GG: Stokowski

[Mary Jo Watts <mwatts@rci.rutgers.edu>]

About the purist Bach issue writes Glenn H. Gould the Essayist:

	"You play the organ and claim to like Bach," said one of my teachers,
a Toscanini advocate. "How can you possibly approve of Stokowski?" (We
all knew of the transcription travesties for which he'd been
responsible in the name of the cantor of Leipzig.)
	It was, to be sure, the Achilles heel in the anatomy of my
admiration, for I had already wasted long hours of practice in a
futile attempt to make diapason-heavy church organs simulate E. Power
Briggs's Sunday-morning sound from the "Germanic Museum" at Harvard. I
thought of myself as a purist, and I scoffed at the Stokowski
transcription; nowadays, strange to say, they hardly bother me at all.
[p 264, from "Stowkowski in Six Scenes" _GG Reader_ 1977-1978]

But this is also from the man who loved the Swingle Singers Bach and
the Carlos synth Bach. I should think the Stokowski transcriptions
would be easy to take! 

Wasn't the crack GG made ("That is Bach for people who don't like
Bach") in regard to the Chromatic Fantasia as a composition (Peter
Lorre at the organ as the clock strikes midnight, or some such he
said...) rather than any specific rendering of any Bach piece?

Speaking of weird transcriptions, why do you suppose GG recorded the
Liszt Beethoven transcriptions considering his negative opinions on the
former's musical abilities and the latter's symphonies? 

-MJ