Glenn Gould: Concert Dropout - In Conversation with John McClure: Pt. While marvelling at his technique, interpretive originality, and the spiritual force of his interpretations, few in his audiences imagined how rare the experience of hearing Gould in concert would be. [77] Weighing this statement against Gould's highly individualistic lifestyle and artistic vision leads to an apparent contradiction. Bazzana writes that "it is tempting to assume that Gould was asexual, an image that certainly fits his aesthetic and the persona he sought to convey, and one can read the whole Gould literature and be convinced that he died a virgin"—but he also mentions that evidence points to "a number of relationships with women that may or may not have been platonic and ultimately became complicated and were ended". He often hummed or sang while he played, and his audio engineers were not always successful in excluding his voice from recordings. ", "Christopher Foss grew up with Glenn Gould, but never got to say goodbye", "Ottawa; An Exhibition of Glenn Gould Memorabilia Sheds A Little Light on A Musical Enigma", "Being Glenn Gould – The Adelaide Review", "Wildlife: On the trail of Count von Svoboda and Glenn Gould", "The Prospects of Recording – Resources – The Glenn Gould Archive", "The Variations of Glenn Gould: Legendary, Eccentric Pianist Launched His Career by Playing Bach", "Glenn Gould " The CBC Legacy " Timeline of a Musical Genius", "Glenn Gould's fascination with Petula Clark (excerpt)", Harper Government Celebrates Glenn Gould as National Historic Person Canadian cultural icon commemorated at plaque unveiling ceremony, "Glenn Gould: The Sounds of Genius » Credits", "Dr. José Antonio Abreu Awarded Coveted 2008 Glenn Gould Prize", "The Glenn Gould School " Key Facts and History", "Home " The Recording Academy " The GRAMMY Awards " GRAMMY Hall of Fame", "Late Toronto pianist Glenn Gould receives Grammy lifetime achievement award", "How Mozart Became a Bad Composer" by Glenn Gould, in, Podcast about Glenn Gould from Library and Archives Canada, "Glenn Gould collected news and commentary", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Glenn_Gould&oldid=996539818, Juno Award for Classical Album of the Year – Solo or Chamber Ensemble winners, Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners, Persons of National Historic Significance (Canada), Burials at Mount Pleasant Cemetery, Toronto, All Wikipedia articles written in Canadian English, Wikipedia articles with BIBSYS identifiers, Wikipedia articles with MusicBrainz identifiers, Wikipedia articles with SELIBR identifiers, Wikipedia articles with SNAC-ID identifiers, Wikipedia articles with SUDOC identifiers, Wikipedia articles with WORLDCATID identifiers, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 27 December 2020, at 05:31. The family's surname was changed to Gould informally around 1939 to avoid being mistaken for Jewish, given the prevailing anti-Semitism of pre-war Toronto and the Jewish associations of the Gold surname. Glenn Gould, John McClure. 1 in D minor with Gould as soloist, he informed the audience that he was assuming no responsibility for what they were about to hear. Because I am fascinated, glad to have the chance for a new look at this much-played work; Because, what's more, there are moments in Mr. Gould's performance that emerge with astonishing freshness and conviction. See, Friedrich first states that Gould performed the Beethoven Piano Sonata No. According to another of Gould's biographers, Otto Friedrich, the air-conditioning engineer had to work just as hard as the recording engineers.[44]. The New York Philharmonic concert of April 6, 1962, is widely regarded as one of the most controversial in the orchestra's history. [23] It seems that Gould was able to practise mentally without access to an instrument, once going so far as to prepare for a recording of Brahms' piano works without playing them until only a few weeks before the sessions. (The audience roared with laughter at this.) [fn 7] He claimed to have almost never practised on the piano itself, preferring to study repertoire by reading,[fn 8] another technique he had learned from Guerrero. [56], Gould lived a private life. [fn 11] Gould performed fewer than 200 concerts over the course of his career, of which fewer than 40 were outside Canada. This is the secret of doing Bach on the piano at all. 2 — Glenn Gould Occupation: Pianist/Producer/Composer Crime: Suspicion of Vagrancy. Harold C. Schonberg, in particular, took great exception to Bernstein's decision, taking him severely to task in the next day's edition of The New York Times. I'm not, um, as you know, in the habit of speaking on any concert except the Thursday night previews, but a curious situation has arisen, which merits, I think, a word or two. The service was attended by over 3,000 people, and was broadcast on the CBC. It is likely that this habit