Performing Like a Lawyer

During law school, I met a lot of people who looked at me funny when I told them I had studied music in college. Some articulated their confusion with a question: "What does music have to do with law?" Their implication was clear. In their minds, the rigorous, precise world of legal thinking was incompatible with the fuzzy, feel-good world of music.

Those people must not have known Gustav Leonhardt. Today as I reflected on the great Dutch harpsichordist's passing, the questions from my classmates reminded me of how important Leonhardt's work was.

If you've never heard of Leonhardt, this New York Times article summarizes his life well. The article notes that Leonhardt helped to define the historical performance movement. Unfortunately, many readers don't know anything about that movement.

Many keyboardists in the first half of the twentieth century played Baroque music the same way they played music by Romantic composers, such as Liszt or Brahms, who lived over a century after the Baroque period ended. They played on pianos, used heavy pedaling and legato phrasing, and made dramatic dynamic shifts. In the middle of the century, several performers, one of the most prominent of whom was Leonhardt, criticized that performance style. They argued that such playing was inappropriate because it would have been impossible on typical Baroque instruments. Bach and his contemporaries usually played on harpsichords, which lack pedals and don't allow performers to play louder or softer by varying their touch.

Leonhardt wasn't content to focus on Baroque instruments while interpreting music. He read musical instruction books written in the 17th and 18th centuries. He scoured archives to find early compositional drafts and compared different versions of pieces to determine which editions best represented composers' preferences. He approached music the way lawyers approach cases -- he researched texts thoroughly and carefully evaluated contrasting approaches before presenting his conclusions to an audience.

Leonhardt's life testifies to the power of rigorous thinking applied to heartfelt music making. The combination of those qualities revolutionized keyboard performance and inspired a generation of musicians to look to the past as a guide for the present. Just as importantly, it sustained a musical career that, as the video below shows, remained vital until its final days.