Gustav Leonhardt

Dutch organist, harpsichordist, and conductor

• Born: May 30, 1928
• Birthplace: Graveland, Netherlands
• Died: January 16, 2012

Leonhardt used his impeccable scholarship and his energetic and passionate performance style to preserve and to promote early music.

The Life

Gustav Maria Leonhardt (GOO-stahv mah-REE-ah LEH-on-hahrt) was born into a Dutch-Austrian family, between World War I and World War II. His childhood home was in Graveland, a country town with stately homes near Hilversum, in the province of North Holland, The Netherlands. His parents were accomplished amateur musicians with eclectic tastes in music, and they encouraged the study of music in their children. Gustav and his sister, Trudelies, were given lessons on the piano and on a harpsichord that their parents had bought for occasions when they played the chamber music of Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel. During wartime when school was cancelled, having a harpsichord at home provided the young Leonhardt with an opportunity to learn to regulate and to play the instrument.

Leonhardt’s father was on the governing board of the Concertgebouw Orchestra and of the De Nederlandse Bachvereniging (The Netherlands Bach Society) known for its performances of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion (1727) it has given since 1922 in the Grote Kerk, Naarden. These performances under the direction of Anthon van der Horst were uncut, and he conducted from a facsimile of the original manuscript. Two organ continuo players were used, one of whom played from a thoroughbass rather than a written realization. This first experience of historical performing practice greatly impressed Leonhardt. A prolific composer and a prodigious keyboard player, van der Horst was Leonhardt’s theory teacher in this early period. Recordings of Wanda Landowska played a part in shaping Leonhardt’s interest in the harpsichord and his search for an expressive style of playing it.

Leonhardt spent his student years in Basel, Switzerland, and Vienna, Austria. He then returned to Holland, where he lived for many years in an eighteenth century canal house in Amsterdam. In 1979 he published a book about the house called Het huis Bartolotti en zijn bewoners. He married Marie, a violinist who was a native of Lausanne, Switzerland, and they had three daughters.

Leonhardt was on the faculty of the Sweelinck Conservatorium in Amsterdam, and he served as organist, first of the Waalse Kerk and later the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam. During his twenty-five-year tenure at the Waalse Kerk, Leonhardt collaborated in the restoration of an important organ from the 1680’s that had been rebuilt in 1734 by Christian Müller. Leonhard plays or conducts one hundred concerts per year, and he actively records new repertoire.

The Music

Having studied cello and piano in his early youth and theory with van der Horst in his teenage years, Leonhardt began his organ, harpsichord, and thoroughbass studies at the age of nineteen with Eduard Müller at the Schola Cantorum in Basel, where he received his soloist’s diploma magna cum laude. Subsequently, he studied musicology and made his harpsichord debut in Vienna. Between 1952 and 1955, he was professor of harpsichord at the Vienna Music Academy, and he began a long teaching career at the Sweelinck Conservatorium in Amsterdam in 1954.

Recordings. Leonhardt began his extensive and influential recording career in the 1950’s, both as a soloist playing the music of Bach and with the Leonhardt Baroque Ensemble, a group that included his wife, Marie Leonhardt, and Eduard Melkus on violins, Alice Hoffelner on viola, Nikolaus Harnoncourt on cello, and Michel Piguet on oboe. In 1954 the group recorded two Bach cantatas with Alfred Deller, for whom Leonhardt had great admiration. During his student years in Basel, Leonhardt had an English friend who owned a recording of Henry Purcell songs performed by Deller. Leonhardt was impressed by Deller’s expressive singing and text delivery, and during a 1948 visit to London, the two friends boldly called to invite Deller to tea. Leonhardt subsequently asked Deller to make several radio recordings in Holland, and in 1954 a commercial recording was made in Vienna. The Leonhardt Consort, starting in 1955, went on to produce numerous concerts and recordings. The Library of Congress catalog lists more than 120 individual commercial recordings made by Leonhardt, not only as harpsichord, clavichord, fortepiano, and organ soloist but also as conductor. Many of these recordings were made on antique instruments found in churches, in museums, and in private collections.

In chamber music performances and recordings, Leonhardt collaborated with virtually every early music performer of note, as well as many who were considered to be more in the mainstream. His close colleagues in Holland and Belgium included Anner Bijlsma, Elly Ameling, Max van Egmond, René Jacobs, Frans Bruggen, and the brothers Wieland, Sigiswald, and Barthold Kuijken.

Film Roles. Leonhardt played the role of Bach in Jean-Marie Straub’s film “The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach” (1967), directed by Danièle Huillet. The film won a British Film Institute Award, and it included an appearance by the noted cellist and conductor Harnoncourt in the role of the Prince of Anhalt-Cöthen.

