thumb|alt=black and white photograph of middle-aged man, balding|Leibowitz, c. mid-1960s
René Leibowitz (; ; 17 February 1913 – 29 August 1972) was a Polish and French composer, conductor, music theorist and teacher. He was historically significant in promoting the music of the Second Viennese School in Paris after the Second World War, and teaching a new generation of serialist composers.
Leibowitz remained firmly committed to the musical aesthetic of Arnold Schoenberg, and was to some extent sidelined among the French avant-garde in the 1950s, when, under the influence of Leibowitz's former student, Pierre Boulez and others, the music of Schoenberg's pupil Anton Webern was adopted as the orthodox model by younger composers.
Although his compositional ideas remained strictly serialist, as a conductor Leibowitz had broad sympathies, performing works by composers as diverse as Gluck, Beethoven, Brahms, Offenbach and Ravel, and his repertory extended to include pieces by Gershwin, Puccini, Sullivan and Johann Strauss.
Life and career
Early years
The facts about Leibowitz's early years are problematical, complicated by his practice of reinventing his history, but it is known that he was born in Warsaw. According to his pupil and translator, Jan Maguire, who wrote two studies of him for Tempo magazine in the late 1970s, Leibowitz was of Russian Jewish parentage; his father was an art historian. During the First World War the family was obliged to move from Warsaw to Berlin, where, Maguire writes, Leibowitz began a career as a concert violinist at the age of ten. Neither is now believed to be correct: Sabine Meine wrote in the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians in 2001, "Leibowitz's claims of having met Schoenberg and studied with Webern in the early 1930s remain unsubstantiated",
Paris
In Paris, according to Maguire, Leibowitz earned his living as a jazz pianist and composed constantly. In his early twenties he married an artist from an illustrious French family and settled down in Paris, eventually taking French nationality.
When the Germans invaded France in the Second World War, Leibowitz was interned as an alien for a time. He did not succeed in emigrating, but, as the musicologist Reinhard Kapp puts it, "managed to survive somehow, partly hidden by [[Georges Bataille|[Georges] Bataille]] in Paris, at other times with his family in the Unoccupied Zone". In 1944, just before the liberation of Paris, there was a party at the Left Bank apartment of the Swiss artist Balthus attended by artistic opponents of the Nazis, such as Picasso and others; Leibowitz provided the music.
Although Leibowitz was receptive to a wide range of musical styles, he could not bear the music of Sibelius, and published a pamphlet about him under the title of Sibelius: the Worst Composer in the World; he also severely criticised Bartók for writing music that was too accessible: Leibowitz felt that by failing to adopt dodecaphony in his later works Bartók was pandering to popular taste rather than helping to move music away from tonality in accordance with Leibowitz's notions of historical inevitability and composers' duty. For Leibowitz, to write a popular work like Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra was a betrayal of modernism.
Grove has articles on thirty-two composers who studied with Leibowitz in Paris or attended his sessions at Darmstadt or elsewhere: as well as Boulez and Monod, they include Vinko Globokar; Hans Werner Henze; Diego Masson; Serge Nigg; and Bernd Alois Zimmermann.
The writer Joan Peyser summed up Leibowitz's career:
Leibowitz died suddenly in Paris on 29 August 1972, at the age of 59.-->
Recordings
In the early LP era, in the 1950s, Leibowitz conducted complete recordings of seven operas, which were generally well received, and have mostly been reissued on CD. They were Bizet's Les Pêcheurs de perles; Gluck's Alceste and L'ivrogne corrigé; Mozart's Zaïde; Offenbach's La Belle Hélène and Orphée aux enfers; and Ravel's L'Heure espagnole. A set of Ravel's orchestral works was less well reviewed, but Leibowitz received qualified praise for his set of Schoenberg's Gurre-Lieder ("Leibowitz makes a serious attempt to produce a convincing performance; his slow tempi find justification in Schoenberg's markings, but his artists cannot persuade us that Gurre-Lieder is other than an historical curiosity").
In 1961 Leibowitz conducted the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in a set of Beethoven's symphonies made by Decca for Reader's Digest; it was among the first to attempt to follow Beethoven's metronome markings, following the pioneering set made in Vienna three years earlier, conducted by Hermann Scherchen. In 1995 Richard Taruskin, analysing a selection of Beethoven recordings, concluded that Leibowitz, like Scherchen, delivered performances that were musically and musicologically superior to more recent attempts by "authentic" conductors such as Christopher Hogwood. By the 21st century the performances had come to seem old-fashioned, in the view of a critic in Fanfare, who found them more akin to those by Herbert von Karajan than to those by specialist authenticists such as Roger Norrington and John Eliot Gardiner.
With the Decca team, Leibowitz recorded eleven more albums between 1959 and 1962. They included large-scale works such as The Rite of Spring, symphonies by Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, and concertos by Grieg, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Prokofiev, as well as short pieces by more than thirty composers ranging from Bach to Gershwin, from Wagner to Sullivan, Puccini and Johann Strauss.