Wanda Landowska , born with Warsaw the July 5th 1879 and died with Lakeville (Connecticut, the United States) the August 16th 1959, is a Clavecin ist and Jewish pianist Polish.

Biography

Berlin, Paris

She works initially the piano, the composition with Berlin, its first universe sound is that of Hans von Bülow and inflation post- Romantique of the symphony orchestras but its attraction towards the old music, the feeling which she must be played on the instruments of time mark out its whole life: it will devote to a resurrection of the old Musique and baroque by one of its major instruments, the Clavecin.

Dissatisfied in its research of the old harpsichords, she asks construction at the house Pleyel of a “harpsichord” which she inaugurates with the festival Bach of Breslau in 1912, she will play it in the whole world.

This instrument resembles rather little the harpsichords of time. Although its sonority can like by its majesty, it is not appropriate nowadays any more to the musicians specialized in the time baroque, who seek instruments less imposing and closer to those on which Bach played.

By teaching also, it transmits its convictions and in 1927 creates with Paris, the old Music school inaugurated with Alfred Cortot for harpsichordists, pianists or singers of the whole world. It trains many pupils, in particular Isabelle Nef, Ralph Kirkpatrick, Rafael Puyana, Aimée van of Wiele.

She makes build a concert hall in her house of Saint-Leu-the-Forest; the May 14th 1933, it gives the first public execution to the harpsichord of the Variations Goldberg of Bach which it has worked for forty-five years; these variations, works single, that it goes, as Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy had done it one century earlier with the Passion according to Saint Matthieu , to impose, contributing with others such Pablo Casals to this rehabilitation of the music of Bach.

The exile

In June 1940 with the projection of the troops Nazis, it is forced all to give up and after one period of wandering, it is fixed at the the United States and at sixty-three years a new career starts again and continues with enthusiasm its vocation, with teaching, the concerts and the recordings. His/her partner Denise Restout represented and published her writings on the music, inter alia old Musique , and Landowska one Music .

Its art, following days

Dedicated works

• Concerto for Manual harpsichord of of pastoral Falla
• Concert of Francis Poulenc

Writings

• On the interpretation of works of harpsichord of Jean-Sebastien Bach , 1905
• old Music , 1909
• Chopin and the old French music , 1931
• On the Goldberg Variations of Jean-Sebastien Bach 1933

Quotations

• a bacchante in Bach. , Arthur Nikisch
• One should not play chief-of works of last as one would look at passing a funerary convoy, paralyzed by the respect. , Wanda Landowska.
• Between a blow of metronome and the following, it has only the vide.
  Entre there a human palpitation and the following there is a whole world. Wanda Landowska.

Selective discography

• With the harpsichord

• Johann Sebastian Bach
• Imagination chromatic and Running away, BWV. 903 .
• Partita in major B flat, BWV. 825 .
• the quite moderate harpsichord

• With the piano

• Johann Sebastian Bach, Variations Goldberg , recorded with Saint-Leu-the-Forest in November 1933
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, concerto for piano and Orchestra K. 537 known as “crowning” .

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