
A concert by Gustav Leonhardt was not like any other. He approached his harpsichord with the air of a mortician, slightly flexing his long, delicate hands. As he played he sat bolt upright, gaunt and aquiline, unsmiling in his crisp, perfect suit, with his elbows held close to his sides. No unnecessary gesture, no hint of emotion:
senza baldanza, as a composer might have marked it. He did not have the look of a man on a mission. But he was.
Mr Leonhardt's life-work was to persuade the world how beautiful the harpsichord was, and how the harpsichord repertoire should be played. When he first fell in love with it, in the shape of the fairly bad instrument his parents bought for their house at Graveland in the Netherlands, he recognized it as the king of keyboards. Organs were noble characters, and he played church organ for years. Virginals were pleasing; he wrote a book on Flemish examples. But fortepianos were awful, the sound muffling all over the place when the hammer hit the keys, which put him off playing his beloved Mozart; and modern grands were unspeakable. None had that direct pluck of plectrum on string for which he loved the harpsichord—though that mechanism was also fearsomely exacting, even “diabolical”, and that was why he did not smile as he played.
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| Leonhardt (on the left) |
When he began to study harpsichord seriously, at Basel in 1950, the instrument had been neglected, or overlaid with Romantic sweetness, for decades. He intended to restore it to the simple, original sound, “salt rather than sugar”, that Johann Sebastian Bach had written for. If people found that sound too thin for modern halls, and the pitch disturbingly low, too bad; their ears would just have to get used to it. And after a while, they did.
When he was asked in the mid-1960s to play the part of his favourite composer in “The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach”, and was filmed in a long periwig and a frock-coat forging elegantly through the fifth Brandenburg Concerto, many listeners may well have felt that this was as near the mind of Bach as any man could reasonably get.
[
from The Economist]
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