Introduction to The
Last Puritan:
Glenn Gould (1932 ~ 1982)
© Bruno Monsaingeon
Los
Angeles - late July 1973
I happen to be spending a few days in the company of Yehudi Menuhin who
came to give two concerts in California. Tomorrow, he will travel
back to Europe while I will be flying to Toronto where I am to meet Glenn
Gould for the first time. I mention this to Yehudi, curious as I
am to know his feelings vis-a-vis an artist whom I admire but have never
met, although we did exchange a rather voluminous written correspondence
over the past few months. Much to my surprise, I learn that Yehudi
and Glenn know each other personally; that they have in fact played together.
Yehudi undertakes to relate the occasion:
"It dates back to 1965; Glenn Gould
had invited me to participate in one of his television appearances and
had asked me to play with him sonatas by Bach and Beethoven and...the
Schönberg Fantasy. As you well know, Schönberg is not amongst
those twentieth century composers for whose music I have an immediate
and irresistible appeal. When I arrived at Glenn's place in Toronto
for our first scheduled rehearsal, I met a man of genius to whom the Schönbergian
structures and idiom were natural elements. We worked on the Fantasy
together and he magnificently managed to convey to me the profound understanding
and true love he had for that music. It was a revelation."
Toronto - one day later
I let into my hotel room a very odd individual
muffled up in a sizeless overcoat and wearing cap, scarves, gloves and
overshoes despite the hot weather outside. In the course of the
subsequent first fifteen hours of uninterrupted conversation, I feel submerged
by his intensity, his warmth and his humour. Our mutual admiration
for Menuhin provides us with a most opportune conversation opener:
"Two days prior to the taping sessions,
Yehudi came to Toronto hardly knowing the Schönberg Fantasy. While
we were working on it, I witnessed his progressive immersion into the
work of which he finally gave an intensely poetic and heart- rending reading.
It was a revelation."
Such was the appropriate beginning to what
was to prove an incredibly productive ten years of collaboration between
Glenn Gould and myself. This collaboration resulted in two series
of films, the last one designed to represent his musical testament - containing
the Goldberg Variations as the ultimate instalment we were given
to complete - and for which we had further plans for a few years to come.
I was still more or less a kid then and
he was approaching his fortieth year. My professional activity as
musician and film-maker had hardly begun, whereas he had already been
the subject of a legend. Moreover I was living in France where he
had never set foot ("The French nation has known worse crises than
my absence," he said to me.) and towards whose music and art, a few
exceptions aside, he felt no inclination; now that he has departed, thereby
depriving my own existence of a part of the essential content with which
he had provided it, I often and timidly wonder, like Thomas Mann's Dr.
Zeitblom attempting to draw the portrait of Adrian Leverkuhn, what might
have been the common ground on which our friendship was founded and without
which no long-term association would have been possible.
I suppose that more than age analogy, more
than geographic rooting, and more even than community of experience and
interests, it is a community of preoccupations that is most likely to
fecundate friendship. Here I was attempting to give musical form
and expression to films, confronted with a great man who was convinced
that his best musical thought went into recordings and that the best analogy
to be found vis-a-vis the making of a record involving musical interpretation
was in the filming process - a man who was convinced that concentrated
communication required isolation from the world with which one eventually
wanted to communicate and also the whole apparatus of preconception, production
and post-production editorial after-thought. And yet of all pianists,
he was in a sense the one who needed least the assistance of the editorial
blade because of the unparalleled infallibility of his technical resources
and the superb lucidity of his conceptions.
It will already have been guessed: Glenn
Gould is in my opinion the most important personality of the present musical
world, not only as a pianist (even though many people, because of their
attachment to pre-ordained categories, ignore or prefer to ignore that
he was much more: "I am," he said, "a Canadian writer and
broadcaster who happens to play the piano in his spare time.") but
also as a musical thinker: composer, writer, sociologist, theoretician
and prophet of the means of communication of the future, and finally moralist.
Let us imagine for a moment that we are
in the audience at one of the concerts that established Glenn Gould's
international reputation in 1955 - we immediately know that we are dealing
with the foremost pianist of the century. Such an assertion, however,
does not mean very much, because what he is bringing lies in an altogether
different and elevated sphere. His kingdom does not belong in the
same world. By deserting a few years later, at the age of 32 and
at the peak of fame according to a carefully premeditated plan which nobody
believed he would follow, the bloodthirsty arena of public concerts, to
confine his activity to the hermetically sealed privacy of the recording
studio, Glenn Gould was assigning a new role to the interpreter and defining
a new concept of interpretation. Concert audiences seldom have a
clear idea of what a concert artist's career represents. What they
perceive as a unique occasion is often not much more than an act of routine
which ensnares in their own trap those who commit themselves to it.
