Landowska’s father was an amateur musician and lawyer in Warsaw. Her mother spoke six languages and was the first person to translate the works of Mark Twain into Polish. She also founded the first Berlitz Language School in Warsaw. Their daughter Wanda was born in Warsaw in 1879 and began to play the piano at the age of four. Her first teacher was Jan Kleczyn´ski and she continued her tuition at the Warsaw Conservatory with Aleksander Michalowski. At seventeen Landowska went to Berlin to complete her studies in piano with Moritz Moszkowski and took lessons in composition from Heinrich Urban. In 1900 Landowska moved to Paris where she married Henri Lew. It was Lew, whom she had met in Berlin, who encouraged her to explore music from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Landowska was introduced to Vincent d’Indy, Charles Bordes and Alexandre Guilmant who founded the Schola Cantorum in order to promote ancient music, as well as Albert Schweitzer. Between 1905 and 1909 she wrote a number of scholarly articles which were published in book form as Musique Ancienne in 1909.
From 1903 she began to appear in public as a harpsichordist, and it is with this instrument that her name is usually connected, although she did continue to play the piano in public. In 1907 Landowska visited Russia with her harpsichord, and on the second visit two years later played for Leo Tolstoy. She toured throughout Europe as a harpsichordist and just before the First World War taught at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin. Landowska and her husband remained in Berlin, but as civil prisoners on parole, because they were French citizens.
After the War, she taught harpsichord at the Conservatory in Basel for a short period and then returned to Paris, teaching at the Sorbonne and Ecole Normale de Musique. Landowska’s husband was killed in a road accident in 1919. She founded the Ecole de Musique Ancienne near Paris at Saint-Leu-la-Fôret where she had settled in 1925. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s she continued to tour and perform on both the harpsichord and piano, often playing works specially written for her and her harpsichord such as the Concert Champêtre by Poulenc and the Concerto for Harpsichord by Manuel de Falla. At the Nazi invasion of Paris, Landowska and her pupil and companion Denise Restout escaped, first to a town on the Spanish border, then to New York.
In 1947 she settled in Lakeville, Connecticut, with Restout whom she had met in 1933, and remained there for the rest of her life. She continued to perform into the 1950s and became renowned as the most eminent harpsichordist of the first half of the twentieth century, and the individual responsible for resurrecting the instrument and a scholarly approach to the performance of music from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although she made recording in New York City during the late 1940s, from around 1950 Landowska preferred to record at her home in Connecticut and made her last recordings there at the age of eighty in the Spring of 1959.
