Isolde Ahlgrimm, Vienna and the Early Music Revival Isolde Ahlgrimm, Vienna 1943 (Isolde Ahlgrimm’S Collection) Isolde Ahlgrimm, Vienna and the Early Music Revival

Isolde Ahlgrimm, Vienna and the Early Music Revival Isolde Ahlgrimm, Vienna 1943 (Isolde Ahlgrimm’s collection) Isolde Ahlgrimm, Vienna and the Early Music Revival

Peter Watchorn ROUTLEDGE Routledge Taylor & Francis Group LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 2007 by Ashgate Publishing

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Watchorn, Peter Isolde Ahlgrimm, Vienna and the early music revival 1. Ahlgrimm, Isolde, 1914–1995 2. Early-music specialists – Austria – Biography 3. Harpsichordists – Austria – Biography 4. Harpsichord music – Austria –Vienna – History and criticism I. Title 786.4’092

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Watchorn, Peter. Isolde Ahlgrimm, Vienna and the early music revival / Peter Watchorn. p. cm. Includes list of Ahlgrimm’s publications (p. 193) and discography (p. 163). ISBN 978-0-7546-5787-3 (alk. paper) 1. Ahlgrimm, Isolde, 1914–1995. 2. Harpsichordists–Austria–Biography.3. Pianists–Austria– Biography. I. Title. ML417.A615W37 2007 786.4092–dc22 [B] 2007010747

ISBN 9780754657873 (hbk)

Bach musicological font developed by (c) Yo Tomita. This work is dedicated to Isolde Ahlgrimm (1914–1995), one of the great musicians of the twentieth century, whose contributions as performer, scholar and thinker profoundly changed how we view great music of all periods.

Contents

List of Figures ix Acknowledgements xi Foreword by Penelope Crawford xiii Preface by Virginia Pleasants xv

Introduction: Early Music, Vienna and the Missing Link 1

1 Early Education and Influences 29

2 Instrument Collecting, Erich Fiala and the Concerte für Kenner und Liebhaber, 1934–1956 51

3 Isolde Ahlgrimm, Philips Phongraphische Industrie and J. S. Bach: The Complete Works for Harpsichord 89

4 After the Deluge: Artistic Independence. The Years 1956–1984 135

Appendices 1 Discography 163 2 Performers in the Concerte für Kenner und Liebhaber, 1937–1956 169 3 Isolde Ahlgrimm Holland Debut: January 1957, Reviews 171 4 die Concerte für Kenner und Liebhaber—Chronology 177 5 Publications by Isolde Ahlgrimm 193 6 Instruments in the Ahlgrimm-Fiala Collection 195 7 richard Strauss: Capriccio Suite, TrV 279c 197 8 Bach: Cembalo-Konzerte/Das Amati Orchester 199 9 current Trends in Performance of Baroque Music by Isolde Ahlgrimm 207 10 harpsichord Lessons for the Beginner—à la Isolde Ahlgrimm by Kim Kasling 235

Bibliography 239 Index 241

List of Figures

Frontispiece: Isolde Ahlgrimm, Vienna 1943 (Isolde Ahlgrimm’s collection)

1.1 Isolde and Hans Ahlgrimm, 1917 (Isolde Ahlgrimm’s collection) 31 1.2 a) Isolde with friends, Hofburg, Vienna c. 1925 32 b) Isolde at 17, 1931 32 1.3 Juliette Matton Pain-Parré, 1929 (National Portrait Gallery, London) 36 1.4 emil von Sauer, c. 1935 (Photo: Fayer, Vienna. Isolde Ahlgrimm’s collection) 39

2.1 The first concert, 20 February 1937 (Isolde Ahlgrimm’s collection) 56 2.2 erich Fiala, Vienna, 1943 (Isolde Ahlgrimm’s collection) 58 2.3 Isolde Ahlgrimm at the 1937 Ammer harpsichord, 1943 (Isolde Ahlgrimm’s collection) 61 2.4 Programme for the Richard Strauss birthday concert, 1943 67 2.5 Isolde Ahlgrimm at an Ammer clavichord, Vienna 1940s (Isolde Ahlgrimm’s collection) 69 2.6 the “lost” wartime Concerte, 1944–5 73 2.7 Isolde Ahlgrimm and Erich Fiala, Vienna 1953 (Photo: Nico Jesse) 80 2.8 Isolde Ahlgrimm and Erich Fiala, Vienna 1951 (Photo: Nico Jesse) 81 2.9 Concert für Kenner und Liebhaber, 1952: Die Kunst der Fuge (Isolde Ahlgrimm’s collection) 82 2.10 At home, Linke Wienzeile 42, 1953 (Isolde Ahlgrimm’s collection) 82 2.11 Philips publicity photo: “Her Life’s Work,” 1953 (Photo: Nico Jesse) 84 2.12 recording the Bach concertos, Palais Liechtenstein, Vienna 1955 (Photo: Kurt Theiner) 86

3.1 marius van der Meulen, producer for the Bach Complete Works for Harpsichord, with Isolde Ahlgrimm and Friederike Bretschneider (Isolde Ahlgrimm’s collection) 91 3.2 Between takes, Bach: Complete Works for Harpsichord, 1953 (Photo: Nico Jesse) 96 3.3 Isolde Ahlgrimm with the Bach portrait, Vienna 1951 (Photo: Nico Jesse) 107 3.4 The Amati Orchestra: Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Erich Fiala, 1955 (Photo: Kurt Theiner, Isolde Ahlgrimm’s collection) 120 3.5 the Amati Orchestra: Rudolf Baumgartner, Alice Harnoncourt, Karl Trotzmüller (Photo: Kurt Theiner) 125 Isolde Ahlgrimm, Vienna and the Early Music Revival 3.6 the Amati Orchestra: Alice Harnoncourt, 1955 (Photo: Kurt Theiner) 127 3.7 the Amati Orchestra: Alice Harnoncourt and rudolf Baumgartner, 1955 (Photo: Kurt Theiner) 127 3.8 the Holland Tour: The Hague, February 1958 (Isolde Ahlgrimm’s collection) 133

4.1 mozart-Jahr, 1956: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (Photo: Pressestelle der Stadt Wien) 139 4.2 mozart-Jahr, 1956: Isolde Ahlgrimm playing a fortepiano by Anton Walter, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (Photo: Pressestelle der Stadt Wien, Isolde Ahlgrimm’s collection) 139 4.3 recording Bach for Belvedere, 1965 (Isolde Ahlgrimm’s collection) 143 4.4 Brugge, 1968: Robert Veyron-Lacroix, Isolde Ahlgrimm, thurston Dart, Charles König (Isolde Ahlgrimm’s collection) 148 4.5 Brugge, 1974: Isolde Ahlgrimm playing the Knud Kaufmann copy of a 1734 Hass harpsichord (Photo Luc Bovée, Brugge, Isolde Ahlgrimm’s collection) 149 4.6 Vienna, 1975. Receiving the medal of honour for services to the Austrian Republic (Photo: Fritz Kern, Vienna. Isolde Ahlgrimm’s collection) 153 4.7 recording the Händel Suites for Eterna, 1978 (Photo: Hans-Joachim Mirschel, Isolde Ahlgrimm’s collection) 154 4.8 Isolde Ahlgrimm, 1980 (Photo: Kaufmann, Köthen, Isolde Ahlgrimm’s collection) 155 Acknowledgements

This work has been written with the assistance of numerous people over many years. I would first like to acknowledge the crucial assistance of two early collaborators, Ilse Wolfram and Laszlo Molnar, both of whom were long-time residents of Vienna with a passionate interest in preserving her cultural traditions. It was they who undertook most of the translations into both German and English of the many quotations throughout. The American fortepianist and harpsichordist, Virginia Pleasants, Ahlgrimm’s closest friend for fifty years, contributed a short but moving preface that transports us back to Vienna in the immediate post-war period. She was also a mine of information in re-creating the atmosphere of immediate post-war Vienna, where she and her husband Henry lived for five critical years. My good friend, the late Dr. Howard Schott (1923–2005) read the early proofs and made many helpful suggestions that have helped improve the flow of the text. My thanks also go to the greatest harpsichordist of our time, Dr. Gustav Leonhardt, who provided an invaluable interview, fine strawberries and the hospitality of his beautiful home in Amsterdam. I am also grateful to Dr. Larry Palmer and Dr. C. David Harris, two of Isolde Ahlgrimm’s distinguished American former students, both of whom have made many helpful suggestions. Larry Palmer, a kindred spirit, has just published his most interesting memoirs, based on letters he wrote home as a student in Salzburg in the late 1950s. He conveys Isolde Ahlgrimm’s combination of musicianship, skill and warm sense of humour perfectly. In recent days I received generous cooperation from Prof. Paul Badura-Skoda in Vienna, who confirmed an essential link between Isolde Ahlgrimm’s playing of Mozart in 1951, and both his colleague Jörg Demus’ and his own initial interest in the fortepiano and harpsichord. For the laborious process of multiple proof-reading of the near-to-final text, my friends and colleagues Susan Youens, Max van Egmond, Greg Miller and Penelope Crawford are owed special thanks. Penelope Crawford, one of America’s leading fortepianists, having provided invaluable assistance in proofing the manuscript, kindly contributed a foreword for the book in tribute to her Viennese predecessor. Geoffrey Burgess transcribed the music examples. I especially wish to acknowledge the continued assistance of Dr. Richard Hallinan, fine violinist and physician, who personally undertook the job of interviewing Isolde Ahlgrimm during the very first stages of the genesis of this work. Richard, who was my eyes and ears in Vienna for many years, has assisted into print an essentially unwritten chapter in the story of period-instrument performance. He gave the work its basic form, which survives in the book’s final incarnation without serious alteration. This book is, in large part, his work too. I could not have written it without him. My thanks also go to Heidi May of Ashgate Publishing and especially to my

Larry Palmer: Letters from Salzburg. A Music Student in Europe, 1958–1959, Eau Clare, WI, Skyline Publications, 2006. xii Isolde Ahlgrimm, Vienna and the Early Music Revival editors, Sara Peacock and Barbara Pretty for their understanding and diligence in correcting my text. Needless to say, as every author must admit at this juncture, the points of view expressed are my own and responsibility for any remaining errors is willingly accepted. The quality of the finished result was largely due also to the interest and assistance of Isolde Ahlgrimm herself, who over time warmed to the idea, and finally became quite curious to see the result. She provided unfailing hospitality during hours upon hours of interviews and also supplied many rare documents and photographs, which were left to me in order to complete what we had started, along with her permission to publish them posthumously. I am honouring her memory by presenting most of them here for the very first time. I hope she would be pleased (and relieved) by the completion and appearance of the finished product. It is offered to her memory with great love and respect. Peter Watchorn, Cambridge, MA Foreword

