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24-Karat Gould at The Kennedy CenterAFI Series Focuses on the Brilliant PianistBy Tim PageWashington Post Staff Writer Sunday, September 21, 1997; Page G01 The Washington Post More than 30 years after his last public concert, Glenn Gould (1932-1982) remains an extraordinarily vital figure in our musical life. His piano recordings continue to sell steadily; his performances and philosophies have been examined in at least a half dozen books; he has been the subject of a novel (the late Thomas Bernhard's "The Loser") and a full-length feature film. And now Washington area residents will have the opportunity to encounter Gould in all of his brilliance and complexity. Thursday through Sunday nights the American Film Institute at the Kennedy Center will present a series titled "Glenn Gould on Film." The offerings will include a film of Gould's rendition of Bach's "Goldberg Variations"; a conversation and duo performance from Gould and Yehudi Menuhin; the impressionistic 1994 study "32 Short Films About Glenn Gould," with actor Colm Feore as the pianist; and four superb 40-minute shorts on Bach, Beethoven, Schoenberg and Stravinsky that Gould made in 1966 for the BBC with the producer and biographer Humphrey Burton. Glenn Herbert Gould was born Sept. 25, 1932, the son of a Toronto furrier and his wife, a piano teacher who became the boy's first teacher. He began keyboard studies at the age of 3 and entered the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto seven years later. By 14, he had graduated with an associate degree and he made his first public appearance as a pianist in May 1946. He quickly achieved national fame, and by the time he was 20 Gould had given concerts throughout Canada and for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. Although Gould would sometimes refer disparagingly to New York as "Debut Town," he made his own United States debut right here in Washington -- at the Phillips Gallery on Jan. 2, 1955. Paul Hume, then the music critic for this newspaper, attended the concert and was ecstatic about what he heard: "Few pianists play the piano so beautifully, so lovingly, so musicianly in manner, and with such regard for its real nature and its enormous literature. . . . Glenn Gould is a pianist with rare gifts for the world. It must not long delay hearing and according him the honor and audience he deserves. We know of no pianist anything like him at any age." After his first album for Columbia Masterworks -- a fleet, mercurial, highly original rendition of Bach's "Goldberg Variations" -- was released in early 1956, Gould was thrown into a maelstrom of professional activity. He toured Europe and the United States, and became the first Canadian artist to perform in the Soviet Union. He became famous not only for the intensity and virtuosity of his playing but for his temperament, his personal eccentricities and a tendency to cancel engagements at the last minute. Gould never made any secret of his dislike for the performer's life. In 1964, at the age of 31, he announced that he was withdrawing from playing in concert and would henceforth concentrate his efforts on recordings and films. This was disparaged as one more example of Gould's "bizarre" behavior, and it was widely predicted that he would be back touring within a few months. But Gould never played in public again. He had ready explanations for his decision to quit the stage. Briefly, he was tired of what he called the "non-take-two-ness" of the concert experience -- the inability of a performer to correct finger slips and other minor mistakes. He pointed out that most creative artists were able to tinker and perfect, but that a live performer had to re-create his work from scratch in every concert. The result, in Gould's view, was a "tremendous conservatism" that made it difficult for an artist to learn and grow. "Concert pianists are really afraid to try out the Beethoven Fourth Piano Concerto if the Third happens to be their specialty," he said. "That's the piece they had such success with on Long Island, by George, and it will surely bring them success in Connecticut." Gould believed in what he called "the prospects of recording." "Technology has the capability to create a climate of anonymity and to allow the artist the time and freedom to prepare his conception of a work to the best of his ability," he said. "It has the capability of replacing those awful and degrading and humanly damaging uncertainties which the concert brings with it." And so he spent the rest of his life making recordings: more than 80 of them, alternately brilliant and exasperating (he played the late Mozart sonatas as if he hated them -- which, as it happened, he did) but almost always original and thought-provoking. What are the best Gould recordings? The Bach discs, of course -- both of the commercial "Goldberg Variations" (1955 and 1981) and, for the obsessed, the 1954 and 1958 live performances, too. The "Overture in the French Style." The concertos. The "Well-Tempered Clavier," even though it was recorded during Gould's most willful and, if you like, "eccentric" period. Some less obvious choices: the recording of the Brahms intermezzos from 1960, proof that Gould could play romantic music idiomatically and with extraordinary feeling. The disc devoted to works by William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons -- Gould often said Gibbons was the composer to whom he felt the closest. The Mozart Concerto in C Minor (K. 491) with