Wanda Landowska

• Born: July 5, 1879
• Birthplace: Warsaw, Poland, Russian Empire (now in Poland)
• Died: August 16, 1959
• Place of death: Lakeville, Connecticut

Polish harpsichordist and pianist

Landowska was responsible for the revival of the harpsichord and its repertoire, paving the way for interest in historically informed performance.

The Life

Wanda Louise Landowska (lan-DOV-skuh) was born to Marion Landowski, a lawyer and an amateur musician, and Eva Lautenberg-Landowska, a linguist who founded the first Berlitz school in Warsaw. Of Jewish ancestry, her family had converted to Catholicism before she was born. At the age of three she began her musical studies on the piano with Jan Kleczyński, a renowned pianist who specialized in the work of Frédéric Chopin. She later studied with her godfather, the famous virtuoso pianist Aleksander Michałowski, graduating from the Warsaw Conservatory at the age of fourteen. The same year, Artur Nikisch, the German conductor, heard her play a prelude and fugue from The Well-Tempered Clavier by Johann Sebastian Bach and nicknamed her “the Bacchante.” In 1895 Landowska was sent by her parents to the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin, where she studied piano with Moritz Moszkowski and composition with Heinrich Urban. She began to perform in public, and several of her compositions were published in Poland and Germany. While in Berlin, she saw antique harpsichords for the first time in a museum. She eloped in 1900 with the Polish folklorist Henri Lew to Paris, where they were married. While she had a growing interest in the harpsichord, she continued to compose and won prizes in a competition organized by the music magazine Musica in 1903. After being introduced to Vincent d’Indy, Charles Bordes, and Félix Alexandre Guilmant, who founded the Schola Cantorum, she conducted extensive research on music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

From 1903, while continuing to appear as a pianist, Landowska performed on the harpsichord and toured throughout Europe. A new two-manual Pleyel harpsichord, built to her specifications, was introduced by Landowska in 1912 at the Bach Festival in Breslau. A year later she was invited to teach the first harpsichord class at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin. She and her husband remained in Germany as civil prisoners on parole after the outbreak of World War I. In 1919, as they were preparing to return to Paris, Lew was killed in a car accident.

Landowska resumed touring, performing on both the harpsichord and the piano, and made her American debut in 1923. After teaching several years at the Sorbonne and the École Normale de Musique in Paris, she founded her own École de Musique Ancienne in 1927 at Saint-Leu-la-Forêt near Paris. Fleeing France at the Nazi invasion, she and Denise Restout, her student and companion, arrived in New York on December 7, 1941, the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. In 1947 she settled in Lakeville, Connecticut, where she taught, wrote, composed, and made recordings. She died on August 16, 1959.

The Music

A pioneer in the study of music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Landowska published numerous articles in French and German on such topics as the interpretation of Bach’s keyboard works, Bach’s keyboard instruments, the harpsichord works of François Couperin and Jean-Philippe Rameau, and problems of interpretation, including keyboard fingering, touch, and registration. Her recording repertoire was varied, ranging from seventeenth century works by Jacques Champion de Chambonnières on the harpsichord to nineteenth century compositions by Ludwig van Beethoven and Robert Schumann on piano rolls. She played Baroque pieces on the harpsichord, and she also commissioned new works, such as Concert champêtre for harpsichord and orchestra (1927-1928) by Francis Poulenc and Concerto for Harpsichord or Piano (1928) by Manuel de Falla. Besides transcribing pieces by other composers, she wrote or improvised cadenzas for the keyboard concerti of George Frideric Handel, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Joseph Haydn, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Her own compositions included works for piano, harpsichord, voice, and ensembles.

