Isolde Ahlgrimm

Isolde Ahlgrimm (Vienna, 1914 – Vienna, 1995) was an Austrian harpsichordist who devoted much of her career to Baroque keyboard music and to the revival of the Austrian harpsichord tradition. Her initial training was as a pianist: she was performing in public while still a child. After studying at the Vienna Academy of Music, today the Hochschule für Musik, with Viktor Ebenstein, Franz Schmidt and Emil von Sauer, she turned to the harpsichord and the fortepiano in 1935, learning technique and style from treatises of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

She undertook numerous concert tours across Europe and the United States. Her repertoire was broad and encompassed the complete keyboard works of Bach, which she often performed in cycles of twelve recitals and which she also recorded. She was also noted as an interpreter of Austrian harpsichord music, particularly that of Johann Fux. Richard Strauss composed a suite drawn from his opera Capriccio for her, dated 1944.

From 1945 she was on the teaching staff of the Viennese Hochschule, where she was appointed lecturer in 1969 and professor in 1975. She was absent only between 1958 and 1962, years in which she taught at the Mozarteum in Salzburg. In 1975 she received the Austrian Gold Medal. Her legacy also survives in her writings on Baroque performance practice and ornamentation, including essays on the arpeggio and musical rhetoric.