The eccentric Glenn Gould
An interesting review of a new Gould biography. (Although not mentioned, I like his performances of Beethoven and Haydn piano sonatas).
The canny madness of a remarkable man and his musical talent.
By Michael Dirda
Washington Post
Sunday, March 28, 2004; Page BW15
WONDROUS STRANGE
The Life and Art of Glenn Gould
By Kevin Bazzana. Oxford Univ. 528 pp. $35
Vladimir Horowitz once observed that there were three kinds of pianists -- Jewish pianists, homosexual pianists and bad pianists. Over the years Glenn Gould (1932-1982) has sometimes been thought to belong in all three categories. His father, a prosperous Canadian furrier, changed the family name from Gold to Gould; many admirers have assumed that the reclusive musician -- hypersensitive, fussy, and in his youth almost effeminately pretty -- must have been a closeted gay; and at one time or another nearly all his recordings have been derided as perverse in tempo, willfully disdainful of the composer's intentions, and marred or ruined by Gould's quite noticeable humming. To this day, that Bible of classical music, the Penguin Guide, seldom bestows more than two stars on Glenn Gould CDs and nearly always points out that his renditions of, say, Beethoven's late sonatas will appeal only to committed fans. One can tell that the Penguin critics privately regard such fans as essentially insane cultists.
In fact, as musicologist Kevin Bazzana shows in this authoritative, beautifully composed biography, Gould was English-Irish and not at all Jewish, enjoyed several heterosexual love affairs (one quite serious, with a married woman), and was judged by Sviatoslav Richter -- arguably the greatest all-round pianist of the latter half of the 20th century -- as nothing less than a genius of the keyboard. (After hearing Gould, Richter refused to record "The Goldberg Variations," widely viewed as the Canadian's signature piece.) There will always be debate about Glenn Gould's "willful" and "idiosyncratic" interpretations, yet his major recordings somehow convey a quality that eludes almost all other pianists, no matter how talented: When Gould plays, he brings to bear not only dazzling technique and the fastest and most sensitive fingers in the business, but also a distinct sense that he has thought, and thought hard, about every note. His Bach recordings, in particular, sound like the most pondered interpretations in the world, the keyboard meditations of a Zen master. As Gould once said, "One does not play the piano with one's fingers, one plays the piano with one's mind."
Great pianists, like opera divas, often inspire rapt devotion, but even such mythologized virtuosi as Solomon, William Kapell and Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli can't compare with Gould's iconic presence in our imagination. As Kevin Bazzana reminds us, Gould's afterlife may be best likened to that of James Dean or Elvis Presley. Since his sudden death from a stroke at the age of 50, Gould has appeared as a major character in important novels (Thomas Bernhard's The Loser and Richard Powers's The Gold Bug Variations), been the subject of a much admired (if sometimes inaccurate) movie, "Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould," and was naturally "the pianist of choice for the psychopathic killer Hannibal Lecter" in Thomas Harris's novel The Silence of the Lambs.
Already there have been two previous biographies (one by journalist Otto Friedrich, the other by Peter Ostwald, a psychiatrist who knew Gould), several volumes of conversation and reminiscence, various picture albums, and a hefty collection of the pianist's essays, reviews and other writing (A Glenn Gould Reader, edited by Washington Post music critic Tim Page). Today the truly worshipful travel north to visit Gouldian sites in the master's hometown of Toronto, and hope against hope to touch his old piano (Steinway CD 318) or gaze for a moment upon the rackety old card-table chair that he insisted on using in concerts.
