The Visionary Musician

LANDOWSKA ON MUSIC by Wanda Landowska, edited and translated by Denise Restout and Robert Hawkins. 434 pages. Stein & Day. $12.50.

Few who heard her could forget her. Wanda Landowska saw to that. A tiny black-clad priestess, palms pressed together in prayer, she would float in hushed silence to her altar, the harpsichord. A Romantic who played pre-Romantic music, she got shadings and majestic effects seemingly impossible on her instrument, and no one could equal her in bringing to independent life Bach's intertwined melodies. She took great liberties in interpretation, serenely confident of the backing of the dead composer. "You continue to play Bach your way," she told one musician. "I shall continue to play Bach his way. What I do is comparable to the improvisations of a good jazz band," she explained. "Did Bach, Couperin and Scarlatti play the harpsichord to preserve historical truth or because on this instrument they were able to express passion, joy or despair?"

Corsets & Cats. Landowska died five years ago, aged 80, leaving behind a legacy of great recordings and the articles, scoldings, commentaries and pensees that are now gathered together in this book.

She writes about composers and their works as familiarly as she would about people in her family, which of course they were. Scarlatti, she says, "is the only composer who reminds me of the playfulness of a cat, and he does not suffer from this comparison. We all have seen a kitten play with a twig. It is impossible to describe its grace, charm, vivacity and inventiveness." Couperin's work, she observed, has "an immutable and restricted frame. He moves in it with ease, as did the actresses and dancers of the past, even though they were tightly laced in their corsets." As for Saint-Saens, she noted that he was considered a master of form. "Yes, the form is there, bright, like latticework. But there is nothing in it!"

Alone with Her Rubato. Landowska was constantly musing over the role of the interpreter in music. "One must have visions. The richer the imagination of a musician, the more possibilities of sonority he hears." She insisted that "the idea of objectivity is Utopian. Can the music of any composer maintain its integrity after passing through the living complex--sanguine or phlegmatic--of this or that interpreter?" But at the same time an artist must not go out of bounds, warns Landowska, reminded of the time Gounod had to chide his wife at a funeral: "Be careful; do not cry louder than the widow!"

It was Landowska alone who decided how loud to cry. When a critic complained that he could not follow her in a certain rubato, she thought, "I am perfectly happy, alone with my rubato. Why should you follow me?" Nor did she welcome ghostly interference, however distinguished the ghost might be. She announced that "if Rameau himself would rise from his grave to demand of me some changes in my interpretation of his Danphine, I would answer, 'You gave birth to it; it is beautiful. But now leave me alone with it. You have nothing more to say; go away!' "

In 1950 a former pupil reproached Landowska because she had noticeably changed her interpretations over a period of ten years. Why not? asked Landowska. "What would you say of a scientist or of a painter who, like stagnant water, would stop his experimentation and remain still?" She insisted on surprise and suspense in her performances. The "tragedy" of recordings, she remarked, is that they catch "only one moment, one aspect of an interpretation when there are a thousand and one others, always different."

Arabesques& Soliloquies. Landowska, like a little Polish mother, never stopped giving advice. "There is a certain common way of playing trills which reminds me of an electric doorbell," she warned. An ornament should "fill space with arabesques." How to begin to play a piece? "One has to concentrate and be entirely ready so that when the first note is struck, it comes as a sort of continuation of a soliloquy already begun. Similarly the last note is never the last. It is rather a point of departure for something to come." She was, in a way, describing her own lifework--the continuation of a centuries-old musical soliloquy, and, because of her eloquence, intelligence and devotion, a strong new point of departure.

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