Wanda Landowska was born in Warsaw, then part of the Russian Empire, into a cultured Jewish family.
Wanda Landowska was born on 5 July 1877 in Warsaw, at the time under Russian imperial control. She grew up in an intellectually vibrant, assimilated Jewish family; her father was a lawyer and her mother a translator who rendered Mark Twain into Polish.
This environment fostered an early love of languages, literature, and music. Landowska began piano studies at a very young age, showing prodigious talent that led her family to send her to the Warsaw Conservatory for formal training.
Her birth in this era of partitioned Poland and vibrant Jewish intellectual life shaped her cosmopolitan outlook and eventual role as a bridge between Eastern European musical traditions and the broader European early-music revival. Landowska would go on to become one of the most influential musicians of the twentieth century, almost single-handedly reviving the harpsichord as a concert instrument and transforming the performance of Baroque music.
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