Gould's peculiar habits and convictions have always led many to speculate about his mental stability. The pianist avoided shaking hands, famously wrapped himself up in layers of clothes even in the summer, dosed himself with thousands of pills a year, feared flying and germs (he traveled with a can of Lysol spray) and gave up the concert stage in his mid-thirties. When he sat down at the piano, Gould needed to be just above eye level with the keyboard, which consequently required any concert grand to be up on blocks while he crouched in that special low-slung chair (its seat just 14 inches off the ground). By the evidence of surviving photographs, he bent over the keys like a hunchback. Moreover, Gould searched and searched for the ideal Steinway -- he demanded a very fast action and a crisp, austere sound, without any legato, something, he once said, "like an emasculated harpsichord." He loathed most of the romantic composers for his instrument (Schumann, Chopin et al.), thought Mozart shallowly theatrical and disliked concertos because they sanctioned a competitive spirit between soloist and orchestra.
"He would lope gracelessly onto the stage," Bazzana tells us, "perhaps with his hands in his pockets, looking uncomfortable, then bow perfunctorily, sheepishly. Then came the whole spectacle of Gould playing: the sidesaddle address, the bobbing head, the crouching and pouncing and swaying and flailing, and always the conducting whenever he had a hand free. He sweated copiously. His tangled mane of hair flopped this way and that, and he sometimes wiped it back with a handkerchief. To control his stamping feet he would cross his legs -- hardly a less eccentric option. His mouth smiled and pursed and gaped, his lips sometimes marked the beats, and of course he sang -- and hummed and clucked and buzzed."
No stately Arthur Rubenstein he. Once, in Florida, Gould "was picked up by police in a park on suspicion of being a vagabond, and he was sometimes refused entry to hotels until his identity was made clear." But when this "weirdo" actually made music, all his oddities were forgiven and, as the years went by, transmuted into the endearing outward signs of his genius. To hear Gould live affected many like a conversion experience. At his first Russian concert, the auditorium was only a third full. But during the long intermission, awestruck listeners called their friends to tell them what they had just experienced, "and a minor riot ensued as people from all over Moscow rushed to the Great Hall; by the time the second half started, the hall was full, and many people had to be turned away." At a subsequent Moscow concert, "when the recital ended the applause and encores continued for half an hour, and the great pianist Sviatoslav Richter was seen to clap and cheer long after the general public had become exhausted." As Bazzana notes, "Gould's Bach arrived with the force of a revelation. As more than one Russian musician would say, even decades later, they played and thought about Bach one way before Gould, another way after." On this same European tour the principal cellist of the Berlin Philharmonic announced that this unkempt young Canadian was "the greatest pianist he had ever heard."
And so began the legend of Glenn Gould, the geeky, twitching oddball, the holy madman, the saintly ascetic. But Bazzana's study reveals another side to this dazzling musician: a highly principled moralist and thinker, formed by his Canadian upbringing, widely read in world literature (his favorite books included Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Natsume Soseki's The Three-Cornered World and George Santayana's The Last Puritan), a media visionary (Gould believed that artists should prefer the recording studio to the concert hall) and a tireless, meticulous craftsman on projects for radio and television. At least in part, Gould's tics and phobias may have even served a pragmatic function: They encouraged people to leave him alone so that he could get on with his work. "Isolation," he wrote, "is the one sure way to human happiness."
Bazzana's biography repeatedly evokes Canada in the 1950s and '60s, when the country was finally asserting its identity, and such thinkers as Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye were the intellectuals du jour. The young Gould grew up protected and nurtured by his devout parents (good works, church socials) and was never exploited as a prodigy: "It was interpretive wisdom beyond his years that most impressed his listeners as a child, not bravura technique." In every way, Bazzana underscores the full complexity of Gould as both man and artist. The ethereal artiste assiduously studied his contracts and his stock portfolio, liked big cars, enjoyed steak and potatoes, wrote pompous, almost Jamesian prose, racked up a slew of traffic violations. Yet he always stood up for what he believed was right. After deciding only to make records, because in the studio he could achieve a perfect performance, he refused to give any further public concerts -- even when offers came in for up to a million dollars for a single recital. He left his money and estate to the Salvation Army and the Toronto Humane Society.
