Wanda Landowska

Wanda Landowska, a Polish harpsichordist and composer, spearheaded the harpsichord’s resurgence in popularity during the opening decades of the twentieth century. Among the first scholars to champion historically informed performance, she produced the initial recording of J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations on the instrument itself.

Born in Warsaw in 1879, she began piano lessons at age four. Her early teachers were Jan Kleczyński followed by Aleksander Michalowski. Kleczyński recognized her instinctive pull toward Baroque repertoire and deliberately refrained from overlaying his own interpretive preferences on so evident a prodigy; her mother, however, judged him insufficiently rigorous and transferred her to the stricter Michalowski, a noted Chopin specialist. At sixteen Landowska relocated to Berlin for composition studies with Heinrich Urban, yet found the prescribed regimen stifling. While there she wrote songs and orchestral pieces and met her future husband, Henry Lew.

In 1900 the couple settled in Paris and married. Landowska soon became linked with the Schola Cantorum, where she encountered Vincent D’Indy, Albert Schweitzer, and other leading musicians and musicologists of the period. Over the ensuing decade she concertized throughout Europe and Russia while she and her husband systematically examined historical sources in libraries they visited on tour. Their research led her to conclude that Baroque keyboard works sounded most appropriately on the harpsichord rather than the piano. The couple distilled these findings in the 1909 volume Musique Ancienne. In 1913 she began offering harpsichord instruction at Berlin’s Hochschule für Musik.

Landowska made her American debut in 1923 with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Stokowski. That same year she took part in the world premiere of Manuel de Falla’s El retablo de maese Pedro, an occasion on which she met Francis Poulenc and requested a harpsichord concerto from him. She commissioned a further concerto from Falla in 1925; the resulting score became a landmark of the modern repertory. In 1929 she gave the premiere of Poulenc’s Concert champêtre in Paris. By then she had established L’École de Musique Ancienne north of the city, where she conducted private and group lessons and presented an annual summer concert series that drew large audiences. She maintained this routine until 1940, when the outbreak of World War II forced her to abandon the school, its library, and her residence. Aided by her pupil Denise Restout, she reached Portugal and subsequently sailed to the United States, ultimately making her home in Lakeville, Connecticut. She resumed performing and teaching there, and at seventy she recorded the complete Well-Tempered Clavier to widespread acclaim. Landowska died in Lakeville in 1959 at the age of eighty.