Читать книгу The Great Gould - Peter Goddard - Страница 7

As a kid doing my daily piano practice in a suburban basement west of Toronto in the early fifties, it was inevitable that I would hear the name Glenn Gould. I was born into a musical family: a piano family. My father, Jack, knew enough carpentry to help build a downstairs music studio where he taught piano lessons well into his late eighties. A certain amount of pioneering was involved in growing up in the suburbs those days. I remember picking through the bluish clay heaped up out of the house foundation to find the occasional arrowhead, which, of course, I threw away. Other houses were also rising up around us out of what once was Mississauga First Nation land. Our family became social. Over the months and years to follow, chatter about Gould intensified with weekend visits to our “place in the country” from other piano teachers or from friends with extensive record collections.

I was certainly not au courant on anything about Gould. Some of the adults had heard him play; their reports were confusing, to say the least.

I, on the other hand, had only heard about his playing. Having little access to the latest recordings was not that odd — these were still the days before classical music was played on FM radio (before there even was FM radio, in fact) and before hi-fi sets were a fixture in every modern rec room opposite a stack of LPs lining a lacquered maple cabinet.

Gould’s name was often in the newspapers when I was a boy, yet, as I remember, the stories weren’t always about his piano playing. He was terrific at that, we all knew; but it seems he was also great at the art of becoming famous. Having such a celebrity in our midst in the early fifties was an exceptional thing. Canadians were uneasy about fame, particularly the homegrown type. Celebrity was something the Americans did better. The main exceptions were members of the royal family, hockey players, and the occasional politician or two (who were, of course, always compared to their American counterparts).

The Canadian rules didn’t apply to Glenn Gould, we were learning. News of his rapid-fire conquest of the musical world was downright exciting. There was a Gould triumph here, a stunning breakthrough there. It was like getting news of successful battles in a far-off war. Gould had Moscow at his feet; Leningrad, too. The Germans were overwhelmed. New York was blown away.

Later in the decade, when I’d begun to listen to him with more purpose and frequency, he already seemed a fixture in my life in much the way other things Canadian were, like Ted “Teeder” Kennedy, the stand-up captain of the hometown Toronto Maple Leafs, or the lovely hill on the golf course we tobogganed down in the dead dark after dinner.

Gould’s still there, along with my memories of that hill. He refuses to budge from his place in my Canadian landscape. In my thinking Canada’s 150th birthday in 2017 will be shared with what would have been Glenn Gould’s eighty-fifth birthday.

Canadian Centennial walk of fame, 1967 (left to right): Morley Callaghan, Sir Ernest MacMillan, Kate Reid, A.Y. Jackson, Glenn Gould, and Marshall McLuhan.

Polls over the years regularly place Gould high on the list of the most famous Canadians. One can easily imagine him positioned for a group shot alongside any of the early prime ministers, everyone all bundled up — all good, overdressed, solid Canadian ancients. Gould would be a bit more rumpled than the rest, but every bit as steadfast.

(An aside: To me, rumpled is a loaded word because it has quite a history when it comes to Glenn Gould. In fact, the metamorphosis of Gould’s “rumpled-ness” delineates his entire history. The accusation of being rumpled was from the start part of the accepted view of his eccentricities: Glenn Gould, the overconfident young guy from the sticks [Toronto], with his theatrically rumpled way of dressing: thick sweaters, gloves, scarves, hats, and, of course, a coat that looked less like something worn than something hovering around him like a thick fog. It was noted that “Gould arrived in coat, beret, muffler and gloves” at Columbia’s 30th Street Studio in New York in June 1955 to record The Goldberg Variations, the hallmark of his amazingly uneven (read: rumpled) career. Gould’s mid-career dishevelment — from the mid-sixties to the later seventies — could also be described as “multi-layered,” and not just when it came to clothing.)

