Glenn Gould (7 page)

More convincing, at least in their lack of conviction, are those views on genius that demystify it without reducing it to persistence. “Coffee is good for talent,” Emerson said in his version of the contrasting pair, “but genius wants prayer.” Gould, as we know, consumed a cocktail of prescription painkillers and anti-anxiety drugs in late life: coffee or prayer? Pablo Picasso, a man who knew a great deal about fecundity, was sharper: “Genius is personality with a penny's worth of talent. Error which chances to rise above the commonplace.” And, reversing the usual polarity, poet Paul Valéry offers a crisp symbiotic account. “Talent without genius isn't much,” he said, “but genius without talent is nothing whatsoever.” This last point presumably goes some distance to explain the ranks of undiscovered artistic geniuses, most of them male and in their post-collegiate twenties, who throng the downtown bars and coffee houses of every major European and North American city.

Was Glenn Gould a genius? If we are prepared to be precise about the label, the answer is surely yes. Note that in Kant's
Critique of Judgment,
genius is not contrasted with talent—a mug's game, after all—but is instead defined as a special form of creative talent. “Genius is the
talent (or natural gift) which gives the rule to art,” Kant says, by which he means that genius is the quality of setting new standards in the aesthetic field, of being able to rewrite the rule book. The genius must be rare, because rules are not rules if they are broken every five minutes. The special quality of the genius is that he or she plots both the new trajectory
and
shows why the previous one was insufficient. In this sense, the genius performs a version of Thomas Kuhn's
paradigm shift,
whereby the new rules not only solve problems or explain anomalies the previous rules could not, but also show why they could not. (The problem may be mere repetition, the boredom of institutional stultification; the anomaly may be the existence of the genius himself.) Gould's blistering 1955
Variations,
with its blithe omissions and apparent love of speed over emotion, broke all the rules about Bach; and in so doing, it rewrote those rules.

To talk about rules may be misleading in any case. “Genius is a talent for producing that for which no definite rule can be given,” Kant goes on; “it is not mere aptitude for what can be learned by a rule.” And so “genius is the exemplary originality of the natural gifts of a subject in the
free
employment of his cognitive faculties,” namely, understanding and imagination. The notion of
free play is key; it underwrites the mystery of the genius, who breaks the rules and so enters into a realm where there are none—along the way setting the new ones. For, in addition to originality, genius also exhibits exemplarity: it shows the way forward, in part by being sufficiently intelligible to existing standards as to avoid “original nonsense.” Genius “cannot describe or indicate scientifically how it brings about its products, but it gives the rule just as nature does.” Thus does Kant meld some elements of mystery—the genius cannot explain how he does what he does, or where the gift came from—with a modern appreciation that the genius is constrained by human limits.
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Properly understood,
gift
is the right word: the gods of talent deliver gifts, to be received but never returned; we mortals only exchange presents.

Gould's genius was interpretive, but it is no less creative and groundbreaking for that, especially in the aesthetic realm of music, which can live only in performance. His influence is made inescapable; no performer after him can avoid the example he sets, an example derived from his original interventions and the arguments surrounding them. Now, everyone must perform
through
him; he can be emulated or rejected, but he cannot be ignored. It is true that sometimes Gould, like the ill-advised athlete
conducting a post-game interview, attempted to explain what he was up to. He was more articulate than most people, let alone most athletes; neverthelesss, there is a constant danger that his theorizing will undermine the joy given by his performances. Indeed, the tension between these is a central facet of Gould's life, a tension that was never adequately resolved.

The thirtieth variation in the
Goldberg
sequence is a quodlibet. The Latin word translates more or less as “anything goes” or, in more colloquial parlance, “whatever.” In musical composition, the title quodlibet indicates a section that loosely incorporates snippets of melody, often drawn from folk songs or popular tunes, into the larger, more serious work. Bach's quodlibet does this, using two well-known German folk songs of the period as source materials; but the opening bars of the variation also offer one of the few places where the bass melody line of the entire composition is clearly stated. Variation 30, the catch-all or “whatever” variation, thus appears as a cheerful, serio-comic culmination of the entire sequence of play, drawing the varied threads together as we move into the final section, the aria da capo. It is a deliberately unstable penultimatum, at once forthright and ironic.

