Programming early iberian keyboard musicfrom wanda landowska to santiago kastner

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation, Programming Early Iberian Keyboard Music. From Wanda Landowska to Santiago Kastner, focuses on the programming, performing and editing strategies and procedures developed during the revival of early music in the Iberian Peninsula throughout the twentieth century. The first part is dedicated to analysing the establishing of Wanda Landowska and Joaquín Nin in the early music market, with particular emphasis on their programming and interpretative strategies and the reception they received in Spain. The second and third parts are specifically focused on the career of Santiago Kastner, a British-born musicologist and performer based in Lisbon. During five decades, he endeavoured to focus all his efforts to promote early Iberian music beyond its borders. The ultimate aim is to analyse how these initiatives and programming strategies have an impact on the concert experience nowadays. From his debut in Barcelona in 1931, Kastner’s distinctive feature as scholar-performer was to place himself as a successor to Wanda Landowska in the understanding of the historical concert from a historically informed point of view with regard to the instrument used. He assimilated the Pleyel Grand Modèle de Concert that Landowska devised and later introduced the clavichord as a concert instrument. At the same time, he continued Joaquín Nin’s task in championing Iberian keyboard composers, Portuguese in Kastner’s case, through their inclusion in concert programmes, and later through their editing in international publications. This thesis is supported by methodologies used in the fields of performance studies and cultural history and it appraises a large and heterogeneous corpus of sources including concert programmes, early Iberian music editions, pioneering recordings of those repertoires, writings, unedited correspondence and criticism and reviews appearing in journals. The results obtained value, on the one hand, the relevance of Landowska and Nin as seminal figures in the consolidation of the early music market in the Iberian Peninsula –specifically in Spain- during the first years of the twentieth century. On the other hand, they value Kastner’s importance in the construction of the concept of Iberian music and in the spreading and putting into practice of this repertoire beyond the Pyrenees through his concert tours, editions and writings of international impact. Moreover, within a conceptual framework, this thesis aims to value 1) the essential role played by press as a promotional apparatus during the first steps of the revival; 2) the outstanding impact of the pioneering critical editions of early Iberian music as the first links in the reception of this repertoire; 3) the hitherto underexplored role of the first recordings of Iberian repertoires in its spreading and its understanding and, finally, 4) the unrivalled work of Santiago Kastner as performer, musicologist, editor and teacher in the historically informed approach to the sixteenth to eighteenth-century Iberian keyboard repertoire and its introduction in international markets.