But back to my own piano playing for a moment. For the most part, I didn’t think about it too deeply, sort of like a fish not having an opinion about water. When I did think about it years later, though, I realized that so much playing early in my life had made me monumentally inhospitable to the prospect of piano playing in the future. Sure, I owned albums — the early ones in the 78 rpm format — that focused on the lives of the great composers like Mozart and Schumann. But otherwise, piano music was as ubiquitous as the air in my teen years. My family’s life when I was growing up was spent literally walking over the sounds of the piano, which floated up through the floorboards from the fingers of latest student pounding away at the old Heintzman in the basement.

By that time I’d heard Gould, but I hadn’t really listened. Then one day the heavens opened — how else can I explain it? — and I saw the light. It wasn’t about Gould, not at first. It was jazz that did it.

At least it started with jazz, when a high school friend about a year older loaned me a Benny Goodman LP that included the1938 live recording of “Sing, Sing, Sing,” which has always been known as the record with the Jess Stacy solo. That solo, about twelve or thirteen minutes long, comes partway through Goodman’s now-famous 1938 Carnegie Hall concert. To begin, Stacy noodles around the keys for a moment, sampling the notes of the song’s foundational A-minor chord before making the split-second decision to “come in real quiet,” as he later described it. It is beautiful. The resulting solo’s superb sense of proportion is evident when listening to the recording, with its sly references to Debussy and to Yiddish folk, yielding to Gospel and then … to what? Stacy turned a solo into an entire world.

Gould, though, was ambivalent toward jazz, although he respected its greatest technicians and tried playing some tunes over the years just to surprise his listeners. He also developed a friendship with the quietly cerebral jazz pianist Bill Evans later in his career, with whom he talked about the qualities of different pianos. But while Gould was never entirely comfortable with what jazz was about, some of his listeners, including me, knew he was not entirely separated from it or from any of the new non-classical kinds of piano playing that were out there. By the early sixties, when listening to Gould’s Goldberg was a must-do, appreciating the piano also meant listening to Lennie Tristano and Oscar Peterson and Ray Charles. Good Lord, Ray Charles! Yes, looking back, I included Glenn Gould in that lineup. Jerry Lee Lewis, too.

Okay, I’m temporizing before digging deeper into the subject of Glenn Gould. Approaching the subject of Gould has never been easy and has probably scared some writers off. I feel I’m a bit of an outsider, at least when compared to the many people Gould worked with at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), the Stratford Festival, or wherever. (Gould got around, despite his reputation as the Prince of Privacy.) But I can’t entirely let myself off the hook, because I followed his trail well before I was aware I was even on it, an accidental result of bad career planning on my part.

Growing up with music all around made me all the more determined to find a life that was somewhat distant from it. I was playing in rock and blues bands in my teens, but no matter: I’d had it with music, at least as a way of making a buck. I was determined to go in a different, non-musical direction. Oh, well. Things happen.

Thwarted in my determination — the different directions I mentioned weren’t impressed at all by my marks in high school — I ended up back in music at the Royal Conservatory when Gould could still be found walking its halls. I eventually studied musicology at the University of Toronto under Harvey Olnick, the formidable lecturer who championed Gould to American music circles after the public debut of the Goldbergs in Toronto in 1954. Olnick rarely lacked certainty. Rocked by Gould’s Toronto performance, he was absolutely sure of the great career that would follow (as he stated on more than one occasion). Olnick was spot-on when he compared Gould to Bohemian-American pianist Rudolf Serkin (as well as to Wanda Landowska) in an unsigned piece in Musical Courier, which would be Gould’s debut in the American press. Serkin was the muscle-boy powerhouse of piano playing in these years, and this quality would have appealed to Olnick’s bull-in-the-china-shop approach. To Olnick, Gould had a similar macho presence.

