Musical Heritage, Alterity, and Transnational Migration: Wanda Landowska’s Musical Lives

Musical Heritage, Alterity, and Transnational Migration: Wanda Landowska’s Musical Lives

In 1925 Wanda Landowska bought property in the genteel town of Saint-Leu-la-Forêt, northwest of Paris, and built, between 1926 and 1927, “a temple to music” in her garden. Famous across the musical world as a performer, composer, teacher, consultant and scholar, Landowska was ready to find a home for her gynocentric household after decades of cross-border movement. She had lived in Warsaw, Paris and Berlin, and was traveling extensively through Europe, the Middle East, Argentine and the United States. Throughout all her years of mobility, however, Landowska carried with her a constant sense of musical heritage to be preserved, cherished, and revived through performance and creation, through study and through joyful conviviality. She assembled a distinguished library and instrument collection that included such prized items as Chopin’s upright piano that he had used in Mallorca in 1838. Yet what Landowska had envisaged as her “ forever home” was overrun by Nazi plunderers in 1940 who stole her belongings as Landowska moved, once more, to save her life—this time across the Atlantic, to New York where she arrived on the day after Pearl Harbor. Here, too, her deep investment in a transnational musical heritage became a lodestone that guided her through exile. I address the complex issue of musical heritage in the musical lives of Wanda Landowska as it relates to matters of identity, gender, race, displacement, and creativity. By engaging caringly with the core values of a displaced woman-identified, queer musician of Jewish Polish descent, I propose to rethink how musical heritage might be thought from Landowska’s unique and vulnerable positionality.