The Whispers of Glenn Gould

 

“The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but rather the gradual, 

lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.”
(Glenn Gould)

 

Lately I've been listening to Johann Sebastian Bach's “Goldberg Variations” played by Glenn Gould, and I've seen some old videos of him playing them.

The Goldberg Variations (BWV 988) are a harpsichord work consisting of an aria with thirty variations, composed by Johann Sebastian Bach between 1741 and 1745 and published in Nuremberg by the publisher Balthasar Schmid. And they are among the most famous and difficult to perform classical music keyboard works.

 

The love for classical music dates back to the years between high school and early university, after the teenage years when I only listened to Heavy Metal.

Those were the years in which I needed to let my hearing breathe and they also coincided with the assiduous writing of poems.

I would call it my “classic” period, made up of afternoons listening to classical music, evenings at concerts in Santa Cecilia, weekends at the chess club. It makes me smile to think back to that period, a little too proud.

But it allowed me to get to know some works and artists that I still love today.

Some of them are works of absolute value, a true cultural heritage of humanity, in saecula saeculorum, the Latins said – until the end of the centuries.

 

Like, in fact, the Goldberg Variations.

The work was conceived as a modular architecture of thirty-two pieces, arranged following mathematical schemes and symmetries that make it one of the most fascinating and complex in the history of music for keyboard instruments.

 

Earl Hermann Carl von Keyserling, a great admirer of J. S. Bach, was the Russian ambassador to the Dresden court at the time of the publication of this work. Being a great music lover, he took the promising young Johann Gottlieb Goldberg (born 1727 in Danzig) under his protection so that he could study with J. S. Bach's eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann. In 1740 the earl, sensing the talent of the young Goldberg, sent him to Leipzig to study with J. S. Bach himself. His reputation as a virtuoso soon spread: it was said that he could read any score at first sight, even if placed upside down on the lectern. Bach's first biographer, Johann Nikolaus Forkel, recounts the circumstances in which the composer composed the Aria with several variations for two-manual harpsichord:

In poor health, the Earl often suffered from insomnia, and Goldberg, who lived in his house, had to distract him, on similar occasions, during the night hours, by playing for him in a room adjacent to his. Once the Earl told Bach that he would very much like to have some pieces from him for his Goldberg to play, which were both delicate and witty, so as to be able to distract his sleepless nights.

Bach concluded that the best way to satisfy this desire was to write Variations, a genre that he had not considered with much favor until then because of the basic harmony, always the same. Under his hands, these Variations also became absolute models of art, like all his works of this era. Since then the Earl began to call them “his” Variations. He never tired of listening to them and, for a long time, when he had a sleepless night, he would call: “Dear Goldberg, play me my Variations”.

Thus the story of this work is reported.

It was printed by the publisher Balthasar Schmid of Nuremberg, a friend of Bach.

Only nineteen copies of the first edition have survived, preserved in museums and libraries of rare texts. Among these, the most precious is found in Paris, at the Bibliothèque Nationale and contains corrections and additions signed by the composer.

 

Many were the pianists who ventured into the engraving of this work.

The Variations were composed for a double keyboard harpsichord; therefore the playing difficulties were amplified on the piano, due to the heavier and more demanding mechanics and the acrobatic passages with crossed or superimposed hands made necessary by the single keyboard.

 

Glenn Gould

Glenn Gould's version remains an unsurpassed masterpiece, hailed almost mythically by admirers of the piano and classical music in general.

Glenn Herbert Gould was born in Toronto, Canada on September 25, 1932 where he died on October 4, 1982, and was a pianist, composer, harpsichordist and organist.

He has been called the “James Dean of music”, for his beauty, genius and madness that upset the composed and slightly cheeky world of classical music.

Since he was a child he had perfect pitch and at the age of five he was already composing his first pieces for piano.

At the conservatory he beat all the other students, winning competitions, to the point that even the famous Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard dedicated to him the first book of the trilogy on the Arts (music, theater and painting) that the author wrote between 1983 and 1985: “The Loser”. One of his best-known works that tells of the fictitious relationship between the Canadian pianist and two of his young fellow students at the Mozarteum in Salzburg in the 1950s.

The narrator and his friend Wertheimer (from a wealthy Jewish family) drop out of piano studies as soon as they realize Glenn Gould's superior genius when they hear him play Bach's Goldberg Variations.

 

Listed as one of the greatest pianists who ever lived thanks to his exceptional technique, sensitivity and absolute modernity in the reinterpretation and interpretation of the classics, he is remembered above all for his recordings of music by Bach, Beethoven and the piano repertoire of the twentieth century.

He stopped performing in concert in 1964, with one last public concert in Los Angeles, California, devoting himself entirely to studio recording for the rest of his career.

He died in 1982 in Toronto following a stroke, where he is buried in Mount Pleasant Cemetery.