Reading Peter Watchorn’s vivid chronicle of the life and musical career of fortepianist and harpsichordist Isolde Ahlgrimm fascinated me, but left me with regret that I had so narrowly missed a chance to meet and work with her. In the summer of 1963, as an Eastman graduate pianist with a special interest in music of the Baroque and Classic eras, I arrived in Salzburg, Austria for a year’s study at the Mozarteum. The closest I had ever come to an actual harpsichord was as a teenaged “continuo” player in a Händel concerto grosso performance at the Interlochen National Music Camp. For this, my early music debut, I was provided with an upright piano with thumbtack-studded hammers. Whether it was Händel’s music or the unique sounds of my pseudo-harpsichord, something of this experience remained with me until I finally built a harpsichord of my own many years later. At the Mozarteum I listened wistfully as fellow students regaled me with stories of “the Ahlgrimm Years.” The lady herself had departed the year before I arrived. Had our paths crossed I would undoubtedly have begun my own exploration of historical instruments many years earlier. Isolde Ahlgrimm appears in the pages of Peter Watchorn’s biography as an artist of great depth, insight, and integrity and a person of extraordinary strength and determination. Her pioneering contributions to the field of early music, which have largely gone unrecognized, were vital to our present-day awareness and appreciation of the musical aesthetics of former times. As a superb musician who knew the importance of scholarly research and saw period instruments as primary tools for understanding music of the past, she influenced many of the best known early music performers of the next generation—Gustav Leonhardt, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Paul Badura-Skoda, Jörg Demus, to name a few. Vienna in the time of her Kenner und Liebhaber concert series must indeed have been an exciting musical centre! Ahlgrimm’s venture into the world of early instruments via the fortepiano is an interesting wrinkle that has escaped notice. Most of the generation of keyboard players that followed her, perhaps inspired by Gustav Leonhardt, began by exploring the music and sound world of the harpsichord and eventually “moved on” to the fortepiano. One wonders how things might have proceeded if her performances of solo and chamber music on fortepiano had been recorded and available to the public. The growing interest in the harpsichord, and the burgeoning crop of harpsichord builders in the 1950s and 60s might have been accompanied by a rising number of fortepiano makers and players. As I listen to Ahlgrimm’s harpsichord recordings of Bach I sense her emerging as a missing link in our evolution toward reconstructing historical instruments and playing styles. Her playing, while colourful and imaginative, is never fussy or self-important. One has a clear sense that her goal is to understand and project the spirit and intention of the composer, a goal not shared by some of her more famous contemporaries. Peter Watchorn’s profound respect and admiration for his subject xiv Isolde Ahlgrimm, Vienna and the Early Music Revival is apparent throughout the pages of this book. The story of Ahlgrimm’s musical life offers more than a glimpse of the flowering of early music in Vienna before World War II, and her place at its centre. She was a woman of rare gifts, coupled with vision, perseverance, and the courage of her convictions. The reader will come away from reading about her life with an altered view of the history of the early music movement. Penelope Crawford, Ann Arbor, MI Preface

There are today not many who have known Isolde Ahlgrimm for fifty years. I am fortunate to be one of them. One day in September 1945, an American captain with the occupying 5th Army in Austria, my husband, Henry Pleasants, knocked on the door of the Strudlhofgasse 17, and an apprehensive Isolde answered. She could not have known that he had come on a musical mission, not a military one. I joined him soon after that, and so began a musical and personal friendship which has endured to this day as I write this modest tribute. Her many accomplishments await the reader of these pages. The post-war years were difficult in so many ways, but through total dedication, uncompromising belief, integrity—and talent, she continued through thick and thin—and sometimes, very thin. For her strength of character and singleness of purpose, I happily write these few words from deepest friendship and love. Virginia Pleasants, London 12 September 1994

Virginia Pleasants, the well-known American harpsichordist and fortepianist met Isolde Ahlgrimm at the end of World War II. She took part in the Concerte für Kenner und Liebhaber in 1946, performing the Mozart double piano concerto with Isolde Ahlgrimm and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. Mrs Pleasants and her husband Henry, the famous writer and music critic, remained close friends of Isolde Ahlgrimm until her death in October 1995. Peter Watchorn

Introduction: Early Music, Vienna and the Missing Link

Tempus fugit: early music under the microscope

During the late 1980s and 1990s, several books exploring the history of the twentieth-century early music revival appeared. The movement dedicated to the music and performance practices of previous historical periods was now itself under the microscope of historiographical research. Surveys such as The Early Music Revival—A History by the American critic and writer Harry Haskell dealt in quite some detail with the story of the revival, from its first stirrings in the early nineteenth century, through to the latest developments of the 1980s. Remembering, of course, that Haskell’s book was just one widely circulated example of what was then being written, and that there have since been many others, it remains a useful point of departure for this study, which was begun just after that book first appeared. Although the issues remain largely the same, the scene Haskell described has since changed beyond recognition. Harry Haskell took on the daunting task of describing a wide and expanding field (though it was still not “globalized” as it is today), one of the most interesting and enduring musical phenomena in our time: performance that takes more into account than just intuition or received tradition. Profiling the major performers and scholars involved in all areas of the early music revival, the author also provided a geographically based description of progress in each of the major countries where the revival occurred. Harry Haskell’s book undertook a complete discussion of what he identified as the major centres and personalities of the (then) century-long re-awakening of interest in music of the past. At the source of all this he discussed the pioneering careers of Wanda Landowska and Arnold Dolmetsch, and, later, Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Gustav Leonhardt, the most influential figures on the landscape. In the chapter entitled “The Early Music Subculture,” Haskell quite rightly focused on the tragically short-lived David Munrow and on Gustav Leonhardt as two of the outstanding champions of the post-war early music revival. There followed a brief description of the early music movement in Japan (which had yet to really get underway through its “Dutch” connection, but has since fully flowered) and recent encouraging trends in the countries of the former Eastern Europe, where the early music scene has expanded considerably since.

Harry Haskell: The Early Music Revival—A History, London, Thames & Hudson, 1988. Isolde Ahlgrimm, Vienna and the Early Music Revival Vienna—the view from ’85

Vienna is often described as “the city of music.” The eighteenth- and nineteenth- century musical capital that figures pre-eminently in this book appeared only in sketchy outline at the bottom of Harry Haskell’s geographical list, almost as an afterthought. The author tersely noted:

Elsewhere in Europe, post-war trends have been much the same [as Eastern Europe]. Vienna’s rise to prominence in the 1950s stemmed largely from the musicologist Josef Mertin, who counted [Nikolaus] Harnoncourt, René Clemencic and Eduard Melkus among his pupils at the Akademie für Musik. As the home of Leonhardt (who taught at the academy in the early fifties), the Concentus Musicus, The Clemencic Consort, Melkus’s Capella Academica and the Wiener Blockflötenensemble, Vienna staked its claim to being a capital of the early music world.

And that was that. This brief mention of Vienna’s post-war activities seemed to me to have significantly underestimated, if not overlooked entirely the importance of “the city of music” as one of the first crucially important outposts of the early music revival. And back in 1985, it was perhaps not hard to see why. Vienna is located at the eastern end of what used to be Western Europe and even as late as 1988 it had not fully emerged from the shadow of its bitter war-time experience and its seemingly endless post-war occupation by foreign powers. Since then Vienna has been totally transformed into one of the most vital of all European capitals. Twenty years ago it seemed to the casual observer pretty much the backwater it had been since 1945; its lingering reputation as a once-great centre of European culture, science, and philosophy was strangely at odds with the shabby buildings and the grey, slightly depressed atmosphere that still pervaded it. The piles of rubble wrought by allied bombs during the war were gone, but in 1985 the atmosphere in Vienna retained a faint echo of the city immortalized in Carol Reed’s unforgettable 1949 film of Graham Greene’s story, The Third Man.

And today…

However, from the vantage point of the year 2006, it may be argued that what took place musically in Vienna beginning over seventy years ago truly provided the spark that went on to ignite the entire world’s still-burgeoning interest in early music. Even more significantly, Vienna’s revival of interest in performance practice, with its most famous ambassador Nikolaus Harnoncourt now firmly established as its leading light, has changed the way the entire world thinks about performing Western music of all periods. Most reasonably informed musicians now pay at least some attention to the historical context of music from every period. How did it originally sound? What can we know about how it was first performed? What did the composer

Mertin’s book, Alte Musik: Wege zur Aufführungspraxis, published in Vienna in 1978 by Verlag Elisabeth Lafite, has been made available in an English translation under the title Early Music: Approaches to Performance Practice, New York, Da Capo, 1986. Haskell: The Early Music Revival, p. 168. Introduction: Early Music, Vienna and the Missing Link expect? How big was the orchestra? What did particular notation mean in any given place at any given time? Nowadays, symphony orchestras, pianists, harpsichordists, and violinists are expected to prepare their concerts with more information than their instincts alone provide—whether or not they are fully aware of doing it. Present-day playing by modern orchestras has changed as a result. From the Vienna Philharmonic to the Chamber Orchestra of Europe; from the Concertgebouw of Amsterdam to the Australian Chamber Orchestra; from the Boston Symphony to the Cleveland Orchestra: all of these institutions have adopted elements of historically informed performance practice in their own playing of earlier repertoire. This has in turn filtered down to the younger generation of conductors and soloists, who have grown up hearing the sounds of period-instrument orchestras. Finally, many specialist conductors who began careers with their own period ensembles have now joined the international circuit of modern symphony orchestras. Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Frans Brüggen, Christopher Hogwood, Roger Norrington, Trevor Pinnock, and many others are now familiar figures on the podiums of many modern symphony orchestras. Their influence over both players and mainstream conductors has been profound, gradually changing the way many of their modern colleagues think about performing older music. There is abundant evidence that this new way of looking at things, spawned by the early music revival, has profoundly affected the mainstream interpretation of “classical” music. The question is: how, why and to what extent did this revival begin in Vienna? For over a thousand years Vienna has occupied a special position as a significant outpost of western civilization. Developed from an earlier Celtic settlement about 15 bc by the Romans, the city was mentioned as early as ad 881 among the Annals of Salzburg and in 1155 the Babenberg dukes (976–1248), precursors of the Habsburgs, moved their court to Vienna. In 1282 Rudolph I of Habsburg, appointed Holy Roman Emperor in 1273, installed his two sons as dukes of Austria. Finally, in 1440, the Habsburgs adopted the city as their principal residence, remaining in power until 1918. Vienna’s easterly location made it a border-town of the West and a bastion against numerous foreign invasions, most notably by the Turks, who as late as 1683 attempted to overrun the city, inadvertently contributing two staples, coffee and the croissant, to European culture.

