IN MEMORIAM 1932-2005
The Board, Staff, and Musicians of the
American Bach Soloists mourn the loss of one of the world’s
most powerful exponents of early music, the most celebrated
pioneer for early music in the western United States, board
member of American Bach Soloists, founder of Philharmonia
Baroque, founding member of Early Music America, founder
of MusicSources, and dearest colleague.
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If one woman were to
be chosen as outstanding contributor to the Bay Area’s
musical life over the past 50 years, it would have to be
Laurette Goldberg. Prominent among her achievements was her
founding the Philharmonia Baroque in 1981 and guiding America’s
first full-time professional and leading early instrument
orchestra through its first five seasons. At that point,
in 1986, she gave birth to another original inspiration,
MusicSources, a center for historical performance in Berkeley
that contains a museum of early keyboard instruments, a library
of historical performance practice documents and a school
focusing on historically informed performance.
Her viewpoint embraced all aspects of
the art of early music, with one dominant, overriding idea
that these elements be brought together. Mrs. Goldberg insisted
that the five ingredients—the devoted listeners, the
scholars, the instrument builders, teachers and performers—were
essential to an early music community. A founding member
of the San Francisco Early Music Society, she was an activist,
a magnet drawing the prominent harpsichord builders here,
drawing aspiring harpsichordists to her studio at home and
of course, through Philharmonia Baroque, creating the institution
that made it possible for a corpus of skilled players to
come here to work and stay.
Born Laurette Kushner-Cantor in Chicago,
she began musical studies at four, and made her debut at
12 playing Beethoven’s C major Concerto with a college
orchestra. Her first great teacher was Rudolf Ganz at the
Chicago Musical College, and later she was to study at Mills
College with Egon Petri. Inspired by Wanda Landowska, she
took up the harpsichord and by the 1960s, was teaching harpsichord
on the instrument the Oakland Symphony’s conductor,
Gerhard Samuel, encouraged her to purchase. She was performing
with the Oakland Symphony as its keyboard artist and accompanying
the Oakland Symphony Chorus. Her next inspiring teacher was
Alice Ehlers, then Ralph Kirkpatrick, America’s first
scholar/virtuoso harpsichordist.
The most critical influence was probably
Gustav Leonhardt, with whom Mrs. Goldberg was to work at
length in Holland, and through whom she developed close ties
to the other Dutch leaders in early music performance, Frans
Brueggen, Anne Bylsma and Jaap Schroeder, relationships that
were to shape the nature and style of the early music circle
that formed around her. The soprano Anna Carol Dudley recalled
Mrs. Goldberg’s passion about Bach during her Oakland
Symphony days as a pianist, “learning to play the harpsichord
because of that passion. It was wonderful to see the transformation
of her keyboard technique when she came back from studying
with Gustav Leonhardt.” She was an accomplished player,
but increasingly turned her attention and energy to teaching
and promoting the cause of Baroque music performance. She
wrote her own edition of J.S. Bach’s preludes and fugues,
J.S. Bach Open Score, The Well-Tempered Clavier .
Through all of her careers, she remained
devoted to the audience and to youth. It was only natural
then that she served as president of the Junior Bach Festival
for several years. In later years she served the American
Bach Soloists as advisor, and was still a board member at
the time of her death. A former board member of Early Music
America, she was awarded the Howard Mayer Award for lifetime
achievement in the field of early music by that organization.
©2005 Robert P. Commanday,
all rights reserved
reprinted with permission from San Francisco Classical Voice - www.sfcv.org
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