Leonhardt’s Pioneering Vision, Compromised by Its Moment
Gustav Leonhardt was twenty-five when he made this recording in Vienna. Young, brilliant, already certain that Bach’s Art of Fugue belonged at the keyboard—not dispersed among consorts or orchestras, but under the hands of a single player. The idea seems obvious now. In 1953 it was radical.
This Vanguard set captures that revolutionary moment, and therein lies both its fascination and its frustration. Leonhardt’s interpretive courage runs headlong into the sonic limitations of early 1950s disc technology and—one must say it plainly—an inadequate instrument. The harpsichord here possesses a tinny, pinched quality that drains the music of its architectural grandeur. Listen to the lower register and you hear something approaching hollowness, a thinness of texture that makes the densest contrapuntal passages sound skeletal rather than muscular. When Bach descends into his darker harmonic regions, the instrument simply cannot follow him there with any conviction.
The engineering doesn’t help. That characteristic early-LP flatness, the sense of the harpsichord existing in some airless acoustic space—it’s all here, compounding the instrument’s own deficiencies. By the time we reach Contrapunctus XIV, the unfinished fugue that breaks off with such devastating abruptness, the harpsichord sounds distinctly out of tune. One’s attention, which should be riveted by Bach’s final, incomplete utterance, instead wanders to questions of pitch stability and tonal focus.
Yet Leonhardt’s musical intelligence shines through these obstacles. His tempi tend toward the deliberate—at times, as in the fourth contrapunctus, perhaps excessively so. That particular fugue, with its inverted subject, moves at such a measured pace that it threatens to become a demonstration rather than a living musical argument. This is ironic, given that Leonhardt spent much of his career insisting that the Art of Fugue was music first, pedagogy second. But in most of the other fugues and canons, the slower speeds allow the contrapuntal voices to breathe and interact, to truly converse rather than merely coexist. You can hear him thinking through each line, considering its relationship to the others—this is interpretive work of genuine substance, even if the sonic medium betrays it.
The historical importance is undeniable. This recording helped establish the keyboard as a legitimate vehicle for this music, paving the way for everything that followed. Leonhardt himself recognized its limitations; his later Teldec recording surpasses it in every respect. Davitt Moroney’s Harmonia Mundi set offers far richer sonorities, and Robert Hill on Brilliant Classics provides both better sound and a more varied instrumental palette.
This Vanguard reissue belongs in the collections of scholars and Leonhardt completists—those who want to trace the evolution of historically informed reading practice. For listeners seeking a harpsichord Art of Fugue to live with, to return to for musical nourishment rather than historical documentation, look elsewhere. The vision here is prophetic. The execution, through no fault of Leonhardt’s interpretive gifts, cannot sustain repeated listening. Sometimes courage and ideas must wait for technology to catch up.
