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

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