GG: incomplete Art of Fugue: speculation

[Bradley P Lehman <bpl@UMICH.EDU>]

Zev Bechler and I have had the following exchange on another list, and (at
Zev's request) I'm cross-posting it here....

Bradley Lehman, Dayton VA
home: http://i.am/bpl  or  http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bpl

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Zev asked:

Does anyone know or have a clue as to why Glenn Gould never completed his
Art of Fugue organ recording ?

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I replied:

Michael Stegemann's notes in the CD booklet (SMK 52595) sum it up well.
See also chapter 6 of Geoffrey Payzant's book _Glenn Gould, Music & Mind_:
discussion of this recording and the Handel recording on harpsichord. See
also Gould's letters that refer to this project in _Glenn Gould: Selected
Letters_. In 1962 the 29-year-old Gould seemed enthusiastic about
finishing it, even suggesting a suitable third instrument for the
remainder, but that was before the scathing reviews of volume 1 came out.
Thereafter, he claimed that playing the organ messed up his piano muscles.

The short answer is: most likely, Columbia didn't offer him a contract to
finish it. Volume 1 got pounded in the press, both on performance and
sound. Gould's registrations (and lack of practice on the organ) cause
plenty of mud; there are those horribly out-of-tune notes; the close
miking sounds bizarre; there are plenty of tiny flubs throughout the
performances; Gould's interpretations were criticized as "unmusical";
Contrapunctus 9 is uniformly flat in pitch; etc. Why would the company
want to lay out more money for a project that was probably already dead in
the water? It's not too hard to imagine a pragmatic Columbia executive
remarking, "They're all saying it sounds like crap, let's ditch this."
(And Gould himself in one of his letters admonishes his reader to listen
only to the stereo version, as the mono mix has some timing problems.)

This project, in the first place, was Columbia's attempt to market their
superstar young pianist as an equally good organist (or at least to get
some novelty value out of it), and from the evidence of the record,
clearly he wasn't. They did much better to let him concentrate on his best
instrument. (Then they made a similar mistake a dozen years later, with
that Handel album, but that's neither here nor there. Again, novelty.)

On the back of the original LP jacket for the Art of Fugue, there is a
self-promotional box about Gould. It quotes three glowing reviews of
Gould's pianism, and continues: "Such is the praise that has greeted each
appearance of Glenn Gould, the distinguished Canadian pianist, who now
adds new laurels to his crown as an organist. Mr. Gould began studying the
organ as a young boy. When he was only fourteen he appeared in the
Casavant Series at Eaton Auditorium in Toronto, which each year brought to
that city five of the world's finest organists. Although the piano is now
Glenn Gould's major medium as a performer, it is brilliantly evident from
this recording of the _Art of the Fugue_ that he is also a master of
Bach's royal instrument."

The critics weren't fooled by that puffery. The old joke "Such
unappetizing food...and such small portions!" comes to mind, as this LP is
scarcely over 31 minutes long....

It's an enjoyable recording, in its own way, but it *is* problematic for
all the reasons mentioned above. Quite simply, Gould wasn't at his best
when playing the organ. Perhaps they should have offered him a
counter-contract to start over with a recording of the _Art of Fugue_ on
piano?

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Zev continued:

Many thanks. Well, as a hypothesis this may be ok, but I doubt it. I am
not aware of any similar case in which a recording giant like cbs got cold
feet after the critics had their say and stopped a project in its midst.
Are you ? And then - when was the critics' reaction to Gould's Bach ( or
Mozart, say) ever uniformly enthusiastic? And yet such a strange stop-
short never happened there.

However, all that critics' howl about the AOF is of little relevance to
the heart of the puzzle -- why didnt Gould finish the recording prior to
the release of the 1st part ? That he was serious about this we know from
his letter to Chapin ( June 26, 1962) for there he suggested that the
recording sessions be completed at the coming fall or, at the latest, in
the winter, " so that the complete Art of Fugue be assembled for the
market by this time next year". So, what stopped him then ?

As for his late January 10,1965 ( ! ) complaint about the organ having
cramped his piano playing ( he never even hints at anything of the sort in
the Chapin letter, written only a few months after the organ recording ) ,
you probably noticed that in the same letter, just as he declared that "my
organ playing days are behind me", he also, almost in the same breath,
declared his intent of " finishing the Art of Fugue at some future date" .
Which means that the critics reaction left no mark on Gould himself , and
this might indicate that he sensed no adverse reaction from the cbs
people. And, to top it, if the organ release was cosidered a mistake by
those anonymous cbs people, how reconcile it with the, by now, according
to your suggestion, much stranger adventure with the Haendel suites (
again , by the way, only 4 out of 16) ?

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I continued:

Hmm. Let me offer a different interpretation of those same two letters.
Try this on for size.

On 6/26/62 he's writing to his employer, Chapin, director of Columbia
Masterworks. The letter lists all the projects Gould is interested in
doing over the next few years. Obviously it's his own intention to finish
the Art of Fugue, and he's assuming it will be picked up, but that doesn't
mean it's Chapin's intention to sign the OK for it. (And even if Gould did
have shoulder trouble or whatever after the recording session, which we
can't be sure of one way or the other, there would be no reason to mention
it here. Why would he want to offer Chapin any excuse to cancel the
project?)

