经济学人302:羽管键琴家——古斯塔夫·莱昂哈特

 　　A CONCERT by Gustav Leonhardt was not like any other. He approached his harpsichord 1 with the air of a mortician, slightly flexing 2 his long, delicate hands. As he played he sat bolt upright, gaunt and aquiline 3, unsmiling in his crisp, perfect suit, with his elbows held close to his sides. No unnecessary gesture, no hint of emotion: senza baldanza, as a composer might have marked it. He did not have the look of a man on a mission. But he was.

　　古斯塔夫?莱昂哈特的演奏会与众不同。他带着一种殡仪师的气质慢慢走近他的羽管键琴，轻轻地扭动一下他那纤细修长的双手。在演奏时他的背挺得笔直，瘦削且轮廓分明，穿着一身干净得体的西装而表情严肃，手肘紧靠在身体两侧。没有花俏的手势，没有透露出一点情绪，作曲家可能会把这叫做“缺乏自信”。他看上去不像一个肩负使命的人，但他是的。
　　Mr Leonhardt’s life-work was to persuade the world how beautiful the harpsichord was, and how the harpsichord repertoire 4 should be played. When he first fell in love with it, in the shape of the fairly bad instrument his parents bought for their house at Graveland in the Netherlands, he recognised it as the king of keyboards. Organs were noble characters, and he played church organ for years. Virginals were pleasing; he wrote a book on Flemish examples. But fortepianos were awful, the sound muffling 5 all over the place when the hammer hit the keys, which put him off playing his beloved Mozart; and modern grands were unspeakable. None had that direct pluck of plectrum on string for which he loved the harpsichord—though that mechanism 6 was also fearsomely exacting 7, even “diabolical”, and that was why he did not smile as he played.
　　莱昂哈特先生的毕生心血都花在让世界了解羽管键琴是多么美好的一种乐器，以及应该怎样弹奏羽管键琴曲目上面。当初，他父母替位于荷兰格雷弗兰村的房子买了一台音质很差的羽管键琴，从那时起他就爱上了这种乐器，认识到它是键盘乐器之王。风琴具有高贵的特色，他曾在教堂弹奏多年的风琴。小键琴则悦耳动听，他曾著过一本讨论弗兰芒小键琴的书。但是古典钢琴糟透了，当琴槌敲出音调时到处都是压抑的声音，让他在弹奏他钟爱的莫扎特时大受打击，至于现代钢琴，简直糟得无法形容。所有这些乐器都没有琴拨在琴弦上的直接拨动，而这正是他热爱羽管键琴的原因。不过同时要掌握这种发声机制也费劲得令人害怕，简直有如“恶魔”一般，这也是为什么他在演奏时从不微笑的原因。
　　It would also have been vulgar. Mr Leonhardt was ever on the watch for that, whether in the form of electric lighting 8, or showy articulation 9, or hotel breakfast buffets 10, or Beethoven’s Ninth. (“That ‘Ode to Joy’, talk about vulgarity! And the text! Completely puerile 11!”) His own manners were exquisitely 12 courteous 13; he seemed to have stepped from the past, and even a shockingly fast drive in his Alfa Romeo might end with Mr Leonhardt, lost, finding his way home not by sat-nav but the stars.
　　而且羽管键琴的演奏也容易流于低俗。不管是电灯照明，或是浮华的发音，抑或旅馆的自助早餐，还是贝多芬的第九交响乐里（“那首《欢乐颂》，简直是低俗的代表！再看看歌词！幼稚极了！”），莱昂哈特一直小心翼翼，让自己远离低俗。他自己的行为举止都带有一种高雅的礼貌，就好像他来自于过去的时代，给人感觉莱昂哈特就算开他自己的那辆快得让人乍舌的阿尔法?罗密欧去兜风，最后可能也会落得迷路下场，而且他会借助星星而不是导航器的指引找到家。
　　When he began to study harpsichord seriously, at Basel in 1950, the instrument had been neglected, or overlaid with Romantic sweetness, for decades. He intended to restore it to the simple, original sound, “salt rather than sugar”, that Johann Sebastian Bach had written for. If people found that sound too thin for modern halls, and the pitch disturbingly low, too bad; their ears would just have to get used to it. And after a while, they did.
　　1950年他开始在巴塞尔正式学习羽管键琴，当时这种乐器要么被人忽略，要么就是用来表现浪漫风格的甜蜜感，这种情况已经有几十年了。他决定要让羽管键琴重拾它原本那种简单的声音，那种“是盐，而不是糖”的声音，约翰?塞巴斯蒂安?巴赫当初就是为这种声音作曲的。如果人们觉得这种声音对于现代音乐厅来说太过于稀薄了，或是调子低得令人不安，太糟了，让他们去习惯这种声音吧。实际上，经过一段时间，人们真得习惯了。
　　It meant hard work for him. He began by tirelessly hand-copying hundreds of original scores in the Vienna Library, when he was meant to be studying conducting (but he scorned conducting, thinking it “the easiest way out” in music, with never a wrong note to worry about). He continued by making a definitive 14 recording 15 in 1953 of Bach’s “Art of Fugue”, and publishing an impassioned argument that the piece had been written for solo harpsichord rather than ensemble 16. That stirred up interest in pre-Romantic music, though still not enough to fill a room when his little consort 17 played Biber’s unpublished “Fidicinium sacro-profanum”, or other treasures he had unearthed 18. He thought of those as his catacomb days. Fairly quickly, however, listeners warmed to Byrd and Frescobaldi, Rameau and Ritter; his own recordings 19, especially with Nikolaus Harnoncourt of all Bach’s Cantatas 20, fanned the flame; and the early-music movement has flourished ever since.
　　这对他来说可不是轻松的工作。就在他本应学习指挥的时间里，他孜孜不倦地从维也纳图书馆手抄了数百份原谱（他本来就很轻视指挥，认为这是音乐中“最轻松的一条路”，从不需要担心弹错音）。他继续努力，在1953年录制了一张巴赫《赋格的艺术》的权威唱片，同时出版了一篇热情洋溢的论文，提出这首曲子并不是为了合奏，而是为了羽管键琴独奏而写的观点。这激起了人们对前浪漫主义音乐的兴趣，虽然在他的小乐队演奏比贝尔的《宗教世俗弦乐集》以及其它他挖掘出来的宝藏时，这种兴趣还没有大到可以让听众填满一个房间。他后来回忆时说那是一段暗无天日的时期。不过，很快的，听众对伯德，弗雷斯科巴尔迪，拉莫，斯瑞特的曲子反应热烈，他自己的一些唱片，尤其是和尼古劳斯?哈农库特合作录制的巴赫康塔塔全集进一步提高了他的声望，从那之后早期音乐运动就如火如荼地展开了。