In the early twentieth century, the idea that pianists should be musician-scholars
whose playing reflected the way composers wanted their music to sound replaced
the notion that pianists should be virtuosos whose performances thrilled audiences
with emotional daring and showy displays of technique. One important figure to
emerge in the period, though a harpsichordist rather than a pianist, was Wanda
Landowska (1879–1959). She demonstrated how the keyboard works of Baroque
composers such as Bach, Handel, Scarlatti, and Couperin probably sounded in their
own times. It would be a mistake to consider Landowska a classicist, however. She
had been born in an age of Romantic playing dominated by Liszt, Leschetizky,
and their pupils. Thus she grew up with and was influenced by certain Romantic
traditions of performance, whatever the stringency of her musical scholarship;
Landowska knew how to hold audiences breathless, and when she gave recitals,
they responded with deathlike silence and rapt attention.
Her playing was Romantic, but it was at least as close in spirit to the style of playing
intended by composers of the Baroque (1600–1750) and Classical (1750–1830) eras, as
have been the more exacting but less emotionally resonant interpretations of most
harpsichordists since Landowska. She had a miraculous quality of touch, a seemingly
autonomous left hand; no artist in her generation could clarify with such deftness the
polyphonic writing of the Baroque masters. And none could make their music so
spring to life.
Her achievements were the result of a lifetime of scholarship, truly remarkable physical
gifts, and resilient rhythm, all combined with excellent judgment about when not to hold
the printed note sacrosanct. Of course, developing such judgment demanded considerable
experience and imagination. She was a genius at underlining the dramatic and emotional
content of a piece, and to do so, she took liberties, all kinds of liberties, while nevertheless
preserving the integrity of a composer’s score. In short, her entire musical approach was
Romantic: intensely personal, full of light and shade, never pedantic.
Thanks to Landowska, Bach’s music (originally composed for the harpsichord) now
sounded inappropriately thick when played on the piano. One by one, pianists stopped
playing Bach’s music as adapted for the piano by Liszt or by Tausig. Then they gradually
stopped performing any kind of Baroque music on the piano, even Scarlatti’s. The piano
repertoire, it began to be felt, was extensive enough without reverting to transcriptions of
Baroque music originally written for the harpsichord—and piano performances of Bach
and Scarlatti were, despite the obvious similarities between the harpsichord and the piano,
transcriptions, no matter how faithfully the original notes were played. In accordance with
this kind of purism came an emphasis on studying composers’ manuscript notations, a
relatively new field of musicology that is flourishing even today.