Denis Dutton on Glenn Gould
THOUGH THE WORLD OF MUSIC and art has always been thought to thrive on novelty, history teaches us that it often rejects the imaginatively new simply because it is too new. Examples are limitless, but I have in mind something that interested me back in the late 1950s. It was then common to complain that virtually all of the younger generation of pianists (and not only pianists) were musically indistinguishable from one another. All very fine technically, so the story went, but what of spirit? They all played “like machines,” devoid of temperament, of individual personality.
Generally speaking, I agreed. A child of the LP era, I nevertheless lurked in dusty record shops searching out the 78 discs of de Pachmann, Rosenthal, Friedman, Lhevinne, Godowsky, and my pianistic idols, Rachmaninoff and Hofmann. However remote or scratchy the sound of those recordings, the performances they transcribed were full of musical life, the deeply personal testaments of musicians of character. But I soon learned that many who shared my interest in pianists of generations past seemed motivated more by nostalgia than by a desire to hear great artistry from any age. For most collectors, a musician could only be of interest if he was at least retired, and preferably dead. This attitude, though it involved the continued veneration of some of history’s most admirable performing musicians, was — and still is — based more in a sentimental longing for a Golden Age of performance than it was in a continuing search for musical genius.
The acid test that revealed to my satisfaction the narrow mentality of my fellow 78 enthusiasts was Glenn Gould. Against mechanical technicians, here was a pianist whose interpretations were at once imaginative, coherent, and utterly unlike anything heard before. The young Gould was dismissed as an eccentric, though I had noticed that eccentricity was a virtue when heard in the recordings of the old de Pachmann. How I wished I had possessed the apparatus to add 78 clicks and surface noise to, say, Gould’s Beethoven Opus 109 and present it as a lost Friedman or Godowsky recording. I could only imagine the reaction: No one can play Beethoven like that anymore! (This would have been a variation on Gould’s concept of “creative cheating,” put to the task of rooting out a form of what he called the “Van Meegeren syndrome.”)
Now, as fate would have it, it falls to us to be nostalgic about the artistry of Glenn Gould, a phenomenon so compelling, so unlike anything else in music in our time, that it is impossible to imagine that he will be forgotten. In fact, I would hazard that if there is any twentieth-century performing musician who is still listened to five hundred years from now, it will be Glenn Gould. His recorded legacy is as close as I can conceive to being a permanent contribution to the history of musical art as any body of performance produced since the invention of the phonograph.
The artistry of Gould cannot, I believe, be thought about in the same way as we usually think about the work of other performers. In arguing this, I want to apply to Gould two terms which, since they are these days applied to everything from opera singers to sports cars, have practically lost all meaning. I claim that in a fundamental sense Gould’s art is inimitable and significantly unique. Of course, carried to some ultimate point of analysis, every musical performance is inimitable, as in a trivial sense every snowflake is unique. Nevertheless, I defend these as significant characterizations of Gould’s genius.
