●★ J. S. Bach : Goldberg Variations BWV 988 ★●
A r i a Intro.
30Variations
Aria Dacapo
((Plays the Piano by Glenn Gould))
■ Canadian Pianist Glenn Gould(1932-1982) ■
● Gould as a Pianist
Gould was known for his vivid musical imagination, and listeners regarded his
interpretations as ranging from brilliantly creative to, on occasion, outright
eccentric. His piano playing had great clarity, particularly in contrapuntal passages, and
extraordinary control. He was considered a child prodigy, and in
adulthood was also described as a musical phenomenon. As he played, he often
swayed his torso, almost always in a clockwise motion.[17] When Gould was around ten years old, he injured his back as a result of a
fall from a boat ramp on the shore of Lake Simcoe.[18]
This incident is almost certainly not related to his father's subsequent
construction for him of an adjustable-height chair, which he used for the rest
of his life. This famous chair was designed so that Gould could sit very low at
the keyboard with the object of pulling down on the keys rather than striking
them from above—a central technical idea of his teacher, Alberto Guerrero.[19]
Gould's mother urged the young Gould to sit up straight at the keyboard.[20] Gould developed a formidable technique. It enabled him to choose very fast tempos while retaining
the separateness and clarity of each note. His extremely low position at the
instrument, arguably, permitted more control over the keyboard. Gould showed
considerable technical skill in performing and recording a wide repertoire
including virtuosic and romantic works, such as his own arrangement of Ravel's La Valse
and Liszt's transcriptions of
Beethoven's fifth and sixth
symphonies. Gould worked from a young age with his teacher Alberto Guerrero on a
technique known as finger-tapping, a method of training the fingers to act more
independently from the arm.[21] Gould claimed he almost never practiced on the piano, preferring to study
music by reading it rather than playing it, a technique he had also learned from
Guerrero. His manual practicing focussed on articulation, rather than basic
facility. He may have spoken ironically about his practicing, but there is
evidence that on occasion, he did practice quite hard, sometimes using his own
drills and techniques.[22] He stated that he didn't understand the requirement of other pianists to
continuously reinforce their relationship with the instrument by practicing many
hours a day.[23]
It seems that Gould was able to practice mentally without access to an
instrument, and even took this so far as to prepare for a recording of Brahms piano works
without ever playing them until a few weeks before the recording sessions. This
is all the more staggering considering the absolute accuracy and phenomenal
dexterity exhibited in his playing. Gould's large repertoire also demonstrated
this natural mnemonic gift. The piano, Gould said, "is not an instrument for which I have any great love
as such... [but] I have played it all my life, and it is the best vehicle I have
to express my ideas." In the case of Bach, Gould admitted, "[I] fixed the action in some of the
instruments I play on—and the piano I use for all recordings is now so fixed—so
that it is a shallower and more responsive action than the standard. 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. This is the
secret of doing Bach on the piano at all. You must have that immediacy of
response, that control over fine definitions of things."[24] Of significant influence upon the teenage Gould were Artur
Schnabel (Gould: "The piano was a means to an end for him, and the end was
to approach Beethoven."); Rosalyn Tureck's
recordings of Bach ("upright, with a sense of repose and positiveness"); and Leopold Stokowski.[25] Gould had a pronounced aversion to what he termed a "hedonistic" approach to
the piano repertoire, performance, and music generally. For Gould, "hedonism" in
this sense denoted a superficial theatricality, something to which he felt Mozart, for
example, became increasingly susceptible later in his career.[26]
He associated this drift towards hedonism with the emergence of a cult of
showmanship and gratuitous virtuosity on the concert platform in the nineteenth
century and later. The institution of the public concert, he felt, degenerated
into the "blood sport" with which he struggled, and which he ultimately
rejected.[27] In creating music, Gould much preferred the control and intimacy provided by
the recording studio; he
disliked the concert hall, which he compared to a competitive sporting arena.
After his final public performance in 1964, he devoted his career solely to the
studio, recording albums and several radio documentaries.
