H.C. Robbins Landon - Musicologist
Ted
an obit had appeared since people don't believe anything unless it's
in print.
Here's the Guardian obit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/nov/24/hc-robbins-landon-obituary
HC Robbins Landon obituary
Distinguished musicologist known for his trailblazing work on Haydn
and his books on Mozart
HC Robbins Landon cut through the myth of Mozart's death and
demonstrated that no one had poisoned him and that he had, in fact,
died of kidney failure.
Few musicologists achieve true celebrity outside their specialist
field. But the name of HC Robbins Landon, who has died at the age of
83, was known by many thousands of people beyond the scholarly
community. While his reputation was founded on his trailblazing
research into Joseph Haydn, which helped to establish the composer's
works – largely unknown as late as the 1950s – in the canon, it was
his series of books on Mozart, aimed at a wider public and selling in
huge numbers in many languages, that brought him global renown.
It is no exaggeration to call him a titan, for Robbie, as he was
universally known, was a giant in both physical and intellectual
terms. And yet his infectious enthusiasm for the subject under
discussion, coupled with an encyclopedic memory and almost recklessly
fluent delivery, allowed him to engage lay audiences in a way that few
scholars are able.
Born in Boston and educated at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania,
Landon studied music theory, composition and English literature, the
latter under WH Auden. His interest in Haydn had already been piqued
as a schoolboy, but an encounter with the scholar Karl Geiringer, his
teacher at Boston University (1945-47), helped him on his chosen path.
Realising that his future lay in Europe, where all the relevant
sources were located, he managed to secure work as a music critic and
European correspondent for various US newspapers and journals,
including Musical America.
Employment by the Times, for which he worked for nearly a decade, was
a crucial factor in gaining him admittance to archives behind the iron
curtain. The papers of Haydn's employers, the princes of Esterházy, in
the National Library in Budapest, had recently been taken over by the
state. General access was all but impossible, but the Times connection
ensured that he was treated with courtesy and even offered a visa.
In 1949 the Haydn Society was founded at his instigation. Originally
located in Boston, but later operating out of Vienna also, the society
planned a complete edition of Haydn's works, of which only a tenth had
been published at that time; the project was subsequently abandoned,
though much valuable musicological work was undertaken by the society.
Equally notable were the recordings it issued, which included a number
of Haydn's works, not least symphonies and masses, that had been
previously unavailable on disc. The first recordings of Mozart's C
minor Mass and Idomeneo were also made by the society.
Partly in conjunction with the activities of the Haydn Society, Landon
began to produce critical editions and other material relating to the
composer at this time. The first major publishing milestone was The
Symphonies of Joseph Haydn (1955), which presented those works in the
context of Haydn's output as a whole and of 18th-century music in
general. Meanwhile he published editions of a number of Haydn's other
works, notably masses and operas, helping to stimulate performances
and effectively bringing about a reappraisal of Haydn's abilities as a
dramatic composer.
The crowning achievement of his Haydn scholarship was the five-volume
Haydn: Chronicle and Works (1976-80). The prodigious detail in which
Landon lays out in these volumes the documentary material unearthed
from the archives is a compliment as much to his faithful publishers,
Thames & Hudson, as it is to Landon himself. It is difficult to
imagine a similar project being undertaken today. To take examples at
random, in volume one the salaries and payments in kind made in 1760
to Haydn's musicians at Eisenstadt are listed: they include precise
allocations of wheat, corn, lard, candles, cabbage and beets, and, for
some privileged players, a pig or two.
The third volume, covering the London years, includes, among its
scores of documents, diary accounts by Haydn of his visit to Ascot,
intimate information about Haydn's visits to a surgeon (wishing to
remove a polyp from the composer's nose, the surgeon summoned "a few
brawny fellows" to hold him down, but Haydn resisted) and much more
besides.
Further esoterica are found in the copious footnotes, placed, where
they belong but are too rarely found, on the page. If, in the case of
Haydn, Landon's efforts effected a radical reappraisal of the composer
by bringing many of the works into the public domain for the first
time, with Mozart his influence was of a different order. By the time
he produced his five Mozart publications – 1791: Mozart's Last Year,
Mozart: The Golden Years, The Mozart Compendium, Mozart and Vienna,
and The Mozart Essays – between 1988 and 1995, Mozart was firmly
established in the pantheon of great composers. Thanks to the huge
success of Peter Shaffer's 1979 play and 1984 film Amadeus, not only
was Mozart's music suddenly on the bestseller lists, but a new
mythology had grown up around the last months of Mozart's life: the
relationship with Salieri, the Requiem, the "mysterious messenger",
the final illness, the pauper's burial.
