Leonard Borwick was an English concert pianist associated especially with the music of Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms because of his training under distinguished pianist-composer Clara Schumann. He is #114 in Marc Edmund Jones’s 1000 nativities.
Read more: Leonard Borwick: A Concert Pianist Shaped by the great Clara SchumannEarly training and debuts
Borwick was born in 1868 in Walthamstow, Essex, a business district in East London on the River Lea. His family, originally from Staffordshire, had moved there for business. Showing an early precocity in piano, he studied first under Henry Richard Bird; and then moved to violin and viola under Geoge Alfred Gibson, a professor at the Royal Academy of Music, who was famous for owning a 1734 Stradivarius viola. He returned to the piano and studied under the famed concert pianist of the era, Clara Josephine Schumann, at her studios in Frankfurt am Main, Germany..
In the 1880s, while on leave from the Schumann studio. Borwick played at Chappell’s. Owned by Arthur Chappell, who was also the owner the major piano manufacturer, Chappell & Co., at 50 New Bond Street in London, he had young pianists come to his home for recitals sometimes publishing their works if popular enough (Gilbert and Sullivan was one of Chappell’s greatest hits). There he met Henry Plunkett Greene, an Irish baritone, who knew of Borwick through his older brother, when the two had attended the Jewish boarding school Clifton College in Bristol. Plunkett Green introduced himself, and a natural friendship grew up between the two that later developed into a musical partnership.
Alas, this did not last as each found different audiences appreciated their work: Plunkett-Green toured heavily in the USA while Borwick stayed in the London area..
Marc Edmund Jones incorrectly states that his name was “Borwich,” and not Borwick, and could be a typo. All other details are correct. Jones gives Borwick’s time as 7 am, and thus the chart gets a Pisces 08 ascendant and thus makes him a double Pisces. This gets the symbol of a “girl blowing a bugle” symbolizing the dedication required for perfecting one’s craft. Jones writes this is when a “myriad of modifications must occur for one to find their own special fulfillment.” Obviously, for Borwich this was all the travel and various musical training he had to fulfill before he could be a pianist in his own right.
As his Moon and Part of Fortune are partile at Aries 08, it tells us his musical vision consumed him, and he used everything around him to satisfy that dream. This is highlighted by his planetary pattern, a bucket with a Saturn handle; see the chart below.
This pattern shows a distinctive hemispheric break where Saturn separates itself from the rest of the eight planets all residing on the resourceful western side of the chart and emblematic of his pursuit in the best training. His distinctive North Node in his sixth house further highlights his drive towards perfecting his work. Saturn alone in the east, is where Borwick transcends his tutors and creates a style uniquely his own, and yet reminiscent of all that brought him to that pinnacle.
His music can be found on the BBC; click here though it seems to me more Plunket Greene. He died on September 15, 1925 in Le Mans, France before Pluto in his second house was discovered. Alas, Mr Borwick made no recordings; perhaps this is Uranus in the fourth house in Cancer.
