Glenn Gould (6 page)

It has to be conceded that pitch is no guarantee of an ability to compose, let alone compose well. Pitch is neither sufficient nor strictly necessary for musical creation. Though Gould was making up his own tunes by age five, including some that were performed at his school or in church, and meanwhile showed great accuracy and precision at the keyboard, singing the notes as he played them, his own efforts at mature composition are indifferent at best. His one successful recorded work, String Quartet op. 1, was an attempt at counterpoint in which, as he himself admitted, he made all the rookie mistakes of the composer's game. It was also composed in a classical style that, in the year of its origin (1953), any ardent advocate of twelve-tone avant-gardism such as Gould should have abhorred.

He liked to insist, instead, that his compositions in “contrapuntal radio” showed his real compositional talent—not least his documentary “The Idea of North” (1967) and, as a small but telling example, his charming 1963 creation called “So You Want to Write a Fugue”—a multi-voice layering of advice for prospective composers of
counterpoint, first broadcast on CBC-TV as the finale to a program entitled
The Art of the Fugue
and later released by Columbia on the two-disc
Glenn Gould Silver Jubilee Album
(1980): “So you want to write a fugue? You've got the urge to write a fugue? You've got the nerve to write a fugue? The only way to write one is to plunge right in and write one. But never be clever for the sake of being clever, for the sake of showing off !”
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At the same time, Gould would often agree to, sometimes even favour, the phrase
recreative
(rather than
creative
) artist for his own musical interventions at the keyboard. Every interpretation is a new work in its own right, something especially true of the Bach oeuvre, whose lack of specified tempi or phrasing leave decisions about pacing, articulation, and ornamentation largely in the hands of its player or conductor. Though one works in the vertical dimension of the stave, herding the motive along as it performs the business of progression from moment to moment, one can only do so with a keen awareness of the horizontal dimension of the work, its architecture—another issue for interpretation. Add to this the dynamic and colour possibilities available to the pianist, unknown to the composer working on clavichord or harpsichord, and it is easy to see that there is indeed such a thing as a genius of interpretation.

On January 3, 1964,
Time
magazine, that arbiter of mainstream legitimacy, proclaimed the thirty-one-year-old Gould's recording career “little short of genius.” He had yet to record even half of what he would eventually produce in the studio, including many of his now most-prized albums.

All that lay far in the future. His parents later insisted they did not want Gould to have the skewed life of a musical freak—the words
Mozart
and
prodigy
were banned from the household lexicon—but from the start his mother was convinced that he would be a supremely gifted musician, in particular as a concert pianist. Music was everywhere in his life from a point before birth: anticipating a later fad, during pregnancy Gould's mother played music often to stimulate fetal development.

Gould's first public performance came on June 5, 1938, at age five: he accompanied his parents' vocal duet at the thirtieth-anniversary celebration of the Business Men's Bible Class, of which his father was a member. In August of the same year he was a contestant in a piano competition held at the Canadian National Exhibition but did not win. On December 9, his second public performance was at the Emmanuel Presbyterian Church in Toronto. His playing astonished the audience, and young Glenn began saying he wanted to be a concert pianist.

By 1944 Gould was competing in Kiwanis Music Festivals, an experience he would later discuss with derision. Winning a $200 prize in the first of these also brought his first press coverage. He was twelve. The next year, on December 12, 1945, he made his professional organ debut, graduating from churches and provincial competitions to the Eaton Auditorium in downtown Toronto. He played Mendelssohn's Sonata no. 6, the Concerto Movement by Dupuis, and the Fugue in F Major by J.S. Bach. A review in the Toronto
Evening Telegram
called him a genius—the first public application of the magic word.

On May 8, 1946, he played for the first time with an orchestra, performing the first movement of Beethoven's Concerto no. 4 with the Toronto Conservatory Symphony at Massey Hall. The critics were respectful. On January 14 and 15, 1947, he made his professional debut with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, performing all four movements of Beethoven's Concerto no. 4. Critics noted his distracting onstage fidgets, later explained as the result of allergenic dog hair on his suit.

Really? On October 20 of the same year Gould gave his first full recital in the Eaton Auditorium's “International Artists” series. He played five sonatas by Scarlatti, Beethoven's “Tempest” Sonata, the Passacaille in B Minor by Couperin,
Liszt's
Au Bord d'une Source,
the Waltz in A-flat Major (op. 42) and Impromptu in F-sharp (op. 36) by Chopin, and Mendelssohn's Andante and Rondo Capriccioso. Reviews were positive. They also laid stress on the growing evidence of unusual mannerisms: twitching, humming while playing, lowering his head almost to the keyboard. Already a dedicated hypochondriac and mild germ paranoiac, Gould had been avoiding crowds and bundling himself up in the famed later manner since at least the age of six. Now, at age fifteen, the outward signs of genius were all in place. It is a word that would be applied, more and more frequently in the years to come, to the young man from the Beach.

But what, after all, is genius? Writers as diverse as Diderot, Artaud, and Pound would maintain versions of Aristotle's divine madness position—sometimes, indeed, tending to the far less plausible view that, just as all geniuses are madmen, all madmen are geniuses. Neither conclusion is borne out by the evidence, unless we are prepared to agree that any exceptional performance is by definition divine.

By this token, though, divine madmen seem to proliferate too far and too fast, revealing a familiar anti-divine double endgame. The trouble with genius is that there is always either too much or too little of it. In a logical extension of the
elitist's rap on democracy—in the land where everybody's somebody, nobody's anybody—nowadays we have both too many geniuses and too few. So every successful investment banker is now a genius of finance, every talented cook a genius of fusion, every slippery running back a genius of rushing, every logo artist a genius of design.

