Glenn Gould
The truth is more important than the facts.
- Frank Lloyd Wright
When I was seven and had just begun taking piano lessons, my Uncle Steve, himself a pianist, gave me the legendary 1955 Gould recording of the Goldberg Variations. He told me that no matter how many times I listened to it, I could never tire of it. Taking him at his word, I put it on every night for a year or so as I fell asleep, each day turning the volume slightly softer until I could only hear it echoing in my imagination. Occasionally I would turn it up for a moment to see if we were in sync…
That was my introduction to Classical Music, J. S. Bach, and Glenn Gould. Only much later would I begin to understand the genius of the Canadian recluse, but his stamp was deeply embedded in my psyche from the very beginning.
Gould was the first bad-boy of the Urtext Age. He made his way into the Establishment through the hazy back-door of urtext thought, J. S. Bach. How can you define what’s just and right for a style if it’s so unclear in the text? It was a conundrum for urtext thinkers. J. S. Bach was one of the most careful editors of his time. He didn’t want to give his compositions over in rounded-out form so that any hack musician could improvise his way over them left and right, as was the custom of his époque. He wrote out much of the desired embellishments into the score with such interwoven precision and detail that he left little to be filled in or changed.
Nevertheless, from a modern perspective, there’s still much vagueness; urtext thinkers didn’t know yet how to nail him down. The page doesn’t reveal all of its secrets; it can’t be precisely defined. Tempos, dynamics and articulation, not to mention characterization – all of this is generally left up to the interpreter. Who’s to say who’s wrong or right? They knew only that his music needed to be rid of the romantic excesses of the past and be purified, the juicy wet heart excised.
And along came Glenn Gould with his Goldberg Variations, dry as could be, with a flawless finger-technique linked to a cerebral but passionate rhythmic verve that drove the critics into a frenzy. Down with Landowska and her romantic excesses! Long live the genius hailing from the North! 1955 became a defining year in Baroque interpretation.
But step by step, without losing his dryness and directness, his Bach became a bit strange, the stamp of genius ever greater. Still, it was difficult for urtext critics to criticize because he hadn’t actually altered anything in the score. It’s not as if he had changed a Presto to a Largo, a legato to staccato, a crescendo to diminuendo, because none of those marking tended to be in the score. It was simply the notes and rhythms, black against white, the rest left up to the interpreter.
Who’s to say whether Gould’s approach to Bach isn’t a manmade remolding of Baroque Cathedrals into skyscrapers? Who’s to say whether he has unearthed hidden natural truths or built up his own modern re-creations for his own recreation? With Beethoven, you can prove it by pointing to deviations on the written page; with Bach it’s any man’s guess. And besides, it’s usually so convincing!
It was when Gould ventured into less free terrain that his anti-urtext tendencies were blatant and often offensive. The free-spirited Leonard Bernstein himself, irony of all ironies, felt it his duty to address the audience with an unprecedented disclaimer before beginning a performance of Brahms 1st Piano Concerto with Gould as soloist. Gould had the idea that it should be slower, that there was a common underlying pulse linking the three movements. This would add a good 7-8 minutes to the performance and make the whole thing sound endless. {If you take the trouble to listen to the live recording, it’s actually not a slow tempo at all by today’s standards!} “In the spirit of experimentation, I’ve decided to humor this young gentleman, but know that these are not my tempos – they’re his...”
Some early Beethoven could be spot-on – dry, electric and full of rhythmic verve and precision. Other Beethoven, taken with a wetter approach, revealed a terrible command of the pedal, way-out tempi and strange liberties. You never knew quite what to expect from any repertoire.
But what people thought of his approach was not his primary concern. He played for himself and for his scattered people. He had by now withdrawn from playing concerts and become the mystic voice of the wilderness.
Whatever you think of him, you always feel that his playing is absolutely sincere, that he isn’t simply trying to provoke, at least not maliciously. He embodies creative interpretation and integrity.
I think of him as the original cubist. I sometimes wish that post-Baroque composers had left the pages as bare, leaving greater liberties to the modern interpreter. Would Glenn Gould have had a successful career if Bach had been as precise in his interpretive indications as Beethoven? If Beethoven had left his pages more bare, giving the interpreter more liberty, would a Beethovenian Glenn Gould have sprung up among us?
The question is not whether we will be extremists,
but what kind of extremists we will be...
The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.
Martin Luther King, Jr.