Glenn Herbert Gould was a genius. Leonard Bernstein thought so and so did Vladimir Ashkenazy. Bernstein remarked once that “There is nobody like him, and I just love playing with him.” George Szell, who conducted Gould with the Cleveland Orchestra, exclaimed to his assistant: “That nut’s a genius!”
Ashkenazy only met Gould once. It was in the mid-1960s, he tells us that Ashkenazy was performing the Mozart Double Concerto with Malcom Frager in Toronto. Gould got in touch and they decided to have lunch. Ashkenazy writes: “He was extremely good company – very warm, very amusing and it was a great pleasure to talk to him….he was extremely intelligent. As for his gift, it was a gift of a genius. His recordings of Bach are incomparable.”
Ashkenazy had actually seen Gould perform in 1957, when Gould was the first North American to play in the Soviet Union since World War II. Gould’s first concert was about half-full, more like a let’s-see-what-this-guy’s-got to-offer kind of crowd. By the time the next concert took place the word had spread and it was a sell-out. Ashkenazy also went to the student’s concert at the conservatorium. Gould performed music by Berg and Schoenberg, “music that had never been heard in Russia at the time because the Communist Party forbade it.”
Gould was also eccentric to the point of being strange and perhaps weird. He developed the habit of popping pills to relieve ailments he thought he was suffering from. He was constantly trying to stay as warm as he could and when recording, the heat had to be turned up to almost unbearable levels. He started wearing heavy clothing even in warm conditions including an astrakhan hat and gloves. In fact he insisted on wearing gloves whenever he had to shake hands. He was once arrested for sitting on a park bench in Sarasota, Florida presumably having been mistaken for a vagrant. He was also prone to cancelling performances at short notice.
In January 1966 the Legges (Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and husband Walter) travelled to New York where Columbia had booked a studio for three sessions and Schwarzkopf was due to record some Richard Strauss lieder with Gould. From the outset Schwarzkopf had her reservations. “Gould began playing something quasi-Straussian,” she wrote later. “We thought he was simply warming up – but no, he continued to play like that throughout the actual recordings. …..my husband and I were baffled……I always tried to be as accurate as possible.” Plus, of course “the studio was incredibly overheated” and Gould refused to sit-in on the day’s recordings.
On the second day a similar pattern occurred and Schwarzkopf started to have misgivings. For his part, Gould saw the collaboration as a meeting of like spirits although he later admitted they had different approaches to the use of rubato. Finally Walter Legge decided to call it a day and the third day was cancelled.
Glenn Herbert Gould was born in Toronto, Canada on 25th September 1932 to Russell and Florence Gold (they later changed their name to Gould by deed poll). Florence could trace her lineage to Edvard Grieg and from an early age she encouraged young Glenn to pursue a musical career. At 3 he had perfect pitch and had learned to read music well before he could read words. At 10, Gould had an accident and his father built him an adjustable chair which Gould took everywhere with him when playing. At 12 he passed his final Conservatory examination and at 13 was performing with the Toronto Symphony. By then he’d developed a clockwise motion when playing and would often hum as he played.
Gould’s American debut was in 1955 and his first recoding, for Columbia, came out the following year. By now he had developed a unique personality on stage that marked him for the rest of his short life. He preferred late Romantic and early 20th century music and later added Bach and Schoenberg. He insisted on playing at a certain height above the floor, a technique that enabled him to play at a fast tempo while maintaining a clarity and evenness for each note. During recitals, the piano would be raised or lowered on wooden blocks. He had to sit 14 inches above the floor and would only play while sitting on the chair his father had made. Sometimes if the flooring was cold he’d insist on a small rug to be placed at his feet. According to Gould’s biographer and fellow Canadian, Kevin Bazzana, Gould believed that “the performer’s role was properly creative [and] he offered original, deeply personal, sometimes shocking interpretations (extreme tempos, odd dynamics, finicky phrasing), particularly in canonical works by Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms.”
On 6 April, 1962 Gould was the soloist in Brahms’ D minor concerto at Carnegie Hall. Bernstein was to accompany him with the New York Philharmonic. Gould had pre-warned Bernstein that he had some new ideas about the concerto. It was to take the form of some tempi changes. After Gould arrived in New York, Bernstein later wrote: “[He} set forth three unbelievable tempi for the three movements. In the first place, they were so slow that the first movement alone took about as much time as it should take to play the whole concerto.”
“I did forewarn the orchestra about this,” Bernstein continues. “I said ‘Now don’t give up because this is a great man whom we have to take seriously.’ ….but they were wonderfully co-operative and went right along with it.” It was very tiring for the orchestra. “After the rehearsal I asked [Gould] if he was still convinced about the ‘slowth’ of this piece,” Bernstein wrote and Gould replied: “more than ever; did you hear how wonderfully the tension built?”
With Gould’s permission, Bernstein also forewarned the Thursday night audience. “You could never get a ticket for Thursday night,” Bernstein adds. “It was a chic night, the night to be there” hoping against hope they wouldn’t desert the concert after the first movement. They didn’t of course. “The house came down although, if I remember correctly, it took well over an hour to play. It was very exciting. I never loved him more.”
Controversy followed. Harold Schonberg, then the chief critic of the New York Times and a serial opponent of Bernstein (especially his podium ‘gymnastics’) wrote his infamous ‘gossip’ letter to: “Dear Ossip, You vill nyever guess vat last night in Carneygie Hall happent! You know what, Ossip? I think that even though the conductor made this big disclaimer, he should not be allowed to wiggle off the hook that easy. I mean, who engaged the Gould boy in the first place? Who is the musical director? Somebody has to be responsible.” He finished with a swipe at Gould’s technique.
The criticism travelled all around the world and according to Bernstein, Gould never received the acclamation and reward his daring interpretation deserved.
Gould’s mannerisms and eccentricity was considered autistic. He suffered constant pains and ailments. As a child he had incurred a spine injury and his doctors prescribed an assortment of analgesics, anxiolytics and other drugs. He was constantly worried about his blood pressure which led him to record the readings.
He had a brief (four and a half years) affair with Cornelia Foss, the wife of composer and conductor Lukas Foss whom Gould had met in Los Angeles in 1956. Cornelia left Lukas for Gould in 1967, taking her two children with her. Cornelia was later to say that “There was a lot of misconception about Glenn, and it was partly because he was very private. But I assure you he was an extremely heterosexual man.” The affair lasted till 1972 when Cornelia returned to Lukas. During her time with Gould, Cornelia mentions serious paranoid episodes. Friends close to Gould have described how he was convinced he was being poisoned and being spied on.
Gould retired from public appearances and began recording in a private studio in New York from 1970. In September 1982 Gould suffered a stroke which left his left side paralysed. He was admitted to the Toronto General Hospital, but his condition rapidly deteriorated. On October 4, his father was forced to deprive him of his life-support. He is buried in Toronto’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery.
At the autopsy, doctors discovered that Gould did not show signs of the many ailments he thought he was suffering from.
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