Wanda Landowska

Perhaps more than any other single individual, keyboard performer Wanda Landowska (1879–1959) was responsible for the revival of the harpsichord—the instrument that was the piano's most important ancestor.

Important composers of the Baroque era (c.1600–1750), such as Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frederic Handel and François Couperin, wrote solo keyboard works, and keyboard parts in larger works, with the harpsichord in mind. Today, performances of Baroque music on "period" or historically appropriate instruments are at least as common as those using modern ones. Modern harpsichord performers owe Landowska a tremendous debt, for she single-handedly researched the instrument's construction, commissioned new examples from builders, investigated performance styles, wrote polemical articles promoting the use of the harpsichord, and, most importantly, repopularized the instrument by performing on it over a five-decade concert career. Her influence extended even beyond her chosen instrument; essayist Allan Evans, in an essay appearing on the website of the Arbiter Records label, asserted that "one of the many debts of gratitude we owe to Wanda Landowska is for her having viewed music as a continuum rather than a progressing art ever perfecting itself." She helped lead classical music audiences to realize that music of the past is often best appreciated on its own terms.

Family Converted to Catholicism

Born in Warsaw, Poland, on July 5, 1879, Landowska was the daughter of attorney Marian Landowski and linguist Eva Lautenberg. Her mother produced the first translations of American author Mark Twain's novels into Polish. Landowska's background was Jewish, but her family had converted to the Catholic faith. A child prodigy, Landowska gave her first piano recital at age four. Her parents signed her up for lessons with two high-level teachers at the Warsaw Conservatory (named Klenczynski and Michalowski) who were exponents of the style of Polish-born nineteenthcentury composer and pianist Fryderyk Chopin. But even as a young woman she liked the music of earlier eras when she heard it, which was rarely—although Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) is now considered among the greatest composers in history, his music was mostly forgotten in the late 1800s. She also heard and reacted strongly to the harpsichord music of French composer Jean-Philippe Rameau when played on the piano. Her teachers realized that she had talent and unusual instincts, and they let her pursue her interests to some degree.

A small growth on one hand temporarily sidelined Landowska's keyboard career but had the effect of broadening her musical horizons—her mother sent her to study composition with Heinrich Urban in Berlin, Germany, after she graduated from the Warsaw Conservatory in 1896, and she began to find her place within the international musical community. Landowska remained for just a few years in Berlin, but while she was there she met fellow Pole Henry Lew, a folklorist and writer, who supported her in her musical ambitions. They moved to Paris, France, in 1900 and got married there. Lew supported Landowska's growing interest in the harpsichord, and that interest was stimulated still further when she began to cultivate contacts at Paris's Schola Cantorum and became acquainted with the group of top music scholars who were active there. These included composer Vincent d'Indy and the great organist and Bach specialist Albert Schweitzer. She heard more Baroque-era music, by French composers François Couperin and Jean-Philippe Rameau.

Landowska's next move was to launch intensive research into harpsichord design. Most of the models she had to work with were in museums, for it had been a century since harpsichords had been made in appreciable numbers. Complicating Landowska's task was the fact that harpsichords differed in major ways from one another; unlike the nineteenth-century piano market, which was dominated by a few major manufacturers, harpsichords were made by individual builders and might be large or small, with anywhere from one to four sets of strings, one or two keyboards, and a variety of technical specifications. The few performers who had tried to play existing harpsichords in public concerts had been met with indifference or ridicule from audiences who found the instrument's sound anemic or worse—its strings are plucked rather than hammered like those of a piano when a key is struck, and it is not capable of gradations between loud and soft dynamics (the word "pianoforte," the piano's original name, means "soft-loud" in Italian).

In 1903 Landowska devoted a segment of a piano recital to a performance on a small harpsichord built by the Pleyel piano firm, and as her body of research grew she began to work with the firm's engineers on a larger instrument. She also began to prepare the ground for the harpsichord revolution with her writings; the influential article "Sur l'interpretation des oeuvres de clavecin de J.S. Bach," (On the Interpretation of the Harpsichord Works of J.S. Bach), appeared in 1905, and in 1909 she and Lew coauthored a book, La musique ancienne (Early Music). Some of Landowska's writings were combative as she strove to counter the widespread perception that the harpsichord was of purely antiquarian interest. In 1912 Landowska introduced a new two-keyboard Pleyel harpsichord at the Breslau Bach Festival in Germany, and her renown began to grow.

Arrested During War

One mark of Landowska's new influence was that she was hired in 1913 to teach harpsichord at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin, among Germany's top university music programs. Having come from France, she and her husband were arrested after World War I broke out in 1914 and spent much of the war as paroled civil prisoners—they were not criminally charged, but most of their possessions were confiscated. After the end of the war, Landowska participated in a performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion, playing the continuo part (a chordal accompaniment) on the harpsichord for the first time in decades, and perhaps since Bach's death. In 1919 Lew became an early auto-accident fatality, and Landowska left Germany, giving a series of recitals in Switzerland and Spain and then returning to Paris to take a teaching post at the Ecole Normale de Musique.

