Glenn Gould Stories: Angels, Iconoclasts, and Alter Egos

Throughout his life, Glenn Gould excelled as a writer of provocative, insightful, and surprisingly varied articles, reviews, and opinion pieces. Like philosopher Marshall McLuhan, Gould’s writings can be challenging because of the interpretive leaps they make, and because of his vast erudition. Gould knew so much about so many things that it helps to have Google handy when reading him to trace down some of the context and the allusions. 

Although Gould barely made it out of high school, the breadth of his knowledge and intellect can leave the reader a little breathless. For scholars, his discursiveness and lack of interest in systematically organizing his ideas can be frustrating. For many others, his serpentine prose, wit, and penetrating intellect are colourful and enlivening delights.

Here is a classic example of Gould’s unique mixture of musical thought, of dedication to a hermit-like existence, of philosophical perambulations, and of his quirky humour. He called this piece Glenn Gould Interviews Glenn Gould About Glenn Gould.

The Touch of an Angel? 

Gould’s genius and precociousness were already well-recognized in Canada by the time he made his concert debut with the Toronto Symphony in 1947. It would take the rest of the world another nine years to discover his singular gifts. Following the 1956 release of The Goldberg Variations by Columbia Records, he became an international sensation, touring the world’s musical capitals, and racking up reviews like this one from Rome, in November, 1958:  

Tall, gangly, blondish, like those awkward boys who people American movies, pianist Glenn Gould sits very, very low at the piano, a piano under which, one notes, suitable wooden blocks have been placed in order to bring the keyboard to chin level… But let him play: one wants to yell at him, “Come on, Gould, go at them! You play like a God. You have them all in your pocket!” And in truth Glenn Gould, pianist, born in Toronto in 1932, has the touch of an angel, a touch made of air and sky, limpid, childlike, silvery. 

While marvelling at his technique, interpretive originality, and the spiritual force of his interpretations, few in his audiences imagined how rare the experience of hearing Gould in concert would be. He abandoned live concerts in 1964 to focus on recording, writing, and radio, leaving behind a touring career after fewer than 200 concerts!

Here he is playing the Sweelinck organ fantasy from a 1959 live Salzburg festival performance.

Are Music Audiences a Force of Evil? 

From an early age, Gould challenged the accepted norms of the “classical music biz.” After winning the first Kiwanis festival in Canada in 1944, he swore off competitions, claiming that they were antithetical to the nature of art. (He later declared that “competition, rather than money, is the root of all evil.”) Most controversial of all, he came to detest the live concert experience – for reasons of anxiety, and more importantly, for philosophical reasons. Fundamentally, he regarded his mission as an artist as a moral one: to experience and share a state of “ecstasy,” of a higher spiritual state.

Performing in front of 3,000 people at a live concert invariably added pressures and compromises in achieving that inner state, and as he attempted to convey a fundamentally intimate experience with others. He came to view audiences as the equivalent of witnesses to a blood sport, waiting expectantly for the performer to make mistakes and fail. 

By contrast, the “womb-like” environment of the recording studio was a revelation. It provided him the freedom to experiment, to refine ideas, and to achieve otherwise unattainable results through technology, including the ability to edit and splice differing takes together.  

By 1964, he quit the stage, devoting the rest of his creative life to recording, producing ground-breaking radio and TV documentaries, and writing, solidifying his status as an artist of the next age, seeped in technology.

Here he is interviewed by Alex Trebek (later the host of the long-running TV show Jeopardy!), proclaiming the live concert experience “dead” and “sterile,” and calling audiences for live performances a “force of evil.” But he does says these things in an endearing way!

Helping to Modernize Bach

Gould achieved his greatest fame as the supreme interpreter and populariser of J. S. Bach’s music. Until Gould came along, Bach was seen largely as an historical figure, to be studied and performed almost as a relic of the past. Before Gould, performances of Bach’s music either imposed an artificial romanticism on his music, or tended to sound academic and bloodless. 

Gould rejected both romanticism and slavish scholasticism in favour of a fresh, modern approach that respected the architecture of the composer’s music, revelled in the freedom of staggering virtuosity, and drew the listener into a realm of inwardness and spiritual intensity that made listeners feel they were discovering Bach’s music and confronting its greatness for the first time. 