The notion of quodlibet also appears in the scholastic enumeration of divine transcendental properties.
Quodlibet
ens est unum, verum, bonum seu perfectum,
medieval scholars argued. Which is to say: Whatever entity is one, true, good, or perfect counts as transcendental. The “whatever” here picks out something more mysterious than meets the eye. “Whatever” is not just a grammatical placeholder—whatever being it does not matter. It is also an ontological claim— there is a being
such that
. What is that being? The whatever being. Quodlibet is both pure singularity (the specific being) and absolute generality (all of these considered as possibilities). Quodlibet marks the abyss between example and class, act and potential, particular and universal. Individual beings can only be utterly singular because they are examples of a class that is, by definition, general. How is this possible?

Aristotle divides all potentiality into two classes: the power to be and the power to not-be. Of these, the latter does not seem to be a power at all, but instead an impotence. But the power to not-be is the greater, since it harbours within itself the other power and governs it, holding itself back in absolute potentiality. Thus the being that both is and is not itself is quodlibet being. As we can see, the whatever being contains already, in itself, the act of will (libet)—or rather, the potentiality of will, will suspended.
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The philosopher Giorgio Agamben phrased the issue thus: “Even though every pianist necessarily has the potential to
play and the potential to not-play,” he says, “Glenn Gould is, however, the only one who can
not
not-play.” What can this mean? That Gould does not merely hover between playing and not-playing, as anyone might, but actively makes his not-playing a kind of performance—“he plays, so to speak, with his potential to not-play.” Only Gould can do this because only he is so masterly that such second-order play becomes a possibility, albeit a paradoxical one. “While his ability simply negates and abandons his potential to not-play,” Agamben concludes, “his mastery conserves and exercises in the act not his potential to play… but rather his potential to not-play.”
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Gould gave his last public performance on April 10, 1964, in Los Angeles. He played four fugues from
The Art of the Fugue
and Partita no. 4 in D Major by Bach; Beethoven's Opus 109; and Hindemith's Third Sonata. He did not announce this as a final appearance, nor was it part of a planned farewell tour. Several other concerts were already on his schedule; he cancelled them all.

Though he had been performing publicly since the age of five, it was less than a decade since his American performance debut. He was just thirty-one years old.

The American debut concerts are legend, worth recalling in their immediacy and impact. On January 2, 1955, Gould played in Washington, D.C.; nine days later, he played in
New York. Gould was acutely conscious of the importance of these concerts and fussed over the repertoire, seeking a combination of pieces that would allow his technical prowess full display as well as distinguish his musical intelligence from the run of moody or bombastic Romantic set pieces thought suitable for an unknown's debut. Somewhat radically, he chose instead the “Earl of Salisbury” Pavan and Galliard by Gibbons, one of his favourite pieces and a winning confection of intricate structure and feeling. Also the Fitzwilliam Fantasia by Sweelinck, five Three-Part Inventions and the Partita no. 5 by J.S. Bach, Webern's
Variations
op. 27, Beethoven's Sonata no. 30, op. 109, and the Piano Sonata op. 1 by Berg. A very clever program, in other words, with some familiar pieces and some rare ones, all deployed with a mixture of high-percentile technique and a keen sense of musicality.

The Washington performance attracted only a small crowd, but the reviews were glowing. Critic Paul Hume: “January 2 is early for predictions, but it is unlikely that the year 1955 will bring us a finer piano recital. We shall be lucky if it brings others of equal beauty and significance.”
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Gould repeated the performance at New York's Town Hall, again to a small audience, but one with influential members. David Oppenheim, director of artists and repertoire for Columbia Records' Masterworks division, guided by
musician Alexander Schneider, attended and was suitably impressed. He contacted Gould's agent, Walter Homburger, and offered an exclusive three-year contract—the first time he had signed an artist after just one hearing.