Bazzana emphasizes that Glenn Gould perceived himself as more than just a really good piano player; he was a teacher, an all-round musician, a creative thinker. Gould loved technology and experimented with television documentaries ("The Idea of North"), created "contrapuntal radio," in which multiple voices overlapped and interacted without identification (sometimes to the listener's dismay), produced his own records in his own studio, spliced tape like a professional, organized concerts at the Stratford Festival, composed music and liner notes. And he really could be quite witty, as when he imagined the musicologist and avant-garde composer Karlheinz Klopweisser, whose interests include "the resonance of silence," specifically "German silence, which is of course organic, as opposed to French silence, which is ornamental."
"The purpose of art," wrote Gould, "is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity." Gould found that state when he was playing the piano, and he manages to convey it to anyone who listens, quietly and sympathetically, to his recordings. They are nearly always strikingly original -- Gould never saw the point in doing what other pianists had already done perfectly well. Let me recommend a few of my favorite performances: Bach's "English Suites," the Brahms "Intermezzi," the very early Mozart sonatas (un-Mozartian but breathtaking speed and fingerwork), the admittedly kitsch yet still astonishing Liszt piano transcription of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and, of course, Bach's "Goldberg Variations." Gould began his public career in 1955 with a recording of the Goldbergs -- one of the bestselling classical discs of all time -- and then in 1982 rethought the music and produced a second, slower, deeper interpretation, this one in stereo. He died a week after the record hit the shops. Bazzana stresses that Gould didn't know that his adult life would open and close with the same music or that his later performance would be perceived as valedictory. And yet there are moments in the more reflective sections of the 1982 recording when each touch of the keyboard almost breaks your heart with its sorrowful delicacy. One thinks of Wallace Stevens: "Just as my fingers on these keys/ Make music, so the selfsame sounds/ On my spirit make a music, too./ Music is feeling, then, not sound."
Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould is obviously a must for any fan of this great pianist, but it is more than that: Kevin Bazzana deserves all praise for producing a study worthy of its subject -- expertly paced, admiring yet sensible, touched with wit and intensely readable. •
Michael Dirda's email address is dirdam@washpost.com. His online discussion of books takes place each Wednesday at 2 p.m. on washingtonpost.com.
The canny madness of a remarkable man and his musical talent.
By Michael Dirda
Washington Post
Sunday, March 28, 2004; Page BW15
WONDROUS STRANGE
The Life and Art of Glenn Gould
By Kevin Bazzana. Oxford Univ. 528 pp. $35
Vladimir Horowitz once observed that there were three kinds of pianists -- Jewish pianists, homosexual pianists and bad pianists. Over the years Glenn Gould (1932-1982) has sometimes been thought to belong in all three categories. His father, a prosperous Canadian furrier, changed the family name from Gold to Gould; many admirers have assumed that the reclusive musician -- hypersensitive, fussy, and in his youth almost effeminately pretty -- must have been a closeted gay; and at one time or another nearly all his recordings have been derided as perverse in tempo, willfully disdainful of the composer's intentions, and marred or ruined by Gould's quite noticeable humming. To this day, that Bible of classical music, the Penguin Guide, seldom bestows more than two stars on Glenn Gould CDs and nearly always points out that his renditions of, say, Beethoven's late sonatas will appeal only to committed fans. One can tell that the Penguin critics privately regard such fans as essentially insane cultists.
In fact, as musicologist Kevin Bazzana shows in this authoritative, beautifully composed biography, Gould was English-Irish and not at all Jewish, enjoyed several heterosexual love affairs (one quite serious, with a married woman), and was judged by Sviatoslav Richter -- arguably the greatest all-round pianist of the latter half of the 20th century -- as nothing less than a genius of the keyboard. (After hearing Gould, Richter refused to record "The Goldberg Variations," widely viewed as the Canadian's signature piece.) There will always be debate about Glenn Gould's "willful" and "idiosyncratic" interpretations, yet his major recordings somehow convey a quality that eludes almost all other pianists, no matter how talented: When Gould plays, he brings to bear not only dazzling technique and the fastest and most sensitive fingers in the business, but also a distinct sense that he has thought, and thought hard, about every note. His Bach recordings, in particular, sound like the most pondered interpretations in the world, the keyboard meditations of a Zen master. As Gould once said, "One does not play the piano with one's fingers, one plays the piano with one's mind."
