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IN free articles only all articles this publication Automotive Sports 10,000,000 articles - not found on any other search engine. FindArticles New Statesman Nov 18, 2002
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Advocate, The Air Force Journal of Logistics Air Force Law Review Air Force Speeches ... View all titles in this topic Hot New Articles by Topic Automotive Sports Top Articles Ever by Topic Automotive Sports The last puritan: Henry Sheen on why Glenn Gould still haunts other pianists 20 years after his death - Classical Music - Biography New Statesman Nov 18, 2002 by Henry Sheen
Save a personal copy of this article and quickly find it again with Furl.net. It's free! Save it. In Thomas Bernhard's novel Der Untergeher (The Loser), the virtuoso pianist Wertheimer happens to walk past a room in the Salzburg Conservatorium where the young Canadian Glenn Gould is playing the aria from Bach's Goldberg Variations. The aria is simple, but he has never heard such reverential zeal. It is an "inhuman state" to which he can never aspire. He abandons his musical career, auctions off his piano and takes up the human sciences. Later, he kills himself. On his record-player in the room where he commits suicide is Gould's 1955 recording of the Variations. Glenn Gould died in October 1982. Twenty years on, he remains a spectre to aspirant pianists: revered by most, even the few who dislike his playing concede that Gould's interpretations are always fascinating and instructive. It is fortunate that he bequeathed such a large recording output, a result of his renunciation of the concert hall in 1964 and his subsequent devotion to the recording studio. "At live concerts," he said, "I feel demeaned, like a vaudevillian." He loathed the showpiece element of the concert hall: its artificiality, time constraints and the elevation of the individual above his craft a Romantic legacy as uninteresting to Gould as music that was not contrapuntal. | |
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