He was attracted to the technical aspects of recording, and considered the
manipulation of tape to be another part of the creative process. Although
Gould's recording studio producers have testified that 'he needed splicing, [or overdubbing] less than most
performers',[28]
Gould used the process to give him total artistic control over
the recording process. 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.[29] Gould's first major recording, The
Goldberg Variations, came in 1955, at Columbia Masterworks'
30th Street Studios in New York City. Although there was initially some
controversy at CBS as to whether this was the most appropriate piece to record,
the finished product received phenomenal praise and was among the best-selling
classical music albums of its time.[30]
Gould became closely associated with the piece, playing it in full or in part at
many of his recitals. Another version of the Goldberg Variations,
recorded in 1981, would be among his last recordings, and one of only a few
pieces he recorded twice in the studio. The 1981 recording was one of CBS
Masterworks' first digital recordings.
The two recordings are very different: the first, highly energetic and often
frenetic; the second, slower and more introspective. In the latter, Gould treats
the Aria and its thirty variations as one cohesive piece. There are also two
other recordings of the Goldberg Variations. one is a live recording from 1954
(CBC PSCD2007); the other is a live recording from Salzburg in 1959 (Sony
SRCR-9500). Gould recorded most of Bach's other keyboard works, including the complete
Well-Tempered
Clavier, Partitas, French
Suites, English
Suites, and keyboard concertos. For his only recording at the organ, he recorded about
half of The Art of Fugue.
He also recorded all five of Beethoven's piano
concertos and 23 of the 32 piano
sonatas. Gould also recorded works by Beethoven, Brahms, and many other prominent
piano composers, though he was outspoken in his criticism of some of them. He
was extremely critical of Frederic Chopin. Despite
creating a vast discography, Gould never bothered to record any of Chopin's
works. In a radio interview, when asked if he didn't find himself wanting to
play Chopin, he replied: "No, I don't. I play it in a weak moment — maybe once a
year or twice a year for myself. But it doesn't convince me." Although Gould
recorded all of Mozart's sonatas and admitted enjoying the "actual playing" of
them,[31]
he was a harsh critic of Mozart's music to the extent of arguing (perhaps a
little puckishly) that Mozart died too late rather than too early.[32]
He was fond of many lesser-known composers, such as Orlando Gibbons, whose
Anthems he had heard as a teenager,[33]
and for whose music he felt a 'spiritual attachment'.[34]
He recorded a number of Gibbons's keyboard works and nominated him as his
all-time favourite composer,[35]
despite his better-known admiration for the technical mastery of Bach.[36]
He made recordings of piano music little-known in North America, including music
by Jean Sibelius (the
sonatines, Kyllikki); Georges Bizet (the
Variations Chromatiques de Concert and the Premier nocturne); Richard Strauss (the
piano sonata, the five pieces, Enoch Arden); and Paul
Hindemith (the three sonatas, the sonatas for brass and piano). He also made
recordings of the complete piano works and Lieder of Arnold
Schoenberg. One of Gould's performances of the Prelude and Fugue in C Major from Book Two
of The Well-Tempered Clavier was chosen for inclusion on the NASA Voyager Golden
Record by a committee headed by Carl Sagan. The disc of
recordings was placed on the spacecraft Voyager 1, which is now
approaching interstellar space
and is the farthest human-made object from Earth.[37] The success of Gould's collaborations with other artists was to a degree
dependent upon their receptiveness to his sometimes unconventional readings of
the music. His television collaboration with Yehudi Menuhin in 1965,
recording works by Bach, Beethoven and Schoenberg,[38]
was deemed a success because "Menuhin was ready to embrace the new perspective
opened up by an unorthodox view."[38]
In 1966, his collaboration with Elisabeth
Schwarzkopf, however, recording Richard Strauss's Ophelia Lieder, op.
67, was deemed an "outright fiasco".[38]
Schwarzkopf believed in "total fidelity" to the score, but she also objected to
the thermal conditions in the recording studio: "The studio was incredibly
overheated, which may be good for a pianist but not for a singer: a dry throat
is the end as far as singing is concerned. But we persevered nonetheless. It
wasn't easy for me. 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...".[39] Less well-known is Gould's work in radio. This work was, in part, the
result of Gould's long association with the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation, for which he produced numerous television and
radio programs. Notable recordings include his Solitude Trilogy,
consisting of The Idea of North, a meditation on Northern Canada and its
people; The Latecomers, about Newfoundland;
and The Quiet in the Land, on Mennonites in Manitoba. All
three use a technique that Gould called "contrapuntal radio", in which several
people are heard speaking at once—much like the voices in a fugue. In 2002, during preparations for Queen
Elizabeth II's Jubilee
Tour of Canada, previously lost footage of a Glenn Gould performance was
discovered. It was part of a CBC
program of various musical performances that had followed the Queen's 1957
television address to Canadians from Rideau Hall, and featured a
seven-minute live performance in which he plays the second and third movements
of Bach's Keyboard Concerto in F Minor.[40] As a teenager, Gould wrote chamber music and piano works in the style of the
Second Viennese
school of composition. His only significant work was the String Quartet, Op.