The preservation of artistic and emotional integrity, despite the easy
and deceptive seduction of power which success seems to bring about, is
hardly ever the preoccupation of artists whose lives are made up of intrigue,
rivalry, comparison and tiresome repetitiveness.
The present book, Le dernier Puritain
(Ed.), contains some extremely touching pages on a few artists who have
maintained a purity of purpose and who resisted the temptations of the
'amoral' world of the public concert while still participating in it.
It remains nonetheless a world which Glenn Gould refuses to understand
and which he rejects on the basis of an essentially moral position.
All in all, Gould champions the delightfully totalitarian idea according
to which there should exist in art no concept of "demand" but
only a concept of "supply", or at least that the artist must
not take into account the "demand" of the public. The
consequences of such a system of autocratic thinking are immense albeit
unexpected. On the one hand, the repertoire which an artist like
Glenn Gould tackles gives the impression of an infinitely expanding universe
instead of undergoing the inevitable shrinking process which is that of
the concert artist's who submits to the pressure of time and of his public's
requirements. There is something miraculous in that, by the sheer
strength of his personality, Glenn Gould should have been able to impose
a type of repertoire which did not a priori seem to meet with the
criteria of the musical market.
When Glenn Gould decided to withdraw from
the stage, nobody seriously believed that the discs which he was to continue
to record were going to have a prolonged commercial career, because of
the interruption of the artist's public appearances which one assumed
were the necessary instrument of the continuity of an otherwise unsaleable
marketing image - and also because of the supposed austerity and uncompromising
quality of the pianist's options in terms of repertoire. In but
a few years of concert activity, Glenn Gould had secured a sufficiently
firm financial basis that would allow him to resist the danger of making
concessions ("Another bad week like that on Wall Street, he once
remarked jestingly, and I'll have to record the Grieg and the Tsjaikovski
concertos to recoup!").
More profoundly perhaps, this autocratic
thinking allowed him to redefine the concept of interpretation.
First of all he felt that unless the performer evolved a radically different
- and of course consistent - conception of a piece, different from what
had previously been stated by his colleagues as well as by himself, there
was no justification in his performing it. This amounts to asserting
the autonomy of the performer in relation to the score, as well as the
possibility of an interpretive pluralism: for Glenn Gould there can exist
a multiplicity of equally valid and sublime versions of the same work.
One cannot therefore judge or evolve an interpretation according to the
canons of a tradition or the spirit of a given time - which would lead
to total conformity - but only according to its structural consistency.
The distinction between creation and interpretation tends to disappear
when one hears Glenn Gould, because he invents something which had not
even touched our imagination.
In that sense, Glenn Gould is the first
non-figurative interpreter: once he has grasped the structure of a work,
he can allow himself to treat it in the manner of a film-maker who adapts
a book for a film, or of a painter who transposes the reality of his model
on that other reality which is his canvas; the work poses for him.
In that sense also, Glenn Gould is the interpreter who is closest to the
listener, for he invites the latter to participate with him in the exploration
of an unknown territory, in the deciphering of signs whose code would
have long been lost. The listener who wishes to find in an interpretation
that he knows already cannot but reject him. The other listener
participates with him in the ecstasy of the creation of a new work of
art which is much more than just the ephemeral expression of an emotion
or the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline: "The purpose
of art," wrote Glenn, "is the gradual, life-long construction
of a state of wonder and serenity."
Engaged in the structure of the music, detached
from the instrument which he had mastered to perfection, Glenn seemed
to be possessed by a kind of clinical ecstasy when he played. Thinking
as a composer, he identified creatively with the work performed and could
therefore allow himself a critical and non-servile attitude towards the
score. Harnessing the undissipated intellectual power that only
solitude can give, he could engage himself in a manifold enterprise as
pianist, composer, writer and broadcaster: a kind of meditation in action
on the concept of communication in the era of technology and of the "charitable"
machine. Technology, he hoped, would be a redeemer. A sin
had been committed at the end of the eighteenth century and if technology
helped to put less emphasis on the notion of individual and separate identity,
as well as on the hierarchical subdivisions that art seems to imply, composer,
interpreter and listener should be in a state to reclaim the unity shattered
by the artistic concepts of the Romantic age.
