On the Protestant Roots of Gustav Leonhardt’s Performance Style

Abstract:Keyboardist and conductor Gustav Maria Leonhardt was arguably one of the most influential figures in the late twentieth-century Early Music movement. Through his numerous recordings and extensive teaching he transmitted an aesthetic for the performance of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century music that still influences the reception and production of Early Music today. This article argues that aspects of that aesthetic can be traced to Protestant ideologies of Bach performance prevalent in Germany at the turn of the twentieth century as promoted by certain members of the Neue Bachgesellschaft. The ardent attempts of these theologians and musicologists to return J. S. Bach’s church cantatas to the Evangelical service in Germany (here referred to as the kirchliche Bachbewegung) were linked to ideals of a performance style free from ego and virtuosity. It was believed that by performing the cantatas in a pious spirit, returning them to the service in acts of selfless devotion, the dangerous doctrine of l’art pour l’art could be repudiated. Musicians would then bring spiritual renewal to the German people through Bach’s art. These ideals of performance were taken over and adjusted to the Dutch Calvinist situation by members of the Nederlandse Bachvereniging (Netherlands Bach Society). Leonhardt himself attributed his decision to become a musician to his youthful association with this society. However, rather than ascribing Leonhardt’s absorbtion of key principles of performance to some form of religious indoctrination, it is argued here that his fervent personal Protestant faith formed him to a manner of thinking much in sympathy with the ideals of the Nederlandse Bachvereniging.