Isolde Ahlgrimm

Harry Haskell’s brief reference to Vienna as an early music centre quite rightly lists a few of the now famous names, musicians who will figure prominently as we proceed. I believe, however, that he has overlooked one of the principal instigators of Vienna’s unique development as an early music capital. He has failed to mention a prodigy born into a family that was sufficiently musical to be able to count Johannes Brahms as its regular visitor in the 1890s. It was she who first came to bridge the gap Isolde Ahlgrimm, Vienna and the Early Music Revival between Vienna’s conservative musical establishment and a new understanding of the value of old music and period instruments. Isolde Ahlgrimm was both a harpsichordist and the pioneer exponent of the fortepiano. In the course of a long career she became a much-respected figure amongst her colleagues, students, and, for a long time, the musical public in Vienna itself. The central thesis of this work is that her contribution to the harpsichord and fortepiano revival was pivotal in the resurrection and further understanding of these two neglected instruments. Her use of period instruments and the example she provided to younger musicians, including Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Gustav Leonhardt, has been almost entirely overlooked by the wider musical world. This neglect was confirmed by her omission from Haskell’s and virtually every other study, including the latest edition of the Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music, a standard reference work that includes the names of both Leonhardt and Harnoncourt. I hope to rectify this situation and show why she is worthy of far greater recognition.

How and why this book came to be written

I first noticed Isolde Ahlgrimm’s absence from the written accounts of the early music revival around 1972 when—as a student fascinated by the harpsichord, who had heard only her recordings of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier—I could never find a single written reference to her or any of her work. In those days, as an avid collector of LP recordings, I was also a committed reader of The Gramophone magazine, which I regularly perused in our town library. Within a few years it was made forcefully clear to me, as I read the first review I had ever found of her work, that the writer really had no idea of who she was, or what she had done. With the memory of this review still fresh in my mind, it came as a total surprise to me to learn, while conducting my research, that Ahlgrimm’s original inspiration to take up the harpsichord had actually come during a trip she made to England as a student in 1930. The writer for The Gramophone reviewed Isolde Ahlgrimm’s first LP for a major label in twenty years as though it was her debut recording, so it was clear that she was basically unknown in Britain. When I actually met her for the first time in 1985, I was still quite unaware of the extent of her career, or the position she had once held as a beloved and important musician in Vienna, various other countries in Europe and the USA. I knew, since both she and Harnoncourt lived in Vienna, and Leonhardt had been there too as a young man, that they probably all knew one another, or had at least crossed paths. It seemed to me that there was something here

Howard Mayer Brown, in his article ‘Pedantry or Liberation? A Sketch of the Historical Performance Movement’, in N. Kenyon (ed.), Authenticity and Early Music (Oxford University Press, 1988), likewise fails to mention Ahlgrimm and her concerts, although, in a letter to the author in 1989, he noted that, as a student in Vienna in the 1950s, he was well aware of her activities. A then newly recorded solo Bach disc containing the Italian Concerto, French Overture, four Duets, and the Capriccio in B: Philips, 1975. Introduction: Early Music, Vienna and the Missing Link that had never been written about, and obvious connections that had never been made. I simply knew her as a recording artist whose work I truly liked and admired, and had little idea of the wider implications of her career or her impact on the early music movement. That Isolde Ahlgrimm gained an entry in the 1980 New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians was due to the diligence and erudition of the American editor, writer and scholar Howard Schott. Dr. Schott, as a harpsichord specialist and long- time friend of the fortepianist Virginia Pleasants, his compatriot who also happened also to be one of Ahlgrimm’s oldest friends, well understood the importance of her career. Although it seemed that England had largely overlooked her, certain others interested in the harpsichord had not, even in such far-flung British colonial outposts as Newcastle, New South Wales, where I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s. Fortunately for me, the Ahlgrimm recordings seem to have been better circulated in distant Australia than they were in nearby England and, indeed, my first experience of the harpsichord itself came through hearing Ahlgrimm’s recordings as a young piano student. I was so entranced by the playing that I became determined to seek her out in Vienna, and if possible, work with her. This I did for the first time in 1985, after having received a not entirely encouraging response to my first letter, mainly pointing out the impossibility of finding any sort of practice instrument in Vienna. I was persistent, however, and first made the long trip to Vienna in March 1985. Three months later, after a period of intensive study, I received the Erwin Bodky Memorial Award in Boston for my performances of the music we had worked on together. She was so thrilled (and, perhaps surprised) that she sent me a hand-written letter of congratulation covered in stick-on flowers as a bouquet. In 1987 I went back for more and cemented the relationship, visiting her for extended periods over the next eight years. As a result of my first tentative enquiries, sent unpromisingly from the opposite side of the world, I studied seriously with her for eight years and became her friend for the last ten years of her life. Observing that Ahlgrimm had no family, and that she also appeared to have no obvious musical successor, although she had taught many students over the years, I very gingerly broached the idea of a written biography one afternoon after our lesson, quite unsure of what her reaction might be. She was astonished that anyone could be interested in undertaking such a task. Who on earth, she asked, would want to read it? I remained resolute (or perhaps, to put it more accurately, stubborn). Finally, by 1989 with Isolde Ahlgrimm as an initially reluctant subject, aided by an Australian friend studying in Vienna who kindly offered to assist, I began to set down her story. It is a story that all those interested in the harpsichord and fortepiano should know, a story of courage and fortitude, of the joy of discovery and of the tragedy of war. More specifically, it helps us to understand how the early music revival in Vienna began and subsequently spread via Amsterdam to the rest of the Europe and throughout the world, as far afield as the United States, Australia and Japan. And my

Named after Erwin Bodky (1896–1958), another pioneering harpsichordist and foundation professor of music at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA in the USA. In 1985, the award was still presented as a prize for participation in a competition. Isolde Ahlgrimm, Vienna and the Early Music Revival research showed, as I began to make all the hitherto merely suspected connections, that Isolde Ahlgrimm’s role in it all was indeed an important one. She deserved to be known to a wider public and a new generation. Most importantly, my familiarity with her work and my own instincts told me that she was an extraordinary musician. This early admiration has grown as I have come to know her work in far greater detail and with the perspective afforded by many years of reflection on my subject.

Isolde Ahlgrimm’s idea, with inspiration from Erich Fiala

Isolde Ahlgrimm was born in Vienna at the beginning of World War I, 31 July 1914. In the course of a career lasting fifty years she played a truly significant role re- establishing the performance of early music in Europe. This she did by simply taking into account whatever she could find out about how the music was performed in its own day. Her straightforward idea, taken up by many of the next-generation musicians mentioned by Harry Haskell, including Gustav Leonhardt, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Eduard Melkus, and later their own students, led to a wide variety of results and finally produced the thriving early music scene with which we are familiar today. It was a simple concept with profound implications that spread throughout the world, and its results now influence to some degree the performance of virtually all Western art music. Nowadays, singers and instrumentalists training in conservatories, as well as symphony orchestras and conductors, all at least pay lip service to “performance practice”. New ideas always seem to create waves of action and reaction, and the wave of reaction appears, with Bach again played on the piano, to have very much taken hold—for the present. Nevertheless, the argument for at least taking into account the resources and performance conditions expected by the composer has largely won musicians over, and the musical landscape has been transformed as a result. This enlightened attitude was far from usual in the musical world of Isolde Ahlgrimm’s youth and early maturity, as we shall see.

“A little bit of luck”

Isolde Ahlgrimm struggled to develop her own unusual career in Vienna in the face of two world wars and a terrible depression, when, during its worst days, people carried their weekly wages home in wheelbarrows and the currency halved in value between the opening and closing of one business day. No less significantly, Ahlgrimm’s concentration on early music ran counter to the ideas of a conservative and powerful musical establishment. She overcame these difficulties through hard work, courage, and determination. In her favour she had a few sympathetic critics, huge reserves of talent, and, now and then, a little bit of luck. Out of this, Ahlgrimm managed to forge an important musical career, based on the use of period instruments and a proper understanding of historical performance practice. The word “authenticity” Introduction: Early Music, Vienna and the Missing Link was disliked by Ahlgrimm, who always understood its limits. Above all she wanted to please and enlighten her audiences by playing with beauty and intelligence. In 1934 she met her future husband, Erich Fiala, whose ideas on how to perform old music convinced her to completely change her own goals. This led her to abandon the life of aspiring piano virtuoso for something much more unusual and, perhaps, worthwhile: a career devoted to researching, playing, and educating the public in the world of historical keyboard instruments. Fiala had the obsessive interest—and the resources—to open up this world to her. The results were to significantly change her life and the history of musical performance.

The beginnings of the revival: Dolmetsch and Landowska

In 1930, the 16-year-old Isolde Ahlgrimm, visiting England on her first trip away from home, encountered the Belgian Juliette Matton-Pain Parré, a soprano, viola da gambist, and music director who taught in the summer in the little resort town of Frinton-on-Sea, and who throughout the rest of the year conducted a professional troupe of musicians in London, which provided musical accompaniments on period instruments for the plays of William Shakespeare. The general interest in the culture of the past that allowed Mme. Matton’s peculiar professional focus to flourish can be traced back to around 1830, at the height of the Romantic era, when composers and writers alike began to draw fresh inspiration from Shakespeare and other Elizabethan dramatists. Since then the movement had continued to gain pace throughout Europe. In the field of music, and specifically the revival of what was later termed “early” music, this drive to re-discover the past had gathered extra momentum since around 1900, interest now extending to the actual sounds of historical musical instruments as well as the music. Similarly, paralleling the field of music, poets, writers, and painters all began to examine and draw their own inspiration from the works of their predecessors to a far greater degree than before. In England, beginning around 1880, this produced a sort of mini-Renaissance, spearheaded by the pre-Raphaelite movement. In the embryonic field of “early music” this spirit of re-discovery was personified by the French violinist Arnold Dolmetsch (1858–1940), who moved to London in the 1880s. Dolmetsch’s influence grew with the publication of his book The Interpretation of Music in the Seventeenth & Eighteenth Centuries, which appeared in 1915. Under the influence of the British Arts and Crafts movement led by William Morris, Dolmetsch’s interest in early music extended to re-creating historical musical instruments himself. He established workshops devoted to making early keyboard instruments in Boston at the Chickering piano factory in 1908, and in Paris in 1925 for the piano makers Gaveau, and finally back in England in the town of Haslemere, Surrey. His work was supported and promoted by influential literary figures such as George Bernard Shaw, W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound. Among the many customers for his instruments who also studied with Dolmetsch were the famous Italian pianist and composer Ferruccio Busoni (1866–1924) and England’s first woman harpsichordist, Violet Gordon Woodhouse