Blessed as he was with the conjunction of
an incomparably compelling intellect and seemingly limitless pianistic
gifts, yet also distrustful of fingers he saw as dangerous agents full
of thought-dictating potential, Glenn could dispense with practicing,
that chore of a musician's daily routine. Indeed, if, aside from
our working and shooting sessions, I did hear Glenn play the piano quite
often for his, or our own pleasure (Ah! that first time, in the
warehouse where his piano was stored, when I was granted a six hour long
recital consisting of Schubert's 5th Symphony, the entire Elektra
of Richard Strauss, Hindemith's 3rd Sonata, Lieder by Schönberg, and
the final scene from Strauss' Capriccio.) The only time I
ever heard Glenn actually practice the piano happened a few days before
he was scheduled to record the Webern Concert for nine instruments for
his Television series Music in our time. We were working
on the details of a script, when suddenly, in the middle of the night,
he asked me if I would not mind wasting a few minutes. As usual,
he had studied the score away from the piano. Its intricate parts
had become so integrated in his mind that he suddenly discovered he had
to go to the piano to force his fingers to "unlearn" the parts
of the other instruments involved in the piece! In fact, the whole
concept of repetitiveness on which the practice of music has so far been
based appeared to him entirely nonsensical and deprived of the creative
spark that makes music an ecstatic experience. A new vision of the
same work was of course always possible, but it would not be conditioned
by the deteriorating influence of overexposure. If Glenn decided
to record a work again - that happened only two or three times in 26 years
of recording endeavours - his decision was based on technological reasons
as well as on the conviction that he could establish an entirely new relationship
to the work in question and envisage it from a completely different and
coherent angle.
Of this attitude, I was the privileged participant
when, amongst many other ventures, I directed the film of Bach's Goldberg
Variations which he re-recorded one year before his death. The filming
sessions, which coincided with those of the sound recording, took place
over a period of several months during which I would travel back and forth
from Europe and he between Toronto and New York. We kept in daily
contact, spending countless nights on transatlantic calls singing to each
other over the telephone the variations that remained to be filmed so
as to make sure that we would finally achieve a perfectly integrated structure
of picture and sound.
The film which ensued remains for me in
the estate of dreams, because I know that I probably never again will
extract from an "interpreter" such an intense and confident
participation in the staging process, which partly accounts for the unequalled
strength of its impact as a musical film. As to the record, which
is made up of the sound track of the film, it presents the sumptuous testimony
of its author's ability to renew himself radically in an act of mystical
lucidity. It was to be released a few days before Glenn's death,
thereby surrounding his existence, as though it had been interpolated
between the two peaceful Arias and the two recordings - one opening, the
other closing his career- of Bach's masterpiece, with a symbol of cyclic
perfection. "A work," Glenn had written in his sleeve
notes for his 1956 first recording, "which observes neither beginning
nor end." This seems to me the opportune moment to point out
the extraordinary equation which, as with Sebastian Bach, exists between
the contrapuntal idea and Gould's thinking. It has become a cliché,
to wonder on the clarity of his playing, on that unique capacity to differentiate
the polyphonic texture of a work. Even the most relentless detractors
of Gould could not but acknowledge that fact and, for the layman, the
feeling he has, when listening to Gould, of being able to hear everything,
of participating to an "internal" reading of the score whose
every single element seems to become perceptible thanks to the fanatic
precision of a perfectly designed pattern, is not the least among the
charms of Gould's playing.
One must however examine matters further,
because, to attempt to reduce to a mere phenomenon of pianistic technique
such an exceptional ability to lead a multiplicity of voices along a true
polyphony of ideally differentiated phrasings, must obviously be ruled
out. All that can only proceed from a thought, and Gould's thought,
like his activities and his tastes, falls within the province of an essentially
contrapuntal philosophy. Indeed, his very existence is akin to a
gigantic perpetual fugue, to a form which ponders about its own form and
which defines it. Like all good fugal themes whose utterances are
not conclusive but rather generate an answer and create from their own
substance an infinitely expanding and perennially unfinished universe,
Gould's existence responds to another realm of sensitivity than that to
which we are usually bound, and reaches out towards the world of transcendence.
Glenn Gould's world dismisses the concept of conflict as a principle of
action; it is, in the proper sense of the word, "asexual," contemplative
and ecstatic, passionate yet antisensual, and merges in the divinely ordained
nature of contrapuntal organisation. Like the fugal universe, it
subscribes to a concept of incessant motion and continuous variation which
withstands the assaults of fashion and time, which repels the theatrical
notions based on accumulation of contrast that were secreted and subsequently
exploited by Romanticism. The multiplicity of Gouldian projects,
activities and themes also proceeds from the same spirit of contrapuntal
superposition which totally absorbs the intellect and entails an absolute
control of time, of space, and of their most refined subdivisions.
