Re: Gould vrs Horowitz?

[Sara Meneses <samenese@du.edu>]

Hello List:

First, thank you Dominic, for your help.

and I have a comment for Pooya,

About what Gould had to say about other pianists, I found out (and maybe
most of you know already) that in E. Mach's book "Great Pianists speak for
themselves" Gould mentions that he liked Brendel's mozart and someone
else's Rachmaninnoff (I am sorry I don't remember his name), so by knowing
that, I kind of thought that he was pretty respectful with his colleages.
In Gould's article tittled Rubinstein, he praises him for his performance
in the Brahms piano quintet, which I thought was great. We know he admired
Schnabel, Hoffman and Tureck. That's why It
seems a little stupid for me that Gould would compare himself to Horowitz
who was almost 20 years his senior!, I mean they were not even from the
same generation...

Don't get me wrong I love Gould, as a musician and I am sure he must have
been a wonderul person.

        I also have to say that in Mach's book too, I was sad to find out 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.

But in another book "Reflections from the keyboard", I was more glad too
see that he was acknowledged in a positive way by Andre Watts, Gary
Graffman, Stephen Kovacevich and Andras Schiff among others.
I have been reading and learning about Gould, however for some reason I
felt some kind of relief when Schiff mentioned that after Gould invited
him to his apartment to talk (after Schiff's peformance of the Goldberg
variations), Schiff felt that he was around " a very happy and
fullfilled person, that he exactly lived that way he wanted to live".

I know Gould was a genius, but since he chose to isolate himself most of
the time, had extremely few close friends and didn't have a family of his
own, I still wasn't sure he felt he was always happy. But he was, and I
couldn't be more thankful to God for his life and for leaving so much
written and recorded so that we all can learn from him and enjoy his
music.

enough for today.

Sara Meneses.