Several short articles about Glenn Gould, Part 1

It sat there on the shelf, winking and casting come-thither looks at me. I tried to ignore it; I thought about sad stuff; I practiced a bit of mindfulness meditation.

Nothing worked. We all have our weaknesses. For some it's booze, for others cigars, for others...well, you get the idea.

For me it's "complete" CD box sets. I see one and my vision becomes hazy, my heart palpitates, my mind starts toting up my current credit card balances.

Glenn Gould — never a pianist who rang many bells for me — there in a limited edition CD set, courtesy of Sony, heir to the beloved Columbia Masterworks of yore. All those CDs, Gould's complete Columbia recordings, in their "original jackets", cover art which I remember (in some cases) from my teen years, when I was buying some of Gould's latest via the Columbia Record Club.

So I bought it, in a wave of nostalgia and also in a sudden re-interest in Gould. What, I thought, would be my reaction to his playing these days? I haven't heard a Gould recording in, oh, twenty-five years.

I should mention that I was a piano major at Peabody (and the San Francisco Conservatory), and during my graduate days I minored in harpsichord so intensely as to qualify for all intents and purposes as a double major. My favored repertory in those days was quite close to Gould's; I loved Baroque and earlier music, and 20th century stuff (although my tastes ran more towards Copland, Ives, and Bartók, rather than the Gould's favored Second Viennese School.)

I was part of a small group orbiting our teacher Laurette Goldberg, absorbing whatever goodies the nascient HIP movement could offer us. (Laurette's pet project, the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, was still some years in the future.) We were young, committed, and dreadfully opinionated. Snobs one and all, to the last man- (and woman-) jack of us.

Like insufferable snobs the world over, we had absolutely nothing to be sniffy about, but of course there was no way we were going to discover that on our own.

Glenn Gould was our Antichrist, the target of our most barbed, carefully-saved-up snide zingers. (On the other hand, instant ostracism awaited the one who might even whisper that, maybe just perhaps, Gustav Leonhardt's playing was ever so, a teeny-tiny bit, well, you know, like...dull.)

We played the Gould/Bernstein recording of the Beethoven Fourth Concerto. After the opening piano solo (in which Gould "breaks" the opening chords, very lightly), one of our members arose, unceremoniously flicked the tone arm off the record, took up a steak knife, and proceeded pull a Norman Bates on the offending LP. (While we sillly asses sat there applauding.)

Thus I return to Gould after this long hiatus — middle aged now, while our Lady of the Steak Knife is a very successful lawyer in upper New York State — with a lot of music-making, teaching, and commenting under the belt. Snobbery is much less an issue nowadays, humility having been acquired through the usual series of setbacks, embarrassments, and short sharp shocks.

The 80-CD set is arranged in chronological order; I'm about at 1965 now, just a bit after Gould retired from the concert stage. And I'm having a great time, enjoying the performances no end, fascinated by the creativity, the nerviness, the striking originality.

Certainly he sounds like nobody else (a good thing), and certainly there are moments that are not my cup of tea. But this is the advantage of a few years under the belt: one stops taking such stuff personally. I'd never play the first Prelude from the WTC like that, but I'm me, Gould was Gould, and that's that.

I spend most of my time around musicians, with the result that absolutely none of Gould's "eccentricities" impress me as being anything other than part of the behavioral mainstream. Pianists sing all the time when they play; more than a few put on a choreographed show of body postures and facial tics. Gould did it all a bit more, but that's all.

For that same reason I'm disinclined to sign on to theories about various forms of mental illness, including Asperger's. Our society is so lamentably determined to normalize everybody and everything, explain away any departures from that line-in-the-sand norm with appeals to medicene or upbringing or astrological portents.

Speaking here solely as a musician, Gould strikes me as a man with a strong personality, somebody who had it his way without compromising his own style against the dictates of the normalizing public. He differed from the general populace in that he had an astonishing musical gift which brought him the financial freedom to live life as he wished.

A few issues stand out for me in the recordings up to this point:

There are abundant moments throughout which remind me that Gould, despite the much-vaunted modernism he represented, was fundamentally a Romantic pianist, albeit somewhat Apollonian in his approach. He combined a deep respect for the score with an open mind about interpretation, something characteristic of most older-generation pianists. They never hesitated to touch up a passage here or there if they felt it warranted, but they were nonetheless operating from a sincere desire to communicate the music to the listener.

He was a terrific Beethoven player, period. There are those who are upset about his liberties, but since when was Beethoven ever a composer for conservatives? The composer thought out of the box as a matter of course; why should we deny creative or even rebellious thinking in his interpreters? Among the most fascinating to me are are the 1956 renditions of Op. 110 and the daredevil 1965 Op. 10 No. 1 — among the few performances of this last I've heard that makes a case for this being one of the most compelling of the early sonatas.

The Haydn sonatas figured in his repertoire, although not as much as I would have wished. The slow movement of his 1958 performance of the E-flat "Genzinger" sonata is utterly compelling, completely convincing.

We should all be grateful to record companies such as Columbia who would let a best-selling artist record repertory that was unlikely to bring in big sales. Gould's pre-1960 recordings include some worthy rareties, such as the Krenek Sonata No. 3. He was always willing to look into unusual material, and Columbia was willing to go along for the ride. In that period, the catalog was heavily slanted towards the familiar, as all those big recording stars vied with each other to put out yet even more powerful rendition of the Tchaikovsky Pathétique or the Brahms Violin Concerto. And in their midst was Glenn Gould, recording Richard Strauss's early oddity "Enoch Arden" with the assistance of the grand master actor Claude Rains.

I'll be continuing the series of articles as I move forward in time through the CD set. Right now I'm still with Gould the Golden Boy — and I mean that literally, given his shimmering dark blond hair and angelic beauty (even if frequently obscured by a lack of grooming.) A lot of the Gould repertory is still to come — Hindemith, Schoenberg, Sibelius, Wagner, et al., and of course acres more Bach.

Here's the Sony "Original Jackets" series from Amazon, or from ArkivMusic.

Sony also puts out an "Original Jackets" of some of Gould's Bach performances; here it is on Amazon, and on ArkivMusic.