Between 1962 and 1965 Gould gave up concerts. All concerts, on any
instrument. Permanent retirement. That's important for the next letter....

On 1/10/65 he's writing to the pastor of a church in Brooklyn, that is, a
fan. One speaks differently to fans than to one's employer! Gould here is
saying, in my paraphrase: [You've got a new organ, terrific, thank you for
the invitation to have me play it. However, I don't do organ concerts and
shall not. *If* I do any more organ records it will be only the completion
of Art of Fugue, nothing else. Thank you for your enthusiasm, but don't
waste your time inviting me again.] That is, he's politely turning down a
concert he doesn't want to do. His claim of shoulder trouble is merely a
convenient excuse to placate a fan whom he wants to let down lightly.
(And, for the sake of argument here, suppose Columbia Masterworks *had*
already informed Gould there wouldn't be a completion of the Art of Fugue
project. Would Gould mention that here to his fan? No, he'd have no reason
to!)

And, I think too much has been made of this letter, the shoulder trouble,
in the Gould literature. Wouldn't Gould strive to offer *any* plausible
excuse here to turn down a concert he doesn't want to do? (I know from
years of experience, organ playing *does* use some different muscles than
piano playing, but it's not *that* debilitating...especially if one sits
with a bench that is high enough. Shoulder pain comes in only if one is
sitting at a level that is ergonomically bad for the body!)

-----

One more point from the Chapin letter. Gould wrote: "If your recent
unpleasantness with the Department of Internal Revenue has been adequately
settled, it would be best certainly to do these on the same organ as
Volume 1. If you anticipate great problems with the Customs, I could
investigate an organ which the President of Casavant Freres has recently
described to me. (...) [And it is on Long Island instead of in Canada...]"
As Payzant pointed out in the chapter I cited yesterday, volume 1 used two
different organs. Gould did not finish Contrapunctus 1-9 in the allotted
recording session time, and they had to do additional portions at a
similar organ in New York. This second organ was not mentioned on the
original album; the whole thing is credited to the main location.

If I may suggest another possible perspective Columbia Masterworks
executives may have had: "This whole project has been a pain already
getting the instruments and legalities straightened out, and the critics
hated it, and Gould's better on piano than on organ anyway. Let's scrap
this one!"

After all, Babe Ruth held a strikeout record. The hero can't hit a home
run every time. Gould wasn't a very good organist. Columbia gave him his
experiment, and then moved on to more lucrative things.

-----

As for projects that were stopped in their midst, I was listening to one
this morning: the series of Haydn symphonies led by Derek Solomons, early
1980s, CBS Masterworks. I have "volume 9" and I've only ever heard of one
or maybe two other volumes that ever existed. (Anybody know?) Similarly,
there are the aborted series of Haydn symphonies led by Roy Goodman,
Christopher Hogwood, and Trevor Pinnock. And several series of Bach
cantatas have been discussed on this list. And, for Glenn Gould himself,
there's the incomplete series of Beethoven sonatas.

One of my favorite conductors, Klemperer, recorded only three of the six
Tchaikovsky symphonies, similarly only half the Mendelssohn and Bruckner
symphonies, only a small handful of Mozart and Haydn symphonies, and only
Act 1 of the Valkyrie.... He was also going to record Strauss' "Don
Quixote" with du Pre, and they got some of it done, but then he abandoned
it himself. The recording that was issued a few years ago, long after
everybody involved was gone, is a patch-together conducted mostly by
Adrian Boult, but with some short inserts from the Klemperer session!

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Zev continued:

That's possible too, no doubt, but only for explaining what happenned
after the critics' attack. But it still avoids the heart of the puzzle ,
which can now be put thus: What stopped the project from being completed
in the autumn or the winter of 1962-3, as Gould suggested, so that the
complete work be released in the summer of 1963 ?

As to the list of interrupted projects you supplied-- well, did any of
these happen as a result of adverse citique ? but this is all that matters
to the standard story. I could buy the story that Gould himself decided to
abandon the project because of the poor quality of his product thus far,
or because of the critics, but the letters point against both cases, the
Chapin letter against the former and the Glenesk one against the latter.

By the way, here he wrote not, as your paraphrase wants to suggest, that "
> "*If* I do any more organ records it will be only the completion of Art
of Fugue, nothing else" > but rather that "except for finishing the Art of
Fugue at some future date which can be suitably removed from piano playing
for some several weeks,I am determined" etc. This sounds pretty determined
also about completeing the project, no if and no perhaps (and this is in
January 1965, some three and a half years after the first recording). But
cant we access the cbs people and their records for that period about the
real story ?

And one more thing, would you agree to posting our discussions thus far in
the Glenn Gould forum F_minor? I posted my querry there some time ago but
got no response at all, so maybe this will stir things up there . I would
also like to re-think the quality of the Gould AOF organ recording itself,
but would like to keep it seperate from our present topic, so, some other
time.