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Thirty-four years after his death, Glenn Gould's extensive catalogue of recordings, and the bold artistic vision behind them continue to resonate with music fans the world over. His irreverent interpretations of piano repertoire and perplexing idiosyncrasies have become the stuff of legend. In this episode we speak with Kevin Bazzana, author of the award-winning biography Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould. He tells us about Gould's extraordinary career in music and the surprising secrets revealed to him about Gould's private life while conducting research at Library and Archives Canada.
Genevive Morin: Welcome to "Discover Library and Archives Canada: Your History, Your Documentary Heritage." I'm your host, Genevive Morin. Join us as we showcase treasures from our vaults; guide you through our many services; and introduce you to the people who acquire, safeguard and make known Canada's documentary heritage.
Thirty-four years after his death, Glenn Gould's extensive catalogue of recordings, and the bold artistic vision behind them continue to resonate with music fans the world over. His irreverent interpretations of piano repertoire and perplexing idiosyncrasies have become the stuff of legend. In this episode we speak to Kevin Bazzana, author of the award-winning biography Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould. He tells us about Gould's extraordinary career in music and the surprising secrets revealed to him about Gould's private life while conducting research at Library and Archives Canada.
Many of you will recognize this as the opening aria of Glenn Gould's revered 1955 Columbia Records recording of the Goldberg variations by Johann Sebastian Bach. The recording brought Gould instant international acclaim and has become one of the best-selling classical recordings of all-time. In order to gain a deeper insight into the man behind the myth we spoke with Gould authority Kevin Bazzana. We reached him at his home in Brentwood Bay, British Columbia.
KB: I became interested because I've always had a particular interest in interpretation; musical interpretation has always been where my musical interest has leaned and so when you're interested in what performers do and what they do with a composer's work, you sort of naturally get drawn to the ones who do things in the most distinctive way, the most individual way. So I've always been drawn to some of the great old romantic conductors and turn of the century pianists from the early days of recording, the ones that play things with a great deal of individuality. And there were never many performers like that from the modern era except for very few and Glenn Gould was one of them and very strikingly so. It's hard to really think of anyone who is quite that individual as an interpreter and so if you're interested in performance issues, that's someone you're going to be drawn to again and again and again. It's not surprising that the Glenn Gould industry continues after his death, because it's hard to imagine there's ever going to be a time when he doesn't sound strange and unusual and distinctive. I don't ever think that the way he played and the way he thought is ever going to become the norm in classical music, so I think he's always going to stand out. I wouldn't be surprised if he's one of the few performers from our era that people keep listening to a hundred years from now or whenever.
GM: Well it's funny you're bringing that up because as I was preparing for the interview, I was trying to figure if we have any contemporaries today who could even be somewhat similar to Gould. I was having a lot of trouble even finding someone who could be close to it.
KB: It would be hard for me to think, even today, of a comparable figure. Maybe that's one of the reasons that, even though he's long gone, people keep turning to him when they want that particular kind of encounter with some highly individual performer. And it has to be said that the usual pattern for a classical musician is not for him to become more popular after he dies. There have been some very great performers who don't really survive their death to a great degree you know, they have a great audience as long as they're around to continue to generate new work and new publicity, but interest in them declines after they die. There are very few people like Gould. There's Leonard Bernstein, there's Horowitz, there are a few others, but this kind of posthumous industry is really not the norm and I think it has something to do with just how strikingly unusual a figure he was and always will be. New generations come along and yet Glenn Gould is still the strangest and the most individual sounding performer no matter how many new ones comes along, so I think that explains in part the reason why his recordings, for instance, are all still in print, and always have been and probably always will be.
KB: Well, whenever lists are made of great pianists, he'll always be high on the list. So there'll always be that, and there'll always be the distinctiveness of the product. And of course, the whole eccentric personality thing, I mean that's very attractive. A lot of people find him a sort of loveable character, which I can see.
KB: I think there's also the fact that he did have a sort of vision of things that went far beyond just playing the piano or even just making music. I mean, everything he did at the piano seemed to be sort of part of a larger vision of life, you know, how to live, an ethics, sort of whole philosophy of life that was very consistent in many ways. There was a sort of consistency to every aspect of his work. You look at his ideas about life, his ideas about ethics, his ideas about social and political things. And then you look at his personality and his temperament. And you look at his favourite composers. And you look at the way he played the piano. And the kind of pieces he liked and didn't like. It all kind of fits together in a way that suggests a whole sort of vision. I think that's one of the things that people are attracted to, it's not just a guy playing the piano, it's not just another guy playing the Mozart sonatas. You're getting a whole sort of vision. I mean that's sort of true by definition whenever you hear anyone play anything. But with Gould, it was all very self-conscious and it was all sort of worked out. These are the things he discussed in interviews and discussed in articles and so on. You get sort of a breadth of vision with him, which makes the music-making part of a larger project. This isn't even just me talking; I've heard this from a lot of people. I've heard this from a lot of Gould fans who are captivated by his playing, but one of the reason that they sort of stick around and become heavily invested in him is that they are attracted by this larger vision of, I guess, life. And you get a sense that Gould was not the kind of performer whose whole life was sitting in the practice room, practicing trills. I guess it helped that for him that sort of thing came easily and seemed to be very natural, but he did not really want to be a piano machine, his whole life sort of endlessly at the keyboard. He really had higher ambitions shall we say, and really saw his piano playing as a reflection of a larger vision. And so when he was playing the piano, he wasn't just playing a piece, he was sort of discoursing on his ideas about life and philosophy and so forth. And he really did think that way, I mean it was explicit in the things he talked about and the things he wrote about. He really saw himself as doing more than just playing pieces. I think that's one of the reasons his interpretations were so individual. It's that he was not one of these performers who is interested only in sort of being a mirror that reflects the composer's vision, but he had this really sort of fundamentally romantic idea that when I play a piece of music, I want you to hear what I have to say. And this is one of the things that so many critics and other musicians and so forth often railed against. They would condemn him by saying, you know, when your hear Glenn Gould playing, you're not hearing Bach; you're hearing Glenn Gould's ideas about Bach. Well, yeah, that was just his basic premise. For him, that was the whole reason for playing something, to tell you what he thought about this music, otherwise, what was the point? You could read the score and listen to any one of a hundred other recordings.
KB: There were, and it has to be said that from this point of view, like from a critical point of view, he came along at probably just about the worst time in music history for someone to take this approach to music. The years in which he started to become a public figure in the mid-20th century were sort of the high-water mark years for what you might call a high modernist approach to music where the composer's text was paramount. This was the era when, you know, everyone who took piano lessons was taught to do what the composer said and to add nothing and change nothing. This is the era when a sort of literalistic approach to performance was sort of in the ascendency, and the way people had performed a few generations previously was regarded with hostility and suspicion. This idea that you should use the composer's score as sort of a springboard for your own personality, your own ideas, that was now sort of considered to be the way people played in the bad old days.
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