Robert Everett-Green. Soloist to this day

Soloist to this day
Robert Everett-Green

Publication date: November 22, 2002

The late, great music impresario Franz Kremer loved to tell the story of how he went out to lunch one warm summer day with Glen Gould , who was afraid of being recognized in public. They entered the restaurant, and all the customers immediately turned to look at the man at the door, who was wearing woolen mittens, a coat and a cap - Gould was in his usual summer attire.

“It seems they paid attention to us,” Gould said and went out into the street.

Gould , who would have turned 70 on September 25 this year, has always attracted attention for what he did and what he didn't do. He was known as a man who avoided public speaking, did not like Chopin and Schubert, and did not follow all the notes that appeared in the music, as befits a diligent graduate of the conservatory.

He stood out against the general background, although he tried to protect himself from the close attention of the world around him. And, as always on such occasions, the world became increasingly interested in this man who hummed when he played the piano, wore gloves in all weathers and prepared polyphonic educational programs for radio that sang the romance of loneliness and the north.

himself Gould was a deeply romantic person, a true Canadian. He was one of those eccentric geniuses, which is illustrated by a famous incident from the life of Beethoven: in response to the violinist’s doubts about what could and could not be played on his instrument, Beethoven barked: “What do I care about your violin when it’s with me?” is God speaking? To some, Gould's dedication to his cause seemed heroic, but he was not one of those heroes who were given the gift of direct communication with God. He was too Canadian for this, too ready to see the funny, down-to-earth side of every action, especially if this action was presented to the public as a great accomplishment.

It is significant that one of the composers Gould always liked was Richard Strauss, who wrote almost nothing for the piano, but led the lifestyle prescribed by Gustave Flaubert for a romantic artist: “Live like a bourgeois, but think like a demigod.” Gould himself followed this advice: he lived a boring and uninteresting life in a high-rise building in the north of Toronto and, in solitude, immersed himself in the works of composers that he included in his unique list of the best.

Gould not only played and reflected on this music, but also wrote polemical texts: meticulously defending Arnold Schoenberg and Paul Hindemith and scathingly attacking Mozart , whose real tragedy, in his opinion, was that he died too late, and not too late. early.

Gould advocated banning clapping, editing classic recordings as if they were films, and canonizing Barbra Streisand and Petula Clark. Like John Cage, he became famous in part because he had something to say about his art and its place in a world increasingly dominated by technology.

As a reward for his art, he became a legend even to those who had heard nothing more than his first recording: Bach's Goldberg Variations, to which he owed his success. His life and ideas have inspired not only scientists and biographers, but also playwrights, novelists and film directors.

The general public still celebrates Gould, but among musicians his influence has largely faded. Today, not a single major musician follows his example - this applies both to his performing style and his unceremonious handling of notes.

The most famous modern Bach pianist, Canadian Angela Hewitt, is almost the exact opposite of Gould. Where Gould allowed himself to translate Bach into a living modernist language and close-up individual elements, as they do in films, Hewitt defends an immutable structural order.

Even when performing Bach transcriptions on a recording released this year, Hewitt falters when it comes to reproducing the excesses of Bach's Romantic fans. Since Gould performed the Goldberg Variations, the approach to performing Bach's music has changed radically, but he has almost nothing to do with it.

Today, the main performance trend is extreme precision in the reproduction of musical notation, which Gould rejected; Today's pianists are not very interested in how he or anyone else performed Bach on a Steinway grand piano.

Gould's favorites, not particularly revered by the general public, including Webern and Schoenberg, were no longer loved because he promoted their music on records and in print. Just as fans of Stravinsky's early ballets tend to ignore his later music, most Gould fans prefer to ignore recordings of him performing the music of the New Viennese.

Gould's tastes in modern music have never been more out of fashion than today, when strict systems of note juggling are out of favor and romantic, quasi-religious fantasies have become popular. In his time, Gould was a true modernist, the kind that can only be found today among teachers in higher education.

His ideas regarding sound recording and music processing technologies were perfectly absorbed and put into practice - not by classical, however, but by pop musicians who found their way to the future without him. Gould predicted that music consumers would have the means to process recorded music, but it never occurred to him that the leaders of this kind of rebellion would be hip-hop DJs (Gould believed that someday there would be a device with which listeners could mix classic recordings at home). Today's pop producers are accustomed to the heavy use of the copy-and-paste approach that Gould once championed, but their predecessors included the likes of Berry Gordy and Phil Spector.

Gould's recordings remain widely available and are held in high esteem by many listeners, who consider them to be disturbing and beautiful works of art. Gould is known today much better than those pianists who during his lifetime laughed at his assertion that the gladiatorial events known as “public performances” were doomed. (However, this prediction has not yet come true.)

However, in modern performing arts, Gould is a leader without followers, a cause without effect. His nature turned out to be too obstinate for the world of classical music, which favors respect and does not like innovation.

The Globe and Mail