INTERVIEW WITH GLENN GOULD

Just about everything concerning Glenn Gould is, to say the least, unconventional. He is practically self-taught; he gave public, live concerts for a very brief time, yet his records and tapes are heard constantly wherever classical piano music is broadcast His life style is unconventional He defies tradition in his views toward his instrument, classical music, and the whole aura that surrounds the usual concept of the world of the classical pianist

It was very natural, then, to begin the conversation with the comment that no one had heard Glenn Gould play a live concert in the United States for a number of years. His reply was typical

Nobody else has either because I haven't given concerts since 1964. In the first place, I toured for only eight years, which is really not very long. In the 1956-57 season, I began touring Europe as well as the United States, and that continued to '64. Before I began touring in '56, I had not in my whole life played more than may be thirty or forty concerts; and that's incredibly few. But I did a lot of broadcasting at that time and I found even in my early teens that for me the most comfortable situation was the studio environment and not the concert environment (...).

From the moment I began broadcasting, that medium seemed like another world, as indeed it is. The moment I began to experi­ence the studio environment, my whole reaction to what I could do with music under the proper circumstances changed totally. From then on, concerts were less than second best; they were merely something to be gotten through. They were a very poor substitute for a real artistic experience.

Now, I obviously couldn't imagine how many effects this view was going to have on my life, but I was immediately attracted to the whole electronic experience (...).

After a time, about 1956 or '57, I became profoundly dissatisfied with the whole experience of giving concerts because not only did I not enjoy them per se, but my then-new experience with recording now put what I was going to do in concert in direct competition with what I could do in the studio; and I knew there was no way those two things could properly be reconciled. The recording, for me, is not a picture postcard of a concert. The attempt to record as though one is trying to capture a mystical moment in time - so-and-so at the Royal Albert Hall on a particular night with eighty-five de­gree temperature and ninety percent humidity - is a form of neoromanticism. Trying to capture such a mood, I think, is against the nature of the recording process because, first of all, recordings are to be a certain degree timeless. Recordings are something outside of history, outside of a particular environment context (.,.).

As long as we're on the subject of recordings, which would you say are your finest recording accomplishments? Is there any one or two or three, or any group of things that you've done that stand out as especially good to you?

My favorite record from my catalogue, I think, is a recording of music by Byrd and Gibbons which, first of all, as music, is very close to my heart. I have always been very fond of music for the virginals - indeed, all of the music of the English Tudor com­posers-and, fortunately, I have a piano which can be made to sound rather harpsichordistic, if not clavichordistic.

It is strange you should choose that recording. Ordinarily when one thinks of Glenn Gould, one thinks of Schoenberg and Bach. Would you say you're a specialist in those two areas, or would you not, want to be labeled in any such way?

I don't mind being labeled as a specialist that way, but I think it's necessary occasionally to remind people that I have also recorded all the Mozart sonatas, most of the Beethoven sonatas, and of course all the Beethoven concertos, as well as a lot of things by Hindemith, and pieces by Prokofieff, and Grieg, and Bizet, and Scriabin, and so on. As a matter of fact, not long ago I recorded an album of Sibelius (...).

What is it about Schoenbergs music that attracts you?

I think I was first attracted to it because some of my teachers hated it... . Actually I've always been attracted to music that is in one way or another contrapuntal, whereas I'm essentially bored by homophonic music. Indeed, I've often said that I have something like a century-long blind spot with regard to music. It's roughly demar­cated by The Art of Fugue on one side and Tristan on the other, and almost everything in between is, at best, the subject of admira­tion rather than love. I'd have to exclude Beethoven from that gen­eralization and certain works of Haydn and Mendelssohn, but there's a great deal of music written during that time that I don't play at all - Schubert, Chopin, Schumann, for example. (...).

And my tastes in contemporary music, similarly, are really very limited. I cannot bear Stravinsky, for example; I've never been able to tolerate his music. And his music certainly is vertically oriented to a very high degree, and only minimally interesting from the hori­zontal perspective. By comparison, the integration between line and harmonic balance is very apparent in the best of Schoenberg's works; in fact, one could say that the pursuit of that kind of integration is one of Schoenberg's tradesmarks, and I'm not just speaking of the twelve-tone works. But as far as what attracts me is concerned, I guess I'd have to say that I'm attracted to different aspects of his art at different periods of his life. (...). Experiments aside, I find the mood of those early twelve-tone pieces remarkable. They have a charm and freshness of approach which is quite extraordinary (...).

What about Bach?

Well, you know, the only pianist who had any kind of influence on me when I was growing up-vis-à-vis the Bach repertoire - was Rosalyn Tureck.* I have a great admiration for her principally be­cause, back in the forties when I was a student, one was told one must look for guidance regarding Bach interpretation to figures like Edwin Fisher, Landowska, Casals, and so on. And these were late-romantic figures who certainly played in a very mesmeric way - no question about it. But what they did, for the most part, didn't seem to me to have a great deal to do with Bach. And then I heard Tureck. By the time I heard her recordings, I was, I think, about sixteen (...) By that time, my own style was quite formed - spare,

unpedaled; and then I heard somebody else who was doing some­thing essentially similar... And so my exposure to her recordings was not so much a question of influence as of reinforcement; it was nice to know that somebody else was working in essentially the same di­rection. I must say that I found her tempi then, as I do now, un­necessarily slow most of the time; but that didn't really matter be­cause the relationship between the parts, both in terms of architec­tural parts, and linear parts, was so well thought out that tempo be­came a relative, essentially unimportant matter, subservient to some­thing else.

What about the format, the represantation, for example, of the recital? There are rumors that the recital format is out, or at least is on way out.

Well, I don't go to concerts - I rarely did, even when I was giv­ing them... so I can't honestly tell you that such a format has no validity in today's scheme of things. But it doesn't for me, certainly, as far as I'm concerned, music is something that ought to be lis­tened to in private. I do not believe that it should be treated as group therapy or any kind of communal experience. I think that mu­sic ought to lead the listener - and, indeed, the performer - to a state of contemplation, and I don't think it's really possible to attain that condition with 2,999 other souls sitting all around. So my strongest objections to the concert are primarily moral rather than musical (...).

From: Great Pianists Speak for Themselves by E. Mach

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 997