Wanda Landowska was the preeminent harpsichordist in the first half of the 20th century, the one who convinced audiences that the harpsichord was more than an antique or a toy. A pianist by training, she became the leading figure in the revival of the instrument for which Scarlatti, Bach and Handel had written most of their keyboard music – a revival that began at the turn of the century.

Landowska came from a cultured background. Her mother spoke six languages and was the first to translate the works of Mark Twain into Polish. As a girl, she studied the piano in Warsaw with eminent Chopin specialists, but early on conceived a passion for Bach’s music, which at the time was played mostly in transcriptions.

In 1900 she moved to Paris and married Henry Lew, a Polish-born writer and authority on Hebrew folklore. With his help, she threw herself into research on all aspects of 17th- and 18th-century music and its interpretation. Gradually, she introduced the harpsichord into her recitals. After playing Bach concertos on the piano, she increasingly became convinced that only the harpsichord was appropriate for music of that period. She first played it in public in 1903, earning praise for her interpretations of Bach, which were notable for their balance of precision and freedom, including in the treatment of ornamentation.

Concert tours in Europe followed, and Landowska wrote articles to overcome the resistance widely shown to the harpsichord, much of it due to the feeble tone of available instruments. In 1909 she (with Lew) published her book La musique ancienne, and in 1912 at the Bach festival in Breslau she introduced a large new two-manual harpsichord built to her own specifications by the Pleyel firm.

In 1919, and for what is believed to be the first time in the 20th century, Landowska played continuo on a harpsichord for a performance of the St Matthew Passion in Basel, where she also led a masterclass before returning to her home in Paris. She lectured at the Sorbonne and gave masterclasses at the newly founded École Normale de Musique de Paris, which attracted students from around the world. In 1925, she herself founded the École de Musique Ancienne in Paris, but years later, when the Nazis approached the city in 1940, she was forced to abandon the school, as well as her library of more than 10,000 volumes and her valuable collection of instruments, and fled to Switzerland. She eventually immigrated to the US, and made history by playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations on a two-manual harpsichord at New York’s Town Hall on February 21, 1942.

Reviewing that performance in the New York Herald Tribune, composer and critic Virgil Thomson wrote: ‘A performance so complete, so wholly integrated, so prepared, is rarely to be encountered … All musicianly and expert qualities are observable at their highest in Madame Landowska’s harpsichord-playing … Her especial and unique grandeur is her rhythm … And it is Bach’s rhythm, as that must have been … The pungency and high relief of her playing are the result of such a mastery’s being placed at the service of a penetrating intelligence and a passionate Polish temperament. The final achievement is a musical experience that clarifies the past by revealing it to us through the present, through something we all take for granted nowadays, as Bach’s century took it for granted, but that for a hundred and fifty years has been neglected, out of style, forgotten.’

Landowska’s concerts, recordings and teaching helped banish the image of the harpsichord as a thin, tinkly, limited instrument, as well as dismissing the idea that most pre-Classical music was inexpressive.

In the early stages of the harpsichord revival, builders worked from a limited group of old models, some of them atypical or even spurious. These builders also took for granted that some features of modern piano construction would ‘improve’ the harpsichord, for instance the steel frame that permits greater string tension and more tonal brilliance. In fact, it is because the harpsichord’s wooden frame did not permit such tension that a brilliant tone is historically inaccurate. These early-revival harpsichords usually also imitated the size and ‘feel’ of the piano keyboard.

Landowska’s favourite Pleyel harpsichords were of this hybrid type, and some aspects of her playing were conditioned by the unhistorical possibilities made available by them. Today the emphasis has shifted to the reconstruction and imitation, along historical lines, of authentic instruments, and a different range of sonorities that reflect a more conservative approach to changes of registration. If Landowska’s recordings sound ‘over-coloured’ for later tastes, this arises partly from the instrument she used and, like the spiritedness of her writings, from the seeming necessity at the time of countering objections to the ‘bloodlessness’ of the harpsichord. (Ironically, some of the harpsichord works commissioned by Landowska, such as Falla’s Harpsichord Concerto of 1926, are difficult to bring off on instruments of authentic 18th-century design, so there remains a place for the early 20th-century harpsichord.)

One of Landowska’s specialities was Bach’s Goldberg Variations, perhaps the most brilliant of all harpsichord works. She was the first to record it on the harpsichord, in 1933. An encyclopedia of keyboard styles and techniques, the work emphasises the virtuoso possibilities of a harpsichord with two manuals. Landowska’s instrument, with its resources for elaborate changes of register, tempted her into conceiving some of the pieces in terms of quasi-orchestral climaxes that might never have occurred to Bach. Yet it would be a mistake to allow any reservations to deprive us of the virtues of her playing: the sense of architecture, virtuosity, commanding rhythm and boundless vitality. Some aspects of Landowska’s two recordings (the other made in 1945) remain unsurpassed after all these years, though the listener will find it fascinating to compare them with later versions on the harpsichord (for example by Ralph Kirkpatrick or Gustav Leonhardt) or with the remarkable performances on the piano by Glenn Gould and Murray Perahia.

After fleeing from France, Landowska eventually sailed from Lisbon to New York, where she arrived on December 7, 1941 (the date of the attack on Pearl Harbor), essentially with no assets, owing to her home in France having been looted. In the US she re-established herself as a performer and teacher, touring extensively.

Landowska’s most ambitious project, in the early 1950s, was a complete recording of The Well-Tempered Clavier, full of controversial ideas, almost always fascinating and thought-provoking.

In Europe before and at the outset of the Second World War she made many recordings for EMI. The two albums of Scarlatti sonatas are memorable, and there is a superb selection of Handel suites. Throughout her life, Landowska continued to play the piano as well as the harpsichord, and recorded some performances of Mozart in a thoughtful style based on historical knowledge and sterling musicianship. Concert performances of two Mozart concertos (K415 and K482) have been issued, plus a studio Coronation Concerto, K537, with her own cadenzas and tasteful decorations. There is also a recording on the harpsichord of the Concert champêtre written by Poulenc for Landowska in 1928. The playing is invariably stimulating, in spite of variable recorded sound. To quote Thomson again, ‘The way she makes music is so deeply satisfactory that one has the feeling of a fruition, of a completeness at once intellectual and sensuously auditory beyond which it is difficult to imagine anything further.’

This feature originally appeared in the July 2024 issue of Gramophone. Never miss an issue of the world's leading classical music magazine – subscribe to Gramophone today