originated in his having been taught by his mother to "sing everything that he played", as his biographer Kevin Bazzana puts it. [50] Plans for a studio recording of the performance came to nothing. Clocking in at just over 53 minutes long, it was seen at the time to be far too slow. Gould was widely known for his unusual habits. He was once arrested, having possibly been mistaken for a vagrant, while sitting on a park bench in Sarasota, Florida, dressed in his standard all-climate attire of coats, hat and mittens. He held his final public performance in 1964, and thereafter devoted his career to the studio, recording albums and several radio documentaries. [100], Gould was not only a pianist, but also a prolific transcriber of orchestral repertoire for piano. Gould rejected most of the standard Romantic piano literature by Chopin, Liszt, and others, in favour of Bach and Beethoven mainly, along with some late-Romantic and modernist composers. Although he recorded all of Mozart's sonatas and admitted enjoying the "actual playing" of them,[90] Gould claimed to dislike Mozart's later works, to the extent of arguing (perhaps facetiously) that Mozart died too late rather than too early. [93] He recorded a number of Gibbons's keyboard works, and called him his favourite composer,[94][95] despite his better-known admiration for the technical mastery of Bach. Released: 2012. Released: 1969. Fran's Restaurant in Toronto was a regular haunt of Gould's. For the rest of his life, Gould eschewed live performance, focusing instead on recording, writing, and broadcasting. (Gould rarely shook people's hands, and habitually wore gloves. They were all orchestral sounds, but I was playing them all, and suddenly I was Hofmann. Unlike most renowned pianists, he avoided much music of the 19th century, concentrating instead on that of the Renaissance, Baroque, and early 20th century. No performer after him can avoid the example he sets ... Now, everyone must perform through him: he can be emulated or rejected, but he cannot be ignored. He both was and was not a man of his time. His musical gifts became apparent in infancy, and though his parents never pushed him to become a star prodigy, he became a professional concert pianist at age fifteen, and soon gained a national reputation. When presented with a piano, the young Gould was reported to strike single notes and listen to their long decay, a practice his father Bert noted was different from typical children. Gould left an extensive body of work beyond the keyboard. [2], Musical humorist Peter Schickele, in The Definitive Biography of P.D.Q. Glenn Gould was touring with concert performances until the age of 31. [99], Gould made numerous television and radio programs for CBC Television and CBC Radio. [47] His chair is so closely identified with him that it is shown in a place of honour in a glass case at the National Library of Canada. [31][32] In 1945, at the age of thirteen, he made his first appearance with an orchestra in a performance of the first movement of Beethoven's 4th Piano Concerto with the Toronto Symphony. But almost always, the two manage to get together by persuasion or charm or even threats to achieve a unified performance. In 1964 at age 32, Glenn Gould stuns the world by walking away from the stage, declaring "the concert is dead." Gould's performance, too, came in for a great deal of criticism. That he was not able, by himself, to fashion a bridge between them is neither surprising, nor, in the end, disappointing. The performer had to make creative choices. He stopped giving concerts at the age of 31 to concentrate on studio recording and other projects. I play it in a weak moment – maybe once a year or twice a year for myself. Despite a certain affection for Dixieland jazz, Gould was mostly averse to popular music. He recounted his recording of the A minor fugue from Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier and how it was spliced together from two takes, with the fugue's expositions from one take and its episodes from another. The 1955 interpretation is highly energetic and often frenetic; the later is slower and more deliberate[86][87]—Gould wanted to treat the aria and its 30 variations as a cohesive whole. Although his recordings were dominated by Bach and Beethoven, Gould's repertoire was diverse, including works by Mozart, Haydn, and Brahms; pre-Baroque composers such as Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, William Byrd, and Orlando Gibbons; and 20th-century composers including Paul Hindemith, Arnold Schoenberg, and Richard Strauss. [40] Among the pieces he performed that night were Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. Gould, for his part, claimed publicly to be in favor of B… "[116] The prize consists of CA$100,000 for the recipient, and the responsibility of awarding the CA$15,000 Glenn Gould Protégé Prize to a young musician of their choice. Canarina later remembered seeing Harold Gomberg, principal oboe of the orchestra, standing by backstage to see if he would be needed for the symphony. He also made recordings of the complete piano works Lieder by Arnold Schoenberg. The disc of recordings was placed on the spacecraft Voyager 1. Gould: "The piano was a means to an end for him, and the end was to approach Beethoven." 