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There is no such thing as bad press -- Bela Lugosi
Salut Jean-Christophe, ça va?
And don't forget what Glenn Gould said
about Mozart! That he was a lousy composer! That the tragedy of Mozart isn't
that he died too young, but that he died too old!
I'd already become obsessed with
Gould's (white dove LP) Mozart for ten years before I read that he said he
disliked Mozart. It frightened me! If I had dared to say, "Mozart is a
lousy composer," I would have expected a lightning bolt to incinerate me
promptly!
My professional background is as a
journalist, and I've found it very interesting to consider Gould from the
standpoint of Glenn Gould, Master Media Manipulator.
The basic and very simple problem every
public figure faces is how to attract the media and how to make it generate
metric tonnes of ink and gazillions of colorful and loud electrons featuring the
public figure's face and name on it.
This is a pretty easy problem to solve
for serial murderers, cannibals, and scantily-clad young MTV artists and movie
stars.
It is a nearly impossible problem for
classical pianists. To the general media -- newspapers, magazines, CNN -- a
classical pianist is the most boring creature on Earth. In Hollywood, there's a
phrase about such people: They complain that they can't even get
arrested.
Last night I watched a wonderful movie,
"Ed Wood," about the man who was once, very deservedly, voted The
Worst Movie Director Who Ever Lived. Wood became friends with Bela Lugosi in the
last few years of Lugosi's troubled life. In one scene, Wood goes to visit
Lugosi in the hospital that's treating him for morphine addiction. Lugosi's room
is filled with the sleaziest kind of papparrazi, sensationalist tabloid
reporters and photographers. Wood is horrified and chases them away. "Don't
you understand?" he tells the aging, sick, forgotten movie star.
"They'll ruin you! They'll print terrible things about
you!"
Lugosi smiles broadly. He'd called the
papparazzi himself, and was thrilled that they'd come and were now going to
violate his privacy with distorted, false, sensational stories and ugly photos.
Lugosi explains: "Kid -- there is no such thing as bad
press."
For public performers and artists,
that's pretty much true. The world is so easily bored. Wynona Ryder is about to
go on trial in Los Angeles on charges she was trying to shoplift $5000 worth of
clothes from a department store. I would look on such circumstances as the total
destruction of my life and reputation, and would probably gas myself in the
garage. When the trial is all over, Wynona Ryder will be considerably more
famous than before the arrest. If she's found guilty and has to spend three
months in a woman's jail, she will be five times more world-famous than if she
were found innocent. People who never heard of her before will flock to see her
next movie. (Ms. Ryder needs to resort to desperate measures to attract the
media, as she is now a very old female movie star -- 29.)
And yet out of the world's entire pack
of classical pianists, Glenn Gould managed to attract and hold the media's
attention and fascination for his entire life.
This was no accident. And I suspect he
did it without much help from professional publicists. He did it entirely by
instinct. And because he wanted and thrived on all the publicity; certainly his
career and album sales thrived on it. Does anyone have the Raw Sales Numbers
comparing Gould's lifetime album sales with those of his contemporary classical
pianists? Who outsold him? Maybe Horowitz, maybe Rubinstein? But by Y2K, which
classical pianist of the 20th century had outsold Gould? Mere death has not
cooled the media's and the public's fascination with Gould.
Anyone who argues that Gould's sales
are entirely a function of his wonderful piano playing, and have nothing to do
with his savvy manipulation of the media and publicity ... well, argue away! But
I and every other journalist will be giggling behind your back.
Gould instinctively knew how to make
controversy work for him. I don't think we'll ever have the slightest accurate
knowledge of his "true feelings" about Bach, Byrd, Mozart, Gibbons. He
told interviewers whatever whimsically leapt into his brain that instant,
perfectly sensing the things that were interesting and exciting to the
interviewer.
These subtle Gould-interviewer
interplays are wonderfully joked about in "32 Short Films" -- he
played music interviewers and journalists like a violin. Look at the boy
freezing to death in an outdoor Toronto phone booth for the privilege of a few
words from The Mysterious Musical Master. Someone less savvy than Gould would
have assumed that, to generate favorable publicity, you must make the journalist
warm and comfortable in a fancy hotel suite, with drinks, coffee and free lunch.
Gould knew how to get hectares of ink by making journalists crawl through broken
glass, and when it was over, the journalist would be grateful and feel something
wonderful had just happened!
If there's a lesson to be learned from
Gould's example: If you want to be world-famous, become a hermit, be reclusive,
be nearly impossible to find, impossible to contact, impossible to talk to. He
didn't invent this school of modern publicity -- Howard Hughes, Greta Garbo,
Marlon Brando and Thomas Pynchon were/are past masters of it.
And say astonishing, shocking, totally
unexpected things. Give the interviewer juicy, colorful quotes. Do you expect to
be splashed all over the front page if you say, "Bach was a wonderful
composer. His compositions have always moved me deeply since I was a
child."? You can expect a comatose and extremely unenthused interviewer,
and an even more comatose editor -- the person who decides where or if the story
should run.
People are so terribly bored. Gould
always knew how to give them Something Different, Something Surprising,
Something Shocking, Something Wildly Controversial, Something Totally
Unexpected. And he did it so well because you could tell it wasn't forced -- he
enjoyed manipulating the media, making the media dance to his tune. He wears a
special smile in those moments when he realizes the interviewer has become putty
in his hands.
He was also a pretty good piano player,
if you ask me.
Elmer
>I don't know if we should really take GG
seriously
>considering what he says of the Goldbergs in this
late
>interview. Did he also really mean it when he said
>Gibbons
(or perhaps Byrd, I don't remember) was his
>favorite composer? Don't
forget he was a bit of an
>eccentric!
>
>Anyway it's
unsettling. With his incredible words(to
>me as a Frenchman they sound
even more savory) I think
>he is incredibly harsh, which makes me doubt
he's
>being serious. "Balcony-pleasing"!!! How dares he!
I
>have always thought there are practically no weak
>points in the
Goldbergs, and I stick to that. I've
>just had a look at the score: Var 28
and 29 certainly
>have some "etude" elements, especially Var 28,
and any
>not so good composer as Bach would have make a
>disaster
out of them. But Bach it was, and he
>carefully deviced other patterns to
balance those.
>Variation 29 has a marvellous solemn side to it,
at
>that, and clearly trumpets the oncoming blazing end of
>the
quodlibet. Those two wouldn't be the first ones
>I'd cross out if I had
the painful task of downsizing
>the Goldbergs.
>
>Maybe GG had
some profound objections at that time
>which he did not explain, but I
tend to think he was
>(once again) provoking, and desacralizing THE
Bach
>work, possibly because he was fed up with people
>thinking
GG=Bach=Goldbergs...