On the other hand, the once solid geniuses of literature and philosophy, the canonical Great Names of the Great Books, are everywhere contextualized and historicized and otherwise cut down to size. They're not so special. Who do they think they are?
Genius
is exposed as a typical piece of Enlightenment self-congratulation, the regard of limited interests, maybe class-based ones, all dressed up as universal significance. In popular sociological texts of our own day, the exceptional is made ordinary, success analyzed in order to demystify it and make us all feel better. Now
genius
is just another word for someone who practises the ten thousand hours needed to excel at any given thing. No word, in these tautological accounts, on what qualities of gift or inspiration are needed to stay the course of those hours…

Satisfying though this may be to our self-regard, down here in the mediocre ranks, it seems ultimately unsatisfactory. The choice between an inexpressible gift from the gods and mere
workmanlike persistence is typical of the age, a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't reduction. But what can we say in the face of it? How to avoid mysticism, on the one hand, and on the other what the critic Harold Bloom calls “historicizing and contextualizing the imagination of genius,” the pernicious influence of “all those who would reduce authors to social energies, readers to gleaners of phonemes”?
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Bloom's special interest is literary genius—a category whose existence some people would be inclined to doubt.
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We can nevertheless indicate some of the features that considered thinkers have ascribed to genius.
Fecundity,
first, since that is the root of the word: genius produces; it germinates. Also
vision:
an ability to see possibilities denied to the ordinary practitioner of an art, still more the ordinary fan or person in the street. Hence, too,
originality
—what philosopher Hans Jonas called “the intoxication of unprecedentedness.” This quality makes genius an unstable property, since, if too little originality makes for mediocre work, too much originality risks incomprehensible work. Indeed, many consider genius to be that volatile reaction on the margin between sense and nonsense—a version of the madness theme again.

Finally, in literary form anyway,
irony
is commonly named as a distillate of genius, if not a strictly necessary
condition for it. The genius appreciates the mortal finality of life, its inherent limit, even while making the most of life's ever-renewed powers of transcendence. These factors, or some of them, combine in the person of the genius, who creates work that, to quote Bloom, rises “above the age” and “buries its undertakers.” Or, in poet Edmund Spenser's words: “Genius survives; all else is claimed by death.”

So much may seem uncontroversial, if a little po-faced and tautological: does genius survive because it is good or is it good because it survives? And compare novelist and critic William Gass on the dubious blessing of meeting the test of time: “So works which pass the Test of Time are never again ignored, misunderstood, or neglected? No. Works which fail find oblivion. Those which pass stay around to be ignored, misunderstood, exploited, and neglected.” The test of time is just a diachronic, transgenerational popularity contest, no more reliable than any other such.
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Any test-of-time account of genius also remains vague on the essential question of
what it is
. Further investigation reveals that the majority of genius claims are what a philosopher would call contrastive: genius is most often defined against something else, typically the concept of (mere) talent. Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, in his essay on genius, provides a standard contrastive account. “Talent is like a
marksman who hits a target that the rest cannot reach; genius, one who hits a target they cannot even sight.” In other words, “talent is able to achieve that which surpasses others' ability to perform, though not their ability to apprehend; it therefore immediately finds its appreciators.” Genius, by contrast, may arouse a less positive reaction and may well be experienced even by its possessor as an ambiguous gift.

Once made, this conceptual lever has proven too powerful to resist. “Talent is that which is in a man's power,” James Russell Lowell wrote. “Genius is that in whose power a man is.” Oscar Wilde offered a variety of
aperçus
on the subject, including his much-repeated exculpatory claim that “Talent borrows, genius steals,” and the self-regarding one that “Genius learns from nature, its own nature; talent learns from art.”
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Wilde also made the following famous self-assessment concerning genius. “I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.” Some interpret this as an aesthete's call to arms, like Nietzsche's injunction to live one's life like a work of art. But Wilde is distinguished as a self-proclaimed genius—nothing in the canonical accounts of genius rules out such reflexive congratulation; some even demand it. In part because of that, he was well aware of the
burdens of rising above simple talent. “The public is wonderfully tolerant,” he noted. “It forgives everything except genius.” Wilde defined genius as “an infinite capacity for giving pains,” a neat inversion of the slavish “taking pains” of the merely talented, however perfectionist, combined with a puckish reminder of the way true genius can irk the status quo. He may have had in mind the formulation offered two centuries earlier by a fellow Anglo-Irish writer of gifts. “When a true genius appears in this world,” Jonathan Swift wrote, “you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”

This leaguing of mediocre interest against the genius was the central worry of John Stuart Mill, himself an oddball prodigy of such ability that his own mental powers threw him into breakdown during adolescence. “Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric,” Mill argued. “Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. That so few dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.”

But now a confusion has crept into the argument. First, we may not be prepared to accept the contrastive account of genius over talent. The categorical distinction proves loose on examination: where is the threshold between them, and who is positioned to judge it? Second, even if we did agree to such an account, the notion that genius and eccentricity are aligned, even correlated or coextensive, as Mill suggests, is overwrought. Not to mention the more controversial question of whether strength of character, mental vigour, and moral courage are implicated in eccentricity.

One does not have to count as a lackey of mediocrity to wonder whether eccentricity such as Gould exhibited is valuable in and of itself; sometimes it is pretension or fashion, sometimes no more than distinctive oddness—possibly charming, possibly not. Eccentricity may be a broad value in Mill's “experiments in living” conception of human freedom, the bare value of diversity, but any further claims will need more argument. Leaving aside the background questions of how eccentricity can be commanded (“people should be”) and whether there can even be eccentricity without the concentric majority to support it—conceptually, first of all, but perhaps ultimately socially and financially— we must still wonder about a genius/eccentricity nexus,
even as we find a genius/talent distinction slipping through our fingers.