5 and the cantata Widerstehe doch der Sünde from the harpsipiano (a piano with metal hammers to simulate a harpsichord's sound), and Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. [119], The Grammys are awarded annually by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. [fn 3] Gould had no Jewish ancestry,[fn 4] though he sometimes made jokes on the subject, such as "When people ask me if I'm Jewish, I always tell them that I was Jewish during the war. And in truth Glenn Gould, pianist, born in Toronto in 1932, has the touch of an angel, a touch made of air and sky, limpid, childlike, silvery. [111] He was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame in Toronto in 1998, and designated a National Historic Person in 2012. Glenn Gould Concert Tours Part 1 of 7. Who is the musical director? But, but this time the discrepancies between our views are so great that I feel I must make this small disclaimer. [6][7] The family's surname was changed to Gould informally around 1939 to avoid being mistaken for Jewish, given the prevailing anti-Semitism of pre-war Toronto and the Jewish associations of the Gold surname. [29] He associated this drift towards hedonism with the emergence of a cult of showmanship and gratuitous virtuosity on the concert platform in the 19th century and later. 73, popularly known as the “Emperor”. In 1983, Gould was posthumously inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. [fn 9], He stated that he did not understand the requirement of other pianists to continuously reinforce their relationship with the instrument by practising many hours a day. He asked the audience: "In a concerto, who is the boss – the soloist or the conductor? Nevertheless, the novelty of Gould's ideas needed to be shared carefully with the orchestra, and later with the public. Only when the concerto, for which he was not required, actually began did he leave the hall. He was attracted to the technical aspects of recording, and considered the manipulation of tape to be another part of the creative process. He ate one meal a day which was supplemented with arrowroot biscuits and coffee. For example, a reviewer of his 1981 re-recording of the Goldberg Variations opined that many listeners would "find the groans and croons intolerable". The institution of the public concert, he felt, degenerated into the "blood sport" with which he struggled, and which he ultimately rejected.[30]. Then why, to repeat the question, am I conducting it? [fn 19]. Program for Calgary Women's Musical Club recital, November 7, 1951. [42] Some of Gould's recordings were severely criticised because of this background "vocalising". He disliked the concert hall, which he compared to a competitive sporting arena. [20], Gould passed his final Conservatory examination in piano at the age of 12, achieving the highest marks of any candidate, and thus attaining professional standing as a pianist at that age. For a pianist such as Van Cliburn, 200 concerts would have amounted to about two years' touring.[41]. It tends to have a mechanism which is rather like an automobile without power steering: you are in control and not it; it doesn't drive you, you drive it. [59] She left her husband in 1967 for Gould, taking her two children with her to Toronto. On a visit to Steinway Hall in New York City in 1959, Gould was greeted by the chief piano technician at the time, William Hupfer, with a slap on the back. This went smoothly, but the second half of the concert was less sure. Gould worked from a young age with Guerrero on a technique known as finger-tapping: a method of training the fingers to act more independently from the arm. He was, in effect, stranded on a beachhead of his own thinking between past and future. Glenn Herbert Gould was born at home in Toronto, on 25 September 1932, to Russell Herbert Gold (1901–1996) and Florence Emma Gold (née Grieg; 1891–1975),[4] Presbyterians of Scottish, English, and Norwegian ancestry. [18], Gould developed a technique that enabled him to choose a very fast tempo while retaining the "separateness" and clarity of each note. Best of Glenn Gould’s Bach. By the time he was twenty, Gould had appeared in London (Ontario), St. Catharines, Montréal, Vancouver, Calgary and Hamilton as well as Toronto. Both he and Gould were on contract to the company; it had further been expected that he would record most of the orchestra's concert repertory for distribution. He hated being touched, and in later life limited personal contact, relying on the telephone and letters for