From the standpoint of originality and imagination, musical performance today is a pretty dull affair. Influenced by the widespread diffusion of music and the easy availability of recordings, recent performers of the most diverse intellectual and cultural backgrounds strive mightily to approach a common standard of accuracy, textual fidelity, and unobjectionable musicality. And it must be said that they succeed. Wherever one attends concerts, whichever records one buys, the result is the same: an international, received style of music-making. Laudable though this is, it is only in rare cases exciting, provocative, or even capable of inspiring rejection.

But there is one consistent exception. Of the current generation, Glenn Gould has been without doubt the most interesting—in every meaning of that valuable word—pianist the public has heard. From his eruption into fame with an unheralded 1955 concert at the Phillips Gallery in Washington, D.C. to the present day, when he lives reclusively in Toronto, this Canadian has stimulated and offended musical taste in North America and Europe, and through his continuing stream of recordings he bids fair to remain for some time to come the magisterial bad boy of serious music.

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How can one man’s piano-playing stand out so definitively from that of his colleagues? How can one man have escaped the becalming influences to which everyone else has succumbed? The answer to the first question flows in a reasonably straightforward way from a consideration of Gould as a pianist; the answer to the second involves issues of talent, psychology, and nurture that are rather less accessible to the ordinary procedures of criticism.

Any discussion of Gould’s playing must begin by acknowledging the sheer quantity of musical evidence. In the past twenty-five years he has made over sixty separate records, almost never recording a work more than once. All of these discs have been made for Columbia Records, which had the good sense to begin a long-term exclusive contractual relationship with him only days after his Washington debut. And, what is remarkable in this period of short-term marketing, more than two-thirds of Gould’s records remain in print to this day.

The pianist’s vast recorded repertory ranges in time from the Elizabethan to the contemporary, and in scope from the most famous masterpieces to unknown Canadian music composed between 1948 and 1964. Nor is it confined to music originally written for the keyboard; in recent years Gould has busied himself with the playing of orchestral transcriptions, including the Liszt arrangement of the Fifth Symphony of Beethoven and the pianist’s own reworking of the Prelude to Wagner’s Die Meistersinger.

Not only has he chosen widely, but in the case of several of the greatest composers he has chosen in depth: among the works of Bach he has recorded are six of the seven harpsichord concertos, all the Partitas, the English and French Suites, the Inventions, and the 48 Preludes and Fugues of The Well-Tempered Clavier. He has recorded all the solo keyboard sonatas of Mozart, and of Beethoven all the concertos and fourteen piano sonatas as well. And in a praiseworthy service to the music of his own time, he has over a period of years recorded almost all the piano music of Schoenberg, including the keyboard parts of his songs and chamber music, and the still knotty Piano Concerto (1942).

Out of all this music it would seem that the pianist’s own favorite remains what it has been since the beginning of his career, the compositions of J. S. Bach. And happily, it is Bach who has occasioned Gould’s greatest successes and most favorable critical responses. His Washington debut recital, repeated nine days later in New York’s Town Hall, included the G-major Partita; the critics were rapturous. Still more importantly, his first recording for Columbia, made just five months later, was nothing less than the monumental Goldberg Variations, then widely known only in the classic 1945 harpsichord recording by Wanda Landowska (an earlier one had been made in 1933). It is a tribute to Gould’s early mastery—he was twenty-two at the time—that his Goldberg record has remained with Landowska’s the yardstick against which all others must be measured.

In that recording, now released again in a version satisfactorily rechanneled for stereo, may be found all the most attractive qualities of Gould as pianist and musician. The listener’s immediate impression is of a lightness of touch and quickness of movement, as if the piano keys were being played on an upward rather than a downward stroke. All the notes seem distinct and yet connected by phrasing and pulse, the result of the pianist’s emphasis upon perfect articulation and a legato produced by the fingers rather than the damper pedal. Out of this remarkable technical virtuosity emerges a performance freed both from the authentic twang of the harpsichord so palpable in Landowska’s version and from our notion of the piano as a heaven-storming vehicle for romantically plunging hands playing richly crashing chords.

Elsewhere among Gould’s Bach recordings, the riches, though numerous, seem hardly as fresh. The very act of executing so many integral performances has unavoidably involved him in playing on each disc at least some works which do not engage his full sympathy. Although he never gives less than full concentration to anything he plays, sometimes in his traversals of Bach love seems to have been replaced by duty, with a resultant monotony of texture and a mannered repetition of phrasing. Yet such cavils cannot be applied to those important works with which he identifies completely; his recording of the D-minor Concerto, made with Leonard Bernstein in 1957, remains to this day gorgeous in its simplicity and, as always with Gould, remarkable in its technical finish.