The first essay Harvey Olnick assigned to us asked us to consider the question “What is music?” After two years of wrestling with that question, I was led to a course in aesthetics taught by Geoffrey Payzant, an organist and University of Toronto philosophy professor. Payzant, who claimed to be able to identify any movement from any of Haydn’s 106 symphonies, penned the book Glenn Gould: Music and Mind. The biography focused on Gould’s way of thinking. Even Gould liked it, going so far as helping the author correct the proofs and select photographs. When asked to review the book for the Globe and Mail, Gould gave it a quiet rave.

Payzant and I talked on occasion as he was writing the book, although I was unaware of that fact at the time. Then he sent me a copy of the manuscript. “This book is not like the other books about pianists,” it begins calmly. “How could it be? Gould is not like other pianists. He is a musical thinker who makes use of all available means to thought, including the piano.” Few shorter or better summations of Gould had appeared before Payzant’s book, or, perhaps, appeared after it.

By the early seventies I’d also crossed paths with Gould at the CBC, where I worked off and on in radio for some years. And as a music critic at the Toronto Star I interviewed him on a handful of occasions.

Approaching Glenn Gould in any guise is still intimidating. So much has been written already. So many experts. So many doctoral theses. So many opinions. So many books. So many books about other books. And so much of Gould’s own writing about Glenn Gould. Tackling his recording legacy is another large-scale undertaking, which continues to grow increasingly monumental due to Sony Records’ ongoing repackaging enterprises. (I’ve just come back from being given a peek at the latest iteration of The Goldberg Variations, which promises “The Complete Unreleased Recording Sessions, June 1955.”)

Then there was the prerequisite visit to the Gould archives in Ottawa, Ontario. At Library and Archives Canada you’re made aware of the vastness of the Gould holdings, which spread to yet another building (or two) in another part of town (who knows?). The unofficial king of the archives is Gould biographer Kevin Bazzana, who isn’t on the library staff but seemingly knows more about the collection than some of the librarians. (“Well, Kevin says …” was often the start of the answer to my questions.)

Bazzana, a music historian from British Columbia, authored Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould, the research-rich 2004 biography. He told me there was a lot more to find in the archives; I think he meant this as encouragement. Gould’s Canadian intimates like Wondrous Strange because they feel it brings the appropriate Canadian spin to what they felt was the “Americanization” of their man in the more mainstream Gould biography, Glenn Gould: A Life in Variations, published in 1990 by Otto Friedrich, formerly of the Saturday Evening Post and Time.

This Canadian-American divide on Gould is not to be dismissed, although the Canadian concern about Friedrich’s take is overstated, in my opinion. Gould’s Canadian-ness is impossible for anyone to ignore or dilute. If Gould were a fictional figure — as he did emerge in his own writing and broadcasting — he might in my mind be compared to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, whose longing for the American dream went nowhere because the dream had come and gone before he had the goods to make it his own. “I was reminded of something,” Gatsby says when thinking out loud of his passion for Daisy, the love of his early life, “an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I heard somewhere a long time ago.” Gould is Gatsby’s opposite; he realized his dream at all costs. Gould found there was a boundless future for him.

Reckoning with Gould’s mystical side can also be intimidating. So, too, the bedrock of Ontario Christianity that marked his upbringing. He was never far from a Bible, we’re told; but rarely did he quote from it.

Gould dealt with his ongoing physical misery, real or imagined (the difference seemed to mean little to him), much the way a man might have to deal with a demanding, petulant mistress who could nag him to distraction (or to a hotel during a 1958 European tour).

“My hysteria about eating,” he said in 1955, “it’s getting worse all the time.”

In 1956 he’s taking anti-psychotic medications like Thorazine, as well as reserpine, another anti-psychotic, though it is also taken to lower blood pressure.

In 1959 people are spying on him, he reports. He says he hears voices.

Most interpretive disagreements regarding Gould begin with what’s found, or not found, in a diary he maintained throughout 1977 into early 1978, which is thick with his notations about things going wrong. With regard to pain, he wrote on June 23: “For the last several days right wrist had been unbearably sore after any 10–15-minute practice session.”