Early Works. Except for her last work, Liberation Fanfare, scored by Richard Franko-Goldman in 1943 (keyboard version, 1941), all of Landowska’s compositions were written between 1895 and 1920. Her earliest chamber works include Five Polish Folk Songs for harpsichord with winds and strings, Serenade for Strings, and Paysage triste. Many of her compositions for voice and piano are not dated, such as Kolysanka, Piosenka ludowa, Mir seimmt in Herzen, Im Walde, Tu veux partir, and Après la pluie, but they were probably written before her Sechs Lieder, Op. 3, published by Gebethner & Wolff of Warsaw in 1898. Her earliest piano works, such as En route, Lied, Reverie d’automne, and Dance polonaise, are in the style of character pieces from the Romantic period.

Early Music. Written between 1905 and 1909, Early Music was a collaboration between Landowska and her husband. They collected manuscripts and examined instrument collections in numerous libraries and museums in Europe in preparation for the book. For the most part, Landowska polemically argues against the then-common concept of progress in music. She also clarifies the confusion between the harpsichord and other early keyboard instruments and anticipates the renaissance of old music. The book received wide attention and recognition from her contemporaries. First translated from French into English by William Aspenwall Bradley in 1924, Early Music is incorporated into Landowska on Music, with a new translation and revisions made by Restout and Robert Hawkins.

Bach: Goldberg Variations.On May 17, 1933, at Saint-Leu-la-Forêt, Landowska gave a complete performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations on the harpsichord for the first time in the twentieth century. Her performance received much acclaim from highly regarded French critics, including René Lalou of La Revue des vivants, André Cœuroy of Gringoire, and Patrice Fitz-Herbert of Marianne. The same year, she made the first recording of the Goldberg Variations on the HMV label; thereafter, she performed the masterpiece throughout Europe and in the United States with much success. She recorded the work again in 1945 for RCA Victor in New York; the album sold a respectable thirty-five thousand copies in its first six years.

A Treasury of Harpsichord Music.In her recording A Treasury of Harpsichord Music made in 1946 for RCA in New York, Landowska performed a program of harpsichord favorites by several seventeenth and eighteenth cenutury composers, including Chambonnières, Couperin, Rameau, Mozart, Handel, William Croft, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Domenico Scarlatti. Several of these pieces are variations on a ground bass or a melody, such as Croft’s Ground in C Minor and Handel’s Suite No. 5 in E, Air and Doubles (“Harmonious Blacksmith”). She twice recorded Scarlatti’s Sonata in D and Sonata in D Minor, the first time on her D. Scarlatti: Twenty Sonatas, Vol 2. and the second time on A Treasury of Harpsichord Music.

J. S. Bach: Well-Tempered Clavier.One of Landowska’s many lifelong research interests was the proper instrument for the performance of J. S. Bach’s keyboard works, especially The Well-Tempered Clavier (the forty-eight preludes and fugues). Because of the tonal limitations and the relatively small compass of the clavichord, she argued that the harpsichord, instead of the clavichord, is the appropriate instrument for The Well-Tempered Clavier. In 1949, at the age of seventy, Landowska began a five-year project with RCA to record the complete work as her “last will and testament.” Except for the first six preludes and fugues of Book I that were recorded at the studios in New York, the rest of The Well-Tempered Clavier pieces were recorded in her house in Lakeville, Connecticut, where she made her other final recordings, including works by Bach, Mozart, and Haydn. The complete six-record set of The Well-Tempered Clavier was released in late 1954.

Musical Legacy

When Landowska died at the age of eighty, she left behind a legacy of more than a hundred recordings. She wrote or improvised cadenzas for all the concerti she played, including ten of Mozart’s concerti; many were published between 1959 and 1963. In addition to her ornamentation of several sarabande movements of Bach, she left behind continuo realizations for several works, including Bach’s cantatas, St. Matthew Passion (1727), Harpsichord Concerto in D Minor (1738), Harpsichord Concerto in G Minor (1735-1740), Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 in D Major (1720-1721), as well as Handel’s Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day (1739), all of which remain unpublished.

