Title: On the Protestant Roots of Gustav Leonhardt's Performance Style
Abstract: a memorial was held for Gustav Maria Leonhardt (1928-2012) in Amsterdam's Westerkerk.Its content had been carefully prepared by the deceased himself, honed and refined over a period of four years, ever since he had first been diagnosed with lymphatic cancer in 2008.The gathering shocked many of those attending both by the severity of its spoken rhetoric and by its paucity of musical content.The chosen organ preludes and postlude by J. S. Bach were relatively simple, with a limited appeal to sentiment. 2 The only music during the event proper was the communal singing of a psalm and several chorales.An extensive text, "Reflections Written by Gustav Leonhardt," was read aloud.In it the Enlightenment was excoriated as foolish hubris, human love dismissed as illusory in contrast to the divine, and the freedoms of modern society disparaged as grotesque deviations from God's will.Attendees were invited to submit themselves to the latter.Those who knew Leonhardt well will not have been surprised by the pious, unsparing tone of the ceremony,