Music: Promise Kept

“I only dream of one thing—to play Bach and Mozart,” wrote Wanda Landowska as a little girl, and then she sealed her dream in an envelope marked: “To be opened when I am grown up.” The young daughter of a Warsaw lawyer could not wait. The very next day she opened it again, and the desire became a promise. By the time she was 14, she was a graduate of the Warsaw Conservatory of Music, and a concert pianist whose greatest joy —and biggest triumph—was her rendition of Bach’s intricate English Suite in E Minor. So strong was her love of Bach that she was called “The Bachante” by famed Conductor Arthur Nikisch. The nickname became a career.

Those were the days when the great master of Leipzig was brushed off as an organist with no notion of the piano keyboard’s range. Musicians bastardized his clavier works, played him, if at all, under such names as Bach-Liszt, Bach-Tausig, Bach-Bülow—all but Landowska, who set out on her own, giving concerts throughout Europe. “I have always been in revolt,” she explained, ripping away the overstuffed romantic upholstery, dazzling her audiences with the simple, direct beauty of Bach’s original compositions.

Master & Instrument. In 1900 the pint-sized (4 ft. 10 in.) young woman with the long black hair and heavy hooked nose was 21 and well on her way to being Bach’s pianist laureate. It was not enough. She yearned to revive the instrument that Bach used as well as his work. Few more difficult instruments exist than the 18th century harpsichord, half-harp, half-piano with its double keyboard and deep, plunky tones. With her husband Henri Lew, a folklorist who died in 1919, Pianist Landowska journeyed through Europe’s museums where old harpsichords were exhibited. Finally she asked Paris’ famed Pleyel piano firm to make her a harpsichord like the one Bach played.

Under her hands, Pleyel’s harpsichord took on a rare brilliance. It was, she said, ”capable of greater brilliance and more tonal variety” than any other modern harpsichord. In 1907 she carried a special harpsichord, first by train to Moscow then by sleigh, to Tolstoy’s country home, Yasnaya Polyana. “I played for him,” she said, “and he talked for me.” In 1923 she shipped her harpsichord to Philadelphia for her U.S. debut under Conductor Leopold Stokowski. Between trips, it stood in the studio of her home in the Paris suburb of Saint-Leu-la-Foret. “Anyone who has heard Wanda Landowska play .Bach’s Italian Concerto on her wonderful harpsichord,” wrote Albert Schweitzer, “finds it hard to understand how it could ever again be played on a piano.”

Schweitzer was only one of Landowska’s admirers. So many music lovers made the trip to Saint-Leu that Paris station guards called the 2 o’clock Sunday run “Mme. Landowska’s train.” Landowska’s art led Manuel de Falla to compose his Harpsichord Concerto especially for her.

Back to a Love. World War II forced Landowska. who was of Jewish origin, to flee France. She came to the U.S. and settled in Lakeville, Conn., with Elsa Schumicke and Denise Restout, who had been her constant companions for more than 25 years. There she concentrated on recording her interpretation of the old masters. Her recording of the 48 labyrinthine preludes and fugues of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier is a modern classic. Landowska called it “my last will and testament.” It was far from her last. At 76, but with the spirit of a sprite, the high priestess of the harpsichord turned once again to “my first love”—the piano, and to a second master—Mozart.

In the intimacy of her parlor, the frail old woman in the gold ballet slippers and purple kimono played some of Mozart’s loveliest and most deceptively simple music (Sonatas K. 282, 283, 311, 333, Rondo in A Minor, K. 511, Country Dances, K. 606) as RCA Victor engineers recorded her art, sometimes for five hours at a stretch. By now, her fingers were gnarled and clawlike; yet her articulation was so sure, her tone never more pure. After a year of daily sessions, her recordings won cheers as one of the most important contributions to the interpretation of Mozart (TIME, Jan. 14, 1957).

Still it was not enough to satisfy her youthful dream. She recorded an album of Haydn sonatas (released this summer), immediately made arrangements to record Bach’s Three-Part Inventions. But that, at last, was denied. One morning last week, in her home in Connecticut, Wanda Landowska suffered a stroke, and there she died at the age of 80.