Creating Madame Landowska

Creating Madame Landowska

The famous polish harpsichordist Wanda Landowska has recently been characterized as an "uncommon visionary" and an "epochal exception."¹ Such epithets recognize her as a singularly influential musician and, at the same time, mythologize her into a modern revolutionary who almost single-handedly initiated the worldwide harpsichord revival of the twentieth century by championing above all the "authentic" performance of Bach on the harpsichord. Over the past seventy years the legend of Wanda Landowska has become firmly enshrined in the histories and mythologies of the early music movement. This image stems from her successful and sustained international solo career—flourishing to her death in 1959—and from the worldwide impact of her midcareer recordings of the 1930s.² Wanda Landowska's story is one of struggle, controversy, and triumph in which personal sacrifice engenders musical greatness while the performer becomes anointed as the true voice of the composer. Her visual and artistic self-representation and the aura of aristocratic mystique and inspiration turned her concerts into ritualized celebrations during which she appeared as a high priestess of the cult of Bach. From her clothing to her hairstyle, every element of her public appearances was deliberate and choreographed.³ Landowska "would not have dreamt of beginning a recital without first establishing the proper atmosphere: the lighting on stage had to be very dim before she would glide, wraith-like, onto the platform, hands clasped as if in prayer and eyes cast heavenward."⁴ 


The roots of Landowska's self-representation as the "goddess of the harpsichord" and the myths associated with it reach back to the beginnings of her career in prewar Paris at the turn of the twentieth century.⁵ The French capital provided the cultural context within which Landowska's career as performer, composer, and scholar was molded. As a young woman in her twenties she could draw on models of gendered performance tested by other female musicians in the French capital. Indeed, the strategies that she and her entourage developed in these early years created "Madame Landowska," as she was known, by instrumentalizing successful female career tactics in prewar Paris so as to forge her own unique artistic identity. Landowska's claim for artistic uniqueness, her increasing musical specialization as a harpsichordist, her (self‑)representation as "musical daughter" of Bach, her emphasis on a special musical calling, the relentless rhetoric of exceptionality and artistic struggle not only characterize her (auto)biography since the 1940s but also reflect key elements of women's professional strategies in the Parisian musical world around 1900.⁶ Her correspondence and other documents from these early years reveal that she was an active agent in the creation of her public persona while drawing on a support network that included her husband, Henri Lew, her impresario, Gabriel Astruc, and a host of wise if not always old men such as Charles Bordes and Leo Tolstoy. 


Paris, Women, and Harpsichord Music


Women musicians in particular were attracted to fin de siècle Paris because it offered career opportunities that were scarce in other cities such as Vienna, Berlin, and London.⁷ Paris had a cosmopolitan and financially well heeled audience, dozens of concert series, hundreds of salons and concert societies, many schools and conservatories—all spaces within which a young, ambitious musician could carve out a place for herself. What Walter Benjamin so famously called the capital of the nineteenth century represented not only a place full of career opportunities but also the cultural and musical center of a Europe that needed to be conquered for any major international career to flourish.⁸ Paris presented thus an ideal milieu for the ambitious young pianist and fledgling composer Wanda Landowska, who moved to the French capital in 1900 at the age of twenty-one to fulfill her "mad desire to be famous."⁹ 


What follows presents the story usually told: Landowska and her new husband, Henri Lew, arrived...