ABSTRACT
The famous polish harpsichordist Wanda Landowska has been characterized as an "uncommon visionary" and an "epochal exception". As a young woman in her twenties she could draw on models of gendered performance tested by other female musicians in the French capital. Indeed, the strategies that she and her entourage developed in these early years created "Madame Landowska," as she was known, by instrumentalizing successful female career tactics in prewar Paris so as to forge her own unique artistic identity. Through Enoch, Landowska also seems to have gained links with the publisher Pierre Lafitte & Cie, which brought out two prestigious illustrated journals, Femina and Musica, both of which presented Landowska as a composer-pianist in those early years. On her way to early music stardom Landowska had to set herself apart from one other young female soloist in particular: Blanche Selva, with whom she competed in terms of both repertoire and audience.