A reading of these entries led Frank R. Wilson, an American neur­ologist, to write a 2000 article suggesting that things were wrong with Gould from the very start; that “for virtually his entire career, Gould struggled against and adroitly finessed critical limitation in upper body, forearm, and hand movement.” Focal dystonia, the term for this condition, indicates abnormal hand and finger functioning. In Gould’s case, it suggested certain fingers tended to bunch in certain ways, minimizing how broadly he might be able to stretch out his thumb and fifth finger. When I went through some of his annotated scores, with correct fingers listed below each note, I noticed a lot of middle fingers were used. A professional-grade pianist I asked to look over it said his fingering was very odd indeed.

His score, his scribbles.

Gould-inspired work created since the pianist’s death in 1982 has taken on a life and dimension of its own. The Gould effect and legacy now occupy our minds as much as his immediate history. I would cite David Young’s play Glenn and François Girard’s Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould as excellent examples. His Goldberg Variations alone have had a significant afterlife — witness Canadian composer Christos Hatzis’s Gouldberg Variations or Richard Powers’s short story The Gold Bug Variations. Canadian-born French author Nancy Huston’s Les Variations Goldberg offers what is perhaps the most transgressive take on the Bach, when in one early scene of her Paris-based novel the variation in question is sexual.

Arguably the most audacious Gould Goldberg riff is The Goldberg Variations: Aria, BMV 988, Johann Sebastian Bach, 1741, Canadian artist Tim Lee’s deconstruction of a film of Gould’s Goldberg performance where Gould’s hands are shown on monitors positioned near enough to each other to give the impression the hands belong to the viewer. Karaoke Glenn Gould.

Gould’s speech to the Royal Conservatory of Music’s 1964 graduation class, where he speaks of “the inner ear,” led to The Inner Eye, a series of quasi-surreal, magic-realist collages by Vancouver artist Joan McCrimmon.

Gould’s Goldbergs have become the fault-line of his legacy with following generations of piano players. Acclaimed Austrian pianist, poet, and author Alfred Brendel famously hated it. Another Austrian, Jörg Demus, who recorded his own Goldberg Variations, used the word detest when I mentioned Gould’s version to him. Angela Hewitt, a Canadian Bach specialist, questioned Gould’s Bach — “it’s more about him than Bach” — but recognized how his playing as a young man “was totally fearless, there’s a ferocity, a youthful exuberance.” Other pianists suggest Gould’s greatest legacy might go beyond his performances. Jon Kimura Parker, the Canadian pianist and professor of piano performance, told me he urges his students to follow Gould’s beyond-the-piano thinking. Still others — the fine Italian pianist Francesco Piemontesi, mentored by Brendel, for example — thinks Gould’s embrace of technology opened the eyes of other pianists.

The fact that a Bach prelude and fugue played by Gould is hurtling into infinity on the 1977 Voyager spaceship amazed earlier biographers. These days many would be surprised if it was proven that Gould wasn’t being heard somewhere in space.

And so it’s gone. Hollywood tapped Gould most notably when Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs wanted Gould’s Goldbergs but was served the same piece in the film score by pianist Jerry Zimmerman. Years ago, during my day as a film critic, I heard of plans for Gould to be the soundtrack for a Sly Stallone movie, a decision abandoned along the way.

And writers? There are books channelling Gould for kids, for young adults, and for fellow obsessives — any of Austrian author Thomas Bernhard’s novels Der Untergeher (translated as The Loser in English) or Alte Meister, or his play Heldenplatz, for example. French comic book artist Sandrine Revel’s 2015 illustrated biography, Glenn Gould: une vie à contretemps, resolves many of Gould’s apparent contradictions into a very human story.

But something deeper is going on. There’s a sea change in the nature of Gould’s afterlife that can’t be ignored. He has new listeners, ones lacking any standard order classical music training or any shared history with Gould. They hear his playing differently, understand his history differently, and respond differently to him and his music.

