Product Code Database
Gustav Maria Leonhardt (30 May 1928 – 16 January 2012) was a Dutch keyboardist, conductor, musicologist, teacher and editor. He was a leading figure in the historically informed performance movement to perform music on period instruments.
Leonhardt professionally played many instruments, including the harpsichord, pipe organ, claviorganum (a combination of harpsichord and organ), clavichord, fortepiano, and piano. He also conducted orchestras and choruses.
Central to Leonhardt's career was Johann Sebastian Bach. Leonhardt first recorded music of the composer in the early 1950s, with recordings in 1953 of the Goldberg Variations and The Art of Fugue. The latter embodies the thesis he had published the previous year arguing that the work was intended for the keyboard, a conclusion now widely accepted. The recordings helped establish his reputation as a distinguished harpsichordist and Bach interpreter. In 1954 he led the Leonhardt Baroque Ensemble with the English countertenor Alfred Deller in a pioneering recording of two Bach . The ensemble included his wife , Eduard Melkus (violins), Alice Harnoncourt-Hoffelner (violin, viola), Nikolaus Harnoncourt (cello), and Michel Piguet (oboe).
In 1971, Leonhardt and Harnoncourt undertook the project of recording the complete Bach cantatas; the two conductors divided up the cantatas and recorded their assigned cantatas with their own ensembles. The project, the first cycle on period instruments, ended up taking nineteen years, from 1971 to 1990. In addition, Leonhardt recorded Bach's St Matthew Passion, Mass in B minor, Magnificat, and the complete secular cantatas, as well as the harpsichord concertos, Brandenburg Concertos, and most of his chamber and keyboard music; he recorded Bach's Goldberg Variations (three times), Partitas (twice), The Art of Fugue (twice), The Well-Tempered Clavier, French Suites, English Suites (twice), Inventions and Sinfonias, and many other individual works for the harpsichord, clavichord, or organ. To the surprise of some of his associates,Rudolf Rausch, "Gustav Leonhardt" Ad Parnassum: A Journal of Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Instrumental Music 10 (19) April 2012, p.194-196 Leonhardt accepted the role of Johann Sebastian Bach (played in a wig) in The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, a 1968 film by Straub-Huillet.
Between 1974 and 1990, Leonhardt served as editor of the primary scholarly collection of the works of Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, which is noted as SwWV or L.
Butt argues that Leonhardt's influence is not necessarily a simple, direct matter, but that some of his students consciously or unconsciously tried to play differently than he did. In comparing recordings of Bach's Goldberg Variations, Butt asserts that a "classic case" of the anxiety of influence is at work in the Goldberg recording by Ton Koopman, in which "what is immediately evident is the incessant ornamentation added to virtually every measure, often regardless of whether there is already obvious ornamentation in the notation.... my immediate reaction is often that this performance's principal message is 'Not Leonhardt'."John Butt, "Bach Recordings since 1980: A Mirror of Historical Performance," in Bach Perspectives 4, ed. David Schulenberg, University of Nebraska Press, 1999, p. 186, Similarly, he says that "Bob van Asperen takes Leonhardt's rhythmic subtlety to a new extreme and perhaps presents the most rhythmically nuanced account of the work The, one that will be ideal to some and mannered to others." By contrast, Butt argues, the younger Christophe Rousset plays the Goldberg Variations in a "meat-and-potatoes" manner with "a steady rhythm, even articulation, and a matter-of-fact presentation with little extra ornamentation," demonstrating that "certainly Rousset does not seem to count among the 'radical reactivists' to such as Koopman and van Asperen."
Leonhardt served as a member of the jury for the triennial International Harpsichord Concours of the Musica Antiqua Bruges. He was the only jury member who had participated in all sixteen juries from 1965 to 2010.
Among the awards given to him were the Medal of Honour for the Arts and Sciences from the Netherlands, presented to him by Queen Beatrix in 2009, and the 1980 Erasmus Prize, which he shared with Nicolaus Harnoncourt; it honored their recording of the complete Bach cantatas. (Leonhardt donated the money he received from the Erasmus Prize to Oudezijds 100, an ecumenical Christian charity operating "in the red-light district of Amsterdam" that "addresses the issues of drug-addicts, prostitutes, refugees, and the homeless.").Gaetan Naulleau, "Gustav Leonhardt's Bach cantata recordings: project, reception and style," Early Music (2014) 42 (1): 37–54, p. 51 Leonhardt was doctor honoris causa of the universities of Dallas, Amsterdam, Harvard, Metz and Padua. In 2007, he was made Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France, and in 2008, Commander of the Order of the Crown in Belgium.
Leonhardt gave his last public performance on 12 December 2011 at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris. Thereafter, he announced his retirement due to illness and cancelled all of his 2012 engagements. He died of cancer in Amsterdam on Monday, 16 January 2012, aged 83.
Two were named after him: 9903 Leonhardt and 12637 Gustavleonhardt.
|
|
