Wanda Landowska

Wanda Landowska grew up in Warsaw in a Jewish family and was a piano prodigy. In 1900 she moved to Paris, where she married the folklorist Henry Lew. She became fascinated by early music and the harpsichord, an instrument that had been almost forgotten since the 18th century.

She had harpsichords built for concert halls, played Bach, Scarlatti and Rameau on them and wrote about how early music should be performed. Composers such as Manuel de Falla and Francis Poulenc wrote concertos for her. In 1933 she made the first recording of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” on the harpsichord. At her school near Paris she trained generations of musicians.

After her husband’s death in 1919 she lived with women. From 1933 her pupil Denise Restout was her companion, assistant and later the guardian of her legacy; biographers describe a close, lifelong partnership.

In 1940, when the Germans occupied France, Landowska and Restout fled; the Nazis looted her house and her collection of instruments and manuscripts. In 1941 she arrived in New York, penniless, and started again. She lived in Lakeville, Connecticut, where she died in 1959, aged 80.