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Well damn, I guess nobody heard the BBC show last month
that featured James Wood and a Brahms intermezzo as performed by
Gould.
Too bad, because judging from the following excerpt from
his novel (with tangential Gould interest) I bet he would had something
interesting
to say about our hero.
Decent book, by the way, with a surprising emphasis
on comedy given Wood's constant cry for more serious
literature.
In the passage that follows the main character of the
novel is having an evening with his estranged wife. She's a pianist and puts on
some music
for them to hear.
"'This is Richter. A live performance of Beethoven
109. This is the slow bit, a beautiful theme, with
variations.'
I listened, heard first the noise of steady background
hiss, and then, cleanly abolishing it in a way that made me think of opening my
eyes for
the first time on a brilliant morning, the piano's chords
sounded. It was a beautiful tune, of yes, simple and hymnlike, broken into
sets of
two repetitions. There was something about the first chord
which made everything following it less exciting. That first chord was
pristine, and
pushed its successors out into an ordinary exile.
Nostalgic for the first annunciation, I asked if she could stop the record, and
start again. She did.
Again, the first chord broke through the background noise
and announced itself. This time I listened properly to what
followed. The melody
was, above all, very stable, neither joyful nor
melancholy: instead, it seemed to be the essence of knowledge itself, the old of
truth, constant behind our stormy extremes as
the sun is behind the clouds. Yet there was another
sound, not musical. Something like a man sniffing. It was the pianist
breathing!--heavy,
almost impatient, as if he was wrestling with the music to
secure its great medial serenity. The pianist was breathing quite hard
through
his nose as he wrestled with this sweet sound. It was the
sound of hard work, but it was also the sound of existence itself--a
man's
ordinary breath, the give and take of the organism, our
colorless wind of survival, the zephyr of it all.
The evidence of human effort, of pain, was intensely
moving, and I hung my head as I listened. How strange, this combination of
Richter's strong
masculine, worker butcher-breath, just audible to the
microphone, and the delicate impalpable music."
They're talking about the third-final movement for that
sonata, one that Gould played throughout his career, and if I remember
correctly,
he played it at his first USA recital in Washington DC and
at his final one in LA. I have a live Richter recording of this work
(recorded in 1991 and found
on the Philips great pianists series, number 2 of the
Richter editions) and his breath
is just barely audible in the recording, but in order to
hear it you need to either have the music turned it very loud or have earphones
on.
Wood is taking a little poetic license (if indeed this is
the same recording he's writing of) when he makes the breathing so
easily
perceived by the man in the novel. Good performance,
well wroth having. Richter takes 12 minutes to complete this
movement,
if you want to compare him with Gould's
recording.
The first four of so movements of this work fit the above
description, but after that the music takes a playful, capricious turn that's
not
brought up by Wood. Somedays I wish that music
wouldn't take that turn. Somedays I think otherwise. I can understand where
Gould
got the idea to exaggerate the middle of the movement,
given that there's a dramatic change already written into the
score.
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