Glenn Gould (17 page)

Which leaves placation and generality. One need not be anti-art to reject the jejune notion that art heals. Sometimes it may, sometimes it may not; in no case is that its reason for being. On the last point, I suppose one may well feel affronted by a given artwork's claim to general applicability, but
considering art in such a fashion is already a mistake. Not a moral one, an aesthetic one. Art begins to look, in Gould's formulation, suspiciously like a straw man. Who really thinks of art in these brutally reductive terms? As so often, art's declared ending is artful, part of the player's play.

The various Goulds began to proliferate and multiply even before the fact of death brought an end to his performance of self, drawing a line beneath the score that opens the door to interpretation. Variations were being played before the piece was fully composed.

Gould displayed an evident fondness for multiple voices and characters, a persistent need to assume accents and characters for the amusement of … well, some would say his co-producers in the recording studio, but at this distance it is difficult to imagine anyone being fetched by these self-indulgent japes except their creator. Nor did that creator confine them to his imagination or his off-mike moments. In 1980 Columbia released the
Silver Jubilee Album,
mentioned earlier, almost one-half of which is an extended and rather strained joke radio show,
Critics Call-Out Corner,
in which Gould confronts four critics, three of them played by himself (the fourth is rendered by co-host Margaret Pacsu, who should have known better). Gould also plays the
off-set sound engineer, Duncan Haig-Guinness, with a schoolyard-quality Scottish accent of the sort that is inexplicably funny to some audiences and so has somehow fuelled certain comic careers.
¹⁰²

The result is an unclassifiable piece of barely tolerable comedy that nevertheless strains to touch on various Gould preoccupations: the art of recording, the perils of performance, piano over harpsichord in interpreting Bach, and so on. The main action is run by means of a disagreement between two main characters. The liner notes explain that crusty Sir Nigel Twitt-Thornwaite has been described by
The Guardian
as exemplifying “all that is most typical in English musical life,” his knighthood deriving from military as much as musical achievement. “He was cited in the New Year's List of 1941 for the courage and coordination exemplified by his rendition of Handel's ‘Water Music' from the decks of the evacuation flotilla at Dunkirk in the preceding year.” Opposing Sir Nigel is Professor Karlheinz Klopweisser, who has already appeared in these pages. He, for his part, has been described by
Stern
magazine as “personifying the musical equivalent of the German post-war industrial miracle,” including a distinguished war record during which he created the composition “Ein Panzersymphonie” while
serving with Rommel's Afrika Korps, a piece “given its world premiere at El Alamein on the evening of October 22, 1942.” We learn he is “currently at work on an analysis of Glenn Gould's
Solitude Trilogy
which will be published in America under the title
Thematisch-systematisches Verzeichnis der Einsamkeit Trilogie von Glenn Gould
.”

Gould—we should say, the Gould character within the fictional frame—was evidently nervous. He admitted he had soaked his hands in ice water before the recording, just as he did before performing on the piano—a clear instance of displaced anxiety ritual. And in the piece's only actually funny exchange, the Gould character is asked whether he is ready to proceed. “Well, I've just taken a Valium, Margaret,” he replied with an audible smile, “and I'm trying to be as calm as one can be when confronted by a bevy of critics.”
¹⁰³

Listeners will wish they were similarly fortified. With Sir Nigel tutting and harrumphing and Professor Klopweisser pontificating to Gould's murmured approval, we limp through a series of arguments about interpretation. The final Gould character, Theodore Slutz, arrives late. He is described as the Fine Arts Editor of the New York
Village Grass Is Greener
—“Equally at home with literature, painting, music and architecture, he represents a new high in the democratization of American intellectual life”—and as author of an essay
collection,
Vacuum,
which provides “a unique summing-up of the state of American culture in the last decades of the twentieth century.” Slutz, supposedly based on a New York cab driver Gould liked to imitate, in fact sounds like a mumbling beatnik poetaster, sprinkling liberal instances of “‘man,” “like,” “you know,” “dig,” and “cats” in his discourse.
¹⁰⁴

In a final indignity, all three plus Pacsu's Hungarian Communist harridan, Marta Nortavanyi, are depicted in photographs within the gatefold album. Yes, Glenn Gould poses for the camera in various wigs and moustaches, swapping frock coat for leather jacket as the character demands. I am not making this up.

