At Home With Landowska in Lakeville

    â€œAnd now the smokair!â€�

    With these words, Robert Hawkins’ weekly visits to the great Wanda Landowska would begin.

    The “smokairâ€� was, roughly, Landowska’s pronunciation of  â€œsmoker,â€� the word she used to refer to the raunchy smoking-room stories that she loved, and with which she liked to start their meetings.

    And these stories?

    “The more outrageous the better,â€� Hawkins, 86,  recalled in a recent interview about his years as a kind of editorial assistant and advisor to Landowska and her friend Denise Restout, in their home on Millerton Road.

    In those days, the early-to-mid 1950s, Hawkins was an English teacher at The Hotchkiss School who had been recommended to Landowska by a South American  student he had coached in English. At that time Landowska was the best-known harpsichordist in the world, and she needed someone  to help her prepare some of her many articles on a wide variety of musical subjects.  

    â€œI never give my hand,â€� she said, greeting Hawkins on his first call with a dramatic pause, “ but frequently my heart.â€�  She had “enormous charm,â€� he recalled in a recent interview at his Lake-ville home, but “she could turn it on, and she could turn it off.â€�

   Her native tongue was Polish,  but she had lived some of her younger years in Germany and France, and was thoroughly at home in both languages. She preferred to write in French, and Hawkins’ job was primarily  to help her with idiomatic expressions, general verbal advice and polishing.

   After 1959, the year of Landowska’s death at 80, Hawkins worked closely with Denise Restout, who lived until 2004 in their house, and was an outstanding musician herself, a harpsichordist, pianist and teacher who was also an organist at St. Mary’s Church. It was Hawkins who introduced her to the Deerfield Foundation, which provided funds so that she could continue with the preparation of “Landowska on Music,â€�  the remarkable collection of the virtuoso’s views on an encyclopedic variety of subjects.

   Far more than just a performer, more even than the major rediscoverer of the harpsichord after more than a century of neglect, Landowska was an outstanding musicologist, often with opinions likely to upset conventional, academic views, especially in Europe. She wrote, for example, “The Dance in Music of the Past,â€� “Climax and Monotony,â€� on music in Shakespeare, on George Gershwin, and “The Liberties I Take,â€�  as well as on many individual composers.

   While she repopularized the harpsichord, she did not turn away from jazz, or from the modernism of Poulenc and de Falla, who both wrote compositions especially for her. This was a long stride from the experiences of a young girl who grew up learning the musical classics from the age of four.

   In one notable essay, she tackled the problem of melody, and complaints that modern music lacks melody. “Modern music does not seem melodious to you?â€� she wrote. “Well, it will become so. Just have a little patience.â€�  

   And she added, “We have had an entire century of broad and stout, thick and violent, burning and sticky melodies.

If modern melody is short of breath, a little asthmatic . . . so much the better!�

   In the typical visit to Landowska, after the ritual smoking-room story, there would be work on manuscript problems — finding just the idiomatic phrase needed — and perhaps a walk on Selleck Hill with her and Ms. Restout, and ending with “gouter,â€� the French word for light refreshment at tea time.

   What did they talk about on their walks? Not music, certainly.  â€œI was completely unmusical,â€� Hawkins said. “Landowska called me her musical virgin.â€�

   As he recalled her, Hawkins mentioned particularly her “driving energyâ€� and her sense of humor, which could be biting. She habitually referred to the eminent and much younger harpsichordist Sylvia Marlowe, who was herself the center of a fashionable East Side salon in New York City, as “Marsh Marlowe.â€�

   When it came to composers, however, her  tastes were expansive. She fiercely denied that one group of  composers “advancedâ€� on another. She compared art to the earth rotating around the sun; it “gets closer at times, farther in others, only to return to about the same place.â€�

   After her death — Hawkins was the first Lakeville friend whom Restout notified outside of her household — Hawkins continued to work closely with Restout, who produced the 434-page, fascinating “Landowska on Musicâ€� published in 1965, “collected, edited, and translated by Denise Restout, assisted by Robert Hawkins.â€�

   As he looked back on those days recently, Hawkins summarized, “Wanda Landowska’s greatest accomplishment was herself.â€�

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