Walter Susskind -- far and away his finest Mozart performance. An early album of the Beethoven second piano concerto (Gould's favorite among the five) with Leonard Bernstein. His sole venture into recorded conducting -- Wagner's "Siegfried Idyll," probably the slowest performance in history and a reading of melting and surpassing tenderness. The selection of programs for AFI's "Glenn Gould on Film" was made by Susan Koscis, who has curated similar festivals in New York and San Francisco. Koscis was a friend who worked closely with Gould as the director of public relations for CBS Masterworks in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and is now a vice president for the Washington-based conflict resolution organization Search for Common Ground. "I'm very happy to bring these films to my new city, principally because most of them have never been seen here before," Koscis said in a recent interview. "Moreover, so much of what has been written about Gould has been such psychobabble that I don't always recognize the person I knew. The only way that a new generation can really become acquainted with Glenn is to watch him, listen to him, think things through with him. In these films, we find the real Glenn Gould." The best of Gould's films are indeed terrific. I recommend especially the "Goldberg Variations," in which music and image are so intimately connected as to create a new and transcendent artistic experience; this will be presented at both the beginning and the end of the festival. "The Retreat From the Stage" will be of help to anybody seeking to understand Gould's prophetic views on recording. And the four "Conversations With Humphrey Burton" represent Gould at his most brilliant and engaging; it is a shame that they were so poorly represented in Sony Classical's gigantic Glenn Gould video edition. (The material on those tapes is wonderful; the presentation is execrable. Why couldn't we have had Gould's own programs, on which he labored with such care, rather than this flashy, diced-up mash, complete with soppy connective narrative?) Opinion is divided on "32 Short Films About Glenn Gould." I find it an earnest, well-meaning but excruciatingly artsy-craftsy movie cum meditation, but I am glad that it has won its subject a new group of admirers. Moreover, almost everyone I've spoken to likes this film -- everybody, that is, but the people who actually knew Gould. For most of us, the film is so solemn and reverential, nuanced and portentous, that it is impossible to escape an occasional, flashing memory of Gould's gleeful, childlike, self-deprecating laughter -- the laughter with which I suspect he would have greeted all latter-day attempts to portray him as "Saint Glenn." In person, Glenn Gould was, above all, an awful lot of fun, and virtually none of that comes across in the film; if there were some way to cross the "32 Short Films" with something silly and inspired such as one of the "Airplane!" movies or a Three Stooges short, we might be getting someplace.
A Gentle Man As the reader may have surmised, I was fortunate enough to have been acquainted with Gould during the last years of his life, mostly through dozens of lengthy, wide-ranging after-midnight phone calls. Indeed, it was Susan Koscis who was responsible for my initial contact with the pianist -- a press interview that grew into a friendship. Few of his friends knew one another well, but we were aware that we were a charmed circle, enormously lucky to be associated with this gentle, funny, out-of-the-ordinary man. Our hours with him seem only the more precious (and, for me, at least, curiously mythic) as the years wear on. And we know that, no matter what we do with the rest of our lives, young scholars will be always searching us out, with the hope of summoning just one more unpublished anecdote, one more insight into Glenn Gould. Not that we mind such visits. On the contrary, an occasional conversation about Gould brings him fitfully back to life -- particularly when the interrogator is sportive, animated and truly prepared -- and we only wish we had more to offer. The Gould legend is firmly established. He was the man who hummed while he played and wore winter coats on the hottest summer days, a fanatic germophobe who supposedly refused to shake hands. (I can debunk the last of these stories; he instantly proffered his hand when we finally met after two years of phone friendship.) In fact, some of these "eccentricities" may not have been so eccentric after all. For example, Gould used to soak his hands under hot and cold water immediately before a performance, a habit that was often dismissed as just another morsel to feed the journalists. But in recent years many people who make intricate and prolonged use of their fingers and hands every day have begun to suffer from a cluster of afflictions known collectively as repetitive stress injury (several distinguished pianists were forced to curtail their concertizing in mid-career). And, as it happens, one of the best ways to prevent repetitive stress injury is to soak your hands in hot and cold running water. Although Gould kept an apartment in downtown Toronto, he lived most of the time in the suburban borough of North York, at the Inn on the Park Hotel. He liked the hotel because it had all-night room service, enormously helpful to somebody who awoke toward the dinner hour and went to bed in the early morning. It was at the Inn on the Park that Gould suffered a fatal stroke, on Oct. 3, 1982, two weeks past his 50th birthday.