communication. [61] He did not cook; instead he would frequently eat at restaurants and relied upon room service. [5] In the event, Gould did perform, choosing to work from the orchestral score, which had been affixed to large pieces of cardboard on the piano. After several years, she and Gould became lovers. [10] She would later teach him the piano. He recorded all five of Beethoven's piano concertos, 23 of the 32 piano sonatas, and numerous bagatelles and variations. Glenn Gould: Concert Dropout - In Conversation with John McClure Glenn Gould (Artist), John McClure (Artist) Format: Audio CD. "[55] In a letter to the cellist Virginia Katims of 20 January 1973, Gould said he had been vegetarian for about ten years. To commemorate what would have been Gould's 75th birthday, the Canadian Museum of Civilization held an exhibition titled Glenn Gould: The Sounds of Genius in 2007. Released: 2017. Philosopher Mark Kingwell writes that "his influence is made inescapable. Bach, referred to this concert in his entry for P.D.Q. I cannot say I am in total agreement with Mr. Gould's conception and this raises the interesting question: "What am I doing conducting it?" Gould was averse to the cold, and wore heavy clothing (including gloves), even in warm places. Gould was also a writer, broadcaster, composer and conductor. Towards the end of his life, Gould began conducting. The speech was interpreted by Harold C. Schonberg, music critic for The New York Times, as an abdication of responsibility and an attack on Gould. "[57] He never married, and biographers have spent considerable time on his sexuality. "[82], In creating music, Gould much preferred the control and intimacy provided by the recording studio. Reviews were also printed in most New York City newspapers, and in some others around the world. [84], Gould's first commercial recording (of Berg's Piano sonata, Op. Glenn Gould’s unpopular opinions were not solely reserved for the music of Mozart. The 1981 release was one of CBS Masterworks' first digital recordings. For his only recording at the organ, he recorded about half of The Art of Fugue, which was also released posthumously on piano. This is especially evident in his (frequent) attempts at humour and irony. Mark Kingwell summarizes the paradox, never resolved by Gould nor his biographers, this way: He was progressive and anti-progressive at once, and likewise at once both a critic of the Zeitgeist and its most interesting expression. The concert had, however, been broadcast live, and bootleg pressings of the broadcast circulated for some years. Gould was known for his eccentricities, from his unorthodox musical interpretations and mannerisms at the keyboard to aspects of his lifestyle and behaviour. [6] The chair was designed so that Gould could sit very low at the keyboard, and allowed him to pull down on the keys rather than striking them from above, a central technical idea of his teacher at the Conservatory, Alberto Guerrero. As a baby, he reportedly hummed instead of crying and wiggled his fingers as if playing chords, leading his doctor to predict that he would "be either a physician or a pianist". Gould was the first pianist to record any of Liszt's piano transcriptions of Beethoven's symphonies (beginning with the Fifth Symphony, in 1967, with the Sixth released in 1969). ", to which the audience laughed. Gould began by improvising something Straussian—we thought he was simply warming up, but no, he continued to play like that throughout the actual recordings, as though Strauss's notes were just a pretext that allowed him to improvise freely. Somebody has to be responsible.[3]. On 5 June 1938, at the age of five, Gould played in public for the first time, joining his family on stage to play piano at a church service at the Business Men's Bible Class in Uxbridge, Ontario, in front of a congregation of about two thousand. He felt that he could realize a musical score more fully this way. [38], Gould was convinced that the institution of the public concert was not only an anachronism, but also a "force of evil", leading to his retirement from concert performance. [101] There is little critical commentary on Gould's compositions for the simple reason that there are few of them; he never succeeded beyond Opus 1, and left a number of works unfinished. Consequently, the orchestra was ready with another work of Brahms, his First Symphony, which was to be performed on the Saturday concert of the subscription series in place of the concerto. [68], On 27 September 1982, two days after his 50th birthday, after experiencing a severe headache, Gould suffered a stroke that paralyzed the left side of his body. [69] Gould's public funeral was held in St. Paul's Anglican Church on 15 October with singing by Lois Marshall and Maureen Forrester. [fn 20] He made recordings of piano music by Jean Sibelius (the Sonatines and Kyllikki), Georges Bizet (the Variations