Of the resulting recordings, more later. For now, Gould continued to perform in public, indeed quickly stepping up his touring schedule to accommodate growing demand: it would spike after the first
Variations
was released later that year and would never decline. All the while, an increasingly familiar pattern began to emerge.

March 15, 1956: Gould made his American concerto debut and first performance since the 1955 recitals. He played Beethoven's Concerto no. 4 in Detroit with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra conducted by Paul Paray. Six curtain calls. But the reviews highlighted his odd onstage behaviour, his hunching and humming.

March 18, 1956: Gould played the concerto again in Windsor, Ontario. But this time he almost cancelled, his nerves frayed. He delivered only a mediocre performance. He played again three days later, with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Ernest MacMillan. He didn't perform for three weeks afterwards. Feeling “acutely distressed,” he sought the advice of a neurologist at the Toronto General Hospital. He received prescriptions for Largactil and
Serpasil, drugs typically prescribed for mental and emotional disorders, including schizophrenia, but also sometimes used to treat insomnia and anxiety. Gould added these to the cocktail of drugs he was already taking habitually while touring to calm his nerves before and after performances.

January 26, 1957: Gould debuted with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein. His performance of Beethoven's Concerto no. 2 was a riotous success. Bernstein: “He is the greatest thing that has happened to music in years.” Gould played thirty concerts in the subsequent season. The next year, fifty. Sellouts, runs at the box office, attendance records became common.

Summer 1957: The first overseas tour. Gould began in the Soviet Union, the first Canadian and first North American pianist to appear in post-Stalinist Russia. Gould's complex of fears were compounded and highlighted: of eating, of vomiting in public, of flying, of being overwhelmed by crowds.

On May 7 he gave his first performance in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, a solo recital of fugues from
The Art of the Fugue
and Partita no. 6 in E Minor by Bach, Beethoven's Sonata no. 30, op. 109, and the Berg Sonata. Barely a third full at first, the hall was crowded to bursting by the end of the performance, bolstered by intermission communication to friends. Gould was applauded for twenty
minutes and played a long encore: a Fantasia by Sweelinck and ten of the
Goldberg Variations
. The audience was still clapping as the house lights came up, and Gould was later mobbed by admirers outside the concert hall.

May 8, 1957: Performance at the Tchaikovsky Hall with the Moscow Philharmonic. Beethoven's Concerto no. 4 and Bach's Concerto in D Minor. Sold out.

May 11, 1957: Tchaikovsky Hall sold out again, 1,500 people seated in the auditorium, plus another 900 allowed to stand or take chairs added onstage. The complete
Goldberg Variations
as well as two Intermezzi by Brahms and Hindemith's Third Sonata. Applause for thirty minutes.

May 12, 1957: Gould gave a seminar-recital on contemporary music at the Moscow Conservatory. Lectured on twelve-tone music and played Berg's Sonata, Webern's
Variations,
two movements from Krenek's Third Sonata. Some conservative professors walked out in protest, but the audience cheered. Encore: parts of the
Goldberg Variations
and
The Art of the Fugue
. Deafening applause.

May 16 and 17, 1957: Performances in Leningrad. Extra seats added onstage at Maly Hall for the first time ever. Police called to control the crowd outside the hall trying to obtain tickets. Gould played for more than three hours,
including the entire Berg Sonata as an encore, and finally had to excuse himself in order to leave the stage.

May 18, 1957: The Bolshoi Hall, capacity 1,300, sold out. Eleven hundred seats added. Playing with the Leningrad Philharmonic, Gould offered Bach's Concerto in D Minor and Beethoven's B-flat Concerto. Encores and more encores. Gould took his last bow wearing coat and gloves. He later repeated the seminar-recital he performed in Moscow. Exposing students to twelve-tone music created, he said, “a sensation equivalent to being the first musician to land on Mars or Venus and to be in a position of revealing a vast unexplored territory to some greatly puzzled but willing auditors.”
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