Gustav Leonhardt
Encyclopedia
Gustav Leonhardt is a province situated on the North Sea in the northwest part of the Netherlands. The provincial capital is Haarlem and its largest city is Amsterdam.-Geography:...
) is a highly renowned Dutch
Netherlands
The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...
keyboard player, conductor
Conducting
Conducting is the art of directing a musical performance by way of visible gestures. The primary duties of the conductor are to unify performers, set the tempo, execute clear preparations and beats, and to listen critically and shape the sound of the ensemble...
, musicologist, teacher and editor. Leonhardt has been a leading figure in the movement to perform music on period instruments. He has played professionally the harpsichord
Harpsichord
A harpsichord is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard. It produces sound by plucking a string when a key is pressed.In the narrow sense, "harpsichord" designates only the large wing-shaped instruments in which the strings are perpendicular to the keyboard...
, pipe organ
Pipe organ
The pipe organ is a musical instrument that produces sound by driving pressurized air through pipes selected via a keyboard. Because each organ pipe produces a single pitch, the pipes are provided in sets called ranks, each of which has a common timbre and volume throughout the keyboard compass...
, claviorganum
Claviorganum
The claviorganum is an instrument whose origin is uncertain. A number of "virgynalls with regals" are mentioned in the inventories of Henry VIII in 1542/3 and 1547 and Wilson Barry cites references to the claviorganum in England dating back to the 1530s...
(a combination of a harpsichord and an organ), clavichord
Clavichord
The clavichord is a European stringed keyboard instrument known from the late Medieval, through the Renaissance, Baroque and Classical eras. Historically, it was widely used as a practice instrument and as an aid to composition, not being loud enough for larger performances. The clavichord produces...
and fortepiano
Fortepiano
Fortepiano designates the early version of the piano, from its invention by the Italian instrument maker Bartolomeo Cristofori around 1700 up to the early 19th century. It was the instrument for which Haydn, Mozart, and the early Beethoven wrote their piano music...
.
From 1947 to 1950, Leonhardt studied organ and harpsichord with Eduard Müller at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis
Schola Cantorum Basiliensis
Schola Cantorum Basiliensis is a music academy and research institution located in Basel, Switzerland, and focusing on early music and historically informed performance....
in Basel
Basel
Basel or Basle In the national languages of Switzerland the city is also known as Bâle , Basilea and Basilea is Switzerland's third most populous city with about 166,000 inhabitants. Located where the Swiss, French and German borders meet, Basel also has suburbs in France and Germany...
. He made his debut as a harpsichordist in Vienna
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
in 1950 and studied musicology there. He was professor of harpsichord in the Academy of Music from 1952 to 1955 and as professor of harpsichord in the Amsterdam Conservatory from 1954. He was also a church organist.
Leonhardt made his first recordings of Johann Sebastian Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach was a German composer, organist, harpsichordist, violist, and violinist whose sacred and secular works for choir, orchestra, and solo instruments drew together the strands of the Baroque period and brought it to its ultimate maturity...
's works for harpsichord in the early 1950s, including 1953 recordings of the Goldberg Variations
Goldberg Variations
The Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, is a work for harpsichord by Johann Sebastian Bach, consisting of an aria and a set of 30 variations. First published in 1741, the work is considered to be one of the most important examples of variation form...
and of 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 counter-tenor Alfred Deller
Alfred Deller
Alfred George Deller CBE , was an English singer and one of the main figures in popularizing the return of the countertenor voice in Renaissance and Baroque music during the 20th Century....
in a pioneering recording of two Bach cantata
Cantata
A cantata is a vocal composition with an instrumental accompaniment, typically in several movements, often involving a choir....
s. The Ensemble included his wife Marie Leonhardt (b. 1928), Eduard Melkus
Eduard Melkus
Eduard Melkus is an Austrian violinist and violist.Following the Second World War, Melkus dedicated himself to the exploration of historically informed performance...
(violins), Alice Harnoncourt
Alice Harnoncourt
Alice Harnoncourt is a violinist. She is noted for her playing of the Baroque violin, viol, and other stringed instruments...
-Hoffelner (violin, viola), Nikolaus Harnoncourt
Nikolaus Harnoncourt
Nikolaus Harnoncourt is an Austrian conductor, particularly known for his historically informed performances of music from the Classical era and earlier. Starting out as a classical cellist, he founded his own period instrument ensemble in the 1950s, and became a pioneer of the Early Music movement...
(cello) and Michel Piguet (oboe).
Leonhardt has performed and conducted a variety of solo, chamber, orchestral, operatic, and choral music from the Renaissance
Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
, Baroque
Baroque
The Baroque is a period and the style that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, literature, dance, and music...
and Classical periods. He and Harnoncourt undertook the project of recording the first complete cycle of Bach's cantata
Cantata
A cantata is a vocal composition with an instrumental accompaniment, typically in several movements, often involving a choir....
s on period instruments; the two conductors divided up the cantatas and recorded their assigned cantatas with their own ensembles. The undertaking took almost twenty years, from 1971 to 1990. Leonhardt has also recorded Bach's St Matthew Passion and Mass in B minor, and much other baroque choral music.
As a keyboardist, Leonhardt has recorded much of the repertory from the Elizabethan William Byrd
William Byrd
William Byrd was an English composer of the Renaissance. He wrote in many of the forms current in England at the time, including various types of sacred and secular polyphony, keyboard and consort music.-Provenance:Knowledge of Byrd's biography expanded in the late 20th century, thanks largely...
to some sonatas of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart , baptismal name Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart , was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era. He composed over 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music...