Landowska published more than fifty scholarly writings and commentaries, many of which, along with a new translation of her Early Music and several unpublished essays, were incorporated into Landowska on Music, edited by her life companion Restout. Landowka’s instruments, including two Pleyel harpsichords, a Challis clavichord, and a Steinway baby grand piano, as well as her manuscript and printed music, books, correspondence, diaries, photographs, sound recordings, and programs that were preserved by Restout (who died in 2004), are now in the music division at the U. S. Library of Congress.

Decorated by the Polish and French governments, Landowska was widely respected by her contemporaries. Her most important students included Alice Ehlers, Putnam Aldrich, Denise Restout, Ralph Kirkpatrick, Ruggero Gerlin, Aimée van de Wiele, Sylvia Marlowe, Rafael Puyana, Joseph Payne, and Daniel Pinkham, all of whom continued Landowska’s legacy in historically informed performance practice.

Principal Works

chamber works:Five Polish Folk Songs, 1895; Serenade for Strings, 1896; Paysage triste, 1900.

piano works:Dance polonaise, Op. 7, 1901; En route, Op. 4, 1901; Lied, Op. 5, 1901; Reverie d’automne, Op. 6, 1901; Liberation Fanfare, 1941.

vocal works:Sechs Lieder, Op. 3, 1898.

Principal Recordings

albums:Bach: Goldberg Variations; Italian Concerto; Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, 1933-1936 (by Johann Sebastian Bach); J. S. Bach: Sonatas and Partitas, 1934-1944; D. Scarlatti: Twenty Sonatas, Vol. 2, 1940; A Treasury of Harpsichord Music, 1946; J. S. Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I, 1949-1951; J. S. Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II, 1951-1954; Dances of Ancient Poland, 1951.

writings of interest:Musique ancienne, 1909 (Early Music, 1924); Landowska on Music, 1965 (edited by Denise Restout).

Bibliography

Bainbridge, Timothy. “Wanda Landowska and Her Repertoire.” Early Music 3, no. 1 (January, 1975): 39-41. This article offers an account of Landowska’s extensive concert and recording repertoire.

Cash, Alice Hudnall. “Wanda Landowska and the Revival of the Harpsichord.” In Music in the Theater, Church, and Villa: Essays in Honor of Robert Lamar Weaver and Norma Wright Weaver, edited by Susan Parisi with the collaboration of Ernest Harriss and Calvin M. Bower. Warren, Mich.: Harmonie Park Press, 2000. Focuses on Landowska’s career and her challenges as a woman in the revival of the harpsichord as a performing instrument.

Dyson, Ruth. “Bend the Finger at All Three Joints: A First-Hand Record of Landowska’s Teaching Methods.” Early Music 3, no. 3 (July, 1975): 240-242. Dyson investigates a notebook owned by a student of Landowska and attempts to reconstruct her teaching methods. Discusses Landowska’s technical exercises, including finger position and fingering.

Gavoty, Bernard, and Roger Hauert. Wanda Landowska. Translated by F. E. Richardson. Geneva: René Kister, 1957. This book features a number of high-quality photographs of Landowska with a concise biography.

Landowska, Wanda. Early Music. Translated by William Aspenwall Bradley. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1924. Written with her husband and first published in French in 1909, Landowska’s book argues against the then-common concept of progress in music. The work consists of extensive quotations from more than seventy authors and composers from different periods of music history.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Landowska on Music. Collected, edited, and translated by Denise Restout, with the assistance of Robert Hawkins. 3d ed. Briarcliff Manor, N.Y.: Scarborough House, 1981. Contains a substantial selection of Landowska’s writings and a new translation of Early Music, edited by Restout. Includes a discography, a list of compositions, and photographs of Landowska, her Pleyel harpsichord, and other historical keyboards.

Schott, Howard. “Wanda Landowska: A Centenary Appraisal.” Early Music 7, no. 4 (October, 1979): 467-472. This article provides an assessment of Landowska’s career and her legacy on the hundredth anniversary of her birth.