Bach Recordings. Between 1971 and 1990, the Leonhardt Consort, working jointly with Harnoncourt’s Concentus Musicus, recorded all the Bach cantatas. This massive undertaking successfully created the first substantial representation of the historically informed performance movement that influenced playing styles in the last thirty years of the twentieth century. Leonhardt also recorded all the major keyboard works of Bach as well as his own harpsichord transcriptions of some of Bach’s compositions for strings. He published a study of Bach’s The Art of Fugue (1751) and numerous musicological articles, and he was the coeditor of a publication of the complete keyboard music of Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck and of Girolamo Frescobaldi.

Organist and Teacher. Leonhardt had a parallel career as an organist, serving two Amsterdam churches, the Waalse Kerk and the Niewe Kerk, and he made several recordings on historical European organs. While his primary instrument for recitals was the harpsichord, he also had command of the organ and the fortepiano. In later years, he explored the claviorganum, a keyboard instrument combining organ pipes and plucked strings.

Students from all over the world traveled to Holland to study with Leonhardt, sometimes waiting several years. He attracted students who went on to have noteworthy performing careers, among them Bob van Asperen, Alan Curtis, Richard Eggar, John Gibbons, Ketil Haugsand, Christopher Hogwood, Ton Koopman, Martin Pearlman, Frederick Renz, Skip Sempe, Menno van Delft, and Glenn Wilson. Others traveled for short-term study, and dozens of young musicians played for him in master classes at conservatories, universities, and festivals in many countries. His insights and suggestions were valued by singers and instrumentalists of all types, because of his ability to clarify the nature of a piece of music and to encourage a player to focus on and project that nature in a performance. His use of such expressive words as spicy, luscious, wild, pathetic, and bliss in teaching belied his reserved personal manner. He was in steady demand as an adjudicator for harpsichord competitions.

An impressive polyglot, Leonhardt taught and lectured with ease in several languages. He was Horatio Appleton Lamb Professor of Music at Harvard University in 1969-1970, an honor that was also conferred on Béla Bartók in 1943. Leohardt was awarded honorary doctorates by several universities, including Harvard in 1991. In 1980 Leonhardt and Harnoncourt were jointly awarded the Erasmus Prize by the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation in recognition of their contributions to European culture, notably the recordings of the cantatas of Bach.

In later years, Leonhardt was in increasing demand as a conductor, both in Europe and abroad. Aside from the Leonhardt Consort, among the groups he conducted were the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, La Petite Bande, and The Netherlands Bach Society. He conducted the inaugural concerts of the New York Collegium in 1998.

Musical Legacy

Leonhardt championed the cause of the music he played and respected rather than his own virtuosity. As a teacher and a conductor, he encouraged in his fellow musicians a sense of humility and curiosity about European music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He taught them how to breathe life into a repertoire that was, at the time, being performed in an abstract and largely intellectual manner. His particular insight into the concept of Baroque music as speech and the role of rhetoric and articulation in creating that speech set his playing of the harpsichord apart from that of his contemporaries.

Never a flamboyant showman, Leonhardt was sometimes criticized for his cool and detached manner. He was a passionate performer: serious, witty, expressive, and thoroughly engaged with the music he played. He could clarify for a listener the contrapuntal and harmonic dimensions of a composer’s creation, revealing its underlying structure as well as its elegant surface layers. His improvised ornamentation sounded spontaneous, and his keyboard playing had extraordinary rhythmic suppleness and variety.

As one of the founders of the historically informed performance movement of the twentieth century, Leonhardt helped to release music from the grip of overly dry scholarly interpretation and of Romantic self-indulgence, and his performances of lesser known works vastly increased the repertoire. Through collaborations with builders of early keyboard instruments, he also contributed to the revival of historical principles in instrument building.

Leonhardt’s keen musicologist’s mind and his lack of ostentation were as much a part of shaping his legacy as were his stunning abilities as a keyboard player. He taught respect for a composer’s musical statement within its cultural context. Rather than assume that a puzzling element of a piece was a weakness, a mistake, or a copyist’s error, he studied writings of the period, searching for the musical truth. Thus he discovered levels of subtlety, nuance, and design that won admiration for the music. His ability to use articulation and the concept of Baroque music as speech set a new standard in harpsichord playing throughout the world. However, his influence reached far beyond solo keyboard playing—his work with colleagues and students brought historically informed performance into the respected mainstream of classical music.

