The Keyboard in Baroque Europe (review)

This collection of essays was compiled as a Festschrift for Gustav Leonhardt on his 75th birthday, and the list of contributors reads like a 'Who's Who in Keyboard Studies'. Christopher Hogwood has assembled an all-star cast to offer new research and perspectives on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century keyboard music, with emphasis on the Bach family. In the Preface, Hogwood notes the link between Leonhardt's career and the concept of the 'scholar–performer', and most of the authors are active as performers in addition to their scholarly pursuits. The types of article included—repertory and source studies, biographical essays, discussions of historical keyboard performance, and even a transcription of Bach's D minor Violin Partita BWV 1004 for harpsichord—reflect the many facets of Leonhardt's work in creating a new sensibility for the harpsichord in the second half of the twentieth century. As Hogwood points out, 'The early keyboard's hortus musicus flourishes as never before, and the head gardener is, without doubt, Gustav Leonhardt.'

The twelve contributors provide fitting tributes to this pioneer in the performance of early music, focusing on aspects of repertory from 1600 to 1800. The result is an extremely valuable collection of essays whose title, The Keyboard in Baroque Europe, belies its contents. While readers might expect an organological exploration of keyboard instruments between 1600 and 1750, all of the articles focus on repertory rather than the development of instruments, and four of them are firmly rooted in music from the second half of the eighteenth century. Indeed, a hallmark of the volume is its exploration of the transition from baroque to galant and rococo keyboard styles. A title such as 'Aspects of Keyboard Repertory in Europe, 1600–1800' would have better reflected the scope of the scholarship presented.

Several authors acknowledge their indebtedness to Leonhardt's performances and teaching. Davitt Moroney opens his essay linking French and German harpsichord practice with a quotation from Leonhardt's 1952 monograph on The Art of Fugue: 'Bach was necessarily a so-called "child of his time" . . . Style is something greater and stronger than any genius.' This philosophy leads him to explore links between Couperin's and Bach's performance styles at the keyboard. He documents the importance of the French playing style throughout Europe during Bach's formative years and reveals that examples from Bach's keyboard music were used to illustrate Marpurg's French-inspired Die Kunst das Clavier zu spielen of 1750 (appearing six years later in a French translation as L'Art de toucher le clavecin and condensed by Roeser in 1764). By illuminating these international connections in the dissemination of Baroque performance styles, Moroney pays homage to Leonhardt, 'from whom so many modern players trace their lineage as performers'.

David Schulenberg credits Leonhardt more directly in his essay tracing the development of keyboard accompaniment from the 'full-voiced style' of J. S. Bach to the 'new gallant style' of C. P. E. Bach: 'This technique [slightly breaking unaccented chords in order to 'soften' them], not described in the historical sources, is one of many rediscovered in the twentieth century by pioneers such as Gustav Leonhardt, whose performances and teaching have helped fill in the silences of Bach, Quantz, and their contemporaries'. Schulenberg thereby elevates the insights gained through performance: in searching out convincing techniques for the modern re-creation of eighteenth-century music, keyboard players have perhaps uncovered aspects of earlier performance traditions.

The emphasis on performance practice also extends to Menno van Delft's positivistic assessment of schnellen as a technique of articulation, based on interpretations of Quantz (1752), C. P. E. Bach (1753), Ernst Wilhelm Wolf (1785), Türk (1789), and Forkel and Griepenkerl in the nineteenth century. As with Schulenberg's discussion of keyboard accompaniment, this issue provides an interesting bridge between Baroque and Classical practice that is further enhanced by Peter Wollny in his essay on W. F. Bach's polonaises. Robert Levin, the noted improviser, also concentrates on musical...