Early adopters

The death of Gustav Leonhardt at the age of 83 brings to an end the career of one of the giants of the early music movement. As an organist, harpsichordist and conductor he was long at the forefront of the experiments and revelations that the drive to perform music on period instruments made possible. He will be remembered for being fearless in his single-minded pursuit of what he thought his chosen repertoires required. And he was producing peerless recordings of those repertoires right from the beginning which — one forgets — was in the late ’40s.

The term ‘early music’, and its demanding fellow traveller ‘authenticity’, have had a long innings. If one were talking in terms of the title of a revolution in modern concert practice one could say the battle has been won and the barriers taken down. As a more general remark it still has a useful application, though the point at which ‘early’ ceases to be early enough to qualify as being early is moot. Whether choral music was really part of the revolution is equally moot, since one cannot dig up old voices and blow air through them, and descriptions of what singing was like in the past are not accurate enough to inform anything useful now. But with instruments the cleaning out of later practices and expectations was really a revolution in taste, which Leonhardt helped to foment.

Most of those pioneers are still alive and still active. Of the really significant figures only David Munrow is long gone; but Harnoncourt, Brüggen, the Kuijkens, Koopman and Hogwood are pursuing distinguished careers into old age, working to blend the lessons of 30 and 40 years ago with the modern symphony sound that they have all helped to refashion.