1, which he finished when he was in his 20s, and perhaps his cadenzas to Beethoven's Piano
Concerto No. 1, which can be heard on his recording of the piece and have
recently been recorded by the German pianist Lars Vogt. Early works: Slightly later works: The majority of his work is published by Schott Music. The recording
Glenn Gould: The Composer contains his original works excepting the
cadenzas. Not only a composer, Gould was a prolific arranger of orchestral repertoire
for piano. His arrangements include his Wagner and Ravel transcriptions that he
recorded, as well as the operas of Richard Strauss and the
symphonies of Schubert and Bruckner, which he played
privately for his own pleasure.[41] Gould's String Quartet Op. 1 (published in 1956 and recorded in 1960) had a
mixed reception from the critics. For example, the notices from the Christian Science
Monitor and The Saturday
Review were quite laudatory, while the response from the Montreal
Star was less so.[42]
There is not an extensive critical commentary on Gould's compositional work for
the simple reason that there is not much of it: he never proceeded beyond Opus
1. Although the String Quartet was not Gould's last published composition, there
was never an Opus 2. Gould left a lot of compositions unfinished.[43]
Ultimately Gould failed in his ambition to become a composer because, as he
admitted himself, he lacked a 'personal voice'.[44] Glenn Gould usually hummed while he played, and his recording engineers had
mixed results in how successfully they were able to exclude his voice from
recordings. Gould claimed that his singing was subconscious and increased
proportionately with the inability of the piano in question to realize the music
as he intended. It is likely that this habit originated in Gould's having been
taught by his mother to "sing everything that he played", as Kevin Bazzana puts
it. This became "an unbreakable (and notorious) habit".[45]
Some of Gould's recordings were severely criticised because of the background
"vocalise". For example, a reviewer of his 1981 re-recording of the Goldberg
Variations opined that many listeners would "find the groans and croons
intolerable".[46]
A similar habit is often exhibited by jazz pianists Keith Jarrett, Erroll
Garner and even, in a somewhat less obtrusive way, Oscar Peterson. Gould was renowned for his peculiar body movements while playing (circular
swaying; conducting; or grasping at the air as if to reach for notes, as he did
in the taping of Beethoven's Tempest
Sonata) and for his insistence on absolute control over every aspect of his
playing environment. The temperature of the recording studio had to be exactly
regulated. He invariably insisted that it be extremely warm. According to
Friedrich, the air conditioning engineer had to work just as hard as the
recording engineers.[47]
The piano had to be set at a certain height and would be raised on wooden blocks
if necessary.[48]
A small rug would sometimes be required for his feet underneath the piano.[49]
He had to sit fourteen inches above the floor and would only play concerts while
sitting on the old chair his father had made. He continued to use this chair
even when the seat was completely worn through.[50]
His chair is so closely identified with him that it is shown in a place of honor
in a glass case at the National Library
of Canada. Conductors responded diversely to Gould and his playing habits. George
Szell, who led Gould in 1957 with the Cleveland Orchestra,
remarked to his assistant, "That nut's a genius."[51]
Leonard Bernstein
said, "There is nobody quite like him, and I just love playing with him."[51]
Ironically, Bernstein created
a stir in April 1962 when, just before the New York
Philharmonic was to perform the Brahms D minor piano concerto with Gould as
soloist, he informed the audience that he was assuming no responsibility for
what they were about to hear. Specifically, he was referring to Gould's
insistence that the entire first movement be played at half the indicated tempo.
