What did Johann Sebastian Bach hear when he played Bach? What did George Frideric Handel sound like to Handel? The textures and tones of music performed on antique instruments in the original style were lost for hundreds of years, only to be rediscovered in recent decades by the “early music movement.” That illuminating and influential project lost one of its leaders on April 16, when keyboard virtuoso and museum curator James M. Weaver died of covid-19. He was 82.
Impeccable on the harpsichord, formidable on the pipe organ, lustrous on the cocktail lounge piano, Weaver turned the Smithsonian Institution and its extensive collection of historic musical instruments into a center of the early music movement. He and the musicians he featured in live and recorded performances explored not only the pitch and timbre of antique instruments but also how they were grouped in ensembles and the proper techniques for playing them. Audience ears attuned to huge symphonic orchestras swooning in lush vibrato often found the resulting music small, thin, austere and unsatisfying.
Weaver’s long association with the Smithsonian began with a visit as a high school student in the 1950s. Tucked away in the Museum of Natural History (for want of another display space) was an unrestored antique harpsichord. It was love at first sight for the young musician raised in Danville, Ill.
After an apprenticeship in Belgium as a student of the great harpsichordist and organist Gustav Leonhardt, Weaver returned to the Smithsonian in 1961 with an assignment to beef up its musical programming. His taste was wonderfully eclectic, befitting a man who regaled friends with tales of the burlesque houses where he played on Saturday nights in college, before grabbing a bite in the wee hours and dashing to his Sunday morning gigs as a church organist. Along with explorations of great classical composers, Weaver staged performances of music and dance from the Age of Jefferson, 19th-century ballroom dance music and the work of Stephen Foster.
Faced with budget cuts in the early 1970s, Weaver helped to create the Friends of Music at the Smithsonian, whose support ultimately spread the institution’s musical programming across the country through popular tours. Weaver further extended his reach with his most important projects. His performance of Bach’s complete sonatas for violin and harpsichord, with violinist Sonya Monosoff, was the first commercial release in the United States to feature museum instruments when it was issued in 1971.
Weaver’s recordings were prized for their sumptuous attention to historical detail. A re-creation of work by the antebellum singing sensations the Hutchinson Family, for instance, included reproductions of tour tickets and promotional posters, a scholarly history of America’s first popular music stars, and photographs of the period instruments used to accompany the performance. Another example: Weaver’s own exquisite interpretation of all six Bach Partitas for Harpsichord, recorded in 1978, came boxed with a facsimile of the original score in the master’s own handwriting.
No project led by the amiable Weaver was more ambitious than the first recording by American musicians of Handel’s complete “Messiah” oratorio on period instruments. This 1980 undertaking featured the Smithsonian Chamber Players, an orchestra founded by Weaver and the oboe virtuoso James Caldwell in 1976. (And still going strong more than 40 years later.)
In the 1980s, when the Division of Musical Instruments became part of the National Museum of American History, Weaver expanded his influence to preserving and showcasing the early history of jazz. He is also credited with an important role in landing for the Smithsonian two priceless collections of Italian stringed instruments, including creations by the masters of Cremona, Antonio Stradivari and the Amati family.
As a harpsichordist, Weaver performed for presidents from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush; as an organist, he served at a number of congregations in the Washington-Baltimore region; as a teacher, he led classes at universities and conservatories across the country; and as a curator, he tried — without success — to create a National Music Museum in Washington. After retiring from the Smithsonian, he assumed leadership of the struggling Organ Historical Society, where he shored up finances and found a home for the group in a donated mansion near Philadelphia.
Together with like-minded artists such as William Christie and Christopher Hogwood, Weaver and his Smithsonian colleagues ultimately wrought a revolution in the Western music tradition. Once scorned as irrelevant, their contributions are now embraced and explored by celebrated conductors such as Simon Rattle and tastemakers like the Juilliard School of Music. They opened their ears to history, and the world learned to love what they heard.
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