after Columbia producer Andrew Kazdin’s revelations years later that he did the actual editing when recording with Gould, with Gould hovering around in an advisory capacity.
With me, though, Gould seemed stalled on the word fun.
“Less fun maybe,” he said, “but a logical step, a very human step, too — the step toward perfection — if you think of it.”
We talked a bit more and then he drifted away, leaving me to whiz strips of magnetic tape backward and forward, searching for the right spot to splice.
Reviving the Corps
The CBC’s English-language headquarters on Front Street is now home to the Glenn Gould Studio. The 340-seat theatre opened in 1993, eleven years after Gould’s death. It’s only one of several places around town with his name attached, most notably the Glenn Gould Professional School at the glassy new Royal Conservatory of Music. There’s also a Glenn Gould Park at the northwest corner of St. Clair Avenue and Avenue Road, with its statue of Peter Pan — entirely fitting for the boy-man Gould kept alive long after he was no longer a child. And I imagine the number of plaques bearing his name will increase with every new Gould connection that’s discovered by cities and towns he passed through for some project or another: Orillia, Wawa, North York …
All things associated with Gould have taken on a life of their own over the years, becoming almost totemic, fetish objects. Stories about his beloved Steinway CD 318 fill one book. How long before there’s a monograph on his familiar chair, bent like a Picasso sculpture? Somewhere stored away in one basement or another are the Gould family cottage shutters, much desired by Gould fans still looking for mementos.
The CBC statue, owned by the Glenn Gould Foundation, is different. It fixes this intensely private person forever in public. It places Gould in a different sort of space, a more public space where Gould is lesser known, if known at all — a place he himself would not have been ready for. Sculptor Abernethy’s roots in the theatre working with props and the like are apparent in Gould’s caught-in-motion pose. It’s almost as if he is impatiently waiting for a stranger to sit opposite him and talk. Ironically (the word irony hovers over everything Gould), his companions might be Toronto Blue Jays fans on their way to the nearby Rogers Centre, unaware of Gould’s dislike of competition. One can imagine the day when the majority of those strangers will be as much in the dark about Gould or what he did as are most tourists in Paris walking along Avenue du Général Leclerc unaware that its namesake was revered by generations of French as the liberator of Paris.
As with Abernethy’s sculpture, Gould, the idea, the subject, is always in motion, too. The Gould canon, a sizable enough collection while he was alive, has grown impressively in the years since his death in 1982. I’ve never heard anyone say, “Why, yes, I have a book on Glenn Gould.” It’s always, “I have several — well, quite a few actually.” But as Gould is discovered by a new generation of academics — the majority not around when he rocketed to world fame in the mid-1950s, and unencumbered by any personal contact with him — many are apt to see him in the broader context of popular culture. I’ve seen his name associated with the word hipster on occasion, and I get why, although I’m certain Gould himself would not. How else do you describe a brilliant recluse with shaggy hair who loved to drive big, shiny American cars out in the restless night, his pockets stuffed with uppers and downers, the radio picking up sad songs?
Those who are curious about Glenn Gould and dig deeper might be taken aback by just how many Gould narratives there are. The reason for this, of course, is his protean productivity on so many fronts: his recordings, wide-ranging in content and almost unrivalled in number; his intelligence and restless inquisitiveness, made public via his radio and TV appearances; his written essays and their rococo convolutions; and the logic-defying contradictions of his life. All of these aspects of Gould’s life have given rise to any number of narrative approaches. Hence, the themes-and-variations method for organizing any account of Gould, such as Otto Friedrich’s early biography, Glenn Gould: A Life and Variations, or Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, François Girard’s episodic film biography, or Georges Leroux’s Partita for Glenn Gould, whose introductory section, “Praeludium,” is followed by a “Toccata” then an “Allemande” and so on in musical fashion.
Ever the control freak, throughout his life Gould allowed the public, friends, and even lovers only glimpses of the private Gould. Over the years he left rooms full of scribbled sheets behind — notes, lists, one revision after another revision, the good revealed here, the bad there, but almost never anything one could consider reflective, overall. On July 30, 1952, when Gould was filling out his biographical data sheet at the CBC, he left answers to many of the questions blank. After What is your favourite amusement? Blank. After What was the most dramatic moment of your career? Blank. Under what circumstances do you like to prepare your program? Blank. What attracted you to radio? Blank. Blank for first audition. Blank for current programs. Blank for current sport. Blank. Blank. Blank.
Goulds Galore
Many believe the Gould enigma is one code that is not likely to be cracked — a view encouraged by Gould himself. It accounts for the paucity of intimate personal detail in his voluminous notes about, say, his love life, for just one instance. Peter F. Ostwald, the German-born American violinist/psychiatrist who counselled Gould as a friend over the years, called this the “diffusion of Gould’s identity” in Glenn Gould: The Ecstasy and Tragedy of Genius, a startling portrait of the artist in rapid decline. In the womb-like atmosphere of the radio studio, Ostwald says, Gould went through “a certain loss of the primary image of himself as a pianist, an image that had been built up in childhood under his mother’s guidance.”
The narrative of Gould that’s best known focuses on his career highs and lows: the discovery of a brilliant pianist whose 1955 recording of Bach’s The Goldberg Variations may well be the greatest classical recording of all time; then, watching as the freaky artist walks away from a multi-million-dollar career. And, well … that’s it. Well, not entirely. This particular narrative is enriched by circumstances surrounding his 1981 Goldberg recording, its autumnal atmosphere seemingly foreshadowing his death a year later.
The second narrative, Glenn Gould as one of the twentieth century’s great pianists, is of concern to a distressingly diminishing number of classical music cognoscenti. While generally impressed by the volume and scope of Gould’s recording activities, they remain unimpressed by what they feel is the inconsistency of its quality. They will point to senior elite pianists, from Vladimir Ashkenazy to Anton Kuerti, who insist that many of Gould’s performances are flat out wrongheaded. Several composers of works performed by Gould — the Czech-Canadian Oskar Morawetz, for example — have asserted the same thing: that Gould ignored basic musical signage to swerve off-road and do his own thing. Then there are the bootlegs of live concerts, and rumours about tapes of private recordings.
Story three: call it “Glenn Gould: YouTube Star.” Watching Gould live, still exhilarating, leaves still more unanswered questions. The narrative of Gould’s brief, incendiary, fretful, problematic, erratic, and eventually discontinued concert career — I mean the story of the concerts themselves before and after his dramatic early visit to the Soviet Union — may well constitute the greatest Glenn Gould unknown of them all, one that transcended his growing awareness of discomfort — psychological, physical, and aesthetic — with the process.
The fourth story (major film potential here) concerns the private, sexual Glenn Gould. This topic has seemingly lost its intrigue, having been exposed to some degree by Michael Clarkson, a journalist (and one-time Toronto Star colleague of mine) who established that Cornelia Foss, even while married to composer Lukas Foss, remained Gould’s mistress until his idiosyncrasies drove her back to her composer husband. Gould’s earlier historians tended to turn a blind eye to Gould’s sex life — well, some of them peeped, but only a little — even though Gould didn’t avoid discussing sex in his writing and thinking
