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Someone who isn't a GG
fanatic, perhaps not even overly obsessed with music, sent me a note about radio
coverage of the 70th birthday.
It got me thinking how terribly spoiled
he's made me. Something slightly beyond how much he's enriched my
life.
If he'd never existed, or if he'd
become a shoe salesman, I'd never have missed him or noticed.
But now I can't imagine my life without
Glenn Gould marbled throughout it. I can't imagine my life without knowing that,
whenever I wanted to, I could hear him play "Sellinger's Round"
again.
I don't constantly have GG playing on
the stereo. I don't reach for him every chance I get. A day with Django
Reinhardt on the stereo is just as musically rich and delightful.
But I think GG, more than any other
musical artist, has marbled my life not just with great beauty, but with a
standard of creative excellence bordering almost on perfection. As close to
perfection as performed music will ever get.
Can anyone cite a GG release that
he/she felt was artistically shoddy or slapdash or not up to his standards? Can
anyone cite a GG release which was ordinary or commonplace, "background
music," "elevator music," which didn't somehow add some richness
to our love or our understanding of music or beauty?
Feel free to cite the radio
documentaries. I personally find them startling and fascinating -- not just
brilliant radio documentaries, but really an invention of a whole new dimension
in using the radio to convey important and deeply personal ideas.
Now on his 70th birthday, it's easy to
feel that his early death was some sort of savage theft from me, from all of us.
I can't honestly say I've felt like celebrating (the way Kurt Weill's centenary
made me feel). I feel a bit mournful -- because a pianist could very easily have
still been recording remarkable things at age 70. GG could have still been
entertaining me with new things.
And, if I was very, very lucky, or very
determined and obsessive, I could have looked forward to someday meeting him, or
perhaps just being in the same large room with him, looking at him from a
distance while an inner circle of familiars lionized him. Gawking. Wondering
what made him tick, wondering what made him special as a human
being.
One interesting thing f_minor has
taught me is that whatever GG was, what he left behind was strong enough to
sustain and survive any criticism, any savage review, any nosey question, any
misunderstanding, any ghoulish posthumous diagnosis of any outre condition. God
knows this group has picked the poor man apart from his toenails to his tonsure,
from his love life to his hypochondria. We've split into the Hummists vs. the
Anti-Hummists. We've wondered if he were a Jew, we've wondered if he were
homosexual, we've wondered if he was nuts.
With Glenn Gould, overfamiliarity just
doesn't breed contempt. I love him more now, he means more to me now than when I
first joined this bunch.
That's a kind of very special and very
powerful magic. Not many human beings can survive that kind of hyperscrutiny,
and even, in death, seem to thrive on it, and grow in peoples'
esteem.
He lived more than long enough to have
blossomed as a composer as he early-on said he wanted and planned to. But he
never did. That doesn't disappoint me. I suspect I know why it never happened:
In performance, he could achieve the kinds of perfection he demanded of himself.
In composition, his kind of standard of perfection just never materialized, and
he couldn't bear to issue anything less, he couldn't bear to leave behind mere
curiosities with his name on them.
Possibly the Epoch he found himself
trapped in was hostile to the very notion of great musical composition, hostile
to the idea of greatness itself, as Bach's and Mozart's epochs seemed to have
been hospitable and generous to those who aspired to compose great
music.
Well, forgive me for not being able to
say anything important on this day I find sad, but I was reading all the other
posts -- it is, after all, his birthday, and if nothing else, Happy Birthday
messages are certainly in order. I enjoyed them all, I have been moved by this
week full of all of your excitement and enthusiasm and
rememberance.
Perhaps I'm sad because of something
unfulfilled in me -- that I came to appreciate and love him a bit late, and then
he died suddenly, and so I won't ever meet him or hear him play, that's a
fantasy that's been ripped from me forever. All I can do is remember him; I
can't ever again look forward to Glenn Gould.
Bob
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