See Appendix 8. Isolde Ahlgrimm, Vienna and the Early Music Revival (1872–1948). Later the American harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick (1911–84), would come to Haslemere both to train with Dolmetsch on the clavichord and to acquire an instrument from him. Meanwhile, on the continent, the Polish harpsichordist and pianist Wanda Landowska (1879–1959), who saw her first antique harpsichord in 1900, increasingly devoted herself to a study of the old instrument, her career coming to real prominence after a successful concert at the Breslau Bach Festival in 1912. The Bach revival in Germany had gained its first real impetus in 1829 as a result of Felix Mendelssohn’s performances in Leipzig of the St. Matthew Passion. It received further reinforcement twenty years later with the founding of the Bach-Gesellschaft. This society, which included many leading and influential musicians among both its editorial board and its list of subscribers, was dedicated to producing an accurate complete edition of Bach’s music. Its appearance represented the dawning of the field of German musicological research and led to a fundamental change in the way music of the past was considered. Similar projects to edit the works of Händel and Couperin followed. A sense of nationalism drove various projects to collect the works of various composers into complete editions. In France the works of François Couperin, Jean-Baptiste Lully, and Jean-Philippe Rameau; in Germany the works of Heinrich Schütz; and in the Netherlands the music of Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck were collected and edited. In Austria, the 83-volume Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich project, founded by Guido Adler and produced from 1896 to 1938, collected for the first time the works of Froberger, Fux, Isaac, and many other important Austrian composers. This seismic shift in how the composers of the past were regarded defines a large part of the musical world today. Isolde Ahlgrimm’s own idea of harpsichord performance was initially gained from her experience playing the eighteenth-century Viennese fortepiano, an instrument closely related to the harpsichord that was, in the first decades of its existence, considered to be interchangeable with it. She encountered several original examples of this instrument before she was able to own a harpsichord. The keyboard technique that she later developed came about through a combination of reading old treatises, applying practical experience, and using her own common sense. In this way her experience was similar to that of the young Arnold Dolmetsch, who had acquired his own knowledge through restoring antique keyboard instruments and then copying them. His own perspective as a player was influenced by direct contact with original instruments. In contrast, from 1912 at least, Wanda Landowska applied a Russian- influenced pianistic technique to a modernized type of harpsichord. Landowska, like Ahlgrimm after her, had begun her career as a virtuoso pianist and, in contrast to her younger contemporary, remained active as a modern pianist specializing in the works of Mozart and Haydn. The Parisian piano-making firm Pleyel had constructed their first modern harpsichord in 1889, for the Paris International Exposition of that year. Just prior to 1912 Landowska collaborated with Pleyel in a quest to re-design the

It was the 1740 three-manual instrument by Hieronymus Albrecht Hass, now owned by Landowska’s student, Rafael Puyana. This was truly the magnum opus of historical harpsichord building and featured the following disposition: 16′, 2 x 8′, 4′, 2′ plus an array of buff registers and manual couplers. Introduction: Early Music, Vienna and the Missing Link harpsichord as a fully fledged twentieth-century instrument, in order to present the older instrument more effectively to a public conditioned to a high level of pianistic virtuosity. From the outset, Ahlgrimm was keenly aware of Landowska’s importance in re-establishing the harpsichord as an instrument to be taken seriously. She strove to achieve a similar level of professionalism in her own playing, although in other ways her ideals and experience were quite different from those of her illustrious older colleague. Ahlgrimm believed passionately in the use of the fortepiano for the music of Mozart and Haydn. Landowska, who was also a genuinely great Mozart pianist, was interested in conveying the effects possible on the fortepiano by way of the modern Steinway on which she continued to perform. She wrote:

For a true understanding of these works and of the multiplicity of sonorous and expressive means Mozart had at his disposal, it is of prime importance for all present day pianists to study the resources and effects of eighteenth-century keyboard instruments as well as the manner of manipulating them. They should be instructed in the science and art of creating on the modern piano a special touch which can reproduce most faithfully the tonal aesthetics of Mozart’s time.

This sums up the difference between Landowska’s and Ahlgrimm’s approach: Ahlgrimm removed any need for “adapting” by going directly to the source, in this case, the very fortepianos that Mozart knew. While championing the harpsichord in a modernized form, Landowska remained equally devoted to the modern Steinway piano as a vehicle for playing Classical music. Like her own contemporary Ralph Kirkpatrick (1911–84), Ahlgrimm well knew (briefly owning a very pretty example) that the iron-framed Pleyel harpsichord and the whole cult around Landowska and her playing were far removed from the distant and different eighteenth-century aesthetic of Bach, Scarlatti, Händel, and Rameau. At one time, shortly after her first experience with the harpsichord in London, Isolde Ahlgrimm considered moving to Paris to study with Wanda Landowska. Her mother’s concern for her innocent young daughter alone among the temptations of Paris prevented this from coming about. In Vienna itself there were also some important early pioneers in the field of early music. Several of these, though not harpsichordists, became Isolde Ahlgrimm’s immediate mentors and role models in her developing interest in music of the past. The first, Alexander Wunderer (1877–1955), was principal oboist in the Vienna Philharmonic, director of the Academy of Music as well as a conductor and composer. In 1913 he founded the Vienna Bach Society (Wiener Bach Gemeinde). One of his students was the Viennese-born Gabriela Elsa Pessl, a pianist and harpsichordist who performed under the name Yella Pessl (1906–91) and, for a time, achieved fame second only to Landowska’s. Among other things, Pessl performed the Goldberg Variations10 and elicited the praise of the composer Richard Strauss, who later also befriended Ahlgrimm. Like Landowska, she played a harpsichord that had been redesigned basically as a modified piano, by the German maker Karl Maendler, sold through the piano manufacturer Max Josef Schramm. Pessl left Vienna in 1931 to

Wanda Landowska: Landowska on Music, New York, Stein & Day, 1964. 10 Catherine Dower: Yella Pessl: First Lady of the Harpsichord, Lewiston, NY, The Edwin Mellor Press, 1992, p. 137. 10 Isolde Ahlgrimm, Vienna and the Early Music Revival marry and take up a position at New York’s Columbia University. Wunderer himself left Vienna for the United States in disgust at the Nazi regime in 1938, dying in his native city in 1955.

Vienna, Josef Mertin and the Concerte für Kenner und Liebhaber

As her profile in Vienna increased through playing old instruments in public, Isolde Ahlgrimm’s position complemented the important seminal role of her older colleague, Professor Josef Mertin, who numbered among his students at the Vienna Musikakademie many who were later to achieve worldwide fame in the field of early music theory and practice. The long list of participants in Ahlgrimm’s pioneering concert series before and after the war suggests not only the respect that Ahlgrimm engendered among her own generation, but also shows that these programmes provided rich performance opportunities for younger musicians, many of whom were Mertin’s students, whose subsequent careers would further develop these ideas. Among the many attendees of these concerts11 Gustav Leonhardt, Jörg Demus, Virginia Pleasants and Paul Badura-Skoda have acknowledged that they were impressed by various aspects of those programmes they heard, and characterized them, along with the first reviewers back in 1937, as something entirely new for their time. The American musicologist Howard Mayer Brown also related that, especially for a young foreign student in Vienna at the time, it was very difficult to get into them unless you were a subscriber, since the concerts were always sold out.12 Ahlgrimm’s serious interest in the performance of old music on period instruments began in 1934. Three years later, in February 1937, she presented the first of her eventually famous series ofConcerte für Kenner und Liebhaber (Concerts for Connoisseurs and Dilettantes) (taken from a set of keyboard pieces by C. P. E. Bach)13 in the Palais Palffy on Vienna’s Josefsplatz (near the famous Spanish Riding School). By 1937 Isolde Ahlgrimm was one of a number of musicians working in Europe to restore the music of previous centuries to prominence. She was virtually alone in using genuine period instruments. The element of modernization that both Landowska and Yella Pessl introduced to the harpsichord—with their use of iron-framed instruments strung like pianos, which required their own modern playing technique—was entirely absent from Ahlgrimm and Fiala’s concept of presenting early music. The repertoire the young couple presented filled 74 different programmes, presented in the hundreds of concerts that comprised the Concerte für Kenner und Liebhaber over a period of nearly twenty years. During my own period of study with her in the mid-1980s Isolde Ahlgrimm would often describe how difficult it had been in the early days to find concerts of Mozart’s or Haydn’s music. During her days as a student at the Vienna Academy,

11 All views were expressed through the interviews and written correspondence that were conducted for this work. 12 Howard Mayer Brown studied in Vienna from 1951 to 1953. Private communication, 7 May 1989. 13 Along with the old German spelling of Concerte. Introduction: Early Music, Vienna and the Missing Link 11 very little Viennese classical repertoire was heard at all, not even the works of native composers as recent as Schubert, whose music was transcribed and distorted whenever it was (rarely) played. Along with the keyboard works of the eighteenth century, Schubert’s piano music was not highly regarded by professional musicians or the public for years to come.14 The variety of Ahlgrimm’s concert programmes, which explored all types of repertoire from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, shows how she defined her own mission: to bring first-rate but neglected music to the public’s attention, regardless of when it was written. Nor was contemporary music absent from her programmes, with specially commissioned works appearing alongside music from centuries earlier. Being an uncommonly hard worker she insisted on the highest technical and musical standards in her own performances as well as those of her colleagues. She was also a tough, though ultimately fair, teacher and critic.

Colleagues, friends and rivals

Other than Landowska, there were of course other harpsichordists (although almost no fortepianists we know of) whose careers began either earlier than Ahlgrimm’s or at the same time. The Swiss harpsichordist Isabelle Nef and the German Eta Harich- Schneider were both among Landowska’s earlier students. Harich-Schneider, also an expert on Japanese Court music,15 a good writer and a notoriously difficult woman,16 both followed and preceded Isolde Ahlgrimm as professor of harpsichord at the Vienna Academy. There was also Edith Picht-Axenfeld in Germany, whose career as harpsichordist both began and ended later than Ahlgrimm’s. In Basle there was Eduard Müller, and in Amsterdam Hans Brandts Buys and Janny van Wering. Landowska also included among her early students the Italian Ruggero Gerlin and Viennese-born Alice Ehlers. In Vienna itself until 1931 there was the remarkable Yella Pessl, who emigrated to the USA. There was also Greta Kraus, who first presented a harpsichord concert in 1935. Kraus, like Pessl before her left Vienna to begin afresh overseas, in Kraus’s case settling in Canada. It is important to note, however, that none of these interesting musicians used real period instruments or was influenced by direct experience with them. Pessl had played the occasional old instrument, but only in retirement did she abandon her iron-framed Maendler-Schramm harpsichord, upon which she performed throughout her career. The involvement of Erich Fiala was crucial to the development of Isolde Ahlgrimm’s own ideas, since it was he who had the motivation and the resources to discover and purchase antique instruments. Isolde Ahlgrimm enjoyed one of her bits of good fortune in meeting a man with the means and the interest to fully support and even inspire her. In those early days, Fiala provided ideas, security, space and the physical resources for her to fully develop and pursue her art. Without his drive,

14 It was actually Artur Schnabel who, in the 1920s, began to restore Schubert’s piano music to the concert repertoire. 15 For many years, Harich-Schneider was the leading expert, with many important scholarly books to her credit. 16 “Prussian,” in Virginia Pleasants’ unforgettable description of her. 12 Isolde Ahlgrimm, Vienna and the Early Music Revival as she acknowledged to the end, she would never have done it herself. Nevertheless, Ahlgrimm eventually paid a high price for all this security, for the marriage with Erich Fiala was never an easy one. Fiala was one of the world’s true eccentrics, according to Virginia Pleasants, who together with her husband Henry knew them both well.