Early Gould commentary, arriving during his life or soon after his death, had, like Gould’s own thinking, its basis solidly in the Protestant/European traditions and cultural practices extending to musicology and musical practice. Commentary from and about alternative traditions, non-male, non-white, and non-European, for starters, didn’t figure much early on in the Gould legacy.

Even the very idea of musical progress — such atonality — took place within Eurocentric terms in Gould’s mind. His fascination with technology, which might have been his exit from the traditional, only tightened his embrace on tradition. Technology allowed Gould to stay Gould; to stay distant, in control, ordered. Order was being challenged in the world well beyond his St. Clair Avenue apartment, roiling with unprecedented, society-changing manifestations: Black/Gay/Feminist/Bi/Transgendered power, plugging and tuning in and turning on. No matter. All the while Gould was excitedly imagining how to reach “the enormous audience” that might result from technology’s “creation of a new and paradoxical condition of privacy.”

Yet this new thinking about Gould comes, in its way, from some constraints of his own past. Emerging artists are messing with Gould’s sombre mythology. Some are even parodying his piano playing: Catch Glenn Gould Plays “Invaria” by John Oswald on YouTube. Oswald, a Toronto-based composer-artist, reconfigures a previously filmed sequence of Gould playing, so that the notes of Oswald’s own piece, Invaria, appear to be played by Gould. On YouTube he gets hits like a rock star.

Gould’s two Goldbergs feel like background music throughout Madeleine Thien’s 2016 novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing. Various Gould attributes crop up here and there in the story, such as when the narrator’s father, Kai-Jiang, drifts back to memories of himself as a famous concert pianist in China: he would hum along with a Glenn Gould recording, all the while pretending to conduct. I came to realize that Thien, who played the 1955 Goldbergs daily while she was writing the book in Berlin, was measuring her story to create an overarching continuity down to its very paragraphs, the same way that Gould himself uncovered Bach’s hidden continuity in his second Goldberg recording (1981).

I came to write about this new sense of Gould by catching his refraction in what’s called popular culture and in the continuation of so-called classical culture. This book came to life with its feet in both camps. This had a lot to do with Leonard Cohen, the ninth laureate of the Glenn Gould Prize in 2012, and the piece I was asked to contribute to that evening’s gala. It started — the piece, I mean, not the gala — with my suggesting how much poet and pianist had in common beyond their unique singing. Aloneness was an obvious trait, of course: a sun-drenched Cohen writing alone in Hydra “on a table set among the rocks”; a meditative Gould going unnoticed sitting in a Toronto park.

I had met Cohen over the years in my role as a rock critic/journalist and could not help but be reminded how much like Gould he was in certain ways. Gould and Cohen themselves had met only once, and that was in 1963 when Cohen, cash-strapped as only a poet can be, took an assignment from Holiday magazine to interview Gould about the world’s cities. The meeting took place in Ottawa, where Cohen remembers being so transfixed by what Gould was saying that he forgot to take notes, thus leaving the piece unwritten along with his reactions to meeting the famous pianist.

Understand one and you understand the other: that was my thinking as I wrote. I noted how alike they were in their ability to go famously unnoticed. Both had a thing about overcoats. Both cultivated the role of Mysteriously Bundled Figure Silhouetted Against Bleak Canadian Landscape, their mutual riffing on Northrop Frye’s observation about Canada being a “cool climate for heroes.” Both questioned their faith.

“I believe in God,” Gould once said, “Bach’s God.”

“When it comes to lamentations,” Cohen once wrote, “I prefer Aretha Franklin to, let’s say, Leonard Cohen.”

Both men grew enormously famous by claiming to avoid fame. And I knew from experience both could be funny, right?

Right, said Gould’s people.

Cohen’s protectors weren’t so sure. They weren’t sure being funny was right for the occasion. They didn’t want to “upset” him.

So the piece was a no go. That meant stop.

This book is a new start.

A Gould concert program.