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Celebrity Death Match: Brendel vs Gould
Wie gehts Arne, hiya
Sarah!
rant snort fume
...
Does this Brendel guy have JS Bach's
phone number? Does he chat with Bach about Bach's interpretive
wishes?
Some composers are just thrilled that
ANY artist wants to give their compositions a whack, interpreted any way the
artist likes. Charles Ives refused to copyright any of his compositions and got
very testy if a pianist tried to pump him for details about the
"proper" way to play his stuff.
Doubtless many other composers reside
at the opposite end of the spectrum. They wrote it This Way, and every artist
better damn perform it This Way.
The trouble with that, for composers
who lived before Edison or even the Player Piano (circa 1830), is that it's
extremely difficult to extract a composer's precise interpretive intentions from
sheet music. There's tempo, which will have a precise numerical
specification. But the nuances of syncopation, of ebb and flow from passage to
passage ... before recording technology, these are impossible to rediscover or
recover.
One or two of the keyboard artists
whose performances were preserved on the Weldt recording piano circa 1910 trace
their teacher-pupil lineage directly to Mozart and Bach, and a good scholarly
claim can be made that these modern recordings retain important vestiges of the
17th- and 18th-century composers' interpretive wishes -- their
"rules."
But that's really a stretch that's very
difficult if not impossible to support.
So I think Brendel on Gould's
interpretations is Way Off Base. I think we're just reading the grumblings of a
very very nit-picky man who imagines that he has some Superior Hotline to the
True Interpretive Wishes of Bach. We have only the vaguest, fuzziest ideas how
JS Bach played JS Bach, what it actually sounded like. We will just never know
whether Gould was very close to JSB's interpretive wishes, or whether Gould is
really dangerously, criminally hostile to the composer's wishes.
Play this stuff any damn way you think
it's supposed to go. Your heart and your ears and your wallet will sort it
out.
Elmer / Bob
<unlurk>
Sarah Meneses was sad to
find
>that
>most pianists contemporary to Gould, and some from
older generations
>didn't mention him at all, or if they did, they had
together with him a
>negative idea, like the way he moves or sings when
playing.
Alfred Brendel says in a book of collected interviews /w Martin
Meyer:
"To me Gould was the prime example of what an interpreting
artist must not
be; he was an eccentric doing everything possible to
counteract the wishes
or the character of the composer. There is innumerable
evidence for this.
Sometimes he did this by exposing one or two aspects of
the piece while
ignoring others."
"Glenn Gould made up his
own rules - the word rules is not correct here I
find. Obsessions were the
guidelines along which he performed and which
make his recordings seem so
uniform in the way Gould treats the composers.
I have attended concerts, I
have listened to recordings."
"I have always asked myself: This
man is so gifted, why does he mistreat
composers so terribly? It seems to me
that quite many people love this kind
of sadism (...) You can play pieces in
many different ways, but - if you
please - within the limits, within the
character and the structure of the
piece itself. Gould crosses these limits
voluntarily, or he does not notice
them. Something inside him is at cross
angles to the pieces he plays.
Apparently this seems very attractive to many
people. It makes me mad
sometimes."
Taken from
"Alfred
Brendel - Ausgerechnet ich" [translates as: I of all people
;-)]
Carl Hanser Verlag, München Wien
ISBN
3-446-20001-0
Translation by
me
Arne
</unlurk>
Remail: Original Timestamp:
sometime in April 01