Principal Recordings

albums (as organist/harpsichordist): Blockflötenmusik auf originalinstrumenten um 1700, 1970 (Recorder Music with Original Instruments, 1700); J. S. Bach: Complete Harpsichord Concerti, Vol. 3, 1972; English Suites, 1973; Französische suiten, 1975; Die brandenburgische Konzerte, 1976; Hotteterre: Complete Wind Music, 1977; Domenico Scarlatti: Fourteen Sonatas for Harpsichord, 1986; Bach: Das wohltemperierte Klavier I, 1989 (The Well-Tempered Clavier I); Bach: Das wohltemperierte Klavier II, 1989 (The Well-Tempered Clavier II); J. S. Bach: Complete Harpsichord Concerti, Vol. 2, 1989; J. S. Bach: Goldberg Variations, 1990; J. S. Bach: Mass in B Minor, 1990; J. S. Bach: Matthäuspassion, 1990 (Passion According to St. Matthew); J. S. Bach: Organ Works, 1990; J. S. Bach: Six Sonatas for Violin and Harpsichord, 1990; Lully/Molière: Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme; Campra: L’Europe galante, 1990; Bach: Das Kantatenwerk, Vol. 44, 1991 (Complete Cantatas, Vol. 44); Forqueray: Suite in D; Suite in G, 1992; Henry Purcell: Odes to Queen Mary, 1992; J. S. Bach: Secular Cantatas, 1992; Jean-Philippe Rameau: Les Paladins, 1992; F. Valls: Missa Scala Aretina; H. I. F. Biber: Requiem, 1993; George Böhm: Keyboard Works, 1993; J. S. Bach: Art of Fugue, 1993; Jean Philippe Rameau: Pièces de clavecin en concert, 1993; North German Organ Music, 1993; C. P. E. Bach: Symphonies, 1994 (by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach); Organ Music in France and Southern Netherlands, 1994; Bach: Harpsichord Concertos, 1995; Biber: Requiem; Steffani: Stabat Mater, 1995; Henry Purcell: Anthems and Hymns, 1995; The Arp Schnittger Organ at Saint Jacobi, Hamburg, 1996; J. S. Bach: Cantatas Nos. 27, 34, and 41, 1996; Historic Organs of Austria, 1997; J. S. Bach and C. P. E. Bach: Harpsichord Concertos in D Minor, 1997; J. S. Bach: Great Organ Works, 1997; Mozart: Sonatas for Piano and Violin, 1997; Telemann: Paris Quartets, 1-12, 1997 (by Georg Philipp Telemann); Veritas Portraits, 1997; Weckman, Froberger: Toccatas and Suites, 1997 (by Johann Jacob Froberger and Matthias Weckman); J. S. Bach: Italian Concerto; Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue; Toccatas and Suites, 1998; The Organ in the Renaissance and Baroque: Alpenländer, 1998; Bach: Inventions and Sinfonias, 1999; Bach: The Brandenburg Concertos, Vol. 1, Nos. 1, 2, and 3, 1999; Bach: The Brandenburg Concertos, Vol. 2, Nos. 4, 5, and 6, 1999; J. S. Bach: The French Suites, 1999; Bach: Harpsichord Concertos, 2000; L’Orgue Dom Bedos de Saint-Croix de Bordeaux, 2001; J. S. Bach: Organ Works, 2002; Toccate, canzoni, fantasia, capriccio, recercar, 2003 (by Girolamo Frescobaldi and Louis Couperin); William Byrd: Harpsichord Music, 2005.

Bibliography

Cohen, Joel, and Herb Snitzer. “Gustav Leonhardt.” In Reprise: The Extraordinary Revival of Early Music. Boston: Little, Brown, 1985. Cohen addresses the contrast between Leonhardt’s personal manner and music performance in a lucid and penetrating description. He argues that Leonhardt is “a Diogenes holding up the lantern of musical truth.”

Leonhardt, Gustav. “In Praise of Flemish Virginals of the Seventeenth Century.” In Keyboard Instruments: Studies in Keyboard Organology, 1500-1800, edited by Edwin M. Ripin. New York: Dover, 1977. An eloquent, concise, and thorough study and description of Flemish virginals and muselars, the particularities of their timbre, their construction, and their suitability to their repertoire.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Johann Jakob Froberger and His Music.” L’Organo 6 (1968): 15-38. A study of Froberger that elucidates wider trends and influences in European music of the seventeenth century.

Schott, Howard. “’Ein Volkommener Music-Meister’: Gustav Leonhardt in Profile.” The Musical Times 133, no. 1796 (1992). A longtime acquaintance of Leonhardt talks about details of his life and musical legacy.