It's not that this “Glenn Gould Fantasy,” as the album dubs it, has no points of interest. Gould and Klopweisser argue convincingly that one should feel free to play Gibbons on the harpsichord even though the instrument was unknown to the Tudor composer. The reason for this liberality, sometimes condemned by purists, is that they conceive music as, above all, the play of ideas rather than of notes as such. Gould's “infuriating inconsistencies” and interpretive liberties in tempo are set against the sort of “conceptual fuss and bother” that leads to a restrictive and probably incoherent “authenticity.” The artist, Klopweisser argues, is “creating a point of view” with energy directed negatively, or
antithetically, across the composer's impulse. “If you do it well,” Gould interjects, “the end result is a far more intense and accurate realization of the original concept.”

And so another version of the apologia for the 1964 withdrawal. Mere repetition in the concert setting “afflicted” the musician with a “syndrome” that led to “the slow death of the spirit.” If the performance on night one was successful, the rest could only be failure instead of silence as one performed the same piece again and again. “It was a kind of torture because it ran directly counter to the spirit of invention that that first night had represented.” It is worth noting that this objection is distinct from, and incompatible with, the oft-quoted non-take-twoness objection.

At this point the various voices engage in elaborately layered cross-talk, drowning one another out as they argue about whether humans can pick up multiple auditory vectors. We are then given a long account, in hockey-announcer style, of Gould's “hysteric return” performance—that is, of pieces by Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Chopin, delivered from drilling platform XP-67 in the Arctic, using one dozen pianos, to howling wind accompaniment, for the board of Geyser Petroleum. Against the background of midnight sun over the Beaufort Sea, the accompanying orchestra is stationed two miles downstream of the platform on the Canadian submarine
Inextinguishable,
the production broadcast from its conning tower. Gould, sneezing and coughing, blowing his nose, eventually plays some Ravel from his knees, the famous folding chair having been carried off by a wind gust. This work is called representative of “Mr. Gould's predilection for the romantic and impressionistic repertoire,” at which point the audience abruptly departs and, this being no longer a public event and therefore of no interest, the transmission must cease. Seal cries are heard as Gould mumbles, Elvis-style, “Thank you, thank you very much.”

I am not making this up either. The critic Jed Distler has said of this disc, “The humor is stilted, contrived, and interesting only to true believers.”
¹⁰⁵
He was being charitable. The humour is punishing, reminiscent of a Monty Python sketch gone badly wrong or of the least tolerable of stagey early-Beatles kookiness. There can be no excuse for it, and the one clear lesson of the recording is that it could exist only because of the stature of its creator. Gould in effect called in twenty-five years of chits from Columbia when he got them to release this embarrassing piece of twaddle. Ultimately, though, it says more about Gould than about them.

Gould had played with characters before. In 1965 he published in
Musical America
several articles written by one
Dr. Herbert von Hochmeister, “distinguished Canadian scholar and critic” and “the widely read fine arts critic of
The Great Slave Smelt,
perhaps the most respected journal north of latitude 70 degrees.” These arch, overwritten pieces—about the CBC, the cult of the conductor, and government patronage of the arts—are not without bite: “The very words ‘Canadian Broadcast System', wafted into the night air with the soporific white-noise comfort of a staff announcer confirming a station break, bring a catch to all loyal, and liberal, throats, a tremor to all tractionless spines, a welcome certainty that what we've just heard has been stamped culturally fit.”
¹⁰⁶

