H. C. Robbins Landon, Haydn and Mozart Scholar, Dies at 83
H. C. Robbins Landon, an American musicologist whose research helped to restore many of Haydn’s works to the active repertory after more than a century of neglect, and whose popular books about Mozart countered many popular myths about that composer’s life, died on Friday at Rabastens, near Toulouse, France. He was 83.
Rabastens town officials confirmed his death but did not specify the cause.
Though a serious and prolific scholar, Mr. Landon also had a knack for making musicology seem exciting to the general public. He was a founder (or “instigator,” as he put it) of the Haydn Society, which started in Boston in 1949 and later moved its center of activities to Vienna. The society produced a series of recordings including previously unrecorded Haydn symphonies and Masses as well as the first recordings of Mozart’s “Idomeneo” and Mass in C minor.
In the 1950s Mr. Landon provided commentary for BBC orchestral broadcasts, and in the 1960s he collaborated with the television producer Humphrey Burton on a series of BBC television documentaries about Italian Baroque composers — a subject he returned to in “Maestro,” a 1990 series he produced with John Julius Norwich for Channel 4 in Britain (and which also yielded a book, “Five Centuries of Music in Venice,” in 1991).
He published a useful introduction to the life and music of Handel, “Handel and His World” (1984), as well as five books about Mozart, published between 1988 and 1995. In “1791: Mozart’s Last Year,” he dismissed the notions, popularized in Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play, “Amadeus” (and the 1984 movie), that Mozart had been poisoned, that he had a fraught relationship with the composer Antonio Salieri, and that his Requiem was commissioned by a mysterious stranger.
But Mr. Landon’s true life’s work was bringing Haydn and his music fully into the spotlight. He said he decided to undertake that mission in 1939, when he was a 13-year-old at a boarding school in North Carolina, fascinated by concert broadcasts from New York. After hearing a few Haydn symphonies — at the time only a handful were regularly performed — he told a teacher, Mathias Cooper, that he wanted to study music. In a 2008 interview with the early-music magazine Goldberg, Mr. Landon said it was Mr. Cooper who suggested that he specialize in Haydn...
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Rabastens town officials confirmed his death but did not specify the cause.
Though a serious and prolific scholar, Mr. Landon also had a knack for making musicology seem exciting to the general public. He was a founder (or “instigator,” as he put it) of the Haydn Society, which started in Boston in 1949 and later moved its center of activities to Vienna. The society produced a series of recordings including previously unrecorded Haydn symphonies and Masses as well as the first recordings of Mozart’s “Idomeneo” and Mass in C minor.
In the 1950s Mr. Landon provided commentary for BBC orchestral broadcasts, and in the 1960s he collaborated with the television producer Humphrey Burton on a series of BBC television documentaries about Italian Baroque composers — a subject he returned to in “Maestro,” a 1990 series he produced with John Julius Norwich for Channel 4 in Britain (and which also yielded a book, “Five Centuries of Music in Venice,” in 1991).
He published a useful introduction to the life and music of Handel, “Handel and His World” (1984), as well as five books about Mozart, published between 1988 and 1995. In “1791: Mozart’s Last Year,” he dismissed the notions, popularized in Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play, “Amadeus” (and the 1984 movie), that Mozart had been poisoned, that he had a fraught relationship with the composer Antonio Salieri, and that his Requiem was commissioned by a mysterious stranger.
But Mr. Landon’s true life’s work was bringing Haydn and his music fully into the spotlight. He said he decided to undertake that mission in 1939, when he was a 13-year-old at a boarding school in North Carolina, fascinated by concert broadcasts from New York. After hearing a few Haydn symphonies — at the time only a handful were regularly performed — he told a teacher, Mathias Cooper, that he wanted to study music. In a 2008 interview with the early-music magazine Goldberg, Mr. Landon said it was Mr. Cooper who suggested that he specialize in Haydn...