Gustav Leonhardt’s ‘authenticity’

A pair of sentences attributed to Gustav Leonhardt (illus.1) is repeated on countless websites. As with many of his sayings, this one is somewhat inscrutable, and posits two complementary ideas: If one manages to be convincing, the interpretation sounds authentic. If one strives to be authentic, one will never be convincing. My purpose here is to establish when and in which language Leonhardt wrote these words, to examine the context for his statement, and to try to understand what he actually said. The English sentences, as given above, come from one of at least three existing different translations of a more complex idea. They appeared in 1977, as the opening lines in four meticulously composed paragraphs. This little text, one of the few he wrote for one of his recordings, was published in the booklet of a landmark recording in his career, the highly influential set of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos for the Seon label (illus.2).1