In Paris in the 1920s, Landowska often attended and performed at a salon—an intellectual-social gathering—that was later reported to have had a lesbian orientation. The nature of her marriage to Lew has been variously described, but he was clearly supportive of her musical endeavors. Landowska had numerous private students in Paris, and one of them, Denise Restout, later became her editor, general assistant, and life companion.

In the 1920s and 1930s Landowska reached the peak of her fame. Several major composers wrote new harpsichord compositions for her, including Francis Poulenc, who was quoted by Evans as saying that "the way in which she has resuscitated and re-created the harpsichord is a sort of miracle." Landowska toured the United States for the first time in 1923, sailing from Europe with four harpsichords and making 78 rpm recordings for the Victor label.

The crowning achievement of Landowska's life in France was the construction of her own three-story house in the Paris suburb of St.-Leu. Finished in 1925, it included a garden and a small detached concert hall that became a routine stop for Parisians and visitors interested in new musical developments. Younger keyboard players interested in the harpsichord flocked to Landowska's studio, and her own concerts were packed. In 1933 she performed Bach's massive Goldberg Variations on the harpsichord for the first time in the twentieth century.

Fled Nazis

As German soldiers approached Paris in the summer of 1940, Landowska, due to her Jewish background, found herself in grave danger. She and Restout fled south, hitchhiking out of the city—Restout bribed a passing driver, and they slipped out of Paris at four o'clock in the morning, taking only a few cases of books and manuscripts with them. The house in St.-Leu, with its collection of antique instruments and its large library, was ransacked by the Nazis. Landowska and Restout were refugees in the south of France for about a year and a half, staying with friends and watching their funds dwindle as they moved from place to place. Finally they made their way to the Portuguese coast and sailed for the U.S.

Landowska and Restout were admitted to New York through Ellis Island, where they had to wait among transported Japanese-American internees despite a sheaf of recommendation letters gathered from American acquaintances. Of their $1,300 in remaining money they had to post $1,000 as a bond.

But things improved when Landowska was able to return to performing. Her first U.S. concert was an impromptu recital she gave on a piano she found pushed against a wall on Ellis Island, but by February of 1942 she was performing at the Town Hall auditorium and basking in rave reviews from Virgil Thomson and other leading American critics of the day. Word of Landowska's innovations in Baroque music performance had reached the U.S., and even jazz bandleader Artie Shaw had experimented with the unique tone color of the harpsichord on occasion. The Victor label, now called RCA Victor, released more Landowska recordings, and by 1947 she was able to afford to move to a country home near Lakeville, Connecticut. Another resident of the area was French mystery novelist Georges Simenon.

Perhaps the greatest of Landowska's American recordings was a complete rendering of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, a set of 48 short but intricate harpsichord pieces intended to demonstrate the complete set of musical keys made possible by the tempered tuning system that had just recently been introduced in Bach's time. In 1975, the recording was added to the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences hall of fame. Later recordings of that work and others went beyond Landowska's in sheer authenticity; heard today, her performances seem more concerned with the spirit of a piece of music than with its exact notated score, and she sometimes added ornaments that would later be regarded as questionable. Her big Pleyel harpsichord was likewise superseded by later research, and, noted Richard Dyer of the Boston Globe in his review of the video Landowska: Uncommon Visionary, "the finger-lifting technique and distorted hand positions required to play it go against most of what is known about healthy muscular uses of the hand … and it is not surprising to hear her last record producer, RCA's John Pfeifer, remark that the sessions for her late recordings of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier proved very difficult."

Dyer nevertheless asserted that earlier Landowska recordings heard in the video had "an authority, rhythmic spring, virtuoso elan, and emotional immediacy that has not been surpassed by any of her successors." Landowska was interviewed for an installment of the NBC television series Wisdom in 1953, and she continued to write and perform, never giving up the piano entirely, until her death in Lakeville, on August 16, 1959. Her home was preserved as the Landowska Center; her recordings continued to form cornerstones of many a classical music library; and her influence was magnified into the plethora of harpsichord recordings that had appeared by the twentieth century's end and continued undiminished into the twenty-first.

Books

Gelatt, Roland, Music Makers, Knopf, 1953.

Restout, Denise, ed., Landowska on Music, Stein and Day, 1964.

Sadie, Stanley, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., Macmillan, 2001.

Periodicals

Boston Globe, January 23, 1998.

Online

"Landowska, Wanda," GLBTQ, An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender & Queer Culture, http://www.glbtq.com/arts/landowska_w.html (December 22, 2005).

"Wanda (Aleksandra) Landowska," Arbiter Records, http://www.arbiterrecords.com/musicresourcecenter/landowska.html (December 22, 2005).

