Landowska's Mozart

In the overstuffed parlor of an ungainly green-and-yellow hilltop house in Connecticut, the master of the harpsichord, stately, 77-year-old Wanda Landowska, sat down before the piano morning after morning to record her conception of Mozart. Around the frail old woman, in her gold slippers and purple kimono, hovered the engineers. For four and five hours at a stretch they recorded together, listened, recorded again. The fruits of a year's recording, released in a new RCA Victor album, constitute perhaps the most important single contribution to Mozart interpretation in his bicentennial year.

Ornamentation. For tiny (4 ft. 10 in.) Wanda Landowska, the new album marks a return to piano recording after an absence of 20 years (she recorded Mozart's "Coronation" Concerto for the coronation of George VI in 1936). During part of that time she was engaged in her monumental harpsichord recording of the 48 rippling, finger-cracking preludes and fugues that constitute Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, which she called "my last will and testament." When she was persuaded to leave a codicil to that will, she turned again to the piano ("my first love") and to Mozart. She sighs: "Mozart was my first nature--but Bach, too. Oh, how can I combine these two gentlemen?" In making the recordings, which include some of Mozart's loveliest and most deceptively simple piano music (Sonatas, K.333, 311, 283, 282, Rondo in A Minor, K.511, Country Dances, K.606) she insisted on the intimate atmosphere of her house, which would approximate the acoustics of the salons in which Mozart himself played. After a lifetime of immersion in 18th century keyboard techniques, she brought to her performance a startling freedom--as if she owned the music.

In a separate 45-r.p.m. record enclosed in reviewers' copies of her album, Landowska carefully explains to critics how she scaled her piano to the 18th century: "The pedals should be used, but with discretion, so that the harmonic and melodic texture will remain clear, crisp, light and transparent." In addition, "improvised ornamentation" is indispensable. "Those performances which we respect today for their literal devotion," says Landowska, "would have been called barbaric by Mozart's contemporaries, for it was in his art of ornamentation that the 18th century interpreter was judged."

Understanding. Accordingly, the recordings abound in varied repetitions and rippling cadenzas, written in by Landowska where she felt they were implied in the score. By delicate adjustments of touch, Landowska even manages to convey some of the sharp differences of tone color characteristic of the pianoforte of Mozart's day. The result is a series of performances with shimmering articulation and a profound, spacious sense of repose. Played far more slowly than the usual "virtuoso" Mozart performances, they suggest tensions in the simple melodies rarely detected since Mozart's day.

Now Landowska no longer speaks of her "last testament." Almost immediately after she finished her Mozart recordings, she returned to the harpsichord to begin recording Bach's Three-Part Inventions. She regularly instructs half a dozen dedicated harpsichordists, and in her spare time withdraws to her second-floor study to write knowingly of baroque music. From early in the morning, when she loops her long black hair around her head and goes down to the kitchen for a cup of tea, until late at night, when she bends over the keyboard of her harpsichord by the light from a single globe lamp, she is rarely away from her work. What bothers her chiefly is the lack of time. "Only now," she says smilingly of the 18th century masters, "I am beginning to understand."

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