The uniqueness of Gould’s playing, and his unconcern with interpretive tradition marked him as the first truly modern concert pianist – a true rebel. It is little wonder he was often referred to as “The James Dean of the Piano.”

Here is Gould playing Bach with the Concertgebouw Orchestra, under the direction of Dimitri Mitropoulos.

More Than Just Bach – Part I

While Gould viewed Bach as the “supreme architect of sound,” and is universally associated with that composer, his musical mind extended far beyond the Thomaskirche Kapellmeister. Notably, Gould was one of the greatest champions of the music of Arnold Schoenberg, founder of the Second Viennese School, pioneer of atonalism, and inventor of its most rigorous expression, the “twelve-tone technique.” 

Rather than seeing Schoenberg as a musical vandal who had torn apart music’s harmonic and melodic glories, Gould found in him a culminating figure of a great lineage stretching back to Bach, an artist who had the courage to go where his inspiration led him and confront the realities of music in the modern century, becoming “the Man Who Changed Music.”

As this excerpt shows, Gould also found in Schoenberg’s life and work, the “heroic” isolation of the artist who embraces solitude, the “precondition of ecstasy.”

More Than Just Bach – Part II

Gould’s other great hero of 20th-century music was Richard Strauss, whom Gould described as “the greatest musical figure who has lived in this century.” 

By the time Gould made this claim, Strauss was in disfavour, widely criticized for being the opposite of Schoenberg, a late romantic whose music and style had failed to evolve to reflect the dodecaphonic predilections of the 20th century. 

Gould led the charge for Strauss’s rehabilitation, proclaiming him “the man who makes richer his own time by not being of it; who speaks for all generations by being of none. It is an ultimate argument for individuality …” For Gould (like himself) Strauss was an ecstatic, unafraid of isolating himself from his contemporaries by “walking against the Zeitgeist.” He described Strauss’s Metamorphosen as the most moving piece written in the 20th century and said “not a day goes by that I don’t think of Metamorphosen, or hear it in my mind.” 

Most people do not know that Gould’s final recording was not The Goldberg Variations, but an album of little-performed piano works by Strauss.

Glenn Gould, the First Canadian in Space

In 1977, a Gould performance of Bach was included on the legendary Golden Record, an “interstellar message in a bottle” placed aboard the Voyager I and II space probes, containing 27 musical selections designed to present a picture of human civilization to any alien beings that might find the vessels. 

Voyager I is currently about 14 billion miles from earth. It is the most distant human artefact from our planet, and it is still transmitting signals to the universe!

Glenn Gould the Romantic … Surely Not!

Gould was controversial, and even in his repertoire choices (and aversions) he never shied away from making waves. The great works of the 19th-century piano repertoire were largely an anathema to him. While he acknowledged that Schumann, Liszt, and Chopin extended the expressive and tonal resources of the piano, he regarded these qualities as fundamentally hedonistic pleasures, unlike the primarily architectural qualities that gave the music he loved its power and spiritual meaning.

Following Gould’s New York debut in 1955, he was invited to a reception at the home of Mrs. Rosalie Leventritt, whose husband Edgar founded the famous music competition. Two piano greats, Gary Graffman and Leon Fleisher, approached Gould to introduce themselves. Gould glowered and said accusingly, “I know you . . . you play. . . Chopin!” 

In a (very) weak moment, Glenn Gould let down his guard and played some Chopin himself.

The Other Sides of Glenn Gould

Throughout his life, Gould enjoyed a reputation as a hermit, as antisocial and unavailable. Partly self-created (he once referred to himself as The Last Puritan), this image of distance and unattainability helped him preserve the privacy he needed to do his work, but he knew it also helped create the mystique that fuelled his record sales. 

In private life, Gould conducted many of his relationships by telephone, often ringing friends in the middle of the night, reflecting his own nocturnal lifestyle. Nevertheless, Gould is remembered by his friends as funny, gregarious, sympathetic, and generous. He loved guessing games and had a sense of humour alternately described as corny or delightful. 

Perhaps the greatest expression of his humour is the alter egos he created to lampoon the absurdities, pretensions, fads, and fustiness of contemporary classical musical life. Here is the multi-faceted Gould as German musicologist and avant-garde composer, Dr. Karlheinz Klopweiser, Brando-esque New York pianist and critic Theodore Slutz, and Sir Nigel Twitt-Thornwaite, the “dean of British conductors.”