Landon's achievement was to cut through the fantasy and mystification
to present the facts regarding the composer's last year, unveiling new
documentary material in the process. He found no grounds for Mozart's
having been poisoned by Salieri, or anyone else, taking the most
likely cause of Mozart's death to be a combination of medical factors
including progressive kidney failure, and restored the reputation of
his wife, Constanze, slandered over decades as a scatterbrained,
lascivious woman, incapable of understanding Mozart and encouraging
him to live a disorderly, if not dissolute, existence. As text editor
of 1791: Mozart's Last Year, I was privileged to play a small role in
the dissemination of this revisionist view of Mozart.
Landon had always been generous in his acknowledgment of editorial and
other assistance. In his earlier work on Haydn, his first wife,
Christa Landon, a distinguished harpsichordist and scholar in her own
right, killed in an air crash in 1977, had been an indispensable
colleague. His second wife, Else Radant, also a historian of some
note, was to provide further invaluable support for the next couple of
decades. He relied too on a secretariat and assorted assistants,
publicists and editors to manage his schedule and other administrative
trivia, allowing him to concentrate on the matters in which he had the
expertise. For all the exhaustiveness of his research and annotation,
detail was not necessarily his strong suit.
Nor were the niceties of prose style, which made the process of
coaxing the material he provided into a coherent narrative an
interesting challenge.
His freely expressed gratitude to assistants, as to fellow-scholars,
made him a pleasure to work with, however. It was an instructive
experience too: one could but marvel at his ability to bring to life
the dry documentary material retrieved from dusty library shelves.
Both on the printed page and in the radio studio he communicated an
enthusiasm that for once endowed musicology with the excitement of a
detective story. It was this lightness of touch allied to his
scholarly credentials and an almost missionary desire to share
knowledge with the world at large that brought him unprecedented
financial rewards as well as critical acclaim. In an interview
conducted a couple of years before he died, he reported that he had
just received a royalty cheque for his five Mozart books amounting to
$80,000. Even allowing for the multiple reissues and translations of
1791, the figure represents an astonishing, and surely unequalled,
return on a scholarly endeavour of this nature.
An episode that Landon and others of us would probably prefer to gloss
over occurred a few years after the publication of 1791. Towards the
end of 1993, a group of six piano sonatas thought to be by Haydn came
to light, their authenticity verified by the performer-scholars Paul
and Eva Badura-Skoda and by Landon. The January issue of the BBC Music
Magazine, of which I was then reviews editor, carried an article by
Landon proclaiming their merits. The February issue carried a
retraction, it having been discovered that the sonatas were a skilful
modern fraud perpetrated by a German recorder player and composer
called Winfried Michel. The episode illustrates perhaps Landon's
penchant for precipitate and over-zealous judgment, but it provoked at
the same time a worthwhile debate about the extent to which our
perception of the greatness of works is determined by our knowledge of
their composer.
Other composers on whom he worked and published included Vivaldi,
Handel, JC Bach and Beethoven. Some of the work outside his specialist
field was criticised for its lack of scholarly rigour, though none
could dispute the brio he brought to his subject. The book Five
Centuries of Music in Venice (1991), written in conjunction with John
Julius Norwich, was conceived as a companion to a television series
called Maestro, created by Landon and Norwich, and broadcast by
Channel 4 in association with the French broadcaster La Sept. His
autobiographical Horns in High C, published in 1999, related the
events of his career with characteristically breathless enthusiasm.
His academic appointments included professorships at Queens College,
New York (1969) and the University of California at Davis (1970). He
was John Bird Professor of Music at the University of Wales, Cardiff
(1978-93) and a fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford (1979). He was
also awarded honorary doctorates by Boston University, Queen's
University, Belfast, Bristol University and the New England
Conservatory, as well as the Siemens prize (1991) and the medal of
honour of the Handel and Haydn Society (1993).
Fluent in several languages, Robbie made his home at different times
in America, Britain, Vienna and France. It was to his beautiful 18th-
century chateau at Rabastens, near Toulouse, that he finally retired,
spending his last decade or so with his companion Marie-Noelle Raynal-
Bechetoille, who, like Else Radant, survives him (there were no
children from either marriage). An epicurean and bon vivant, he was no
less generous with his hospitality than with his scholarship.