Gould did not repeat himself, he did not append extendable devices to
his work which therefore inevitably had to remain unfinished, whatever
might have been the time of his death. As with Bach's Art of the
Fugue, however, it is above all an aura of withdrawal which pervades the
ultimate production of Gould. In his quest of anonymity, which according
to him every artist should pursue, he "was in fact withdrawing, from
the pragmatic concerns of music-making into an idealized world of uncompromised
invention." Once he carried out a few more projects that were
particularly close to his heart, Gould - only some of us knew about that
- was going to stop making records; after a few years of a glittering
but enigmatic concert career, after a quarter of a century spent in the
recording studio, after having moreover produced innumerable radio programmes
and published a huge amount of writings on a wide variety of subjects,
Glenn Gould was about to withdraw into a world of silence, of total and
ascetic solitude in which, cleansed of the coarse manifestations of incarnated
sound (which had anyway become unnecessary to his inner hearing), only
the spirit hears. He would not have remained inactive: indeed, being
finally able to control his own profound time, he was ready to let his
literary work blossom in full bloom.
Few artists have, like Glenn Gould, given
so overwhelmingly of their own self while showing themselves so very sparingly,
for the quest of anonymity is hardly compatible with public recognition.
The recognition of Glenn Gould's genius was neither immediate nor universal.
Even in America, his name was known only locally until his first appearances
in Washington and New York launched him overnight and as if by storm on
the international scene. France, a country which, after finally
discovering his genius as a musician, probably best saw into the implications
of his thought, and is also one of the countries where he actually never
performed and where he became known only belatedly, ten years after he
had withdrawn from the stage to respond to a higher calling. His
philosophy of communication had already been defined when he was "launched"
there through the exclusive means of electronic media, and yet without
his ever yielding to the play of public relations, of interviews or of
participation in those facile television talk shows that are plugged into
the spirit of the time and that weaken and paraphrase the strength of
a message which, only when it is controlled, can diffuse its glittering
light.
Our joint work was set, because of its very
meticulousness outside of the television system, and it is a rather comforting
thought to know that, in spite of a single late night showing, in spite
of its complex and passionately uncompromising contents, the message,
extirpating itself from the distressing banality of the televised product,
should have been perceived. The reason no doubt lies in that there
remains a niche to be occupied by someone like Glenn who chooses to place
himself fraternally outside of a civilisation characterised by promiscuity,
comparison, conformity and dispute. By substituting to conventional
and impervious knowledge the deeply experienced reality of structures,
by developing an intelligence which re-interprets the world instead of
reproducing it, Glenn Gould makes a universal gesture, because he reveals
to ourselves an inner world which is also ours but whose vision would
have without him forever remained lazily unknown to us.
Contrary to what some people assumed or
would have liked to have us assume, his is not a sorrowful story.
In giving up concerts towards which indeed many of his contemporaries
such as Svjatoslav Richter or Michelangeli, not to mention predecessors
like Liszt, have displayed hardly less than ambivalent feelings, through
the barely more than intermittent keenness with which they indulged in
them, Gould proposes an answer, which will eventually appear as one of
common sense to questions posed by others. He does however find
there the joyous driving spark which will allow him to communicate in
a manner at once massive and intimate, the inordinate love of music which
is his, before attaining the realm of silence and of the unspeakable.
Whoever has had as I have the implausible privilege to spend those ignited
nights in the alchemist's den, to see him manipulating and mastering concepts
and techniques alike with such jubilation and such exultant humour, can
attest that the passionate, wilful and reasoned ordering of all senses
which Glenn achieved, to express his peremptory yet affectionate and serene
vision of the architecture of all things, if obviously not frivolous,
is also not gloomy or sour. Wisdom prevailed within his enclosure,
confusion without!
Indeed, Glenn Gould was neither insane nor
dangerous. He did, however and no doubt, represent a threat to the
musical profession as we know it, and the implications of his thinking
reach far beyond the limits of esthetics. The musical world, particularly
in North America, if hopefully less so in Europe, is poisoned. Competition
and the search for power have spread their venom. The chairmanship
of Carnegie Hall or of any other similar institution whose access to colleagues
considered by definition as rivals will be thwarted at all costs, the
setting up of clientèles meant to be manipulated, the paranoiac observations
of one's competitors' triumphs and failures, the constant solicitation
of media and the submission to their ephemeral judgements, have become
the target and the major stakes of careers; they stand in for artistic
thinking and qualitative criteria. Paradoxically it is by making
use of electronic media, or more accurately, by taking shelter behind
the protective shield they offer, that Glenn Gould resisted the falsely
satisfying temptation of the world: public opinion did not reach him;
he did not seek approval; nor did he sacrifice his genius on the altar
of the public relations system. Indeed he thought that the artist
should be granted anonymity. In this quest, he was reaching back
to the status of the Medieval illuminators and cathedral builders who
served a purpose larger than themselves.