Great pianists, like opera divas, often inspire rapt devotion, but even such mythologized virtuosi as Solomon, William Kapell and Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli can't compare with Gould's iconic presence in our imagination. As Kevin Bazzana reminds us, Gould's afterlife may be best likened to that of James Dean or Elvis Presley. Since his sudden death from a stroke at the age of 50, Gould has appeared as a major character in important novels (Thomas Bernhard's The Loser and Richard Powers's The Gold Bug Variations), been the subject of a much admired (if sometimes inaccurate) movie, "Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould," and was naturally "the pianist of choice for the psychopathic killer Hannibal Lecter" in Thomas Harris's novel The Silence of the Lambs.
Already there have been two previous biographies (one by journalist Otto Friedrich, the other by Peter Ostwald, a psychiatrist who knew Gould), several volumes of conversation and reminiscence, various picture albums, and a hefty collection of the pianist's essays, reviews and other writing (A Glenn Gould Reader, edited by Washington Post music critic Tim Page). Today the truly worshipful travel north to visit Gouldian sites in the master's hometown of Toronto, and hope against hope to touch his old piano (Steinway CD 318) or gaze for a moment upon the rackety old card-table chair that he insisted on using in concerts.
Gould's peculiar habits and convictions have always led many to speculate about his mental stability. The pianist avoided shaking hands, famously wrapped himself up in layers of clothes even in the summer, dosed himself with thousands of pills a year, feared flying and germs (he traveled with a can of Lysol spray) and gave up the concert stage in his mid-thirties. When he sat down at the piano, Gould needed to be just above eye level with the keyboard, which consequently required any concert grand to be up on blocks while he crouched in that special low-slung chair (its seat just 14 inches off the ground). By the evidence of surviving photographs, he bent over the keys like a hunchback. Moreover, Gould searched and searched for the ideal Steinway -- he demanded a very fast action and a crisp, austere sound, without any legato, something, he once said, "like an emasculated harpsichord." He loathed most of the romantic composers for his instrument (Schumann, Chopin et al.), thought Mozart shallowly theatrical and disliked concertos because they sanctioned a competitive spirit between soloist and orchestra.
"He would lope gracelessly onto the stage," Bazzana tells us, "perhaps with his hands in his pockets, looking uncomfortable, then bow perfunctorily, sheepishly. Then came the whole spectacle of Gould playing: the sidesaddle address, the bobbing head, the crouching and pouncing and swaying and flailing, and always the conducting whenever he had a hand free. He sweated copiously. His tangled mane of hair flopped this way and that, and he sometimes wiped it back with a handkerchief. To control his stamping feet he would cross his legs -- hardly a less eccentric option. His mouth smiled and pursed and gaped, his lips sometimes marked the beats, and of course he sang -- and hummed and clucked and buzzed."
No stately Arthur Rubenstein he. Once, in Florida, Gould "was picked up by police in a park on suspicion of being a vagabond, and he was sometimes refused entry to hotels until his identity was made clear." But when this "weirdo" actually made music, all his oddities were forgiven and, as the years went by, transmuted into the endearing outward signs of his genius. To hear Gould live affected many like a conversion experience. At his first Russian concert, the auditorium was only a third full. But during the long intermission, awestruck listeners called their friends to tell them what they had just experienced, "and a minor riot ensued as people from all over Moscow rushed to the Great Hall; by the time the second half started, the hall was full, and many people had to be turned away." At a subsequent Moscow concert, "when the recital ended the applause and encores continued for half an hour, and the great pianist Sviatoslav Richter was seen to clap and cheer long after the general public had become exhausted." As Bazzana notes, "Gould's Bach arrived with the force of a revelation. As more than one Russian musician would say, even decades later, they played and thought about Bach one way before Gould, another way after." On this same European tour the principal cellist of the Berlin Philharmonic announced that this unkempt young Canadian was "the greatest pianist he had ever heard."
