Keyboardist, Baroque Master Gustav Leonhardt Dies at 83

VPM | By Anastasia Tsioulcas

Published January 17, 2012 at 5:58 PM EST

Updated February 19, 2024

One of the most influential and widely hailed figures in the modern early music movement, conductor, harpsichordist and organist Gustav Leonhardt, has died at 83. Just a month ago, after a concert at Paris’ Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, Leonhardt abruptly announced that he had just given his last public performance. According to Dutch press reports, he died yesterday in Amsterdam, though the cause of death was not released.

Leonhardt was one of the premier shapers of modern understandings of Johann Sebastian Bach‘s music. Along with his colleague Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Leonhardt created a landmark first recording cycle of all of Bach’s cantatas played on original instruments, a project that took nearly 20 years to complete. Beginning in 1971, Leonhardt and Harnoncourt split up the 200-plus cantatas written by Bach between their two ensembles. As a conductor, Leonhardt also recorded some of Bach’s other major choral works, including the St. Matthew Passion and the Mass in B minor.

Leonhardt was born in the northwestern Dutch village of ‘s-Graveland in 1928. He began studying organ and harpsichord at the famed Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Basel, Switzerland, in 1947 before going on to teach at Vienna’s Academy of Music and then at the Amsterdam Conservatory in the early 1950s. It was also during this period that he began recording Bach’s music. In 1953, he recorded both the Goldberg Variations and The Art Of Fugue, a year after publishing an article that argued the unfinished latter work, whose instrumentation is not noted in the score, was intended for keyboard.

The following year, he led a groundbreaking recording of two Bach cantatas with his own Leonhardt Baroque Ensemble. The members included his wife Marie as one of the violinists, Harnoncourt playing cello and the pioneering English countertenor Alfred Deller.

As a keyboard player, Leonhardt recorded the Goldberg Variations three times and most of Bach’s other keyboard music at least once, if not twice. But his repertoire, while centered on Baroque music, extended in both directions to composers such as William Byrd and Mozart.

Leonhardt had a massive influence on the succeeding generations of early music practitioners. His own students form a true “who’s who” within this community, including such artists as Philippe Herreweghe, Ton Koopman, Christopher Hogwood, Alan Curtis, Richard Egarr and Andreas Staier.

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Anastasia Tsioulcas

Anastasia Tsioulcas is a correspondent on NPR's Culture desk. She is intensely interested in the arts at the intersection of culture, politics, economics and identity, and primarily reports on music. Recently, she has extensively covered gender issues and #MeToo in the music industry, including the trial and conviction of former R&B superstar R. Kelly; backstage tumult and alleged secret deals in the wake of sexual misconduct allegations against megastar singer Plácido Domingo; and gender inequity issues at the Grammy Awards.

On happier days, Tsioulcas has celebrated the life of the late Aretha Franklin, traveled to Havana to profile musicians and dancers, revealed the hidden artistry of an Indian virtuoso who spent 60 years in her apartment and brought listeners into the creative process of composers Steve Reich and Terry Riley.

Tsioulcas was formerly a reporter and producer for NPR Music, where she covered breaking news in the music industry as well as a wide range of musical genres and artists. She has also produced episodes for NPR Music's much-lauded Tiny Desk concert series and has hosted live concerts from venues like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and New York's (Le) Poisson Rouge. She also commissioned and produced several world premieres on behalf of NPR Music, including a live event that brought together 350 musicians to debut a new work together. As a video producer, she created high-profile video shorts for NPR Music, including performances by cellist Yo-Yo Ma in a Brooklyn theatrical props warehouse and pianist Yuja Wang in an icy-cold Steinway & Sons piano factory.

Tsioulcas has also reported from north and west Africa, south Asia, and across Europe for NPR and other outlets. Prior to joining NPR in 2011, she was widely published as a writer and critic on both classical and world music, and was the North America editor for Gramophone Magazine and the classical music columnist for Billboard.

Born in Boston and based in New York, Tsioulcas is a lapsed classical violinist and violist (shoutout to all the overlooked violists!). She graduated from Barnard College, Columbia University with a B.A. in comparative religion.

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