At the other end of the repertory, Gould’s playing has been equally distinguished, though hardly so successful with the public. His first venture into the music of the Second Viennese School began with a 1958 recording of Schoenberg’s Three Piano Pieces opus 11 (1909). The same year, he recorded Alban Berg’s Sonata opus 1 (1908), written while Berg was a student of Schoenberg. Ironically, while the teacher’s work seems today mostly of historical interest, the student’s has become a staple of the repertory. It is a mark of a profound performer that he plays better music better than he plays inferior music, and Gould’s performance of the Berg Sonata, which fully plumbs that work’s luxuriant Viennese hothouse atmosphere, is now a standard; by contrast, the Schoenberg performance seems gray and stale. His other performances of Schoenberg, despite the loving care he has lavished on them, give the impression of sharing the same unhappy fate. Only in the accompaniments to Schoenberg’s early songs is Gould’s playing marked by the same sparkle and vivacity which informs his best Bach playing.

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But in Bach and Schoenberg, Gould is hardly performing works central to the piano; Bach’s music was not written for the piano at all, and Schoenberg was almost totally unconcerned with the sound quality and technical characteristics of the piano as an instrument. The music that most pianists spend their time on was written from the last quarter of the 18th century to World War II, and to be a pianist in the public mind is to take a musical position on how these works should be played. It is Glenn Gould’s position on these central works that has made his playing a matter of supreme interest in terms of its originality, freedom, and imagination.

If the word interesting can be defined to mean different, none of Gould’s playing is more interesting than his Mozart. As if to counter the notion of Mozart as the epitome of grace, delicacy, and gentle charm, Gould exaggerates the contrasts suggested in the music, employs a dynamic scale unknown in Mozart’s time, and plays fast movements at the limits of speed but at the same time heavily. One’s impression can only be that Gould dislikes the music, an impression confirmed by his remark in an interview with Jonathan Cott that he does not “really . . . like Mozart as a composer.” Whatever his reasons for playing the music, the intended rebuke to a sainted figure is plain. Yet perhaps it is just because of Gould’s distortion of the “proper” view of the composer that his Mozart emerges as a figure of bones and guts, driven by ambition to challenge later, larger-scaled composers on their own terrain.

The gentleness so lacking in Gould’s Mozart is surprisingly present in his recorded Brahms. Ten Intermezzi, recorded in 1960, show the pianist to be a master of the miniature and fully at home in Brahms’s rich but bittersweet harmonic progressions. The result is extraordinary, and the best Brahms playing to be heard today. The reasons for Gould’s triumph in these gems surely have to do precisely with the absence in them of fustian rhetoric and structural pretension; it would seem that Gould is perfectly willing to be restrained so long as the composer matches that restraint.

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Such self-limitation cannot be said to operate in the case of Beethoven, a composer to whom Gould has paid almost as much attention as to Bach. His recordings of the five concertos were made between 1957 and 1966; in addition to his sonata performances, he has more recently recorded three sets of Variations and two sets of Bagatelles. Gould has made no secret of his admiration for Artur Schnabel, who recorded all Beethoven’s piano music almost two generations ago; it is likely that before he is through, Gould will accomplish the same task.

The Beethoven recordings Gould has made so far have been the most controversial of his career. The initial storm broke with his recording of Beethoven’s last three sonatas-opus 109, 110, and 111—made in 1956 as his second disc for Columbia. This album has long been out of print, and by now has attained something of the status of a camp classic. Notwithstanding Gould’s positive feeling about Schnabel, the recording bears little resemblance to the elder pianist’s playing. The chief difference is Gould’s inability—or more likely, his unwillingness—to play naturally, to avoid harshness, extreme contrasts, and awkward transitions. It was in giving an impression of flow that Schnabel was a master; the easy gemütlichkeit of his conceptions has long seemed the way a sophisticated musician went about being profound. But in Gould’s conceptions what stands out is a frequent brusqueness verging on flippancy. Tempos are often terribly fast—in the slow movement of opus 109, for example, sometimes startlingly so. It is not that Gould takes more liberties with the pulse or always plays faster than Schnabel; it is rather that the liberties he does take intrude themselves on the listener by their unexpectedness.

If Gould’s attitude toward these last three sonatas is apparently one of devil-may-care—in the program notes which accompany the recording he writes deflatingly that the sonatas “perhaps do not yield the apocalyptic disclosures that have been so graphically ascribed to them”—toward some earlier sonatas he has felt free to express outright hostility. In describing the famous Grave opening of the opus 13 (“Pathétique”), for example, he writes in disparagement of “the somewhat stage-struck character of its doom-foretelling double-dotted rhythm.” And of the opus 57 (“Appassionata”) he writes:

. . . [T]here is about the Appassionata an egoistic pomposity, a defiant “let’s just see if I can’t get away with using that once more attitude. . . .”

What kind of performance can come out of such a conception of the music? The answer is simple: where Gould finds bluster, he adds rodomontade; where he finds structural weakness, he chooses particularly slow tempos—the snail’s pace at which he plays the entire first movement of the “Appassionata” is surely unparalleled for audacity in the entire history of recorded piano music. It is all done without sympathy and yet with a peculiar kind of intimate understanding which conveys at every moment a real, if hardly attractive, picture of the music.

