Wanda Landowskaaus expressionism + impressionism + modern

Wanda (Aleksandra) Landowska (* 5 July 1879 in Warsaw, Russian Empire; † 16 August 1959 in Lakeville, Connecticut) was a Polish-German-French-American composer, harpsichordist and pianist.

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Life

Artistic career

Landowska received her first piano lessons at the age of three. At fourteen, she completed her training at the Warsaw Conservatory. After studying composition with Heinrich Urban in Berlin, she became a teacher at the Schola Cantorum in Paris and became intensively involved in early music and harpsichord playing. From 1913 to 1919 she taught at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik. After a brief interlude in Basel, she taught at the École Normale de Musique in Paris in 1920. In 1923 she made her first recordings, having already recorded eight piano pieces for the Welte-Mignon reproduction piano in the recording studio of M. Welte & Söhne in 1905. In 1925 she founded the school “École de Musique Ancienne” in Saint-Leu-la-Forêt, where she held annual summer courses and organised concerts. She taught Alice Ehlers, Eta Harich-Schneider, Ralph Kirkpatrick and Rafael Puyana, among others. From 1925 to 1928 she taught at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia (USA).

Wanda Landowska began playing in 1903 on a modernised harpsichord from the French pianoforte factory Pleyel, which combined the keel action with elements of the modern concert grand piano and with which she was initially successful in specialist circles. She and her harpsichord playing became widely known when she appeared in 1912 with a new harpsichord model built by Pleyel according to her wishes. This type had a disposition extended by a 16′ stop, as Landowska had become acquainted with in a historical original by Hieronymus Hass in the Brussels Museum, and also a nasal 8′ in the second manual as a fifth stop. The “Landowska model” went into series production and became the model for new harpsichord designs by many other manufacturers in the 20th century, until half a century later, the most faithful possible reproduction of historical originals prevailed among performers and instrument makers.

Landowska motivated composers to write for this new type of harpsichord. Manuel de Falla dedicated a concerto for harpsichord and orchestra to her in 1926, and in 1927/1928 Francis Poulenc composed the Concert champêtre pour clavecin et orchestre FP.049. In 1933, she was the first harpsichordist to perform Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations coherently and unabridged.

Fleeing and deprivation

Because of her Jewish ancestry, Landowska fled to the part of France unoccupied by the German Wehrmacht in June 1940. She had to leave behind her extensive music library, valuable manuscripts and her famous collection of musical instruments in Paris. On 20 September 1940, Herbert Gerigk of the “Special Music Staff” in the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Operations Staff for the Occupied Territories (ERR) confiscated her property and had the instruments packed in 54 special crates shipped to Berlin. Official protests against the theft of art from French cultural property were countered with the argument that Landowska was not French, but a Jew with a Polish passport.

Wanda Landowska was able to obtain a visa for the USA and embarked in Lisbon in November 1941. In 1947 she found a new home in Lakeville, where she also taught again after 1950. At the age of seventy-five, she gave her farewell concert in New York.

Large parts of her collection had disappeared and were thought to have been destroyed in the bombing. Various instruments later turned up at auctions in Belgium, Canada and Australia. Wanda Landowska did not receive any compensation.

Source Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanda_Landowska