A woman with pluck

In the second half of the 20th century, nearly every harpsichord player in the Western world was either one of her students or the student of one of her students. Wanda Landowska was almost single-handedly (or rather, double-handedly) responsible for the revival of the harpsichord at a time when the instrument had been relegated to museum displays for most of two centuries. Despite nagging protests from detractors who preferred the piano, she was determined that the music of the past sounded best when played on the instruments of the past. In a spirited argument about how best to interpret the music of her favorite composer, she reportedly patted the hand of a rival and said: “Why don’t you play Bach your way and I’ll play him his way?”

In short, the woman had pluck.

She was a child prodigy in Warsaw, a teenage virtuoso in Berlin, a grownup doyenne in turn-of-the-20th-century Paris, to where she eloped at age 21 with the Polish folklorist Henry Lew. Her husband was her impresario, research assistant and first editor of her writings on music. At a certain point, however, Wanda asked to be “relieved of the obligations of marriage.” She proposed to Henry that they should stay married but should each have a woman on the side – or perhaps, even better, a woman to share. They lived in one love triangle after another, with Lew continuing to act as Wanda’s musical manager and collaborator, until his death in 1919, in one of the first automobile accidents in Paris.

Wanda never re-married; in fact, for the rest of her life, she lived with women, primarily Denise Restout. A student-turned-lover-turned-companion some 30 years her Wanda’s junior, Restout fled with mentor from France to the United States as the Nazis reached Paris. The couple landed at Ellis Island on the day Pearl Harbor was bombed, and they lived together in New York and Lakeville, Conn., until Wanda’s death in 1959 at age 80.

X-RAYS OF WANDA LANDOWSKA'S HANDS

The light box is white, slightly crooked, and has two tiny cracks on its face, which you only notice if you make yourself stop looking at her hands. Wanda Landowska’s fingers are splayed. She wears no rings, although there’s an odd fragment of line at her wrist that suggests the edge of a bracelet or wristwatch. The bones are neither stark white nor smoky gray nor steely blue, but all three, and then none of those colors, and then another color that doesn’t even have a name.
Somehow their position looks both modest and bold, although both seem like strange words to apply to a skeleton. In the upper right corner, the date is burned into the X-ray, with a short, straight vertical line posing as a comma between the day and year: MAY 31 | 1946.

There’s a smudgy plaque beneath the light box, which has a caption in all caps:

X-RAYS OF WANDA LANDOWSKA’S HANDS
PRESENTED IN MEMORY OF A. DAVID GUREWITSCH
1902-1974
PROFESSOR OF REHABILITATION MEDICINE
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK
1974

I am studying this when an announcement comes over the speakers, and the voice of a live woman is bouncing off the tiles.

“May I have your attention please? May I have your attention please? Cancel fox code for the fifth floor of Jefferson Towers. Cancel fox code for the fifth floor of Jefferson Towers.”

I have no idea what a “fox code” is but I feel relieved that it’s canceled, considering that I’m standing on the fifth floor of Jefferson Towers. The building is better known to Birminghamians as the Spain Rehabilitation Center, and to the physicians, patients and staffers who populate it simply as Spain. I’m not here for rehabilitation, however, at least not as a patient. I am here to look at art, particularly an X-ray hung as art, of the hands of a great pianist and the harpsichord’s first great 20th century champion. The patient, the subject, was dead before this hospital ever opened its doors; she may have never even set foot in the state of Alabama. But here are her hands, hung up as art, the light box humming alongside humdrum watercolors. The X-ray was taken 50 years ago by a doctor remembered as a pioneer of rehabilitation and brought to Birmingham by another physician who had his own ideas about what her bones showed.