Classical - Dermot Clinch on the neurotic genius of the keyboard
Glenn Gould arrived in Manhattan in the hot summer of 1955 wearing coat, beret, muffler and gloves. He had come to record Bach's Goldberg Variations and brought his usual equipment: "music portfolio, batch of towels, two large bottles of spring water, five small bottles of pills and his own special chair" on which he would sit, almost certainly, with his legs crossed. Gould was neurotic. The least deniable criticism of him must be Alfred Brendel's put-down: he was "not mainstream".
The Goldbergs Gould recorded that summer are infuriating. They are too fast, too slow, too percussive; they are wilful and obstructive. They are also perhaps the most famous and influential piano recordings ever made. Now, thanks to a de luxe "Original Jacket Collection" from Sony Classical - 12 Bach CDs at original LP length, enrobed in facsimiles of the original LP jackets - we may newly weep, laugh and dance with delight at the authentic Gould experience, with the benefit of added sepia nostalgia. Be reminded: to play this "precision-made" LP, your turntable "must be level". Be warned: an "Osmium (metal) tip" - should you have been so evidently foolish as to fit one - may last you "not over 20 hours".
Gould recorded a large repertoire, with unequal distinction. His Great Pianists of the 20th Century disc earlier this year included no Bach, but works by Byrd, Gibbons, Bizet, Scriabin, Prokofiev and Berg, plus a Mozart performance of staggering petulance and childishness. By Gould's rendition of Chopin's B Minor Sonata, Gould's most excitable biographer has been put in mind of "a frigid woman being forced to kiss a man she despises". Gould regarded Chopin with derision, thought Mozart's late works "intolerable" and considered Beethoven's middle period the "supreme example of a composer on an ego trip". He could be fantastically silly.
So why was he also a genius? First, his Bach. You may dislike it. But you cannot ignore it. Before Gould, pianists tended not so much to play the great master as to caress and adore him. Gould's Bach recordings are instantly identifiable: for their play of chopped, brittle staccato with slyly insinuating legato, their delving into the deepest heart of the polyphony. And they happen to contain - in the singing Sarabande of the first Partita, the drama of the Sinfonia from the second, the explosive energy of the first variation of the Goldbergs, the dazzling joy of the B Flat Prelude from the first book of the Forty-Eight - insights that imprint themselves on our ear so strongly as to obliterate all others.
The other reason? Gould's writing. Tucked away in parts two and three of The Glenn Gould Reader - "Performance" and "Media" - lurk a couple of the most explosive ideas about musical performance expressed by any bona fide musical performer of the modern era. Gould embraced the technological age. "I herewith reaffirm my prediction that the habit of concert-going and concert-giving will be as dormant in the 21st century as, with luck, will be Tristan da Cunha's volcano . . ." Gould may lose himself amid Bertie Woosterish ironies and contortions. But his writings burn even now in the hands of impresarios and concert promoters across the world.
He wanted the death of public performance. He gave up playing in public at the age of three. He praised the ideal of "aesthetic narcissism" and positively encouraged listeners to interfere with his recorded performances: to twiddle our dials was a creative act. The ability to edit a tape of his performance exalted the performer, too. It made him "like the composer": it gave him power.
Gould's high, uncompromising view of art resembles nobody's more than Richard Wagner's. The purpose of art "is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but the gradual lifelong construction of a state of wonder and eternity", he wrote. Wagner banned applause at his opera house. "Let's ban applause" is the title of a seminal Gould article. And Gould's vanishing trick - the performer retiring from the public stage the better to allow the glorious work to shine without distraction - was anticipated by Wagner, too. At Bayreuth, by the composer's own design, the orchestra would be in a pit, covered by a roof, hidden.
Gould's desire was transparency, the removal of the performer's superficial personality from the musical equation. And the irony is that he ended by asserting the performer's personality more strongly than perhaps any other performer we know. Is anything more distinctive in the recorded piano repertoire than the staccato, woodpecker tapping of Gould's C Major Prelude from the first book of the Forty-Eight or his dignified aria from the Goldbergs? Gould was aware of his fatal attraction, this flaw in his own vanishing trick. In his notes to that famous Goldberg recording he chides himself for ascribing to Bach his own subjective reactions. "I suspect I may have unwittingly engaged," he tells us, "in a dangerous game."
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