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Music: That Nut’s a Genius

3 minute read
Michael Walsh

He sometimes wore fingerless gloves while he played, sang along with the music, and sat on a stool so low that he could touch the keyboard with his nose. Before a performance of the Brahms D minor piano concerto, Conductor Leonard Bernstein turned to the audience and made a short speech, dissociating himself from his soloist’s unorthodox view of the piece. At his Cleveland Orchestra debut in 1957, he tangled with the irascible maestro George Szell over his use of the soft pedal in a Beethoven concerto; Szell never performed with him after that, but saluted: “That nut’s a genius.”

Wit, misfit and eccentric, Glenn Gould was one of the most provocative pianists of the century. In 1964, after an international concert career that had lasted only nine years, he abruptly retired from the stage to explore the potential of the recording studio. In more than 90 releases, ranging from two idiosyncratic versions of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations to his transcriptions of Wagner, Gould did just that. Flamboyant willfulness marked too much of his work, but at his best he had a penetrating, furiously original vision. Gould died of a stroke in 1982 at age 50, but he remains a challenging figure. Now two new books tap the mind behind the fingers. In Conversations with Glenn Gould (Little, Brown, $15.95), based largely on a 1974 two-part interview in Rolling Stone, Jonathan Cott elicits from the reclusive Canadian his views on teaching (“Given half an hour of your time and your spirit and a quiet room, I could teach any of you how to play the piano”), composers (“I really don’t like Mozart”) and pop music (“At her best, Barbra Streisand is probably the greatest singing actress since Maria Callas”). Often technical, and sometimes sycophantic, the book is perhaps best appreciated by Gould aficionados, but it gives an insight into the pianist’s eclectic thought processes.

Tim Page’s The Glenn Gould Reader (Knopf; $20) is wider in scope. A collection of some 70 speeches, magazine articles, book reviews, radio broadcasts and record-liner notes, it displays Gould’s controversial musical perspicacity in such essays as Data Bank on the Upward-Scuttling Mahler and Hindemith: Will His Time Come? Again?. An accomplished parodist, Gould mocks Arthur Rubinstein’s kiss-and-tell autobiographies in Memories of Maude Harbour: “I resolved to address every note of my performance to her and her alone and to inquire into the country’s statutory-rape provisions at intermission.” Gould even gleefully assaults the sacred memory of Beethoven, saying, “He is one composer whose reputation is based entirely on gossip.” Coming from a man who raised imprudence to an even finer art than his pianism, those words have the clear ring of conviction.

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