, with most of his focus on the Baroque era, including most of the French clavecinistes. He has recorded Bach's Goldberg Variations
Goldberg Variations
The Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, is a work for harpsichord by Johann Sebastian Bach, consisting of an aria and a set of 30 variations. First published in 1741, the work is considered to be one of the most important examples of variation form...
(three times), Partitas (twice), the Art of Fugue twice, Well-Tempered Clavier, French Suites, English Suites, and many individual works for harpsichord, clavichord, and organ.
Leonhardt has had a significant influence on the technique and style of many harpsichordists of the second half of the 20th century, through his recordings, editions, and teaching. His students include such harpsichordists as Bob van Asperen
Bob van Asperen
Bob van Asperen is a harpsichordist, organist, conductor, clavichordist and early music-specialist.After completing a conventional music course at university, in 1967 he studied under the harpsichord master Gustav Leonhardt. In 1968 he joined the group Quadro Hotteterre, of which he was a member...
, Lucy Carolan, Lisa Crawford, Christopher Hogwood
Christopher Hogwood
Christopher Jarvis Haley Hogwood CBE, MA , HonMusD , born 10 September 1941, Nottingham, is an English conductor, harpsichordist, writer and musicologist, well known as the founder of the Academy of Ancient Music.-Biography:...
, Philippe Herreweghe
Philippe Herreweghe
Philippe Herreweghe is a Flemish conductor.In his school years at the University of Ghent, Herreweghe combined studies in medical science and psychiatry with a musical education at the Ghent Conservatory, where Marcel Gazelle, Yehudi Menuhin's accompanist, was his piano teacher...
, Alan Curtis
Alan Curtis (harpsichordist)
Alan Curtis is a noted American harpsichordist, musicologist, and conductor of baroque opera. After graduate studies at the University of Illinois , where he wrote his dissertation on the keyboard music of Sweelinck, he studied in Amsterdam with Gustav Leonhardt, with whom he subsequently recorded...
, Richard Egarr
Richard Egarr
Richard Egarr is a British keyboard performer and conductor. He received his musical training as a choirboy at York Minster, at Chetham's School of Music in Manchester, and as organ scholar at Clare College, Cambridge...
, John Gibbons, Pierre Hantaï
Pierre Hantaï
Pierre Hantaï, is a French conductor and harpsichordist. The son of painter Simon Hantaï, he took up the harpsichord at the age of 11 and studied in Paris with the American teacher Arthur Haas followed by two years in Amsterdam with Gustav Leonhardt...
, Ketil Haugsand
Ketil Haugsand
Ketil Haugsand is a Norwegian harpsichordist and conductor.He started his musical studies in Trondheim and Oslo, and later studied in Prague and Haarlem...
, Ton Koopman
Ton Koopman
Ton Koopman is a conductor, organist and harpsichordist.Koopman had a "classical education" and then studied the organ , harpsichord and musicology in Amsterdam...
, Charlotte Mattax, Davitt Moroney
Davitt Moroney
Davitt Moroney is a British-born and educated musicologist, harpsichordist and organist. His parents were of Irish and Italian extraction – his father was an executive with the Anglo-Dutch Unilever conglomerate...
, Martin Pearlman
Martin Pearlman
Martin Pearlman is an American conductor, harpsichordist, composer, and early-music specialist. In the1973-74 season, he founded Boston Baroque , the first permanent period-instrument orchestra in North America...
(Music Director of Boston Baroque
Boston Baroque
Boston Baroque is the oldest continuing period instrument orchestra in North America. It was founded in 1973 by the American harpsichordist and conductor, Martin Pearlman to present concerts of the Baroque and Classical repertoire on period instruments, drawing on the insights of the historical...
), Edward Parmentier, Christophe Rousset
Christophe Rousset
Christophe Rousset is a French harpsichordist and conductor, specializing in the performance of baroque music on period instruments.-Biography:...
, Andreas Staier
Andreas Staier
Andreas Staier is a German pianist and harpsichordist.-Life:Staier studied piano and harpsichord in the Hochschule für Musik in Hanover, with Kurt Bauer and Erika Haase for piano and from Lajos Rovatkay for harpsichord, and also in Amsterdam. From 1983 until 1986 he was the harpsichord soloist for...
, Skip Sempé, Colin Tilney
Colin Tilney
-Education and professional life:Born in London, Tilney studied music and modern languages at Cambridge University, studied harpsichord with Mary Potts at Kings College, Cambridge, and became a student of Gustav Leonhardt...
, Glen Wilson, and Jeannette Sorrell (founder of Apollo's Fire
Apollo's Fire
Apollo's Fire, The Cleveland Baroque Orchestra is a popular and critically acclaimed period-instrument ensemble specializing in early music based in Cleveland, Ohio. The ensemble unites a select pool of early music specialists from throughout North America and Europe...
)
Leonhardt appeared in the role of J. S. Bach in The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach
The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach
The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach is a 1968 film by the French filmmaking duo of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. It was their first full-length feature film, and reportedly took a decade to finance. The film stars renowned harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt as Johann Sebastian Bach and...
, the 1968 film by Jean-Marie Straub
Jean-Marie Straub
Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet were a duo of filmmakers who made two dozen films between 1963 and 2006...
and Danièle Huillet.
Since 1965 Leonhardt has been a member of the jury at the triennal international harpsichord concours in Bruges. He is the only jury member who had been in all sixteen juries from 1965-2010.
Among the awards given to him are 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 Harnoncourt; it honored their recording of the complete Bach cantatas. Leonhardt is doctor honoris causa of the universities of Dallas, Amsterdam, Harvard, Metz and Padua. In 2007 he was made Commander in the Crown Order in Belgium.