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"Landowska, Wanda."
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Chopin's piano : in search of the instrument that transformed music
\"In November 1838, Frâedâeric Chopin, George Sand, and her two children sailed to Majorca to escape the Parisian winter. They settled in an abandoned monastery at Valldemossa in the mountains above Palma where Chopin finished what would eventually be recognized as one of the great and revolutionary works of musical Romanticism: his twenty-four Preludes. There was scarcely a decent piano on the island (these were still early days in the evolution of the modern instrument), so Chopin worked on a small pianino made by a local craftsman, Juan Bauza, which remained in their monastic cell for seventy years after he and Sand had left. Chopin's Piano traces the history of Chopin's twenty-four Preludes through the instruments on which they were played, the pianists who interpreted them, and the traditions they came to represent. Yet it begins and ends with the Majorcan pianino, which assumed an astonishing cultural potency during the Second World War as it became, for the Nazis, a symbol of the man and music they were determined to appropriate as their own. After Chopin, the unexpected hero of Chopin's Piano is the great keyboard player Wanda Landowska, who rescued the pianino from Valldemossa in 1913, and who would later become one of the most influential artistic figures of the twentieth century. Paul Kildea shows how her story--a compelling account based for the first time on her private papers--resonates with Chopin's, simultaneously distilling part of the cultural and political history of mid-twentieth century Europe and the United States. After Landowska's flight to America from Paris, which the Germans would occupy only days later, her possessions--including her rare music manuscripts and beloved keyboards--were seized by the Nazis. Only some of these belongings survived the war; those that did were recovered by the Allied armies' Monuments Men and restituted to Landowska's house in France. In scintillating prose, and with an eye for exquisite detail, Kildea beautifully interweaves these narratives, which compose a journey through musical Romanticism--one that illuminates how art is transmitted, interpreted, and appropriated between generations\"--Dust jacket flaps.
Book
Musical Heritage, Alterity, and Transnational Migration: Wanda Landowska’s Musical Lives
Musical Heritage, Alterity, and Transnational Migration: Wanda Landowska’s Musical LivesIn 1925 Wanda Landowska bought property in the genteel town of Saint-Leu-la-Forêt, northwest of Paris, and built, between 1926 and 1927, “a temple to music” in her garden. Famous across the musical world as a performer, composer, teacher, consultant and scholar, Landowska was ready to find a home for her gynocentric household after decades of cross-border movement. She had lived in Warsaw, Paris and Berlin, and was traveling extensively through Europe, the Middle East, Argentine and the United States. Throughout all her years of mobility, however, Landowska carried with her a constant sense of musical heritage to be preserved, cherished, and revived through performance and creation, through study and through joyful conviviality. She assembled a distinguished library and instrument collection that included such prized items as Chopin’s upright piano that he had used in Mallorca in 1838. Yet what Landowska had envisaged as her “ forever home” was overrun by Nazi plunderers in 1940 who stole her belongings as Landowska moved, once more, to save her life—this time across the Atlantic, to New York where she arrived on the day after Pearl Harbor. Here, too, her deep investment in a transnational musical heritage became a lodestone that guided her through exile. I address the complex issue of musical heritage in the musical lives of Wanda Landowska as it relates to matters of identity, gender, race, displacement, and creativity. By engaging caringly with the core values of a displaced woman-identified, queer musician of Jewish Polish descent, I propose to rethink how musical heritage might be thought from Landowska’s unique and vulnerable positionality.
Journal Article
Don Quixote and Wanda Landowska: bells and Pleyels
Wanda Landowska's use of Pleyel harpsichords has often come in for criticism. Some of this has been based on wrong assumptions—for instance that her instruments had metal frames or that they had complicated mechanisms for changing stops while playing. It is true that there were pedals for engaging and disengaging each separate stop, but such devices are found on 18th-century instruments. The 16′ stop (playing an octave below normal pitch), incorporated in Pleyel's design at Landowska's instigation, is also found on a number of historical instruments, even on some of Bach's time. While no historical instrument is known to have been equipped only with leather plectra, as was Landowska's instrument, some certainly had one or more stops with leather plectra besides those in quill. Three 18th-century instruments survive with a 16′ stop with leather plectra. A comparison of Landowska's Pleyel instruments with historical harpsichords should in any case not overshadow her contribution to the early music movement. While taste in instruments and performance practice changes, her spirit and imagination continues to inspire.
Journal Article
Slipping Out of View: Subjectivity and Emotion in Gender History
Focusing on the concept of ‘subjectivity’ in gender history, this article offers a critical review of some developments within cultural history over the past two decades. Although the term ‘subjectivity’ is often used within historical research broadly informed by the cultural turn, such work often possesses an abstract quality. Concentrating on matters of cultural form, it fails to acknowledge the basis of subjectivity within real human relationships and emotional states. Such approaches can tell us little about the emotional experience of historical actors. In response to these limitations, and informed by my current attempts to write a history of mother-son relationships in the First World War, the article offers some suggestions about how research on subjectivity might proceed. It demonstrates – via examples from my research – the kinds of topics and concerns that come to light when relationships, and the emotional processes that they entail, are placed at the centre of historical study.
Journal Article
Coverture and Capitalism
This article looks at the role of gender in the creation of a capitalist economy in England in the early modern period. Most capital in this period was both accumulated and transferred by means of marriage and inheritance, so it stands to reason that the laws governing marriage and inheritance played a role in structuring the economy. English property law was distinctive in two respects: first, married women under coverture were even more restricted than in the rest of Europe; second, single women enjoyed a position unique in Europe as legal individuals in their own right, with no requirement for a male guardian. I suggest these peculiarities had two consequences for the development of capitalism. First, the draconian nature of coverture necessitated the early development of complex private contracts and financial arrangements, accustoming people to complicated legal and financial concepts and establishing a climate in which the concept of legal security for notional concepts of property (the bedrock of capitalism) became commonplace. Second, without the inhibiting effect of legal guardianship, England had up to fifty per cent more people able to move capital purely because that market included the unmarried half of the female population in addition to the male population. This area needs a great deal more research and three comparative European approaches to single women's financial activity are offered: public investment records; court records of debt litigation; and individual biography of single female entrepreneurs. The connections proposed between marital property law and economic development are suggestive and deserve further consideration.
