Mendelssohn: Prelude and Fugue in F minor Op. 35 No. 5 - Annie d'Arco, 1966 - MHS 1172

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Annie d'Arco (28 October 1920 – 5 March 1998) was a 20th-century French classical pianist. Born in Marseille, d'Arco studied the piano with Marguerite Long and won the Geneva competition in 1946. She gave her first concert with the Orchestre Lamoureux, under the direction of Eugène Bigot.

She performed both as a soloist and as a chamber musician, notably with Henryk Szeryng, André Navarra, Jean-Pierre Rampal, Jean-Éric Thirault and Pierre Pierlot. She taught the piano at the École normale de musique de Paris for many years, and had many students with distinguished careers, including Christophe Larrieu, Catherine Joly and Marylin Frascone. She was married to Gilbert Coursier, a French horn player. D'Arco died in the 2nd arrondissement of Paris at age 77.

Mendelssohn is often regarded as the prime mover in the nineteenth-century revival of J S Bach; indeed, Mendelssohn’s efforts to restore Bach’s music at times perhaps bordered on the obsessive. It was Mendelssohn, of course, who at the age of twenty in 1829 revived the St Matthew Passion, dormant for a full century; it was Mendelssohn who effectively introduced Bach’s organ works to England in the 1830s and 1840s; it was Mendelssohn who popularized the solo violin Chaconne in D minor and Partita in E major through arrangements with piano accompaniment in 1840; and it was Mendelssohn who raised funds for the first statue of Bach, unveiled near the Leipzig Thomaskirche in 1843. This veneration of Bach found a different, one might say universal expression when Robert Schumann shared with his friend news of the installation in 1845 of a seventy-two-inch reflecting telescope in Ireland, for many years the largest in the world. When one commentator imagined that extraterrestrial beings peering down at earth through such a device would discern humans as nothing more than infinitesimal mites on cheese, Mendelssohn came up with a suitable Bachian riposte: ‘Yes, but the Well-Tempered Clavier would certainly instill respect in them.’