Plans for a studio recording of the performance came to nothing; the live radio
broadcast (along with Bernstein's disclaimer) was subsequently released on
CD. Gould was averse to cold, and wore heavy clothing (including gloves), even in
warm places. He was once arrested, presumably mistaken for a vagrant, while
sitting on a park bench in Sarasota, Florida, dressed in his standard
all-climate attire of coat(s), warm hat, and mittens.[52]
He also disliked social functions. He hated being touched, and in later life he
limited personal contact, relying on the telephone and letters for
communication. Upon one visit to historic Steinway Hall in New York
City in 1959, the chief piano technician at the time, William Hupfer,
greeted Gould by giving him a slap on the back. Gould was shocked by this, and
complained of aching, lack of coordination, and fatigue due to the incident; he
even went on to explore the possibility of litigation against Steinway & Sons if
his apparent injuries were permanent.[53]
He was known for cancelling performances at the last minute, which is why
Bernstein's above-mentioned public disclaimer opens with, "Don't be frightened,
Mr. Gould is here; will appear in a moment." In his liner notes and broadcasts, Gould created more than two dozen alter egos
for satirical, humorous, or didactic purposes, permitting him to write hostile
reviews or incomprehensible commentaries on his own performances. Probably the
best-known are the German musicologist "Karlheinz Klopweisser", the English
conductor "Sir Nigel Twitt-Thornwaite", and the American critic "Theodore
Slutz".[54] Fran's
Restaurant was a constant haunt of Gould's. A CBC
profile noted, "sometime between two and three every morning, Gould would go to
Fran's, a 24-hour diner a block away from his Toronto apartment, sit in the same
booth, and order the same meal of scrambled eggs."[55] Gould stated that had he not been a musician, he would have been a writer. He
wrote music criticism and expounded his philosophy of music and art. In these he
rejected what he deemed banal in music composition
and its consumption by the public, and also gave insightful analyses of the
music of Richard Strauss, Alban Berg
and Anton Webern. Despite
certain modernist sympathies, Gould's attitude to popular music was ambivalent
or negative. He enjoyed a jazz concert with his friends as a youth, mentioned
jazz in his writings, and once criticized The Beatles for "bad voice
leading".[56]
He did, however, share a mutual admiration with jazz pianist Bill
Evans, who made his seminal record "Conversations with Myself" using Gould's
celebrated Steinway CD 318 piano. He believed that the keyboard is fulfilled as
an instrument primarily through counterpoint, a musical
style that reached its zenith during the Baroque era. Much of the homophony that
followed, he felt, belongs to a less serious and less spiritual period of
art. Gould was convinced that the institution of the public concert with audience
en masse and the tradition of applause was not only an anachronism, but also a
"force of evil," and that these practices should be abandoned. This doctrine he
set forth, half in jest and half seriously, in "GPAADAK", the Gould Plan for the
Abolition of Applause and Demonstrations of All Kinds.[57] Gould enjoyed solitude, and expressed that theme in his trio of radio
documentaries, the Solitude
Trilogy. Having entertained a lifelong fascination with the hereafter, with theories
of reincarnation and mystic numerology akin to those of Arnold Schoenberg,
Gould believed that he would be reincarnated two years after his death in the
person of Sam Caldwell, a media theorist and contrapuntal poet. This belief was
strengthened by Gould's regrets (expressed particularly in his 1980 interviews
with Bruno Monsaigneon) that he had not brought his contrapuntal radio work to a
satisfactory stage of completion. With plans to explore to its logical
conclusion the application of Wagnerian leitmotifs and J.S. Bach's
contrapuntal textures in the medium of the spoken word, and particularly in
poetry, Gould conceived of this fictional "second go-around" toward the end of
his already immensely productive lifetime. ■ WIKIPEDIA ■
● Recordings
Prelude and
Fugue in C major from
The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1
by
Johann Sebastian Bach (excerpt)
The
C major prelude from the first book of the WTC.
Allegro
Moderato from Piano Sonata
No. 10 in C major by Wolfgang
Ama-
deus Mozart (excerpts from two recordings)
Compare
the 1970 version from the "Complete Piano Sonatas" set (played first) and the
1958 interpretation (second).
Contrapunctus
V from The Art of Fugue by Johann Sebastian Bach
(excerpt)
The
only organ recordings Gould made were the first nine parts of Bach's The Art
of Fugue.
Gigue from
Suite in A major HWV 426, by Georg Friederich Handel
(excerpt)
Gould
recorded several Handel suites and a few pieces from J.S. Bach's WTC on a
Wittmayer harpsichord. The somewhat muffled sound of this 20th-century
instrument is very different from modern recordings that are made using copies
of old harpsichords.
Problems listening to these files?
See media
help. ● Collaborations
● Radio
documentaries
● Rediscovered footage of a live performance
● Compositions
● Critical response
● Eccentricities
● Philosophical
and aesthetic views
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