The frantic ambition for a glamorous yet
transient position whereby too many artists degrade their role to that
of entertainers had for a long time been discarded from his mind, if the
temptation ever existed. Instead, he had become the controller and
the doer of an art whose impact is all the stronger in that it is immune
to acceptance. No applause from the few friends who had access to
him, and to whom he gave the warmest and most affectionate of welcomes,
was needed to achieve a state of intense private communion with him -
respectability which atrophies so many men once they have achieved a certain
notoriety, was thoroughly foreign to his sense of humour. This solitude,
which was a recurrent theme in his works, resembled that of a fictitious
character, his brother in literature, Adrian Leverkuhn in Thomas Mann's
Doctor Faustus. However, Glenn's pact was not with the devil,
but with a God of absolute purity and integrity. In his own writings,
he had become the theoritician of a purified humanity, the austere and
penetrated moralist who, away from the sterile pursuit of worldly honours
and pleasures, brought into accord his life and his faith: "The last
puritan."
The field of Gould's meditation extends,
as already mentioned, far beyond the sphere of music; his retreat from
the public eye was to allow Gould, in his monastic existence, to devote
himself to a production of gigantic proportions: immensely elaborate radio
programmes such as the Solitude Trilogy - of which The Idea of North
which is mentioned several times in the present volume forms one part;
numerous essays which make him one of the most brilliant and original
thinkers of our time, and most of which had remained so far inaccessible
in Europe. The present book and those which follow are aimed at
a complete publication of all these texts. Sooner or later, Glenn
would have recycled these critical, fictional, philosophical and extremely
varied essays, to boil down some of their elements into a literary work.
Death closed that perspective and thereby
authorizes us, we think, to publish them here in the form in which they
were issued, for the most part in America, at different periods of his
existence.
For the present book, we have opted for
a four part structure in which will be exposed in succession Gould's fundamental
philosophical ideas, portraits of composers and performers who were particularly
close to him or who intrigued him, and finally some samples of his critical
zest. A few of these texts might not be of easy access to the layman,
and contain - like the ones on Bach and the fugue, or on Byrd and Gibbons
- detailed musical analyses. But these invariably lead to general
conclusions of such penetrating insight that even the least musically
informed reader will have no difficulty understanding their significance.
On the 3rd of March 1972, the day when the
first letter originating from the planet Glenn Gould landed into my hands,
a small space capsule set off in the direction of Jupiter; it escaped
a few months ago the Solar system. At present, Pioneer 10 zooms
at 35,000 miles an hour into the unknown heading toward the star Ross
248 which it will reach in some 30,000 years after having travelled hundreds
of billions of miles. Tucked aboard the capsule as decipherable
symbols of a terrestrial conscience, and swirling together with it, are
a plaque representing the silhouettes of a man and a woman, some mathematical
formulas, and the recording of one fugue of John Sebastian Bach played
by Glenn Gould. Who is to be thanked for that immense privilege:
that, in the coordinates of time and space, such a vessel should for a
while have crossed my own trajectory?
(translated from French by the author) All rights reserved.
Bruno Monsaingeon (1943) studied law and
politics in Paris, took degrees in Russian and Bulgarian at the École
des langues orientales and studied the violin at the Paris Conservatory
of Music. From 1970 onwards Bruno Monsaingeon has applied himself
to making films about music.
He made a great number of programmes for
the French television, four of which were about Glenn Gould: La
Retraite, L'Alchimiste, Glenn Gould 1974 and Partita
de Bach. In 1975 this series was awarded the prize for the best
music film at the international television festival in Prague.
Between 1977 and 1981 Bruno Monsaingeon
was working on another series about Glenn Gould: Glenn Gould
joue Bach. This series consists of three instalments, each lasting
about an hour: 'La Question de l'lnstrument,' 'Un Art de Fugue,'
and 'Les Variations Goldberg.'
Bruno Monsaingeon is also known as the author
of a number of books. He wrote Mademoiselle, fictitious conversations
with Nadia Boulanger (about whom he had also made a film), and three books
about Glenn Gould: Le dernier Puritain, Contrepoint à
la Ligne and Non, je ne suis pas un excentrique.