The afternoon Glenn Gould changed music
Around 4 p.m. next Sunday afternoon at 1600 21st Ave. NW in Washington, D.C., young Canadian pianist Stewart Goodyear is scheduled to relive a moment in musical history.
For it was 61 years earlier in that very spot, the Music Room of the Phillips Gallery, that the man fated to become the most celebrated classical musician in Canadian history launched his international career.
Already embarked upon such a career, Goodyear has said of Glenn Gould’s American debut, “To me that concert is just as historic as the premiere of The Rites of Spring in Paris in 1913. It basically changed music history. Because of Glenn Gould, there is a new way of listening to the piano, a new way of programming.”
Few would argue with Goodyear’s second point. His Washington program begins (as did Gould’s) with Orlando Gibbons’ Pavane for the Earl of Salisbury and includes Sweelinck’s Fantasia Chromatica, Five Sinfonias and the Partita No. 5 in G Major by Bach, Webern’s Variations for Piano, Op. 27 and Beethoven’s Sonata in E Major, Op. 109, before concluding with Berg’s Sonata in One Movement, Op. 1.
In his review in the Washington Post, Paul Hume wrote, “We know of no pianist anything like him of any age.”
Gould acknowledged later that he had deliberately chosen the most off-beat program he could imagine. As we know now it was to be a short career in the concert hall. He hated performing in public and retired to the recording studio at the astonishingly early age of 31.
That early retirement, carefully planned, enabled him to produce one of the most impressive discographies in the annals of the piano.
Although he made earlier discs for small Canadian labels, he signed an exclusive contract with Columbia Records (later CBS and later still Sony Classical) following the New York recital that followed on the heels of his Washington debut.
That contract began with what was to become one of the iconic documents of the classical LP era, a rare recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, a work ordinarily associated with the harpsichord.
By a sad twist, a re-recording of the Goldberg was also to be Gould’s final recording before his death in 1982 at the premature age of 50.
In between, he recorded just about anything he wanted, although he told me once that most of his highly criticized Mozart recordings were his record company’s idea. He preferred Haydn.
The list of composers to fall beneath his fingers extends from unlikely Tudor notesmiths such as Byrd and Gibbons to Hindemith and Krenek. He even celebrated his country’s centennial with an album of music by 20th-century Canadian composers (Oskar Morawetz, Istvan Anhalt and Jacques Hétu).
Although he did record his own Wagner transcriptions, such Romantic composers as Chopin and Rachmaninov are conspicuously absent from his Sony discography.
Granted, he did record the Grieg Sonata in E minor, insisting that the Norwegian composer was a distant relative, but his friend John Roberts told me of the time his record company sent along the score of the popular Grieg Concerto, hoping its star pianist would agree to record it.
As Roberts recalls, Gould played the entire concerto from sight, note perfectly, closed the score and said, simply, “No, it’s not for me.”
It is painful to think of the things Gould might have recorded had death not intervened. What he did record for Columbia-CBS-Sony Classical has now been brought together in a remarkable box: 78 remastered compact discs of music, three more of interviews, plus a handsome 416-page hardcover book with all the original notes, plus an essay by his pre-eminent biographer, Kevin Bazzana.
There is the Bach soundtrack for the film version of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, his Handel Suites played on harpsichord and his “Concert Dropout” conversation with producer John McClure; there is even his magnum opus as a composer, the String Quartet No. l, as well as his talk on Bach in German.
In German? Well, he didn’t really speak the language. When I complimented him on his fake German pronunciation in a satirical spoof, he responded conspiratorially, “but I have no vocabulary!” An autodidact, he learned only what interested him. The rest of us he taught.