Journal Article
Lets get rid of the wrong pralltriller!
Badura-Skoda discusses the pralltriller (half shake, inverted mordent) as an invention of the 20th century and did not exist in keyboard music of the 18th century. This new ornament was created by the great Polish-born harpsichordist Wanda Landowska (1877-1959), a pioneer in the reintroduction of the harpsichord into the European and American music scenes 100 years ago, and a leading figure in the performance practice of early music at the beginning of the 20th century. Her merits are beyond doubt. However, as with pioneers in all fields, she occasionally committed errors resulting from wrong deductons or premature conclusions. One hundred years of musicological research since her early activities have brought to light many sources that would have been unknown to her.
Journal Article
Reconceiving Binaries: the Limits of Memory
This essay explores the conceptual terrain of memory's mediation and articulation across and within the public sphere. After defining the key terms of mediation and articulation, it proposes that a dominant trend in memory research today is the extension and application of terms associated with personal memory to domains beyond the personal – a trend which has the effects of hardening into literality what might better be regarded as a series of compelling metaphors – the ‘traumatization’ of a nation, for instance, or the ‘healing’ of a culture – while drawing attention away from the processes of articulation through which past happenings and the meanings and affects associated with them are discursively produced, transmitted and mediated. This trend might be resisted without reaffirming binary divisions between the personal and the public, by attending more closely to the various and particular articulations of memory by the diverse institutions of the public sphere. From particular studies of memory that have engaged with the sufferings of individuals and groups, the essay draws out some thoughts about what the ‘personalization’ of the conceptual terrain of memory research may screen as well as some suggestions for future research. If the personalization of memory studies hinders a focus on questions of power and structural inequalities, this essay proposes countering that tendency, in particular, by an attention to processes of the recognition of memory and the relations between recognizing authorities – processes that are at once cognitive, affective and political.
Journal Article
From Landowska to Leonhardt, from Pleyel to Skowroneck
There is a tendency to dismiss early 20th-century harpsichords as inferior to the supposedly faithful reproduction of historical harpsichords made during the second half of the century. This belief in an organological progress in harpsichord-making does not, however, do justice to the makers and players; during the first half of the 20th century, Wanda Landowska’s notion of the harpsichord and of playing it shaped the acknowledged standard of harpsichord playing, based on the idea of the harpsichord as a ‘stringed organ’ rather than as the predecessor of the pianoforte. During the 1950s, Gustav Leonhardt, along with some other performers, departed from this idea: for them, the harpsichord was based not just on objectivity, but also on the idea of the harpsichord as a ‘mechanical lute’. This shift replaced the previous emphasis on richness in instrumental colours with a focus on touch. These musicians found allegedly original evidence in surviving instruments and in copies of them. There was thus a second revival of the harpsichord and harpsichord playing, which had very little to do with the first. Gustav Leonhardt was to become the leading figure in the early years of the second revival.
Journal Article
Verwoerd's Bureau of Proof: Total Information in the Making of Apartheid
Hendrik Verwoerd, Apartheid's founder, imposed what he called the ‘Bewysburostelsel’ – a term that is best translated as the ‘bureau of proof regime’ – on South Africa during the 1950s. This paper is a narrative of the administrative catastrophe that followed from the grand project of building a central biometric population register for all Africans, the issuing of identity cards and classification of the huge body of fingerprints that poured in from the countryside. The story examines internally-generated crises and some of the ways those subjected to the Bewysburo sought to defeat it. It offers a new explanation of the origins of Verwoerd's Bantustan policy, for the pervasiveness of violence in the 1960s, and for the Apartheid state's paradoxically blind strength in the decades that followed. The paper thus addresses some of the key questions in the history of the Apartheid state, but it may also offer several important lessons for the contemporary American, and British, effort to build centralised national security databases, like John Poindexter's recently-closed office of Total Information Awareness, or David Blunkett's biometric identity card.
Journal Article
Trauma, Place and the Politics of Memory: Bloody Sunday, Derry, 1972–2004
On 30 January 1972, British soldiers shot dead thirteen unarmed Irish nationalist civilians and seriously wounded fifteen others (one of whom subsequently died), on the occasion of a civil rights demonstration held in the city of Derry. This event, known as ‘Bloody Sunday’, is the most important single case of the abuse of state power perpetrated by the British Army in the course of its long counter-insurgency campaign in Northern Ireland. It is also a ‘contested past’, since the soldiers were exonerated of any wrong-doing at the Public Inquiry led by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Widgery, set up by the British Government to investigate the killings in their immediate aftermath. In the years since 1972, Irish nationalists and Republicans developed and sustained an annual Bloody Sunday commemoration in Derry as a public arena from which to challenge this official memory, through the articulation of an oppositional narrative, or counter-memory, that asserts the innocence of the victims and denounces both the violence and injustice inherent in the British military occupation of the north-eastern corner of Ireland. This essay examines the politics of memory established by these competing narratives about Bloody Sunday. It draws on theories of war memory, trauma and cultural landscape to investigate the identities, meanings and memories of Derry nationalists that have become attached to, and invested in, the material sites where fatal and near-fatal shootings ‘took place’, and the related formation of psychic ‘sites of trauma’ within the internal landscape of survivors and the bereaved.
Journal Article