Landowska, Wanda (Alexandra)

Landowska, Wanda (Alexandra), celebrated Polish-born French harpsichordist, pianist, and pedagogue; b. Warsaw, July 5, 1879; d. Lakeville, Conn., Aug. 16, 1959. She was only 4 when she began to play the piano. Following lessons with Kleczynski, she continued her piano studies at the Warsaw Cons, with Michalowski. In 1896 she went to Berlin and completed her formal training with Moszkowski (piano) and Urban (composition). In 1900 she went to Paris, where she married Henri Lew, an authority on Hebrew folklore. He encouraged her to pursue her interest in the study and performance of 17^th-and 18^th-century music. While she continued to appear as a pianist, from 1903 she gave increasing attention to playing the harpsichord in public and making it once again an accepted concert instrument. Her tours as a harpsichordist took her all over Europe. In 1913 she went to Berlin to teach harpsichord at the Hochschule für Musik. At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, she and her husband were declared as civil prisoners on parole on account of their French citizenship. After the Armistice in 1918, Landowska went to Basel to give master classes in harpsichord at the Cons, in 1919. She then returned to Paris to teach at the Sorbonne and at the École Normale de Musique. In 1923 she made her first appearances in the U.S. In 1925 she settled in St.-Leu-la-Forêt, near Paris, where she founded the École de Musique Ancienne for the study, teaching, and performance of early music. She also continued to tour abroad. With the Nazi occupation of Paris in 1940, Landowska fled France and eventually arrived in N.Y. in 1941. In 1947 she settled in Lakeville, Conn. She continued to be active as a performer and teacher during these years. In 1952 she celebrated her 75^th birthday in a N.Y. recital. Landowska was the foremost champion of the 20^th- century movement to restore the harpsichord to concert settings. Her performance style was an assertive one highlighted by legato playing and variety of articulation. While she was best known for her interpretations of Bach, she also commissioned works from Falla (Harpsichord Concerto, Barcelona, Nov. 5, 1926), Poulenc (Concert champêtre for Harpsichord and Small Orch., Paris, May 3, 1929), and other composers. D. Restout and R. Hawkins ed. a collection of her articles as Landowska on Music (Briarcliff Manor, N.Y, 1964).

Bibliography

B. Gavoty and R. Hauert, W. L. (Geneva, 1957); A. Cash, W. L. and the Revival of the Harpsichord: A Reassessment (diss., Univ. of Ky., 1990).

—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire

LANDOWSKA, WANDA

LANDOWSKA, WANDA (1879–1959), harpsichordist, pianist, and composer. Born in Warsaw, Landowska bean to play the piano at the age of four. She studied at the Warsaw Conservatory with Michaełowski and in Berlin (1896) with Moszkowski (piano and composition). In Paris (1900) she married Henry Lew, a writer on Hebrew folk music. Landowska was one of the first to revive harpsichord music and won renown in that field. Giving numerous concerts and lectures she reawakened interest in music of the Baroque period. She toured all over Europe including Russia. In 1912, the piano maker Pleyel built her a special harpsichord. In 1913 she went to Berlin to teach harpsichord at the Musik-Hochschule. After World War i, Landowska taught in Basel and played a harpsichord continuo in the St. Matthew Passion – for the first time in the 20^th century. In Paris, she taught at the Ecole Normale de Musique. Landowska founded her own Ecole de Musique Ancienne at Saint-Leu-la-Flôret, near Paris, for the study, teaching, and performance of early music. There, in 1933, she gave the first integral performance of Bach's Goldberg Variations. With the advent of Hitler, she was forced to leave the school. She fled to France and settled in the U.S. in 1941. At the age of 70 she recorded the complete Bach "48." Her performance style was an assertive one, highlighted by legato playing and variety of articulation. She developed modern harpsichord technique and played compositions written for her by several modern composers, such as Falla and Poulenc. Landowska was decorated by both the French and Polish governments.

add. bibliography:

Her books include Bach et ses interprèts (1906) and La musique ancienne (1909). Denise Restout edited a collection of her articles as Landowska on Music (1965). add. bibliography: Grove online; mgg; D. Marty, Une dame nommée Wanda (1993).

[Claude Abravanel /

Naama Ramot (2^nd ed.)]

Landowska, Wanda (Alexandra) (b Warsaw, 1877; d Lakeville, Conn., 1959). Polish-born harpsichordist and pianist. Settled in Paris 1900, touring Europe and USA in recitals of baroque mus. on pf. and hpd. Head of hpd. class, Berlin Hochschule, 1913 (interned during 1914–18 war). First in 20th cent. to play continuo of St Matthew Passion on hpd. (Basle, 1919). Returned to Fr. 1919–38 as teacher and to give concerts of early mus. Falla (1926) and Poulenc (1929) comp. hpd. concs. for her. Author of Musique Ancienne (1909).

Landowska, Wanda (1877–1959) Polish harpsichordist and pianist who lived in Paris from 1919, and in the USA from 1941. An authority on early music, she founded the École de Musique Ancienne (1925) in Paris. In her teaching and performances, she did much to promote interest in the harpsichord.