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The Leonhardt Connection From Sweelinck to Bach: Links and Gaps Between Historic “Makers of Organists”

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

10.1353/bach.2018.0000

2767-4843

Christoph Wolff,

Diverse Musicological Studies

The Leonhardt Connection From Sweelinck to Bach: Links and Gaps Between Historic “Makers of Organists”1 Christoph Wolff (bio) It is a great honor and privilege to dedicate the following remarks to the memory of Gustav Leonhardt, whom I knew since the 1960s and whose passing in 2012 we still deeply mourn. What he and the Leonhardt Consort achieved was nothing short of a radical break with the conventions of Early Music performance. In the nineteenth century, Bach was played romantically and this standard persisted in the early twentieth century. Whether by continuing or curtailing this approach, the factual, “sewing machine” Bach was born. Leonhardt and his followers, however, did not think of Bach from the nineteenth-century perspective, but from that of the seventeenth century, from the overwhelmingly fertile, expressive time of Heinrich Schütz, Dieterich Buxtehude, and Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck. Leonhardt’s searching and penetrating mind built the foundation for a new and true approach toward understanding the language of music and toward translating their vocabulary, syntax, and style in the act of performance on the appropriate keyboard instruments. The name Leonhardt stands for fighting the widespread amateurism that had prevailed for so long in the Early Music scene. It stands for discovering new sources and also for looking beyond the printed and seemingly reliable “Urtext” of well-known works by examining and learning from the composer’s autographs, original manuscripts, and early prints. It stands for asking new questions. It stands for opening a dialogue between performers and scholars, a dialogue that should never end. Finally, it stands for balancing the repertoire of indisputable giants like Bach against lesser known and less marketable figures. Emphasizing other names like Sweelinck, Johann Jacob Froberger, Ercole Pasquini, or Antoine Forqueray sheds light on important contexts, cross-currents, and in fact much music that was quite new in the business of Early Music [End Page 2] performance. It is in this spirit that I offer the following remarks on two composers Leonhardt did so much to bridge the gaps between. ________ At first, the gap between Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1562–1621) and Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) seems wide. The two are chronologically separated by almost two centuries when measured by their extreme opposite ends. Even the space between the death of the older and the birth of the younger composer covers about three generations. Clearly, they lived and worked in different worlds. The single most obvious connection, then, is offered by the organ, for both musicians a true identifier rather than a mere symbolic attribute. The seminal function of the great teacher producing many important students has always been an integral part of Sweelinck’s biography. The point was first made in Johann Mattheson’s Ehren-Pforte (Leipzig, 1740) where the Amsterdam master’s nickname of “Hamburgischer Organistenmacher” (maker of Hamburg organists) is mentioned. This came about because he had once trained the organists of no less than four main churches in Hamburg, among them Hieronymus and Jacob Praetorius as well as Heinrich Scheidemann. But his pupils included many more from other places, such as Samuel Scheidt of Halle, Andreas Düben of Leipzig, or Paul Siefert of Gdánsk. By analogy then, Bach deserved the title of “Organistenmacher” as well, for his organ students outnumbered even Sweelinck’s. By further extension, the same term— perhaps modified to “maker of keyboardists”—applies to Leonhardt, who surely taught more distinguished organists, harpsichordists, and Early Music specialists than anyone else in the twentieth century. A focus on Sweelinck and Bach as the two historic “Organistenmacher” brings to the forefront one of the major aspects that separates them. This primarily pertains to the very different role the organ (and the organist) played in the post-Sweelinck era as compared with the situation in the decades following Bach’s death. As it seems important to reflect on this striking gap, a statement by Frederick II, king of Prussia’s great flautist Johann Joachim Quantz may help clarify matters. In his Versuch einer Anweisung die Flöte traversiere zu spielen (Berlin, 1752), he describes the present state of music in its various branches: As early as the last century, in fact from the middle...