Wanda Landowska
| Wanda Landowska | |
|---|---|
Wanda Landowska in 1937
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| Background information | |
| Birth name | Wanda Aleksandra Landowska |
| Born |
July 5, 1879 Warsaw, Poland |
| Died | August 16, 1959 (aged 80) Lakeville, Connecticut, United States |
| Occupation(s) |
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| Instruments | Harpsichord |
Wanda Aleksandra Landowska (5 July 1879 – 16 August 1959) was a Polish-French harpsichordist whose performances, teaching, recordings and writings played a large role in reviving the popularity of the harpsichord in the early 20th century. She was the first person to record Johann Sebastian Bach's Goldberg Variations on the harpsichord (1933). She became a naturalized French citizen in 1938.
Landowska was born in Warsaw to Jewish parents. Her father was a lawyer, and her mother a linguist who translated Mark Twain into Polish. She began playing piano at the age of four, and studied at the Warsaw Conservatory with the senior Jan Kleczyński and Aleksander Michałowski. She also studied composition under Heinrich Urban in Berlin, and had lessons in Paris with Moritz Moszkowski. After marrying the Polish folklorist Henry Lew in 1900 in Paris, she taught piano at the Schola Cantorum there (1900–12).
She later taught harpsichord at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik (1912–19). Deeply interested in musicology, and particularly in the works of Bach, Couperin and Rameau, she toured the museums of Europe looking at original keyboard instruments; she acquired old instruments and had new ones made at her request by Pleyel and Company. These were large, heavily built harpsichords with a 16-foot stop (a set of strings an octave below normal pitch) and owed much to piano construction. Responding to criticism by fellow Bach specialist Pablo Casals, she once said: "You play Bach your way, and I'll play him 'his' way."
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