And so began the legend of Glenn Gould, the geeky, twitching oddball, the holy madman, the saintly ascetic. But Bazzana's study reveals another side to this dazzling musician: a highly principled moralist and thinker, formed by his Canadian upbringing, widely read in world literature (his favorite books included Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Natsume Soseki's The Three-Cornered World and George Santayana's The Last Puritan), a media visionary (Gould believed that artists should prefer the recording studio to the concert hall) and a tireless, meticulous craftsman on projects for radio and television. At least in part, Gould's tics and phobias may have even served a pragmatic function: They encouraged people to leave him alone so that he could get on with his work. "Isolation," he wrote, "is the one sure way to human happiness."
Bazzana's biography repeatedly evokes Canada in the 1950s and '60s, when the country was finally asserting its identity, and such thinkers as Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye were the intellectuals du jour. The young Gould grew up protected and nurtured by his devout parents (good works, church socials) and was never exploited as a prodigy: "It was interpretive wisdom beyond his years that most impressed his listeners as a child, not bravura technique." In every way, Bazzana underscores the full complexity of Gould as both man and artist. The ethereal artiste assiduously studied his contracts and his stock portfolio, liked big cars, enjoyed steak and potatoes, wrote pompous, almost Jamesian prose, racked up a slew of traffic violations. Yet he always stood up for what he believed was right. After deciding only to make records, because in the studio he could achieve a perfect performance, he refused to give any further public concerts -- even when offers came in for up to a million dollars for a single recital. He left his money and estate to the Salvation Army and the Toronto Humane Society.
Bazzana emphasizes that Glenn Gould perceived himself as more than just a really good piano player; he was a teacher, an all-round musician, a creative thinker. Gould loved technology and experimented with television documentaries ("The Idea of North"), created "contrapuntal radio," in which multiple voices overlapped and interacted without identification (sometimes to the listener's dismay), produced his own records in his own studio, spliced tape like a professional, organized concerts at the Stratford Festival, composed music and liner notes. And he really could be quite witty, as when he imagined the musicologist and avant-garde composer Karlheinz Klopweisser, whose interests include "the resonance of silence," specifically "German silence, which is of course organic, as opposed to French silence, which is ornamental."
"The purpose of art," wrote Gould, "is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity." Gould found that state when he was playing the piano, and he manages to convey it to anyone who listens, quietly and sympathetically, to his recordings. They are nearly always strikingly original -- Gould never saw the point in doing what other pianists had already done perfectly well. Let me recommend a few of my favorite performances: Bach's "English Suites," the Brahms "Intermezzi," the very early Mozart sonatas (un-Mozartian but breathtaking speed and fingerwork), the admittedly kitsch yet still astonishing Liszt piano transcription of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and, of course, Bach's "Goldberg Variations." Gould began his public career in 1955 with a recording of the Goldbergs -- one of the bestselling classical discs of all time -- and then in 1982 rethought the music and produced a second, slower, deeper interpretation, this one in stereo. He died a week after the record hit the shops. Bazzana stresses that Gould didn't know that his adult life would open and close with the same music or that his later performance would be perceived as valedictory. And yet there are moments in the more reflective sections of the 1982 recording when each touch of the keyboard almost breaks your heart with its sorrowful delicacy. One thinks of Wallace Stevens: "Just as my fingers on these keys/ Make music, so the selfsame sounds/ On my spirit make a music, too./ Music is feeling, then, not sound."
Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould is obviously a must for any fan of this great pianist, but it is more than that: Kevin Bazzana deserves all praise for producing a study worthy of its subject -- expertly paced, admiring yet sensible, touched with wit and intensely readable. •
Michael Dirda's email address is dirdam@washpost.com. His online discussion of books takes place each Wednesday at 2 p.m. on washingtonpost.com.
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