The harpsichord: modern vs. historical. Ralph Kirkpatrick

Ralph Kirkpatrick (1911–84), the American who had the distinction of studying with both Arnold Dolmetsch and Wanda Landowska, shared one important common experience with Isolde Ahlgrimm, whom he never knew personally. Both musicians had directly encountered genuine antique historical keyboard instruments and appreciated them immediately. Indeed, Kirkpatrick’s mentor, Arnold Dolmetsch, had himself built replica keyboard instruments that owed much to historical models. Dolmetsch also undertook the restoration of antiques, so he knew their characteristics first hand.17 The handful of clavichords he built in England in the 1890s, and the dozen or so harpsichords he built in Boston at Chickering’s factory ten years later, for years set high standards of authenticity. During his American years, Dolmetsch lived close to Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The first harpsichord that Kirkpatrick ever encountered was the Dolmetsch-Chickering instrument acquired by Harvard in 1929, where Kirkpatrick was enrolled as an undergraduate student. It was only later that Dolmetsch, who was always something of a tinkerer, became obsessed with modernizing and improving the harpsichord by re-conceptualizing its action18 and attaching all sorts of gadgets to it, most of which, unfortunately, did not work very well. Wanda Landowska, before Pleyel designed and built her cast-iron framed “Bach” model harpsichord in 1912, might even have followed a similar path had she not felt that their pre-1912 instruments (which were much closer to historical models)19 were insufficiently impressive to compete with the piano for the public’s attention. Armed with seven pedals to change the registers, one of which was at 16′ pitch,20 she then developed and embraced the flamboyant performance style for which she is still famous today, albeit still under the mantle of “authenticity,” a word that was often used by performers whose actual approach had little in common with anything genuinely historical. It was to be a long time before the actual historical harpsichord would be accepted on its own terms. Through the late 1960s, and even

17 Dolmetsch was first encouraged to restore a couple of antique keyboard instruments by the English pianist and associate of the Broadwood piano firm, A. J. Hipkins. Hipkins specialized in presenting “historical” keyboard recitals, using several eighteenth-century English harpsichords. It was William Morris who suggested that Dolmetsch build his first harpsichord for the English Arts & Crafts Exhibition in 1896. 18 The so-called “new” action, which was a complicated device by which the return noise of the plectrum past the string upon releasing the key was mechanically eliminated. 19 The first Pleyels were scaled more like eighteenth-century English instruments and featured an English-style “lute” register, a special row of jacks plucking close to the nut. 20 One octave below ordinary 8′ pitch. Introduction: Early Music, Vienna and the Missing Link 13 later in Eastern Europe, “plucking pianos” by Ammer21 and Neupert were commonly the only instruments available. Today, since many antique harpsichords have been restored to playing condition, there is no longer any question about the greatness of historical builders such as Ruckers, Taskin, Zell, Shudi, Hass or Stehlin. Anyone can hear for themselves their superiority—even after 250 years—to the majority of modern instruments. More recently, the pre-eminence of the fortepianos by the great Viennese makers—Stein, Walter, Könnicke, Streicher, Rosenberger and Conrad Graf—has been similarly confirmed. The best of today’s modern copies do well to equal them, sincethe original instruments were products of shops overseen by a highly regulated system of professional guilds. Players and builders today are full of respect for these masterpieces of technical and musical design. Younger harpsichordists cannot believe that things were ever any different or that there could ever have been any question that historical harpsichords might have been better. Fifty years ago, however, the harpsichord world was completely different, and still very much under the domination of the “plucking piano,” which constituted an attempt to improve the harpsichord by applying modern piano technology to it.

Landowska vs. Kirkpatrick, and Orwell’s 1984

Wanda Landowska was renowned as a larger-than-life figure, her flair and determination easily dominating the small world of the harpsichord for the first sixty years of the twentieth century. She was very closely identified with a type of playing and re-invented instrument that distorted the music, and her students were rigorously trained to play like their mentor. Of Landowska’s first-generation students, only Ralph Kirkpatrick broke free of her influence in order to apply his own ideas of performing music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, based more closely on original sources. He was scathing in his assessment of the Landowska “school” at St. Leu. Here is his description of Landowska’s other students:

Most of Landowska’s pupils are a dreadful bunch of dilettante girls (the men are just as much dilettantes) who have never inspected an old instrument, let alone played one, who know but a minute and unimportant fragment of the music, and who know nothing but what Landowska tells them. I have found possibly two exceptions to this uninteresting lot of tea-drinkers.22

One week later he revealed his own feelings about his teacher:

More than an hour of that woman and her all-pervasive personality makes me ready to go crazy. And she is very nice to me, but she wants to make me simply a part of her own ego, and have complete control over me, a thing which I constantly resist, an exhausting process. She is not a good teacher in that she does not explain things well, or discuss

21 These were entirely different from Ahlgrimm’s pre-war instruments by the original Gebrüder Ammer. 22 Ralph Kirkpatrick: Early Years, New York, Peter Lang, 1985, p. 72. 14 Isolde Ahlgrimm, Vienna and the Early Music Revival anything whatever. There is absolutely no question of doing anything but what one is told. Any exercise of personal intelligence is not considered necessary and is ignored.23

Kirkpatrick’s grudging respect for Landowska’s genius sat uneasily with his lofty disdain for the cult which grew up around her and which she actively encouraged. His first impression of her playing was less than ecstatic:

… I was not much pleased by her playing, which seemed rather dry, resembling nothing so much as a well-bred typewriter, rather than a well-tempered clavichord. I found her registration quite contrary to the structure of the music, and her phrasing the exact opposite of anything I had found out about Bach’s phrasing.24

He was not at all in sympathy with her artistic practices, which he could not reconcile with the philosophy she claimed to represent. Nevertheless, within a few days of his first encounter, Kirkpatrick would acknowledge that he had seriously underestimated both her musicianship and the breadth of her knowledge.

… I have only once heard Mozart playing that even approached the precision, brilliance, and delicacy of hers, and the way she could turn and mold phrases and simply take you straight to heaven in the slow movements … And her harpsichord registration is often very effective, as well as her playing, although frequently unsound stylistically. She is a much greater musician than I had first thought her.25

However, it is quite clear that he did not like her very much, a feeling that was apparently quite mutual. Landowska’s genius has never been in question, and there is no doubt that her artistry, drive, and ambition rescued the harpsichord from oblivion. Nevertheless, she practiced “doublethink,” to use Orwellian terminology: the simultaneous holding of apparently contradictory views. On the one hand, Wanda Landowska claimed unequivocally that her mission was an uncompromising and literal return to the principles and possibilities of the eighteenth century (as Denise Restout, Landowska’s assistant, reports in Landowska on Music).26 Much of what she did was, in a literally historical sense at least, incorrect—in fact, she said so herself and was unconcerned by any inconsistency. Ralph Kirkpatrick simply could not see any logic in her stance, and by any rational assessment, logic was far from her mind:

Like many artists she has two completely separate aspects, what she does and what she says. She talks a great deal about principles and reasons, but practically, she acts on her own personal taste, as do most artists.27

23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., p. 68. 25 Ibid., pp. 92–3. 26 “ … to reconstitute a harpsichord approaching as closely as possible those of the middle eighteenth century when they had reached the height of their glory for richness of registers and beauty of sonority.” Landowska: Landowska on Music, p. 11. 27 Kirkpatrick: Early Years, p. 73. Introduction: Early Music, Vienna and the Missing Link 15 By December of 1931, he supplemented his unsatisfactory instruction at St. Leu- la-Forêt by taking secret lessons with Paul Brunold, the remarkable organist of St. Gervais in Paris, prolific editor and scholar who also owned a working original eighteenth-century French harpsichord.28

I was greatly pleased to meet M. Brunold, since he is a harpsichordist of some reputation, the author of an excellent treatise on ornamentation, and the organist of St. Gervais, the successor to the Couperin family … I immediately made a decision, and asked him to give me some lessons, which he is going to do, beginning next Saturday … Landowska would be furious if she knew about this, because she hates him. However, he is going to be a most valuable supplement to her. I am particularly glad to find him because he is a friend of Dolmetsch, and has an attitude to the harpsichord with which I am much more sympathetic than with Landowska’s.29

Kirkpatrick clearly admired Landowska’s technique and, most importantly, her compelling sense of rhythm. With Brunold and his approach to the original harpsichord and its technique, Kirkpatrick had found a kindred spirit. He described another evening with Brunold, and with his eighteenth-century French harpsichord:

This evening was most important. I visited M. Brunold, who made me quite a number of revelations … The glory of the evening was his magnificent harpsichord, an instrument of the early 18th century, very well restored and with a marvellous richness of tone, one of the best I have ever heard. He played Couperin on it in a fashion which revealed things I had never suspected in the music, and he produced some marvellous effects with the instrument … he knows how to produce a most beautiful tone in a variety and subtlety that Landowska never dreamed of, and that I had never realized so much. But on the other hand he has not her clarity and precision. Oh, for the combination!30

It was this direct experience with an original instrument that convinced Kirkpatrick of the clear superiority of the antique. In his memoirs Kirkpatrick often contrasted it with the Pleyel he was forced to play at St. Leu and increasingly deplored. Indeed, he noted that even the Dolmetsch-Chickering he had played at Harvard, where it still resides to this day, was vastly superior to the Pleyel. None of this makes Landowska any less “correct” in terms of what she was trying to achieve, or Kirkpatrick any more virtuous than his teacher. After all, she had to convince a sceptical public and was prepared to use any means she considered necessary to achieve this end. Thirty years later, for perhaps less lofty reasons than those of his former teacher, Kirkpatrick himself traded ideals for expediency when he succumbed to the temptation of using a modern Neupert “Bach” model, even less authentic than the Pleyel (and without any of the integrity of the Parisian instrument), for his famous complete Bach recordings for Deutsche-Grammophon.

28 Paul Brunold (1875–1948), organist of St. Gervais in Paris from 1915 and curator of the musical instrument collection at the Paris Conservatoire. He edited the works of François Couperin, Chambonnières, Dieupart, Clèrambault, and Jacquet de la Guerre. 29 Kirkpatrick: Early Years, p. 75. 30 Kirkpatrick: Early Years, p. 77. 16 Isolde Ahlgrimm, Vienna and the Early Music Revival Although he personally owned far better-sounding instruments,31 he compromised his principles because the Neupert firm serviced and tuned the instrument for him free of charge.32 Landowska, the harpsichord’s biggest star, had done precisely what she thought would work in gaining public respect for an instrument for which most serious musicians at that time had none at all. Lest it should be thought that her preferred playing style was due to ignorance, it is worth recalling Landowska’s own words on the subject:

I am fully conscious that most harpsichords of the past had hand stops, while my Pleyel is equipped with pedals which allow for a much swifter change of registers without having to lift a hand from the keyboard to move a stop. Yet it would be senseless and narrow- minded to believe that the structure and the inspiration of a piece, its breathings, fermata, changing of colours, etc., depended on whether it was possible to reach a hand stop. We know that organists had helpers who drew the stops while they were playing. Why not admit that harpsichordists too might have been helped? No argumentation, however, can subsist before the only thing that counts—that a piece by its structure, dimensions, and character demands a certain registration. The duty of the performer is to provide this registration even at the price of great effort and difficulty.33

Clearly, Landowska’s subjective conviction that quick registration changes were musically essential overrode the historical facts regarding old instruments and how they were used. Isolde Ahlgrimm, whose early aspirations to work with Landowska in Paris were vetoed by her mother, turned to the original instruments themselves, whatever she could read about performance practice, and her own musicianship in her efforts to develop a viable technique. In addition to these elements, her performance style derived from her own musicianship, scholarship, intelligence—and a little bit of luck.

