On Gould and Baroque Composers
March 4, 2021
Why did Gould largely ignore Baroque music besides Bach? Are there any unreleased tapes of him playing other Baroque composers?
You make a good observation. It is often said that Gould specialized in “Baroque music,” but really he specialized only in Bach—more precisely, in an unapologetically modernist image of Bach, what we might call “Bach seen through the eyes of Schoenberg.” Very little other Baroque music interested him.
As a teenager, Gould performed Couperin’s magnificent Passacaille in B Minor in concerts, in a piano arrangement made by his teacher, Alberto Guerrero, and he even made a private recording of this piece (with a spoken introduction) around the late 1940s. Influenced by Vladimir Horowitz, the young Gould also performed sonatas by Scarlatti in concerts and on the radio (private and broadcast recordings of several sonatas survive). In 1968, he began recording a Scarlatti album for Columbia, but completed only three sonatas before abandoning the project, declaring that he was bored with it—for him, a little Scarlatti went a long way. The same year, he recorded the first of the “Württemberg” Sonatas of Bach’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel, for another aborted album. And in 1972, he recorded four suites by Handel—these on the harpsichord, because his regular piano had been dropped and damaged shortly before.
But this seems to have been the extent of his involvement with Baroque music other than Bach’s. He knew other Baroque music—in his youth, for instance, he took an interest in Buxtehude for a time, and wrote to a friend that he was exploring Purcell’s keyboard music (“really great stuff”)—though never played any of it in public.
Kevin Bazzana is a Canadian writer with degrees in music history from the University of Victoria, Stanford University, and the University of California, Berkeley. Since the mid-1980s, he has written prolifically about Glenn Gould and has worked on many Gould-related projects: CD and CD-ROM releases, radio broadcasts, conferences, websites. He is the author of Glenn Gould: The Performer in the Work (1997) and Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould (2003); edited the Foundation’s Glenn Gould Magazine (1995-2008); and consulted on the documentary film Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould (2009).
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