In 1968, as liner notes to his Columbia recording of Liszt's piano transcription of the Fifth Symphony by Beethoven, he offered “four imaginary reviews” by characters we can view as warmups to the 1980 piece: Sir Humphrey Price-Davies (snooty conductor), Prof. Dr. Karlheinz Heinkel (austere dialectician), S.F. Lemming, MD (reductive Freudian), and Zoltan Mostanyi (doctrinaire Communist). Despite their obviousness, these characters hold interest more than does the “fictionalized documentary for radio” from 1967,
Conference at Chillkoot,
which features keynote speaker Sir Norman Bullock-Carver, critic Homer Sibelius, avant-garde composer Alain Pauvre, and others. (The text was published by
Piano Quarterly
in 1974.)

Gould's liner notes were often brilliant, from the youthful abstractions of his first
Goldberg Variations
to the wit of the Gibbons/Byrd disc and the considered judgments of his album of Hindemith piano sonatas, for which he won an album notes Grammy in 1974—the only Grammy awarded during his lifetime. (Two posthumous ones, for best classical album and best solo performance, went to the 1982
Variations;
his final recording, the Beethoven Piano Sonatas nos. 12 and 13, got the best solo nod in 1984.) But the belaboured humour of the imaginary reviews is best left at the dinner table, if anywhere. Unfortunately, Gould lacked such a mundane outlet even as he had access to more public ones. His fractured ideas are communicated by fractured personalities, and the numerous characters allowed him the same liberties enacted by the
High Fidelity
self-interview of 1976, only now multiplied and intended as comical. There, irony was in fact operating, if delivered with sometimes ham-handed force; here, irony has given way to self-gratification and, hence, discomfiture. We do not know where to look.

One is reminded of the peculiar unease that attends the telling of jokes in social situations, where the person being told the joke is a sort of prisoner of the person telling it. And if the joke is bad, or suggests some sort of “grasp of essential
relevance,” as one philosopher has defined sanity, then the unease redoubles.
¹⁰⁷
We listen to this fantasy recording of 1980 with a growing desperate wish to make it all stop, gazing longingly at some far corner of the room.

At the root of such low-level anxiety is not the thought that Glenn Gould, lost somewhere in the bowels of Columbia's New York recording complex, had actually gone mad. It is, rather, the growing awareness that, toward the end of his life, Gould was no longer willing to maintain the fiction of a single narrative self. Instead he enjoyed the peculiar play of multiple selves that is short of fractured identity but some fairly long toss past what most of us would allow ourselves to perform in front of other people, at least while sober. Glenn Gould is having a party in his own head. Everybody is invited, but he is the only person who gets to play.

Striking, in this connection, is an ostensibly stray remark from an article he wrote about fellow Columbia Records breadwinner Barbra Streisand for
High Fidelity
in May 1976, the same year as the self-interview, comparing her to Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. After some overwrought analysis of the diva of boystown, then at her professional peak—to mention just her films, 1976 was the year of
A Star Is Born,
following
Funny Girl
in 1968,
The Owl and the Pussycat
in
1970,
What's Up, Doc?
in 1972, and
The Way We Were
in 1973—Gould revealed the following cunning thought:

Both imagery and presentation are telling here, from the self-consciously jokey reference to Borges's labyrinthine self-referential fictions (Gould could not resist the now-dated near-pun with Victor Borge) to the personification of register ranges with organ pipes and stock characters. Then there is the central conceit of imagined mirror-front mugging. This last must surely call to mind scenes of fractured selfhood: tortured adolescents, drag queens, deteriorating Norma Desmond icons, even, nowadays, a serial killer's preening psychosis. Here we confront the odd
coincidence that Thomas Harris's fictional killer Hannibal Lecter has a fondness for Gould's 1955
Goldberg Variations
. In film adaptations of the novels the music plays—albeit anachronistically—while the young Lecter injects himself with sodium thiopental as a medical student in 1951; it is also heard while the mature Lecter is mutilating a prison guard's face as part of a later escape plan.