The spirit of Vienna

Isolde Ahlgrimm’s concerto and chamber music recordings were made in a musical capital that had preserved many elements of its older “classical” heritage despite the huge orchestras and overblown late Romantic style it had embraced towards the end of the nineteenth century. Although gargantuan orchestras were required by Bruckner and Mahler, something of the spirit of Mozart, Haydn, and Schubert remained—and does to this day—in the playing of Vienna’s finest musicians, right down to the village dance bands that still exist throughout all of Austria. The survival of Viennese classical style is most evident in its chamber music ensembles. In 1945 Vienna became home to the first specialist chamber group in Europe drawn from front desk players of its principal symphony orchestra—the Vienna Philharmonic.

31 Notably by Hubbard & Dowd, built in 1958, which Kirkpatrick used to record both books of the Well-Tempered Clavier. Kirkpatrick also owned Busoni’s 1908 Dolmetsch- Chickering harpsichord and the instrument formerly owned by Violet Gordon Woodhouse. 32 Howard Schott, a former student of Kirkpatrick, mentioned this in 1989. 33 Landowska: Landowska on Music, p. 378. Introduction: Early Music, Vienna and the Missing Link 17 The Vienna Octet (Wiener-Oktett) was founded in the last year of the war by the violinist Willi Boskovsky and his clarinettist brother, Alfred, both good friends of Isolde Ahlgrimm. The beauty, energy, and simplicity of their performances find their direct parallel in her own playing, for this is music-making she grew up with and these were the people with whom she often played. Willi Boskovsky’s ensembles toured the world and made numerous recordings. His own playing was characterized by transparency and clarity of articulation and phrasing. His successor, Anton Fietz, took the “classical” elements of style even further, with considerably less use of constant vibrato than Boskovsky. The Vienna Octet’s recordings of the major works of the chamber repertoire from Mozart through Rimsky-Korsakoff provide further evidence of a quite different style of playing from that of similar ensembles throughout Europe.34 The Vienna Octet survived until 1974 and was succeeded by two different ensembles bearing the same name composed, like their predecessor, of front-desk players from the Philharmonic. The Vienna Symphony fielded several similar ensembles of its own, but it was the example of The Vienna Octet that inspired the creation of similar ensembles in Berlin (Berlin Philharmonic Octet) and London (The Melos Ensemble). From the late 1930s, many of Vienna’s more adventurous players, including members of The Vienna Octet collaborated with Isolde Ahlgrimm in her historical concerts at one time or another, a tradition of cross-over period instrument performance that has continued with Harnoncourt’s Concentus Musicus, which has proven such an effective training ground for Vienna’s younger musicians interested in period style.35 There is a direct evolutionary link, therefore, between Ahlgrimm’s work with period instruments and the best of Vienna’s present-day “historically informed” chamber groups such as the Quatuor Mosaïques, which comprises members of Harnoncourt’s Concentus Musicus. It might be suggested that Vienna’s innate musical conservatism actually caused faint traces of classical style to linger. These hints of “classicism” include Viennese orchestras’ long-time use of gut strings, wooden conical bore flutes and pre-Böhm-system clarinets and oboes, as well as brass instruments that differed substantially from those in use elsewhere. In addition to the differences in construction found in Viennese woodwind and brass instruments, involving reeds, mouthpieces, and key-systems, the Viennese wind and brass players were sparing in their use of vibrato, a hold-over from the late eighteenth century, where vibrato was regarded as a special effect. One might also mention as a later hold-over from an earlier time the almost misogynist attitude displayed in Vienna’s almost exclusive employment of male musicians. Since the early nineteenth century to the present day, in numerous details, Vienna has simply never changed its musical attitudes or tastes.

34 All recorded for Decca between 1948 and 1974. Works by Mozart include the Clarinet Quintet, K. 581, Clarinet Trio, K. 498, Piano and Wind Quintet, K. 452, and the Divertimenti, K. 247, 287, 334, and 136. The Vienna Octet also recorded the Beethoven Septet, Schubert and Mendelssohn Octets, and chamber works by Ludwig Spohr. 35 Including Erich Höbarth, Peter Matzka, Anita Mitterer, Herwig Tachezi, Christophe Coin, and many others who have taken the art of period instrument performance forward. 18 Isolde Ahlgrimm, Vienna and the Early Music Revival Diverging paths in Vienna, Amsterdam and London

Let us briefly compare Ahlgrimm’s and the Harnoncourts’ concerto and chamber- music recordings from the mid-1950s with similar offerings from ensembles that were then famous for performing and recording early music. These groups included the Boyd Neel Orchestra, and its successor, the Philomusica of London, and Karl Münchinger’s Stuttgarter Kammerorkester, the first and for many years the pre-eminent German chamber orchestra, well known for its Bach performances since 1945. There was also Paul Sacher’s Basle Chamber Orchestra, which, like Münchinger’s group, recorded the Brandenburg Concertos in 1950. These fine ensembles give us a good idea of how early music was being performed in England and Germany when Isolde Ahlgrimm was recording for Philips. First, none of these orchestras at that time (or since) has ever used period instruments, gut strings or original pitch standards. Nor did their conductors put into practice much evidence of detailed knowledge of earlier performance styles.36 Thurston Dart’s exemplary book, The Interpretation of Music37 clearly laid out the case for “historically informed” performance in 1954. Only in the late 1950s, however, did Dart introduce to London’s orchestras the so called “Corelli” bow, an all-purpose baroque-style adjustable bow supposed to make articulation easier. This was still used with ordinary steel-strung instruments at modern pitch. By 1954 Ahlgrimm, Fiala and the Harnoncourts had put Thurston Dart’s theory into practice, combining period instruments with comprehensive knowledge and practical expertise. If we now follow closely the two different strands of performance practice that unfolded separately but simultaneously in London and Vienna we can clearly see the early genesis of the period-instrument movement that has become so familiar today. First, in London the Boyd Neel Orchestra, inherited by the musicologist and harpsichordist Thurston Dart from its founder Boyd Neel, gradually developed into the Philomusica of London. Later, with Dart’s colleague, the violinist Neville Marriner, as concertmaster, this in turn became the nucleus of the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, perhaps to this day the most familiar and most-recorded all- purpose modern chamber orchestra, which is still active in London. Simultaneously in Vienna, the Ahlgrimm-Fiala Amati Orchestra (which was only founded to make the recordings of the concertos) was overtaken by Harnoncourt’s creation of his own Concentus Musicus in 1953, using many of the same musicians as Ahlgrimm. At the same time, founded in part due to Gustav Leonhardt’s admiration for Fiala’s collection and Harnoncourt’s expertise, the Dutch musician’s Leonhardt Baroque Ensemble (which included the Harnoncourts and Eduard Melkus) was created. Later, when Leonhardt moved back to Amsterdam, this was to become the Leonhardt-Consort, which then formed the nucleus of La Petite Bande, adding in the expertise of the brothers Sigiswald, Wieland, and Barthold Kuijken from Brussels. The evolutionary process continues to this day through the next generation. Mention should also be made of the work of the distinguished Dutch violinist Jaap Schröder,

36 Münchinger’s 1949 performance of the third Bach Ouverture, BWV 1068, quickly confirms this. 37 Thurston Dart: The Interpretation of Music, London, Hutchinson, 1954. Introduction: Early Music, Vienna and the Missing Link 19 whose modern-instrument but historically aware ensemble, Concerto Amsterdam, was the one group that actually made the transition from modern to period instruments in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

England—from theory into practice

England, though it produced numerous books about how to play early music by knowledgeable authors from Arnold Dolmetsch (1915) to Robert Donington (from the 1950s through the 1970s) and Thurston Dart (1954), did not acquire its first bona fide period-instrument orchestra until 1973, when Christopher Hogwood, then continuo player and researcher for Neville Marriner’s Academy of St. Martin-in-the- Fields in London, branched out on his own and established the Academy of Ancient Music. Trevor Pinnock’s English Concert was soon to follow. By this stage, Vienna and Amsterdam had chalked up twenty years of experience with old instruments, and their ensembles played with great conviction and authority. After many years of successfully directing modern-instrument baroque ensembles and playing continuo around London’s busy musical scene, Thurston Dart—a brilliant self-taught harpsichordist, editor, and scholar, whose writings were extremely influential—was on the verge of making the great leap of faith towards using period instruments himself. He was deprived of the opportunity when cancer took his life at the early age of 49 in 1971.38 The English, though they had theorized early, arrived quite late to a literal and practical application of historical instruments and performance styles. In reaction to the increasing influence of Harnoncourt and Leonhardt, reactionary English musicians such as Neville Marriner and Raymond Leppard, who had once actively supported the quest for further research into performance practice, turned their backs on the movement as it became too radical for them and threatened to overshadow their own considerable achievements. They were not prepared to embrace the use of period instruments. As a result, many formerly “progressive” English conductors of Baroque music remain scathing about today’s early music movement, which they feel has left them behind.39 Despite this, specialist period-instrument groups have continued to appear all over the world. Against this increasingly active scene, it is easy to forget the initial hard work on the part of a small number of pioneering specialists who helped it to get started. Among these people, Erich Fiala and Isolde Ahlgrimm certainly deserve their share of that credit.

