Wanda Landowska

Wanda Landowska (July 5, 1879 – August 16, 1959) was a Polish-born harpsichordist, pianist, and musicologist who pioneered the twentieth-century revival of the harpsichord as a viable solo concert instrument. Born in Warsaw to a lawyer father and linguist mother, she initially trained as a pianist under specialists in Chopin before studying in Berlin and relocating to Paris in 1900, where she immersed herself in early music scholarship. Her advocacy emphasized the harpsichord's distinct timbre over piano substitutions for Baroque repertoire, leading her to commission custom instruments from the Pleyel firm, including a two-manual model debuted at the 1912 Bach Festival in Breslau.

Landowska's career milestones included founding the École de Musique Ancienne near Paris in 1925 to teach historical performance practices, producing seminal writings such as her 1905 essay on Bach's harpsichord works, and making landmark recordings, notably the first on harpsichord of Johann Sebastian Bach's Goldberg Variations in 1933. She influenced composers like Manuel de Falla and Francis Poulenc to write new works for the instrument and inspired a generation of musicians through teaching and international tours, reestablishing the harpsichord in venues from European halls to New York's Town Hall. During World War II, as a Jew by origin despite her family's conversion, she fled Nazi-occupied France in 1940, eventually resettling in the United States in 1941, where she rebuilt her career amid the loss of her collection to looting.

Wanda Landowska was born on July 5, 1879, in Warsaw, which at the time formed part of the Russian Empire's Congress Poland. Her family belonged to Warsaw's Jewish intellectual class, amid a city with one of Europe's largest Jewish populations, where cultural life blended Polish, Yiddish, and Russian influences under tsarist restrictions on Jewish rights and education.