Living Testament The question is inescapable -- why does Gould continue to exert such a fascination? There are a few possible answers. First and foremost, at the risk of belaboring the obvious, it is because he was a very great musician. By "great" I mean that Gould was able to find new depths -- and sometimes entirely new surfaces -- in thrice-familiar masterworks. He knew no technical difficulties (has anybody ever possessed 10 fingers with 10 such independent lives of their own?), but more important was his ability to make a profound and inexplicable personal connection with the people who listened to him. And he was arrestingly individual. Whether one "liked" everything Gould did was ultimately a matter of small importance. He was always there, impossible to ignore -- even though, paradoxically, he spent so much time carefully hidden from the public eye. Second, Gould was, in a word, entertaining. There has been much recent discussion of the division between art and entertainment and I, for one, don't buy the distinction; any art that does not entertain us on some level is bound for the scrap heap. Samuel Johnson, that greatest of all critics, once said that the first duty of a book was to make us want to read it through, and the statement, appropriately amended, applies to all the arts. If something does not, on some level, seduce us -- entertain us -- it will not hold our attention for very long. Gould entertained, and on many different levels. He was an ecstatic showman -- indeed, Leonard Bernstein is the only other musician I can think of who so reflected what he was actually feeling about the work he was performing, in a manner that sometimes approached choreography. And yet divorced from the visual ballet, the best performances of Gould and Bernstein can stand alone. Finally, Gould was somebody who made his own world -- a civilized, educated man who put together his own unconventional manner of living. It took time, but Gould came to terms with his genius, with the internal demands such a gift naturally made on him, and adapted to suit. As Geoffrey Payzant, whose book "Glenn Gould Music and Mind" remains the finest single volume on the pianist, put it: "Glenn Gould is an exceedingly superior person, friendly and considerate. He is not really an eccentric, nor is he egocentric. Glenn Gould is a person who has found out how he wants to live his life and is doing precisely that." Gould was paradoxical in the extreme and almost any statement you make about him can be contradicted with something equally valid. He made some of the best recordings of our time and a few of the worst. He lived a life of monklike austerity, yet he was one of the jolliest and most spontaneous telephone companions imaginable and extraordinarily courteous in person. He was a profound individualist who prized rectitude and puritanical moral values, yet he considered himself a socialist and, in my experience, was rather skeptical of religious dogma. He lived in Canada all his life, and loved it, but he despised Canadian nationalism. He loathed ostentatious romantic effusion, yet his favorite 20th-century composer was Richard Strauss. He was reclusive and retiring, yet he wanted to be heard, be seen, be felt everywhere. He has been dead almost 15 years, yet he is, somehow, with us today, in some ways more essential to the intellectual life of our times than he was when alive. We'll be a long time figuring him out; in the meantime, we can watch, listen -- and be grateful. GLENN GOULD ON FILM
"The Goldberg Variations" (1981) and "Duo -- Glenn Gould With Yehudi Menuhin" (1965). Thursday and next Sunday night at 6:30. "32 Short Films About Glenn Gould" (1994). Friday at 6:30 and next Sunday at 4:45. "Conversations With Humphrey Burton, Part I" (1966). Saturday at 4:15. Films of Gould discussing and playing the works of Bach and Schoenberg. "Glenn Gould" (1974) and "Bach Partita No. 6" (1974). Gould discusses his views of Berg, Schoenberg and Webern and presents his own "So You Want to Write a Fugue?" followed by a complete filmed performance of a Bach partita. "The Retreat From the Stage" (1974) and "The Alchemist" (1974). In the first program, Gould discusses his abandonment of live performance; in the second, we watch as he makes recordings of Bach and Scriabin. "Conversations With Humphrey Burton, Part II" (1966). Films of Gould discussing and playing music by Beethoven and Richard Strauss; the Strauss film is especially moving. The films will be shown at the American Film Institute at the Kennedy Center. Ticket prices: AFI members, children, students under 18 and senior citizens, $5.50; general public, $6.50. For information: 202-828-4000.
© Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company |
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