Fame, and the long shadow of World War II

The obvious question at this point must be asked: with all of these indisputable achievements, why is Isolde Ahlgrimm not vastly better known today? Why is she

38 Private communication from Christopher Hogwood, 1977. 39 At present writing (2006) Neville Marriner still periodically rails against it. He is less vehement, however, than Pinchas Zuckerman, whose public views on the Early Music movement generally reveal a mixture of contempt and fear. 20 Isolde Ahlgrimm, Vienna and the Early Music Revival not as well known as harpsichordists Wanda Landowska, Gustav Leonhardt, or, more recently, fortepiano specialists such as Malcolm Bilson? The answer lies principally in the turmoil created by World War II. The war restricted and then interrupted Ahlgrimm’s career almost as soon as it began. Unlike Landowska, Ahlgrimm remained in Nazi-occupied Europe during the war years, dealing among other things with her newly enlightened husband’s outspoken comments about the Nazis, which resulted in his arrest. At first Fiala, unlike Ahlgrimm, had been caught up in the euphoria that attended Hitler’s entry into Vienna in 1938.40 Ahlgrimm described that actual scene decades later, with the sheer unreality and danger of the situation still fresh in her mind. She also recalled clearly the sudden transformation and brutalization of the city she had grown up in, with her own former professors from school forced by the Nazis to scrub the streets—and, undoubtedly, far worse things than that. Within a short time, as the reality of the war sank in, like so many other initially elated Viennese, Fiala regained his sense of perspective and swung the other way, denouncing the Nazis within earshot of an informer, declaring that it would be “the greatest misfortune if Germany won the war.” His early morning arrest followed within days. Isolde Ahlgrimm witnessed many things during the war that she would not discuss in any detail even as late as 1995, so we are left to merely speculate on what might have happened during those dark days half a century before. Wanda Landowska was forced to flee Europe in 1940. Her name was on the Nazis’ wanted list, and they ransacked her home outside Paris, stealing everything she had.41 She had also happened to be in the Parisian studio of His Master’s Voice, recording a set of Scarlatti sonatas, just as the Germans entered the city. The sound of anti-aircraft fire can be clearly heard at two points in the opening D major Sonata (K. 490) she was recording at the fateful moment, the guns ironically captured for posterity along with the music. Nevertheless, Landowska stayed and finished the piece, proving that she possessed nerves of steel. Her undoubted courage contributed to her legend. She headed for the New World, where she had already triumphantly toured for the first time back in 1923, debuting with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Stokowski on 16 November. There she was eventually welcomed as a stateless European celebrity musician, entering the USA like so many others, through Ellis Island on 7 December 1941, in the wake of Pearl Harbor. Needing to establish herself in America, and in any case never one to neglect a publicity opportunity, Wanda Landowska re-presented her considerable art to New York’s musical elite with a “debut” in New York’s Town Hall in 1942. This event entered the mythology as the legendary performance of the Goldberg Variations, famously reviewed by composer Virgil Thomson.42 The concert was followed up within a couple of years by a celebrated recording for RCA-Victor (American

40 Stefan Zweig’s memoir The World of Yesterday (New York, Viking Press, 1943) paints an unforgettable picture of Vienna between the wars as well as the various forces that created its unique dynamic. Zweig (1881–1942), one of Austria’s great novelists and poets, escaped from Hitler’s regime and, along with his wife, committed suicide in Brazil in 1942. 41 Her Pleyel harpsichord was rescued from a German officers’ mess hall after the war. 42 Virgil Thomson: The Musical Scene, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1942. Introduction: Early Music, Vienna and the Missing Link 21 HMV) of the entire work on an album of five 78s, with Landowska’s own distinctive annotations (as well as numerous photos of the artist’s hands) included with the release. By seizing opportunities when they occurred, Landowska was able with some justification to create her cult following (which so irritated Ralph Kirkpatrick). Landowska possessed true showmanship and a star quality that was tailor-made for her re-establishment in America, the land of movie stars, Walt Disney and Hollywood. America’s cultural society was also then infatuated with expatriate European musicians such as Arturo Toscanini, Jascha Heifetz, Vladimir Horowitz, Bruno Walter, Georg Szell—and Wanda Landowska. The cult, which was widely promoted by radio and recordings, remains to this day, especially in the United States. Isolde Ahlgrimm, although she knew her own artistic worth, was far more modest than Landowska, due to her own nature and partly because she was dominated by a husband who owned the instruments she played and imposed his own idea of what he thought was a “proper” public profile for his wife to maintain. Like Landowska, who knew no such constraint, she was extremely energetic, intensely hard-working, and a fearless public performer who always played from memory.

Gustav Leonhardt and the apogee

And what about Gustav Leonhardt, the greatest and most universal of all harpsichordists, who has fulfilled the promise of Wanda Landowska, Isolde Ahlgrimm and the other pioneers? Sent out of Amsterdam to the countryside during the German occupation, the young Gustav Leonhardt discovered a harpsichord in his parents’ house and became intrigued by it. After the war he studied harpsichord and organ at the Schola Cantorum in Basle with Eduard Müller and then headed for Vienna (his mother was from Graz) in 1950 where he met the Fialas, Josef Mertin, Nikolaus and Alice Harnoncourt, and others interested in early music. The post-war economic boom came at just the right time for his career, which also benefited from a rapidly developing recording industry. As the world entered the atomic age, the spirit of scientific objectivity also gained ascendancy. This general trend towards dispassionate evaluation resulted in a re-assessment of the arts and music of the pre- Romantic era, and the second half of the twentieth century came to feel an artistic kinship with the eighteenth-century Age of Reason. Historical performance’s time had finally arrived in earnest, and the movement gathered pace. It is interesting to note how, as the Age of Science in the twentieth and twenty- first centuries made “authentic performance” artistically respectable, Leonhardt’s aristocratic image as a reserved, scholarly performer, served, during the 1970s and 1980s, to create his own cult following among the growing early music movement. Leonhardt is certainly the only harpsichordist apart from Landowska (and perhaps Igor Kipnis in the early years of his career) in the last century to have captured the public’s imagination in a big way. And in his case it is a reputation that is thoroughly deserved for a host of reasons including his depth of knowledge, artistic integrity, and profound musicianship. His influence on all performers of historical instruments has been great, and his students and imitators are also legion. 22 Isolde Ahlgrimm, Vienna and the Early Music Revival Apart from his thousands of concerts and innumerable recordings as harpsichordist, organist, and director, Leonhardt came to be more widely known when he stood in for J. S. Bach (“acted the role of” is not quite the right description) in the 1967 film The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach from German director Jean-Marie Straub. It is mentioned in his biography to this day, a sure sign that Leonhardt himself considers it important. The film’s release substantially increased his profile in Europe around the late 1960s. It is, as Straub himself revealed,43 as much a documentary about Leonhardt as it is a film about Bach. Leonhardt himself was positive about the experience and expressed admiration for the way Straub had presented Bach’s life in music and documents unburdened by the film-maker’s (or the actor’s) conceit. Despite this brief moment of cinematic fame, it was really Leonhardt’s own indisputable mastery as harpsichordist, organist, conductor, scholar and mentor to legions of students that earned him his place in musical history. And of course, since he had more than a little money of his own, he was easily able to fund an active career and live a gentlemanly existence in one of the great houses of Amsterdam. Isolde Ahlgrimm, whose own publicity material from the 1950s included photos of her in the kitchen wearing an apron, like any dutiful Wiener Hausfrau, had little or no interest in promoting her own personality for its own sake. Indeed, she was too transparently honest to do so. She also grew up in a place and at a time when women simply were not expected to promote themselves. She was not particularly good at it either. In sad contrast to her younger Dutch colleague’s grand cinematic debut as Johann Sebastian Bach himself, Ahlgrimm’s only foray into the world of the cinema was to provide uncredited fortepiano music44 for the soundtrack of a largely forgotten 1942 film on the life of Mozart,45 produced by the company Wien- Film during the war.

This biography

My first attempt to write this story began in 1988 when Isolde Ahlgrimm was an active, though initially reluctant, collaborator in the task. I came to know her very well over the following years and became acutely aware that she held strong views on what could—and could not—be included in it. At the beginning she was not sure she even wanted a book written about herself at all. It was only as the work progressed and she saw its early development that she considerably warmed to the idea. She was also very wary of having Erich Fiala’s name so much as mentioned in

43 Jean Marie Straub: The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, 1967. Interview included with the DVD release. 44 Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata, played on an early piano. The pianist who had been engaged was unable to play the fortepiano, so Ahlgrimm was contacted. The reviewers praised Dr. Wührer’s “manly” style of playing, although he had not played a note. Isolde Ahlgrimm, interview with Richard Hallinan, Vienna, 1989. 45 Wen die Götter Lieben (Those whom the Gods love) … re-released in 1948 and dubbed into English with the more utilitarian title The Mozart Story. Introduction: Early Music, Vienna and the Missing Link 23 a biography about herself, which seemed to rule out any truly accurate recounting of her story.

Erich Fiala’s role

With Fiala’s alternating creation and destruction of her professional opportunities now distant memories, Ahlgrimm was reluctant to have him mentioned, primarily because she feared that to be associated with him in print might taint her own standards in the eyes of her colleagues. Fiala was not a professional musician, as he himself knew very well when he began to collaborate with Ahlgrimm. She was always a consummate artist who knew how to work extremely hard; Fiala was basically a gentleman of leisure with an idea, money, and a passion. Fiala needed Ahlgrimm to present his own ideas and gain acceptance for them from other professional musicians. My concern with carrying out her wishes and yet doing justice to her achievements in print is perhaps one of the reasons why I have taken so long to get this book into its final form. The work took time to mature, and only the passing oftime has allowed sufficient distance between me and my subject. The perspective has fundamentally changed during the years since Ahlgrimm left us, and even more since the day in 1989 when Richard Hallinan and I sat down with Ahlgrimm to plan this book together. The restoration of Erich Fiala to his rightful place in this story in no way diminishes Isolde Ahlgrimm’s own role in it—indeed, it is essential to a proper understanding. The reader could not hope to comprehend this important missing chapter of Viennese musical history without knowing the impact of Erich Fiala’s presence, which Ahlgrimm in private fully acknowledged. As a matter of principle, a story based on partial truth is hardly worth telling at all. Despite having far exceeded my original brief, I trust that I have maintained a correct balance between respecting Isolde Ahlgrimm’s desire for discretion and the biographer’s responsibility for honouring the whole truth. As a result of recounting the entire story, what exists now is a much better piece of work—and a much more interesting read. I am also keenly aware that I only ever heard Isolde Ahlgrimm’s side of things first-hand and attempt here to present Erich Fiala’s story with sympathy and a sense of fairness. Among his eccentricities, Fiala also had some quite estimable virtues: brilliance, courage, and passion being among them. One representative example concerns the story of Fiala, his brief flirtation with the Nazis, his subsequent denouncing of them, and his arrest for treason. Erich Fiala was like many Viennese of his generation. Living in a country that had known only upheaval and uncertainty since 1914, those who came to maturity in the years between the wars lived with incredible political uncertainty and, in the case of Austria, total loss of its former, far grander identity. After the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, a grave sense of injustice, complicated in the 1920s and 1930s by the rampant unemployment and inflation caused by the Great Depression, grew rapidly. When Hitler moved on Austria under the guise of uniting all German-speaking peoples, people of Fiala’s generation, suddenly thrown into a situation that seemed to offer hope and renewed national 24 Isolde Ahlgrimm, Vienna and the Early Music Revival pride, jumped at the false promise of renewed self-respect offered by the Nazi regime. Before the “big lie” became impossible to ignore, with the invasions of Czechoslovakia and Poland followed by the onset of yet another war, Fiala, drafted immediately by the new Reich government into the armed forces, initially tried to make the best of what he had been told was the truth by the regime. It is significant that, as his eyes were opened to what the Nazis truly represented (in 1941), he displayed a fearless and even reckless courage in speaking out against them, placing himself and his wife in the sort of personal danger that present generations (at least in the West) can only imagine. I believe that in this regard at least, whatever delusions his initial euphoria created, by his display of reckless courage in denouncing the Nazis he later went a long way towards redeeming himself. He was a figure of depth, quite apart from his activities as collector of musical instruments and husband to a great artist. Finally, a biographer can not set out to tell one side of a story. Isolde Ahlgrimm was in many ways a Viennese lady typical of her generation. Beyond that she had a phenomenal memory for more than just music and she was still burningly conscious of events, including intrigues and controversies, that had taken place many decades before. The passing of time heals many wounds, and in more recent years I have come to feel that I am now able to tell far more of the story than before without violating her own concern that her life not be sensationalized. With the distance afforded by time, the true story seems quite remarkable enough. What was common experience to Ahlgrimm’s generation has now become history. The era and the place created the drama, and the story deserves to be told as accurately as possible, both for the light it sheds and the example it sets. To do so serves her memory best, thereby fulfilling the main task of this book.

