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by IRVING KOLODIN.
THE PRIVATE WORLD OF GLENN GOULD ON an occasion when Arnold Schoenberg was asked to relate the circumstances that changed him from an evolutionary to a revolutionary composer, he explained that it was a matter of historical necessity, adding, "No one wanted to be Schoenberg, so I decided to take the job." In a like manner, it could be said that it was a historic inevitability that some performer would one day prefer the electronic life of the recording studio to that of the touring concert virtuoso-and no one but Glenn Gould wanted to be Glenn Gould.
The latest evidence of that preference is, as it has been from time to time for much of a decade, another batch of Glenn Gould recordings from Columbia. I say "for much of a decade" because Andre Watts has recently been celebrating the tenth anniversary of his highly successful New York debut in February of 1963, and I, for one, have not forgotten that it was as a result of Gould's decision not to play with the New York Philharmonic that the then-unknown Watts did. If Gould has since played in a New York concert hall or in a hall in any other major American city (other than to musically illustrate a lecture), it has escaped my notice.
Is there a Gould public? Presumably there still is: Columbia is no more celebrated for philanthropy than any other record company, and if Gould's records don't sell, it is as certain as that Monday follows Sunday that they wouldn't continue to issue them. But the question perhaps ought to be, Is there a public for Gould beyond the one that dotes on his eccentricities? After listening with various degrees of responsiveness to his provocative- meaning "provoking"- performances of four French Suites of Bach (Nos. I through 4), a dollop of Mozart (the Sonatas K. 331, K. 533, K. 545, and the D Minor Fantasy K. 397), the Opus 31 sonatas of Beethoven, the three sonatas of Hindemith, and his own transcriptions of Wagner's Meistersinger Prelude, the Siegfried Idyll, and the Rhine Journey from Gotterdammerung (the catalog numbers are in an ascending sequence from Columbia M 32347 to M 32351), I doubt it. I must say, with all the politeness I can muster, that the recording studio has rarely known such a demonstration of self-indulgence since Ernest Wolff recorded his performances of Brahms, Franz, and other lieder to his own piano accompaniment. The analogy is the more unfortunately apt in that Gould's happy humming to his piano playing is all too audibly preserved in these recordings.
The message to his fellow performers that emerges from Gould's centuries-spanning sequence is, "Anything you can do, I can do different." Even at his least persuasive, he is still a musician whose mental and physical machinery is splendidly oiled, the gears firmly meshed, the edges impeccably tooled. But I am curious to know why the abrupt shifts from low gear to high, why the insistence on page after page (to take the Bach suites as an instance) of phraseology in which measure after measure is stamped out like cookies from a cookie cutter, and further, why are the occasional deviations from this pattern them selves monitored with the mathematical regularity of a turntable goosed up on cue from 33 to 45 rpm? If the imagery used suggests a view of the mind as a machine, it is simply because the character of these performances is primarily cerebral. As one privileged to experience, at the source, the invigorating, life-enhancing Bach of Harold Samuel, Casals, Szigeti, Friskin, Landowska, and a dozen others, I can only say that I listen in vain, in Gould's blood less exercises, for some measure of the passion, humor, urgency, and eloquence that characterized their playing.
What, then, of the music of Mozart and Beethoven, those men of more "modern" impulses and motivations? Here too I find the Gould range to be, in the aggregate, mechanical, from faster-than-fast to slower-than-slow.
In the slow category, one must mention the Andante grazioso of Mozart's A Major Sonata (K. 331), the mincing treatment of which would, I suspect, have impelled Mozart to language even more famously scatalogical than that he addressed to his cousin. The Fantasy in D Minor? D Minor, yes; fantasy, no;
for it is but another example of a monumentally idiosyncratic misreading of Mozart, one that prepares us all too prophetically for Gould's imminent dismemberment of the Beethoven sonatas.
Here we are back in the world of Gould's Olympian overview of Beethoven, a world in which the Pathetique Sonata is described in terms of "the somewhat stage-struck character of its doom-foretelling double-dotted rhythm." It is this fatal propensity for formalizing musical meanings, for erecting super structures of intellectual vacuity (the comparison of Webern and Hindemith in Gould's annotation for the latter's sonatas is an example of this), that constantly corrupts, debases, and finally nullifies the reasoning powers that originally earned respect for Gould as a musical thinker.
EEMINGLY, such debasement could reach no greater fulfillment than that Gould attains in his Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, but it is dangerous to underrate virtuosity, even when it relates only to self-indulgence. Thus, though it takes no small talent to reduce a Mozartian Andante grazioso to the lethargy of a Regerian Andantino pomposo, only the greatest exercise of the will would suffice to extend a famously succinct and beautifully proportioned musical entity by more than a
third of the time span normally assigned to it.
The first warning of things to come in the Gould "transcription" of the Siegfried Idyll is the label timing of 23:39. This is even longer than the celebrated Adagio rendering by Leonard Bernstein in the early Sixties. Going by the median timing of seventeen minutes entered in my copy of the miniature score, it adds more than six minutes, or approximately 35 percent, to a work so carefully calculated that hardly a superfluous note, let alone an extraneous measure, can be identified by the most scrupulous fault-finder. Had Gould's pace prevailed at Triebschen on that Christmas morning in 1870, Cosima Wagner might very well have drifted back to sleep and failed to hear the conclusion of the combination Christmas-birthday present Wagner had created for her. As for Gould's didactic delivery of the Meistersinger Prelude (with every fugal entrance poked into the listener's ears so he will recoil and remember), it suggests some performance-to-come in which the winner of the song contest will not be Walther von Stolzing but Frederick Beckmesser.
The mystifying question mark that arises from this succession of duds and soporifics (1 except only the Hindemith, which is beautifully formed) is: To whom are they ad dressed? To Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, or Wagner, the composers who created them? Hardly. To me or to you, as music lovers keenly interested in the subject matter and eagerly awaiting new illuminations of it? Not really. It is hardly to be denied, I think, that they are primarily directed inward, to Gould himself. It is a case of mirrorrorrim ( a term that another, pre-Gould, Canadian named Gerald Strang applied to a composition which worked as well backward as forward), with Gould not only the arranger and performer but the audience as well--and all three at the same time.
Tits is to me the curious consequence of Gould's isolation from public contacts over much of the last decade. He has sacrificed the tempering that comes from rising regularly to the challenge of "once more into the breach" on the battlefield of the concert stage and re treated to the safety of the recording and TV studio. There, hermetically sealed and air conditioned, he can banish sweat, eliminate body odors, and encourage artificiality until human emotion itself is rendered nonexistent.
The result is all too consistently evident in these sad samples of musical devaluation, gold into Gould.
Ending, as we started, with Schoenberg, some may perhaps recall that, at a lecture in Cincinnati in 1964, Gould observed: "What then has really been the effect of this new world of sound introduced by Schoenberg?
... I think there can be no doubt that its fundamental effect has been to separate audience and composer ... " I would like to suggest to Glenn Gould, whose talents I respect and whose abilities I have often admired, that he has done somewhat the same thing separate audience and performer--in the last decade. He has become a mere servant of the technical opportunities presented by the recording process rather than their master. After his first contact with Gould some years ago, the late George Szell is reported to have commented: "This nut is a genius." Szell was a man of few, though well-chosen words. But had he lived to hear these recordings, he might feel that, for present purposes, he had gotten the order of his words reversed.
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Also see:
RAYMOND LEPPARD--A scholar-performer who hears-and understands--his critics.
EPI / Epicure Products (ad, Feb. 1974)