The pianistic part of classical concert life from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s was dominated by Canada's Gould and America's Van Cliburn. Apart from resounding successes in Russia at the height of the Cold War (Cliburn's first-place finish in the 1958 Tchaikovsky Competition was the stuff of which ticker-tape parades was made -- his subsequent recording of the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1 went platinum for RCA), the two pianists couldn't have been more different. Cliburn was a romantic with a big romantic sound. Gould's technique was virtuosic, but his fleetness, clarity, detached touch and absence of pedal was made to order for his unconventional choice of recorded calling card. Bach's Goldberg Variations, had only enjoyed recorded success when harpsichordist Wanda Landowska played it a generation earlier.
Not only was Gould's performance revolutionary in its fleet tempos tempos and skipped repeats, it flew in the face of the then-burgeoning authentic instrument movement which had returned Bach to the harpsichord for which he wrote. Gould singlehandedly yanked Bach back to the piano, albeit a piano of leaner than usual sonorities, as if he had reached under the lid and stripped the meat from the piano strings. Rethinking the piece, assimilating it, and playing it seemingly from the inside out - although the line had blurred between internal Bach and internal Gould - the performance wasn't merely shocking in its difference from what went before. It was fresh, energized and energizing - the antithesis of what was soon to be called sewing-machine Bach that tinkled from an explosion of harpsichords. That recording has never been out of the catalog.
Gould (1932-1982) arrived early on the concert scene, making his concert debut at 13 in his native Toronto. He says he only ever wanted to live there, felt comfortable only there and at his parents' cottage at nearby Lake Simcoe. He became an international figure in 1957, electrifying the Russian concert world. Recordings exist of some of those performances, as does black and white footage. Hozier and Raymont are nothing if not diligent excavators, and they've got a lot to excavate, including Gould gazing intently into this or that camera or talking into this or that microphone. Paradoxically, for all his legendary privacy and frequent recourse to isolation as a psychic safety zone, there's a lot of footage and sound bites, and the filmmakers enlisted all the right talking heads, including Cornelia Foss, the painter wife of composer-conductor-pianist Lukas Foss. "It was a very straightforward triangle," she says of the years she and her two children shuttled between the two men. Although their liaison ended when she wanted out after feeling he was taking too many pills and felt his controlling ways had grown too confining, the two grown Foss children recall Gould fondly and even admiringly, remarking that he was always respectful and caringly avuncular.
The legend of Gould's unconventional behavior began at that first recording session in 1958, when he showed up bearing his own chair with legs sawed down to 13 inches (he sat lower to the keyboard than other pianists) plus the little rug it sat on. Although it was June, he was swathed in a heavy coat, cap, wool muffler and gloves -- a sartorial choice from which he almost never deviated. He fussed over the temperature in the studio and soaked his hands in hot water for 20 minutes before playing. Several engineers say his performances were almost superhumanly devoid of wrong notes, yet he insisted on multiple takes anyway, presumably alert to nuances they missed. Yet the quote that most sticks with one is from his longtime collaborator in Toronto, who makes us realize what a desperately lonely man Gould must have been when he spontaneously asked the man to legally become his brother (a request gently turned down when then engineer said he wasn't sure how his other siblings would take it).
As time passed, Gould forsook speedy tempos for slower ones, sometimes being accused of being perversely slow His recording of Mozart Sonatas is overthought, a taffy-pull. But his re-recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations in 1982, a few months before he died, is more than just much slower than his first recording (51 minutes to the original's 38), and not just because he included more repeats. The later performance has more breadth and reflection. Tempos were always a much-discussed aspect of his playing. Famously, in 1962 at Carnegie Hall, Leonard Bernstein disowned Gould's ideas about Brahms's First Piano Concerto to a packed house before they performed it. Bernstein, like Gould, was no stranger to showmanship. Gould knew his well-publicized ways sold records. His record sales enabled him to give up concertizing entirely in 1964, a form of music-making he says hated, exposing him as it did to drafts, pianos he couldn't fine-tune and a process that pressured performances to become mechanical and soulless. One can't disagree with his statement that there's no point in recording a classical piece if it's going to sound like any others, including your own previous ones.
Gould was quite happy to retreat to the studio, to an environment he could control. This was an option because of his record sales. He was a great tinkerer and technophile, to say nothing of a provocative essayist and thinker. His so-called sound documentaries on The Idea of North and Petula Clark remain vibrant still and anticipated the likes of Radiohead. By the time he died, he had embarked upon experimenting with several formats. Had he lived, the age of digitization would have been right in his wheelhouse. With even-handed contextualization, the film makes clear that he could only have done what he did because he arrived when he did, when sound recording was on the verge of tremendous advances.
Although his longtime Toronto friendships were obviously the real thing, he was demanding, and relied on gray, WASPy, buttoned-down Toronto to back off and give him the private space he insisted on, even when isolation would sometimes bite him. Hozer and Raymont punctuate the film with long shots of an actor walking, solitary, swathed in Gould's trademark bundled-up gear. One juxtaposition sticks. After his behavior tilted toward paranoia and his hypochondriacal pill cocktails sealed the split between Gould and Cornelia Foss, we see the actor walking alone on a deserted beach in a long shot. Cut to today's Cornelia Foss doing the same. Although Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould is a rich treasury of archival shots and is far from slighting of Gould's rare musical gifts, it is, in the end, more about emotional distance and isolation than genius, and the film nails it.
For more information about Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould, visit Kino Lorber. To order Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould, go to TCM Shopping.
by Jay Carr