Vienna today

After seventeen years I have thoroughly revised and expanded the text, taking into account much that has occurred, and occurred to me, since I first sat down to write this story. Vienna has become a very different place in the meantime. When I first came to know—and love—the city in 1985, there were still faint traces of war damage evident, and the older generation of Viennese, Isolde Ahlgrimm included, were most reluctant to touch on anything that involved thinking about the still painfully remembered war-time past. This seems to have now changed, and Vienna today appears to be a far more open and prosperous place. It is impossible to recount Isolde Ahlgrimm’s story properly without telling a considerable part of Vienna’s as well, as she was truly Viennese. Since 1985 I have also had my own experiences in performing and recording with some of Vienna’s best musicians of my own generation, including members of Harnoncourt’s own Concentus Musicus. This has changed my perspective in assessing Ahlgrimm’s own contribution to Vienna’s present-day early music scene. I recall performing (in 1991) the six Bach sonatas for violin (with Peter Matzka) and harpsichord, with Isolde Ahlgrimm sitting in the front row. This seemed to me to be the ultimate test. Luckily, we passed it! Introduction: Early Music, Vienna and the Missing Link 25 Nevertheless, the main importance of Isolde Ahlgrimm’s story lies in her own musical achievements and this work primarily devotes itself to recounting the influences and background that shaped her musical thought. I aim to establish the connection between Vienna’s grand musical traditions and Ahlgrimm’s place in that story. Following this, I next move on to discuss those musicians who interacted with her and whose careers can reasonably be said to have been in some way influenced by her and the path she took. Heading this list are Harnoncourt and Leonhardt, and we can also add correctly the names of Eduard Melkus, Rudolf Baumgartner, Alice Harnoncourt, Paul Badura-Skoda, and Jörg Demus. This is quite an impressive roster, confirming that Vienna is worth more than just a passing mention inthe early music story. The chapters that follow this lengthy general introduction (which provides a general overview of the entire book plus some background to both the early music phenomenon and some of Ahlgrimm’s important colleagues) are laid out as follows. First, I give a straightforward account of Isolde Ahlgrimm’s upbringing, family and early training to 1935, the year of her first major professional success. Second, my description of the Ahlgrimm-Fiala series of 74 concert programmes, which formed the nucleus of her early career, has been created directly from Isolde Ahlgrimm’s own notes. To simplify the chronology I have alternated direct quotations from her own sketch of the series (written down in 1953 and 1962) with further material and my own commentary. In addition to all this, Isolde Ahlgrimm’s own views and detailed recollection of events from her life have been faithfully transcribed from a series of recorded interviews undertaken by Richard Hallinan and me in 1988, 1989, and 1991. Third, since Ahlgrimm herself saw her recordings as preserving her “life’s work,” I have devoted an entire chapter to her important series of Bach recordings, which inspired me to write this book in the first place. In this chapter I have also tried to convey the fundamentals of her teachings as I absorbed them during my years of study with her between 1985 and 1992. Furthermore, I have tried to share with the reader what this taught me about playing the harpsichord and, especially, what I believe Isolde Ahlgrimm herself considered to be important. There are many other former students of hers who can confirm the basic elements of what I have presented here—and undoubtedly add to what I have presented. To relate this information to actual performances I have expanded in detail my description of Ahlgrimm’s first ever recording, Book 1 of the Well-Tempered Clavier, by providing annotations concerning her musical thought, philosophy, and her method of teaching it to her students. This has become especially important to me as I have recently (in 2005) recorded the same work myself, with my own approach very much based on our years of study together. I am embarking on the same journey that she took, and will continue to draw on our time together as I traverse the entire Bach canon. The reader will become quickly aware that the only way to appreciate Ahlgrimm’s art is to listen to her recordings. In the opinion of Larry Palmer, Virginia Pleasants and others, the live performances were even better. My own survey, which is far from comprehensive, is provided simply to whet the reader’s appetite for further exploration of an aural kind. Where music is concerned, reading will never replace listening. 26 Isolde Ahlgrimm, Vienna and the Early Music Revival Fourth, in the last biographical chapter I have taken the story right up to include the rather painful years of Ahlgrimm’s physical decline, the beginning of which coincided with the time when I first knew Ahlgrimm personally and worked closely with her. We corresponded frequently during this period and her letters (in both German and English) document these years quite well. The appendices that follow this final biographical chapter are presented as an information resource, and include some notes that only chance has preserved. The records Ahlgrimm kept (in German) were fairly rudimentary, and putting all the information together was a laborious and time-consuming procedure. The discography and catalogue of her published writings (also in German) are complete. The material surviving on the once 600- strong Ahlgrimm-Fiala instrument collection is sketchy, and I would welcome further information from my readers for inclusion in (I hope) future printings. I recently found the notes that Ahlgrimm herself wrote for the 1960 recording of Strauss’s Capriccio Suite. The recording was never released and the notes survive only by the greatest good luck. Since her account is different in detail from the one provided by Strauss’s biographer, Norman del Mar, I have included Ahlgrimm’s German text with an English translation. Also included is a short essay she wrote on Fiala’s Amati Orchestra that conveys the rationale behind the couple’s activities up to the mid- 1950s, and the level of their knowledge concerning instruments and performance practice, all very much ahead of its time. This short note contains information on Fiala’s conducting and how he saw his role, which was later deleted (by Ahlgrimm) from the published version, perhaps a reflection of the tensions between the two. The two final articles are reprinted here by kind permission of The Diapason. First is Howard Schott’s translation of the address Ahlgrimm delivered at Brugge in 1977. The other is a brief article by Dr. Kim Kasling, a former Ahlgrimm student, describing her teaching methods. For transcribing these two articles, I am grateful to my brilliant young associate, Mahan Esfahani, a highly gifted harpsichordist who will help to carry the revival forward in a way that would have made Isolde Ahlgrimm hopeful once more for the instrument’s future. Two events of significance have occurred since I began this book. First, the manuscript of Richard Strauss’s Capriccio Suite for harpsichord, (TrV 279c), which for years was the stuff of legend among harpsichordists, has now appeared in print (Edition Schott). Finally, the first volume of Isolde Ahlgrimm’s last scholarly work, her Ornamente der Musik für Tasteninstrumente Bd.1, which occupied her for decades, has also now appeared, edited by her close friend, the Viennese musicologist Helga Scholz-Michelitsch. The present book was begun tentatively in 1989 with its (much younger) author still quite in awe of his teacher and subject, and at a time when Isolde Ahlgrimm still had a decade of life ahead of her, much of which was to be a slow and painful physical decline that tested her spirit and courage to the limit. She has now been gone for more than the same amount of time, so I hope in this writing to speak to a new generation of music lovers and players who never met her or heard her perform. It is important to bring her life story to the attention of those younger readers who might have little or no idea of how the early music revival started or of the dedication and hard work that sustained it, against odds both many and great. Introduction: Early Music, Vienna and the Missing Link 27 Perhaps someone else reading of Isolde Ahlgrimm’s career in the Vienna of long ago will be inspired, as I was myself over thirty years ago, to choose this rich field as a career and to help us all to carry the momentum forward. This book may also provide some insights, based on her example, into why it is worth bothering with music and instruments of other times and why good art is timeless. Perhaps even, in our own culturally challenged era when popular entertainment of no lasting value has obscured genuine art that enriches and improves life, it may show why it is worth bothering with the arts at all and how it is possible to do so even in a troubled age. As time passes we realize that all eras and artistic endeavours merge towards achieving a basic common goal, the pursuit of wider truth. Every age has its own music, which can speak just as compellingly to ours as it did to its own if we just take time to listen and understand its syntax. Great music and musicians, no matter where or when they came from are always worth the effort. Isolde Ahlgrimm certainly thought so. References Ahlgrimm, Isolde (1962) Die Concerte fÃ¼r Kenner und LiebhaberâChronology (Vienna, unpublished document, authorâs collection). Ahlgrimm, Isolde (1968) âDie Rhetorik in der Barockmusik,â Musica, 22(6). Ahlgrimm, Isolde (1979) âZur heutigen AuffÃ¼hrungspraxis der Barockmusik,â Organa Austriaca Band II, Vienna. Ahlgrimm, Isolde (1982) Manuale der Orgel und Cembalotechnik, Vienna, L. Doblinger Verlag. Ahlgrimm, Isolde (1982) âCurrent Trends in Performance of Baroque Music,â translated by Howard Schott , The Diapason, April 1982. 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Husman, Heinrich (1938) âDie âKunst der Fugeâ als Klavierwerk: Besetzung und Anordnung,â Bach Jahrbuch. Kasling, Kim (1977) âHarpsichord Lessons for the BeginnerâÃ la Isolde Ahlgrimm,â The Diapason, March 1977. Kirkpatrick, Ralph (1985) Early Years, New York, Peter Lang. Kirkpatrick, Ralph (1983) âFifty Years of Harpsichord Playingâ, Early Music, 11(1). KÃ¶hler, HansjÃ¼rgen (1940) Inside the Gestapo: Hitlerâs Shadow over the World, London, Pallas Publishing Ltd. Krickeberg, Dieter and Rase, Horst (1987) âBeitrÃ¤ge zur Kenntnis des Mittel- und norddeutschen Cembalobaus um 1700,â Studia OrganologicâFestschrift fÃ¼r John Henry van der Meer, Tutzing, H. Schneider, pp. 285â310. 240 Leonhardt, Gustav (1952) The Art of Fugue: Bachâs Last Harpsichord Work, The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff. Leonhardt, Gustav (1974) Interview in The English Harpsichord Magazine, 1(2). Mayer Brown, Howard (1988) âPedantry or Liberation? A Sketch of the Historical Performance Movement,â in N. Kenyon (ed.) 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