He was famous for his acrobatic speed and clean notes, with a lowered posture on the piano on a folding chair, with individually adjustable legs, which his father, Bert Gould, had built, and continued to use it even when it was almost completely worn out.

Glenn Gould recorded two versions, years later, the first more dynamic and faster, and the last more introspective. Both are considered two masterpieces. And to say, that at first, the publishing house did not want to register them because a very famous version had already been made by the famous Wanda Landowska in 1933 and 1946.

 

What made him famous, in addition to his unsurpassed technique, was also the curious habit of humming all the time while playing. Which drove his sound engineers crazy, who weren't always able to exclude the voice from his recordings. Gould claimed that his singing was something involuntary, and that it increased in proportion to the piano's inability to perform the music exactly as he intended it.

It is enough to watch a video while he plays: the lips follow the fingers, or rather, the fingers follow his singing lips.

 

He was not the only one to have this peculiarity.

Jazz pianist Keith Jarrett is no exception. “The Köln Concert” is his recording, it's a solo improvisation performed at the Cologne Opera in 1975. It is considered the most famous solo jazz album, with 3.5 million copies sold. During this concert Jarrett, all the while, in moments of increasing intensity, he gasps, shouts, stamps his feet on the platform.

Breaths and snorts can be heard from the nose.

But in jazz this is already more normal, unlike classical music where everything is more formal and conservative.

 

Reviewing Glenn Gould's videos made me think about the peculiarities of classical music.

The creation of the masters, the works of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, are musical scores – I even bought some of Beethoven at the time, for no sensible reason, because I was unable to read music.

But, in fact, those books full of notes in the staff are their artistic creations. Equivalent to Cervantes' “Don Quixote”, Monet's “Water Lilies”, sculptor Antonio Canova's “Eros and Psyche” or Cartier-Bresson's photographs.

But in this case we do not need “other eyes” that make us see the shapes of the statue, or the colors of Monet's palette, or the voice that reads us the pages of Cervantes.

There is no mediation.

We buy the book, go to the museum, see the photographs.

Simple and banal truth.

 

Therefore, it was so stupid to buy the score of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, alongside the CDs of the various versions, but it also retains its romantic meaning.

Because, in fact, that dense network of notes for pages and pages, are the real creation sprung from the mind of the German genius.

But, as it is, it slips out of our fingers, out of all understanding and enjoyment, unless one can read and play music. And whatever it is a symphony is not a sonata for piano or viola. It remains impregnable even to those who know music, in the solitude of their own room.

 

I imagined what it would be like if this magic of the sounds of the voice accompanying Glenn Gould on the piano were also possible for the other arts.

Thinking about it, it's melancholy to have nothing but the final result: whether it is a novel, a painting, a photograph, a sculpture, there is no trace of who created them.

How it would be to step through the pages of Moby Dick and be able to listen to Melville's snorts as he writes about the whale wriggling in the water, perhaps with the sound of breaking water as children do when they play.

Or the melancholy sighs of Giacomo Leopardi seated beyond the hedge.

Maybe even Cartier-Bresson was humming as he walked the streets of Paris.

It also happened to me many times to speak alone, or to snort impatiently or shout excitedly during moments of photos that did not arrive or captured at the right time.

 

It's as if it were an excess of life, which prolongs in art, and makes it “human”.

I believe that this is the charm of Glenn Gould's voice, whispered between the notes, and that the audio engineers thought it was a flaw to be eliminated.

A flaw in perfection.

While it is precisely what made it recognizable, unique and distinguishable from any other version of that masterpiece.

 

Glenn Gould, 1956. The LIFE Pictures Collection - Getty

In reality, that very mistake, that voice “from outside”, gives us back a dimension of the work that other forms of art cannot.

I can just think of some old recordings of our poets reciting their poems on the radio.

 

The image of Glenn Gould, bent over himself, swaying gracefully almost in placid ecstasy in front of the piano without even the score, chanting like a dirge one of the most difficult and complex masterpieces to play, is thrilling.

Which is paired with the older one, as a young man, in a dressing gown, wilder and more aggressive as he hits the piano keys and yells at them.

The difference between throwing up the music out with the impetuosity of a bizarre and careless young genius, to the now achieved enlightened mastery that makes him swing and hum fully enjoying it, without the need for speed and aggression: the music is completely inside him, more in the voice barely hinted at almost, than in the fingers that just caress the top.

It is thanks to him that we can enjoy Bach's genius, and at the same time his genius.

 

It wouldn't be bad if every work we love, every painting, poem, photograph, novel, had that pulsating pocket of life of those who created or created it.

 

If only to feel them closer to us.

 

“I always assumed everybody shared my love for overcast skies. 

It came as a shock to find out that some people prefer sunshine.” 

(Glenn Gould) 

 

Glenn Gould plays Bach

Glenn Gould 1/4 Goldberg Variations (HQ audio - 1981)

 

Thomas Bernhard: “The Loser” ( Faber And Faber Ltd., 2012)

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Italian version