Music: Promise Kept

"I only dream of one thing—to play Bach and Mozart," wrote Wanda Landowska as a little girl, and then she sealed her dream in an envelope marked: "To be opened when I am grown up." The young daughter of a Warsaw lawyer could not wait. The very next day she opened it again, and the desire became a promise. By the time she was 14, she was a graduate of the Warsaw Conservatory of Music, and a concert pianist whose greatest joy —and biggest triumph—was her rendition of Bach's intricate English Suite in E...