Re: GG and Mozart

["Michael D. Benedetti" <benedett@bluestone.com>]

Greg Romero wrote:
>	Gould was afraid that serious recordings of these literatures
>would have paled when compared to the recordings of others, so he
>chickened out and played them like a fool intentionally, leaving his
>serious interpretations for those works that did not yet have benchmarks.  

I think of it more like this: Gould didn't understand Mozart. He seems
to have had a great feeling of how Bach (for example) thought and worked,
but I don't think he was able to feel a similar "empathy" with the works
of Mozart. I don't understand what's to like about cottage cheese,
therefore I characterize it as a bland, inferior food. GG didn't understand
what Mozart was trying to do, therefore he characterized him as a bland,
inferior composer.

Your argument of "Gould didn't 'get' Mozart because he was immature"
is a little hard to swallow. I could just as easily claim that "Greg
Romero only 'gets' Mozart because Greg is too immature to see Wolfie's
flaws." I'd like to believe that catholic tastes are a sign of superiority
(for my tastes are as catholic as anyone's), but I see no reason to think
that.

I recall a few anecdotes from the various GG books in which he played
Mozart pieces or improvised in the style of WAM in informal settings
(between takes, etc.) in the accepted fashion, and the anecdotists
invariably described the playing as "wonderful." So I doubt that he was
incapable of turning out a good performance of the pieces.

If GG was so afraid of failing at Mozart, how does doing a bizarre
recording remedy that? It would seem to draw attention to his supposed
inability, rather than hide it. If you challenged me to write a program in
some language I don't know, and I wanted to hide my ignorance, I'd rather
say "that's a stupid language, I won't use it" than give you a bad program
and say "I tried to do that."

Obviously, my arguments against your claim depend on Occam's Razor--"the
best answer is the simplest one." And this may not hold in Gould's case.
It's quite possible that GG came up with an arcane scheme to hide his
musical immaturity by playing bizarre interpretations of composers
whose work was beyond him.

But I don't think it's likely.

Mike Benedetti