Early Music, Vol. xlii, No. 1 © Te Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. doi:10.1093/em/cau026, available online at www.em.oxfordjournals.org Advance Access publication March 21, 2014 23 Kailan R. Rubinof ‘Te Grand Guru of Baroque Music’: Leonhardt’s antiquarianism in the progressivist 1960s I n the late 1960s and early 70s, Gustav Leonhardt emerged as the leading harpsichordist of the post- war generation. His Telefunken recordings garnered strong sales figures, with Gramophone in 1972 pro- claiming him ‘one of the pillars and, indeed, pioneers of the current boom in pre-classical music’. 1 He had even achieved ‘rock star’ celebrity status, or so it would seem from contemporary American concert reports. Writing in the 24 April 1971 edition of the New York Times, critic Donal Henahan remarked: Even before Gustav Leonhardt, the Dutch harpsichord- ist, walked onstage at Alice Tully Hall on Tursday night the audience broke into applause. A stagehand had merely raised the top of the 1642 Johannes Ruckers harpsichord, displaying two opulent Flemish paintings that decorated the underside of the lid, so that the gilded instrument stood revealed in all its efulgent glory. Tat Mr Leonhardt went on to play a similarly attractive recital only made the cup run over for the assembled throng of harpsichord connoisseurs. 2 Who was this ‘assembled throng of harpsichord con- noisseurs’? Indeed, why had so many American fans turned out to hear a 40-something Dutch classical musician on the esoteric harpsichord performing a recital of relatively obscure works? (On the programme was an arrangement of the Sonata no.3 in C major for unaccompanied violin by J. S. Bach, bwv1005, and works by Louis Couperin and Louis Marchand.) Moreover, why might an antique 17th-century Flemish instrument—one that is discussed at length in the review, and credited on the concert advertisement with equal weight alongside the composers on the pro- gramme—attract such special attention? 3 Henahan’s concert report is tongue-in-cheek (sub- stitute Alice Tully Hall for Madison Square Garden, the harpsichord for an electric guitar and Leonhardt for Mick Jagger, and he might have been reporting on a very different sort of musical event!). Yet it is also revealing for what it tells us about Leonhardt’s reputation in the 1960s and 70s, his reception in America, and the attraction of the harpsichord and ‘historically informed performance’ (hereafter abbreviated HIP) during this turbulent period of American post-war society. Early music in the 1960s: regression or renewal? Practitioners, scholars and commentators on the early music movement have frequently noted the association of HIP with 1960s protest and counter- culture. As Bruce Haynes, one of Leonhardt’s former collaborators and mentees, put it: In the 1960s, it is doubtful whether a movement could have had credibility if it did not have an element of protest and revolution about it. A mainspring of HIP in the 1960s was a rejection of the status quo. 4 This correlation of early music with the 1960s warrants unpacking, however: the rise of Gustav Leonhardt’s career during this period seems all the more incongruous considering the historical and cultural context in which it occurred. It is worth emphasizing that Leonhardt and the rarefied harp- sichord, with its aristocratic associations, achieved new heights of popularity in America and abroad during a period synonymous in the mainstream media (and the popular imagination) with youth culture and psychedelic music. The 1960s were also, of course, a period of tre- mendous social unrest, marked in the USA by the at University of North Carolina at Greensboro on April 20, 2014 http://em.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from