Chromatiques de Concert and the Premier nocturne), Richard Strauss (the Piano Sonata, the Five Pieces, and Enoch Arden with Claude Rains), and Paul Hindemith (the three piano sonatas and the sonatas for brass and piano). Gould made his Boston debut in 1958, playing for the Peabody Mason Concert Series. Accompanied by Toronto Symphony Orchestra, one of the best-known and most celebrated classical pianists, Glenn Gould performs Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. "[105], One of Gould's performances of the Prelude and Fugue in C major from Book II of The Well-Tempered Clavier was chosen for inclusion on the NASA Voyager Golden Record by a committee headed by Carl Sagan. You must have that immediacy of response, that control over fine definitions of things."[27]. Gould's mother would urge the young Gould to sit up straight at the keyboard. One is a live recording from 1954, The Schubert can be seen briefly in the film, Glenn Gould: Selected Letters (John P. L. Roberts, Ghyslaine Guertin), 1992, Elliott, R. "Constructions of Identity in the Life Stories of Emma Albani and Glenn Gould. Watch: Glenn Gould’s TV debut. [4][clarification needed] Bernstein's later recording of the concerto, with Krystian Zimerman, runs to 54 minutes (although the first movement, at 24:32 vs. 25:37, and third movement, at 13:00 vs. 13:34, are considerably shorter), and other recordings are of comparable length. The New York Philharmonic concert of April 6, 1962, is widely regarded as one of the most controversial in the orchestra's history. [65] Cornelia Foss has said that Gould took a lot of antidepressants, which she blamed for his deteriorating mental state. It was, I think, his last performance in Toronto, and it was a staggering impression. Glenn Gould was known as both a musical genius and a great eccentric. As a result, it was decided to release the performance on Sony Classical; the disc is rounded out with Bernstein's remarks and with a radio interview with Gould from 1963. [36] His concerts featured Bach, Beethoven, and the serial music of Schoenberg and Berg, which had been suppressed in the Soviet Union during the era of Socialist Realism. The first few bars of the Goldberg Variations are carved on his grave marker. "[48] Leonard Bernstein said, "There is nobody quite like him, and I just love playing with him. Transcriptions, compositions, and conducting, Full circumstances of the name-change can be found in, ATCM is Associate, Toronto Conservatory of Music. The piano had to be set at a certain height and would be raised on wooden blocks if necessary. [6][15], At the age of 10, he began attending the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto (known until 1947 as the Toronto Conservatory of Music). As a teenager, Gould was significantly influenced by Artur Schnabel,[fn 10] Rosalyn Tureck's recordings of Bach (which he called "upright, with a sense of repose and positiveness"), and the conductor Leopold Stokowski. He also allowed some leeway; before the Sunday afternoon concert, at Bernstein's request, he allowed the conductor more freedom with the orchestra, and as a consequence the speech was not given.[5]. The Conservatory received its. He dabbled in composition with few finished works. Glenn Herbert Gould was born at home in Toronto, on 25 September 1932, to Russell Herbert Gold (1901–1996) and Florence Emma Gold (née Grieg; 1891–1975), Presbyterians of Scottish, English, and Norwegian ancestry. This is a broadcast recording (recorded at Konzertsaal der Berlin Hochschule für Musik on 26th May 1957), but the sound quality is far better than the notorious Brahms concerto recording with Bernstein, although occasional coughs and sneezing - plus creaking noise from Glenn Gould's chair - are audible. Glenn Gould famously retired from the stage in 1964 and thereafter only presented his performances through recordings. He is buried next to his parents in Toronto's Mount Pleasant Cemetery (section 38, row 1088, plot 1050). ... Glenn Gould discusses his performances of the Goldberg Variations with Tim Page. [88] He recorded most of Bach's other keyboard works, including both books of The Well-Tempered Clavier and the Partitas, French Suites, English Suites, Inventions and Sinfonias, keyboard concertos, and a number of toccatas (which interested him least, being less polyphonic). [17] He used this famous chair for the rest of his life and took it with him almost everywhere. [102] He attributed his failure as a composer to his lack of a "personal voice". During Gould's 1957 concert performances in Moscow. [51] He also disliked social functions. He was a prolific contributor to musical journals, in which he discussed music theory and outlined his musical philosophy. Gould's perspective on art is often summed up by this 1962 quote: "The justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations.

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