The Nazi Confiscation of Wanda Landowska's Musical Collection and Its Aftermath

When the germans invaded France in May 1940, Wanda Landowska was at the height of her career. She was an internationally renowned harpsichord and piano soloist and an accomplished scholar, writer, teacher, and composer. She had amassed an extensive music library, including manuscripts, rare printed music, and books, and an impressive antique musical instrument collection.¹ Landowska fled her home and music school at 88 rue de Pontoise, Saint-Leu-la-Forêt, four days before the Nazis occupied Paris. She and her assistant and, later, biographer Denise Restout carried only what they could quickly save, 'a few indispensable books and music scores and some notebooks', the latter representing Landowska's fourteen years of teaching.² The Nazis wasted little time, targeting her musical treasures for plunder in September 1940.³ By one estimate, the library contained approximately 10,000 objects.⁴ These objects reflected Landowska's intellectual and aesthetic sensibilities, her eclectic interests, and to some extent her heritage. Many of these looted musical materials remain missing. They may still be discovered, perhaps recovered, if they have not been completely forgotten.

Wanda landowska: the early years

Landowska was born on 5 July 1879 in Warsaw to Marian Landowski, an attorney, and Ewelina, née Lautenberg, a linguist.⁵ She was of Polish Jewish descent: Restout reported that her family had converted to Catholicism two generations earlier.⁶ Landowska began musical studies at the age of 4 under Jan Kleczyński, a Chopin scholar and performer, and later with Aleksander Michałowski, a Chopin and Bach expert at the Warsaw Conservatory. In 1896 Landowska moved to Berlin to study composition under Heinrich Urban and piano with Moritz Moszkowski.⁷ In Berlin, Landowska's fascination with historical instruments was ignited when she gained access to the collection of antique musical instruments at the Hochschule für Musik and considered their role in performance and the music written for them. These investigations would lead her to collect historical musical instruments for performance purposes. Her library reflected these interests and included many books on musical instruments and organology.⁸ Landowska would later work with the French keyboard manufacturer Pleyel to design a harpsichord based on her study and analysis of antique harpsichords.⁹

In 1900, at the age of 21, Landowska eloped to Paris with Henryk Lew, a Polish actor, journalist, writer, and ethnologist with an expertise in Hebrew folklore.¹⁰ Restout reported that Landowska shared Lew's interest in folklore and recalled childhood summers in Poland singing and dancing mazurkas and polonaises.¹¹ In Paris Landowska performed several of her own compositions in concerts on 23 November 1901 and 14 March 1902 at her publisher, Enoch & Cie, and at other events (see Fig. 2).¹² She performed internationally, including in Russia, where she took her harpsichord to perform for Leo Tolstoy.¹³ In the early 1900s she published many scholarly articles on her evolving theories of interpretation, and in 1909 wrote a ground-breaking book, in collaboration with her husband, about the harpsichord and its music, Musique ancienne.¹⁴

Figure 1.

Wanda Landowska, Polish passport no. 2569, 1919 Library of Congress, Washington DC, ML31.L356.

Landowska and Lew moved to Berlin in 1913 when she was invited to teach harpsichord at the Hochschule für Musik, but after the First World War broke out the couple were held as 'civilian prisoners on parole'. Landowska was free to continue teaching, and gave occasional concerts.¹⁵ Before their return to France Lew was tragically killed in a car accident in 1919. Landowska continued to perform, teach, and write, focusing considerable efforts on J. S. Bach and other seventeenthand eighteenth-century composers and the interpretation of their music on the instruments for which it had been composed. She moved back to

Figure 2.

Wanda Landowska playing the harpsichord in Auguste Rodin's studio, on the anniversary of the death of French artist Eugène Carrière, 1908 Library of Congress, Washington DC, ML31.L356.

Paris, where...