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In 1957 Glenn Gould became the first classical musician from North America to play in the Soviet Union. [The Toronto Star] |
Glenn Gould
January 2 is early for predictions,” wrote Washington Post critic Paul Hume, “but it is unlikely that the year 1955 will bring us a finer piano recital than that played yesterday afternoon in the Phillips Gallery. We will be lucky if it brings us others of equal beauty and significance.”
Hume was writing about a 22-year-old Canadian with flair. When Hume visited Toronto in 1987 for the first presentation of the $50,000 Glenn Gould Prize, he reiterated, “Gould made some of the most glorious music I have ever heard from any piano.”
Two years after the Washington concert, Gould became the first classical musician from North America to be invited behind what was then called the Iron Curtain. At Gould’s initial performance, the director of the Moscow Philharmonic went backstage during the intermission and declared, “We have never heard fugues like this.”After the performance, Gould took numerous curtain calls and later left his crowded dressing room to return to the stage to play an encore — five pieces from Bach’s Goldberg Variations.
He was already famous for his Goldberg Variations. His rendition constituted his first long-playing record with Columbia Records. Following a single performance at New York’s Town Hall, in 1955, Columbia had signed him to a contract. Their executives tried to dissuade him from his choice, but he insisted, and in 1956, the year of its release, it became the year’s best-selling classical record.
In making that record, Glenn brought along his own sawed-off chair that enabled him to sit just 14 inches from the floor so that he could keep his wrist at or below the level of the keyboard. He also displayed other eccentricities for which he became almost as famous as for his ability as a pianist.
These included, wrote Jonathan Cott in 1974, “loping on stage like a misplaced eland with unpressed tails, sometimes wearing gloves ... and conducting, humming, singing, combating, and cajoling, and making love to his piano as if it were Lewis Carroll’s Snark.” Off stage he was known for his bizarre dress: “gloves, mittens,T-shirt, vest, sweater, coat, and scarf all in warm weather,” wrote Cott, while others reported on his hypochondria, his excessive need for privacy, his telephone calls after midnight that went on for hours, and numerous other idiosyncrasies that were seen as the trappings of genius and relished by the media.
The media did not take him seriously when he announced his decision to leave the concert stage, but in 1964 he did, never to make another concert appearance. Instead, he concentrated on making records and radio and television programs, claiming that “the functions of concerts had been — or would be soon — taken over by the electronic media.”
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In 1957 Glenn Gould became the first classical musician from North America to play in the Soviet Union. [The Toronto Star] |
Gould continued making records for Columbia in New York or at the Eaton Auditorium in Toronto with nearly all the sessions taking place at night and consisting of three steps — recording a complete take of the movement (or a large section of a major work), listening to it for any finger slips or imperfect musical balances, and replaying small inserts to correct the errors. He made more than 75 records for Columbia in this manner, all but 19 of them featuring Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Schoenberg.
As a composer, Gould completed String Quartet, Opus I in 1955. Performed by the Montreal String Quartet, it won praise from the local newspaper, La Presse, and later from a New York critic attending Ontario’s Stratford Festival musical concerts that Gould co-directed. Gould convinced Columbia to record it with the Symphonia Quartet of the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra. The Christian Science Monitor called it “an intensely beautiful work.” The Saturday Review was equally complimentary.
Gould did not compose any other serious musical compositions though he discussed many ideas with friends and associates, stating he would return to composing and conducting when he stopped recording at age 50. Instead he concentrated on being a CBC radio and TV producer throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Some of his documentaries he believed to be compositions in their own right, particularly his 1967 program, “The Idea of North.” “Chopping it (interviews) up and slicing here and there and pulling on this phrase and accentuating that one ... or adding a compressor here and a filter there” is composing, he claimed. This view was shared by Barbara Frum who wrote, “Gould used his interviews to create a sound composition about the loneliness, the idealism, and the letdowns of those who go north.”
In all, Gould produced, was interviewed, or performed in more than 100 CBC Radio or TV programs over the next two decades. These ranged from radio discussions about the music of his personal favourite pop singers such as Petula Clark and Barbara Streisand to a TV production about his city, Toronto. Some of his work was praised and some condemned. “The Gould broadcast ... is likely to stand as a forerunner of a new radio art, ”wrote the Montreal Star about “The Idea of North,” whereas The Toronto Daily Star’s Roy Shields, commenting on Gould’s “Richard Strauss, a Personal View” wrote, “It is difficult to understand why Mr. Gould was allowed to write his own script.... His use of language ... is quite unintelligible.”
Gould, however, loved writing and did so for print as well as radio and TV. He wrote many of the liner notes for his recordings which won him his only Grammy Award — he never got one for his music — as well as articles for The New York Times,The Globe and Mail, and for magazines such as High Fidelity and the Piano Quarterly where he could write about anything he wanted and at any length but without remuneration. Much of his writing was pedantic and his attempts at witty elegance sounded artificial, but the publisher of the Quarterly admitted to a biographer, “It didn’t matter — I was going to publish it.... I took everything as a gift.”
A few months before Gould’s untimely death he received a letter from a New York fan asking permission to use his recording of the Bach C Major Prelude and Fugue in a film to promote the welfare of animals. Gould responded that he would be delighted, adding, “As it happens, animal welfare is one of the great passions of my life, and if you’d asked to use my entire recorded output in support of such a cause, I couldn’t possibly have refused.”
This was his last letter (now on record at
the National Library in Ottawa). Five weeks later — right after his 50th birthday
— he recognized he was ill. He called a close CBC friend, John P.L. Roberts, who
wanted to call an ambulance, but Gould insisted that he be driven to hospital where he
suffered a second stroke. Shortly afterwards, he slipped into a coma and, on October 4,
with no hope of his recovery, his family authorized that the life-support systems be
removed. His will, written two years earlier, left a major portion of his estate to the
welfare of animals through the Toronto Humane Society.