To spend time in his company was as exhausting as it was stimulating:
nuggets of musical fact would be extricated from the vast repository
of knowledge that was his brain. A tendency to solipsism was balanced
by a remarkable capacity for thoughtfulness. I was deeply touched to
receive a telephone call from him one Christmas Day when he guessed I
would be on my own. Others will have different stories to tell of his
boundless generosity. Larger than life, he was an inspirational
presence, bringing a penetrating intellect and theatrical flair to the
world of musicology.
• Howard Chandler Robbins Landon, musicologist, born 6 March 1926;
died 20 November 2009
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009
and here's the Daily Telegraph one
HC Robbins Landon
HC Robbins Landon, the musicologist, who died on November 20 aged 83,
can be said to have done for classical music what Kenneth Clark did
for art; and his reputation, based on his achievement in unearthing
much of what has become the staple Haydn repertoire, was only slightly
tarnished when, in 1993, he became the victim of a musical hoax.
Published: 6:27PM GMT 24 Nov 2009
It is sometimes easy to forget that before the Second World War most
of Haydn's symphonies had never been printed, let alone recorded,
while whole opera manuscripts lay gathering dust in the archives of
central Europe.
For decades, beavering away in Prague, Budapest and Vienna, Robbins
Landon rediscovered symphonies, masses, quartets and operas, sometimes
by dogged detective work, sometimes by luck.
Robbins Landon made dozens of television films – for the BBC and other
networks – and his massive studies of Haydn became indispensable works
of reference. His Symphonies of Joseph Haydn was published in 1955,
with the five-volume Haydn: Chronicle and Works following at the end
of the 1970s. He also edited a number of Haydn's works and published
numerous other monographs and articles concerning the composer.
In December 1993 Robbins Landon was invited to verify six "lost" Haydn
piano sonatas, dating from 1766-69, which had allegedly been
discovered in Munster by a German flautist by the name of Winfried
Michel.
Delighted to have found such an important addition to the oeuvre,
Robbins Landon gave the story to BBC Music Magazine, The Times and the
BBC Television News.
He explained that the sonatas were important for several reasons: they
were written when Haydn was in a creative ferment; they were intended
for the hammer-flugel (a forerunner of the pianoforte) rather than the
harpsichord; and the "pregnant pauses" and "surprise modulations" of
the work suggested, in Robbins Landon's view, that Haydn was beginning
"to search for a new musical language".
What the reports failed to mention was that neither the media outlets
concerned nor Robbins Landon had carried out checks on the manuscripts
or had even seen the originals. They had relied on photocopies.
A few days later the Haydn Institute in Cologne declared the
manuscripts to be fakes. A Viennese archivist had noted that the steel-
nibbed pen used was not invented until 50 years after Haydn's death,
while other experts dated the paper and the handwriting as probably
20th-century.
Evidently determined not to follow the example of Lord Dacre (Hugh
Trevor Roper), who never fully recovered from the humiliation of the
"Hitler diaries" hoax, the ebullient Robbins Landon, while accepting
that he had been conned, avoided giving an apology and seemed to treat
the whole affair as a great joke, merely explaining how, in the rush
of media attention, he had understandably neglected to examine the
manuscripts themselves.
Others were less amused. The BBC became strangely reticent about any
broadcast involving the sonatas and The Times printed a retraction.
Robbins Landon remained unabashed by the whole affair, and the episode
rates no mention in his autobiography, Horns in High C (1999).
Howard Chandler Robbins Landon was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on
March 6 1926. In his autobiography he recalled how he found his
vocation when his music teacher played him a recording of Haydn's
Symphony No 93. "Do you mean, sir, there are 104 symphonies by Haydn
like this one?" asked the awestruck 13-year-old. "More or less," came
the reply. "I was amazed, and wanted to know how I could go about
becoming a Haydn scholar," Robbins Landon recalled.
He studied music at Swarthmore, a Quaker college in Pennsylvania, from
which he was expelled for having an affair with a girl student. He
went on to Boston University, where he studied with the Haydn expert
Karl Geiringer. After graduating in 1947, he planned to go on to
Harvard to take a master's degree, but in the meantime decided to
spend a summer in Europe, landing a job as foreign music correspondent
for the Intercollegiate Broadcasting System.
By the time he reached Salzburg, he was convinced that he had to stay
in Europe and, knowing he would soon be drafted into military service,
approached the US Army of Occupation in Vienna, hoping to bypass
military bureaucracy and join the army on his own terms.
