On March 18, 2022, Decca Records released My Life in Music, the pianist Ruth Slenczynska’s recent recording of twelve works that have held particular significance for her over her career. The ensuing—and for Decca’s classical division, unprecedented—widespread coverage of the publication by mainstream media stems from the fact that Slenczynska was ninety-six when she made the recording in 2021, after a sixty-year hiatus in her association with Decca, with whom she recorded often in the 1950s and 1960s. More extraordinary, however, is the fact that by 2021 Slenczynska had been performing professionally, and globally, for over ninety years. After Slenczynska’s recital in Copenhagen in 1934, music critics claimed she was not, as her manager maintained, a nine-year-old child, but in fact a mature dwarf. She submitted to a medical examination that established otherwise. Were these critics with us in 2022, they would likely demand proof that Slenczynska’s recent recording was performed not by a ninety-six-year-old, but by a spry sexagenarian.

I first heard Slenczynska play in New Haven when I was in high school in the late 1970s. The venue was not Yale’s Woolsey or Sprague Halls—where I attended recitals by well-known pianists such as Serkin, Horowitz, and Arrau, as well as innumerable programs by School of Music faculty members and students—but at the genteelly threadbare premises of the now-disbanded New Haven Women’s Club.

Music critics claimed she was not, as her manager maintained, a nine-year-old child, but in fact a mature dwarf.