement of Jesu for solo piano.

The 1926 Hess Transcription was a complete solo rendering of a piece everyone loved that had previously required a trumpet, oboe, violin, viola, and continuo to play properly. It spread across Europe faster than the Spanish Flu. It became the favorite of, among many others, the French composer, theorist, and critic Paul Dukas. Dukas died on May 17, 1935. Three days later, Dukas's student Dinu Lipatti made his professional debut. To honor Dukas's memory, Lipatti opened the concert with the Hess transcription of Jesu. It was a performance of a piece that lasts just three and a half minutes, but it helped rocket Lipatti to international fame.