He was taken on as a researcher for an official history of General
Mark Clark's Fifth Army and its role in the liberation of Italy. This
work provided him with invaluable training in the handling of original
source material.
On leaving the army, Robbins Landon returned to Boston to undertake
postgraduate research, and it was there that he and a group of friends
founded the Haydn Society, with the aim of issuing records and
printing a new complete edition of the composer's works. The first set
of records, issued in 1949, was the Harmoniemesse of 1802. It sold out
almost immediately.
A legacy from a rich uncle enabled him to return to Europe to realise
his dream of committing the entire Haydn oeuvre to disc. Back in
Vienna, he found Herbert von Karajan emerging from the shadow of
Nazism, and Walter Legge, the British impresario, putting EMI money
behind the nascent recording scene.
He became a music critic for American newspapers and, using contacts
made while serving in the army, gained access to archives throughout
Europe.
In addition to Haydn's works, Robbins Landon published work on other
18th-century composers, including Mozart, Beethoven and Vivaldi, and
was instrumental in making the first recordings of many of their
works.
One of his early coups was to unearth the original parts of Mozart's
Idomeneo, allowing modern audiences to hear how the opera was intended
to sound. He was also instrumental in making the first recording of
Mozart's Mass in C Minor (K427).
The "horns" of his autobiography referred to the instruments necessary
for a faithful recording of one of Haydn's forgotten symphonies,
Number 56.
The players of the Vienna Philharmonic had been having difficulty
reaching the high notes when Robbins Landon discovered that Haydn's
horns had been an octave higher. He had some made, persuaded the
grumbling musicians to play them and the problem was solved.
In the 1950s an invitation to broadcast an orchestral series for the
BBC Third Programme led to a long and fruitful association with BBC
radio and also television, for which he made a series of feature films
on individual composers, working with Humphrey Burton and later Mervyn
Williams.
Robbins Landon's musical mission was so all-consuming that little else
seemed to register. Throughout the 1960s he was a frequent guest of
the Hungarian government, but since he had eyes only for manuscripts,
he seemed to notice nothing of political interest.
His autobiography records how he was reluctantly induced to visit a
collective farm which, to his relief, turned out fine: "We were
offered the most spectacular local cheese, and the whole experience
was delightful."
In a similar way, his private life seemed an almost incidental
distraction. "He seems to change his wives the way a coachman changes
horses," wrote one bemused reviewer. "Wife number two is suddenly
there in place of number one; then, out of the blue, we encounter
number three."
Howard Robbins Landon had been separated from his third wife, Else
Radant, for 20 years. He is survived by his longtime companion, Marie-
Noëlle Raynal-Bechetoille.
Dave Sill
> I had learned of his death but didn't want to post anything here until
> an obit had appeared since people don't believe anything unless it's
> in print.
OK, but there's something to be said for scooping the mainstream media.
-Dave
Matthew Kruk
news:7n2s1bF...@mid.individual.net...
Okay ... Fidel Castro will die ...
You read it here first ;-)
Ted
a source other than personal knowledge
that I swore at that time I would NEVER post something early again.
Especially since it took several days for
an obit to run as the family wanted to hold services before they
alerted the media.
David Samuel Barr
> Here's the Guardian obit
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/nov/24/hc-robbins-landon-obituary
>
>
> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/music-obituaries/6646024/HC-Robbins-Landon.html
And between the two obituaries, one of the greatest mysteries of
the 20th century remains unsolved: namely was his surname "Landon"
or "Robbins Landon"? (One obit believes the former, the other the
latter.) Libraries, catalogues and reference books all over the
world have variously followed the different usages for decades.
(Likewise for Peter Maxwell Davies.)
Ted
On Nov 25, 3:04 am, David Samuel Barr <dsb...@mindspring.com> wrote:
> Ted wrote:
> > Here's the Guardian obit
> >http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/nov/24/hc-robbins-landon-obituary
>
> > and here's the Daily Telegraph one
>
>
> And between the two obituaries, one of the greatest mysteries of
> the 20th century remains unsolved: namely was his surname "Landon"
> or "Robbins Landon"? (One obit believes the former, the other the
> latter.) Libraries, catalogues and reference books all over the
> world have variously followed the different usages for decades.
> (Likewise for Peter Maxwell Davies.)
That I can answer -- his surname was Landon. Robbins was his middle
name but because it
sounded like a compound name, it confuses librarians.