Women musicians in particular were attracted to findesiecle (late-nineteenth-century) Paris because it offered career opportunities that were scarce in other cities such as Vienna, Berlin, and London. Paris had a cosmopolitan and financially well-heeled audience, dozens of concert series, hundreds of salons and concert societies, many schools and conservatories--all spaces within which a young, ambitious musician could carve out a place for herself. What Walter Benjamin so famously called the capital of the nineteenth century represented not only a place full of career opportunities but also the cultural and musical center of a Europe that needed to be conquered for any major international career to flourish. Paris presented thus an ideal milieu for the ambitious young pianist and fledgling composer Wanda Landowska, who moved to the French capital in 1900 at the age of twenty-one to fulfill her "mad desire to be famous".

What follows presents the story usually told: Landowska and her new husband. Henri Lew, arrived in Paris as unknown, impoverished. Polish immigrants who struggled to survive. Rather than pursuing a lucrative career as a piano virtuoso. Landowska instead began her battle for the revival of the harpsichord as the true instrument of early keyboard music. Driven by her love for the music of Bach, she followed this dream even against the advice of her close friends. An oft-quoted letter dated July 31, 1903, from Landowska's friend Charles Bordes serves as evidence, since in it he suggested that Landowska should play early music "but not on the harpsichord". Landowska persisted, however, and introduced unsuspecting Parisian audiences to the harpsichord in baby steps by programming one or two works played on the instrument in concerts otherwise performed on the piano. "Imagine how I had to fight", she said in a 1953 interview, identifying pianists as the “enemy . . . against me". But by 1908 she had arrived. She was, in her own words, "the most popular instrumentalist of this time".

As is the case with most such myths of artistic beginnings, Landowska's story is revealing particularly in what she and her entourage omitted in order to legitimize the claim of an exceptionality that set her apart from her contemporaries. That Landowska, from an early age, hoped to play works by the composers whose music she loved is not in question. Contrary to common belief, however, Landowska was not the only woman harpsichordist in early-twentieth-century France. Nor was her choice of repertoire uncommon or particularly visionary when seen in the context of fin de siecle Paris.