Re: GG: able to retrain performance habits

[Andrew J Hrycyna <ajh@world.std.com>]

Recent posts about authenticity and Gould led me to remember this other
passage from Richard Taruskin's Text and Act.  After some theorizing, he
gets to GG.  Be patient.  He starts by talking about another very
different Bach interpreter: Pablo Casals. 

"Casals, lucky genius, did not have to face the modern problem,' so
memorably defined by Auden in his great essay on Yeats, as that of being
'no longer supported by tradition without being aware of it.'  Casals did
not have to choose a style, only excel in one: nor did he have to place
himself in history.  It's easy now to dismiss him (in the words of
Stravinsky, chief architect of the modern problem for musicians) for
'playing Bach in the style of Brahms.'  But that misses the whole point,
which is that Casals, till the year he reached his majority, was Brahms's
contemporary, and that he (like Brahms) grew up regarding Bach as the
fountainhead of contemporary music, not as the speaker of a dead language
in need of philological revival. . . .

"No artist who has come to his maturity since the First World War can feel
the presentness of the past the Way Casals could, an no mere conservatory
course can ever hope to compensate for it. 

"The corollary to the 'modern problem,' to return to Auden, is that 'every
individual who wishes to bring order and coherence into the stream of
sensations, emotions, and ideas entering his consciousness, from without
and within, is forced to do deliberately for himself what in previous ages
had been done for him by family, custom, church, and state, namely the
choice of the principles and presuppositions in terms of which he can make
sense of his experience.'  This is the old existentialist dilemma: the
greatesy of all 20th century cliches, perhaps, but still frightening,
since its proper solution is alone what lends authenticity to action and
to life . . .

"Blind sumbission to authority--whether it takes the form of unreflecting
obedience to one's conservatory teacher (whose authority stems from *his*
teacher, and so on) or reliance on 'original instruments,' and other
historical hardware--is the usual method nowadays for evading the
responsibility of choice and decision.  Today's truly authentic
interpreters of music of the past (whatever the vintage of the instruments
they play) are the ones whose styles owe the least to generalized precept
and the most to acute, personal and highly specific observation.  The
great name here, of course, is Glenn Gould.

"Gould's recording of the Bach gamba sonatas (with Leonard Rose along for
the ride ...) is one of the great beacon fires of postmodernist
performance avant le mot.  There is literally nothing in these readings
either of Bach-the-Baroque-composer or of Bach-the-contemporary-of-Brahms.
And, by the way, the recording completely gives the lie to those who
complain that the grand piano cannot achieve a proper balance with a
cello.  On the contrary: This is the only recording of these sonatas ever
made in which the balance cmong the contrapuntal lines is absolutely
perfect (which means, of course, highly flexible and variable).  It is
achieved by exploiting pianistic resources of selective accentuation
unavailable to the harpsichord, and by Rose's unhistorically, even
unnaturally (but in the context of these performances brilliantly
appropriate) detache bowing, which matches Gould's famously ahistorical,
idiosyncratic keyboard touch, and was obviously inspired by it.  Above
all, the balance was achieved by working toward it on the basis of the
text alone, without any interference from preconceptions as to what the
instruments can or ought to be able to do, either 'now' or 'then.'...

"Gould places [emphasis] on the texture of the three-part counterpoint
that is embodied in the writing.  It is realized in a crystalline and
eerily idealized way. . . a play of pure sound-pattern as unrelated as
possible to the characteristic of any historically fixed, hence ephemeral,
medium of performance. . . 

"In order to distill this essence, the pianist actually makes supremely
(some would say criminally) free with the letter of the text.  Not only
does he distend the rhythm so as to achieve a maximum independence between
the lines played by his two hands, but he adds chords ad lib, doubles
parts at the octave and the third(!), improvises melismata to the point
where they become virtual graffiti (e.g. in the first movement of the 2nd
sonata), interpolates extra voices, usually in the middle of the texture
as harmonic fill, but in at least one memorable instance (Son. 2, mvt.3)
in imitation against the main tune.  And that uncanny, extraordinary,
disembodied touch!  I have no idea how he produced the rolled chords in
the right hadn in the 3rd mvt. of the first sonata, for example.  I only
know that they have been haunting me now for a dozen years, and that
Gould's is the only recording of these too familiar works that continues
to give me refreshment.

"George Szell was right.  That nut was a genius."  

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