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Imagination on Fire: A Remembrance of Gustav Leonhardt

2018; Baldwin Wallace University; Volume: 49; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/bach.2018.0009

2767-4843

Jeannette Sorrell,

Music Technology and Sound Studies

Imagination on Fire: A Remembrance of Gustav Leonhardt Jeannette Sorrell (bio) Prelude During 1990 and 1991, I spent many an hour sitting on the doorstep of Gustav Leonhardt’s palatial home on the Herengracht of Amsterdam, the famous “Gentlemen’s Canal.” I sat there with pencil and notepad after each of my lessons with him, to write down everything he had said. It was not so difficult, because Leonhardt was a man of few words. But each word was perfectly chosen. He expected me to bring thirty to forty minutes of music to each lesson, and he only wanted to hear each piece once. That meant I needed thirty minutes of new music each week—quite a challenge, since I had only played the harpsichord for about two years. In just a few words, he illuminated exactly what I needed to fix. Then he would sit down at the harpsichord and show me how to do it—how to make the instrument sing—how to make the music speak—how to create an expressive palette of colors and moods on an instrument that supposedly has no dynamics. Among the four of us who were his students at that time, I know that at least two were frustrated. Each of us crammed for days between each lesson, desperately learning, for example, two Bach toccatas and a large suite by Rameau. And then Leonhardt might say ten words. But for me, each lesson was a revelation. As I stood next to him and listened to him play my pieces, the expressive sound possibilities that I had only half imagined suddenly became crystal clear. I realized that, in order to make something happen in music, you first have to imagine it. And not just halfway. The ideas must be burned and sizzled into your imagination with 100% crystal clarity. Without imagination, there will be no music—because music, especially baroque music, is about ideas. ________ Leonhardt’s intellectual brilliance and fierce dedication to artistic principles gave birth to an entire movement. That movement now has [End Page 13] literally millions of devoted listeners around the world. How did this happen? In stages. Stage 1. The Archeologist Leonhardt gave us our repertoire. At the age of twenty-four, he spent a year in the National Library of Vienna, copying out manuscripts by hand from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. every day. Eventually he took his pile of manuscripts back to Amsterdam, his home, and founded the Leonhardt Consort (which included Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Anner Bijlsma, Frans Brüggen, and brothers Wieland, Barthold, and Sigiswald Kuijken). They began playing the music he had spent a year copying. This was the beginning of the early music revival. The seventeenth-century repertoire that Leonhardt gave the world is not only beautiful and profound, but it is also the gateway to J. S. Bach and his eighteenth-century contemporaries. To understand Bach’s expressive possibilities, you have to immerse yourself in the music of his teachers, Dieterich Buxtehude and Johann Adam Reincken. To understand Bach’s great Chaconne for unaccompanied violin, you need to understand its predecessor—the Passacaglia for unaccompanied violin by Heinrich Biber. It is thanks to Leonhardt that we know and love the music of Buxtehude, Reincken, Biber, and their seventeenth-century colleagues. In the seventeenth-century German repertoire, expressive freedom of tempo is an indispensable part of the performance. I believe that this filters down into Bach’s music, influencing how one evokes the various moods. A piece like “Ruht wohl” (the lullaby for Christ at the end of the St. John Passion) has an ebb and flow, like the waves of sorrow and resignation that wash over us when we are grieving. That ebb and flow emerges through a rubato that one learns from the earlier German composers. By contrast, consider the wild mob scenes of the St. John Passion, such as when Pilate cries out to the seething rabble, “Would you have your king be crucified?” These scenes need the urgency and forward momentum one finds in the fiery toccatas of Bach’s teachers. Thus, my approach to Bach has been much influenced by the emotional world of Bach’s...