Gould gives more comfortable performances of other Beethoven sonatas, in inverse proportion to their fame and the scope of their ambition. The same can be said of his playing of the Bagatelles. One set of these miniatures, opus 126, which is not only Beethoven’s last major solo piano music but is also widely regarded as his most simply wise, he plays heavily and humorlessly, but the altogether less demanding and less highly regarded set, opus 33, receives from him a bright and lively treatment. Nor is the story different with the Variations, for despite many individual felicities in his performances of the massive “Eroica” and the smaller C-minor set, it is only in the relatively unknown F-major Variations that Gould allows listeners to feel relaxed and protected from the surprises he regularly administers elsewhere.

Paradoxically, but in a manner consistent with his general line of development, Gould’s finest Beethoven is not a piano piece at all, but rather the Fifth Symphony. Though Gould has always eschewed the music of Franz Liszt, he nonetheless chose to record the Beethoven Fifth in Liszt’s monumental transcription. As a transcriber, Liszt often felt free to “improve” compositions by the less great, but here he is remarkably faithful to Beethoven in notes and spirit, and so is Gould: in this work he seems fully in his element, playing brilliantly, directly, and powerfully—perhaps because, in this Beethoven at least, he feels an emotional effect produced by content, not rhetoric. Musically his conception of the work bears comparison with the performances of the greatest conductors, and pianistically only Horowitz has brought equally impressive command (but in musically less demanding material) to the playing of compositions already famous in their original form.

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Another of Gould’s ventures into transcriptions has turned out less happily. Something of a Wagnerian, he himself, in 1973, transcribed some of the best-known of the composer’s works: the Siegfried Idyll, the Dawn and Siegfried’s Rhine Journey from Götterdämmerung, and the Prelude from Die Meistersinger. (Considering the many notes Gould added, adapted is perhaps a better word than transcribed.) But whereas the Beethoven Fifth Symphony is “pure” music in that it is sound to the specific timbres produced by the instruments for which it is written, Wagner’s operas are a different matter; their musical and emotional effects are closely link d to the individual sounds and capabilities of the exact instruments Wagner had in mind. Thus, the inevitable outcome of playing Wagner on the neutral and in any case different-sounding piano is that the Siegfried Idyll, for example, sounds (in Gould’s performance) like static musing rather than the ecstatic serenade Wagner wrote to celebrate the birthday of his wife Cosima who had six months earlier given birth to the son of his old age. And toward the end of the Meistersinger Prelude, after having been required at the opening to replace orchestral majesty by pianistic clatter, Gould is forced to resort to the practice of overdubbing (the combination of two separate “takes”) to make possible the simultaneous performance of the three main themes as set forth by the composer. And yet, regardless of these shortcomings, who but Gould in the contemporary musical world would have made such an attempt?

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Glenn Gould today is solely a recording artist, his playing confined to those discs he wishes to make and have issued. This indeed has been the case ever since his retirement from the concert stage in 1964, at the age of thirty-one. Yet fortunately more survives than the memory of concertgoers to make clear just what Gould was as a live rather than a record performer. One document in particular fittingly preserves the last time he appeared with an orchestra in New York City, which was also one of the most significant performances of his entire career: his playing of the Brahms D-minor Concerto with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic.

Simply put, this performance (in existence today because the concert was broadcast and preserved on tape by collectors) was a scandal. It began with a disclaimer from the conductor, who spoke to the audience of irreconcilable differences with the soloist. Bernstein then wondered aloud why he did not get another soloist, or an assistant to conduct in his place. He answered his own question by explaining that Gould’s performance was a chance for a new look at a familiar piece, that sometimes in Gould’s playing the music emerged with force and clarity, and that everyone could learn from an artist of Gould’s caliber. These noble sentiments were somewhat vitiated by the final reason he gave, to the accompaniment of occasional muted laughter from the hall, for going ahead with the concert: there was a “sportive” element in music and it had been an adventure collaborating for one week with Gould.

Judging now from the tape, one can see why Bernstein was concerned. The familiar opening movement (marked Maestoso though customarily played in a much faster Allegro) is begun by the orchestra—plainly at the soloist’s desire—in a strong six beats to the bar instead of the customary two. So unused is the orchestra to the initial tempo that the players have difficulty at first keeping together. Although by the time the piano enters the pace has been firmly established for several minutes, the first solo bars are still a shock. Then, at least for some, the shock wears off, to be succeeded by an appreciation of Gould’s courage in approaching the music as a symphony rather than a pianist’s vehicle, as if what counts are the notes and not the brilliance with which they are gotten through. All in all, the performance—including Gould’s beautifully serious playing of the slow movement, and despite Bernstein’s heavy-handed conducting—remains a moving as well as a spectacularly individual execution of the work.

But for those who, at the time, had in their ears the ruling memory of countless traditional performances, the whole thing was too much to bear. One of the enraged was Harold Schonberg of the New York Times, whose sarcastic review took the form of a report to an imaginary piano fan named Ossip, and was written in a dialect approaching that of the Lower East Side. Throughout, Schonberg refers to the pianist as “the Gould boy.” About his choice of tempos, the critic writes that “The reason he plays it so slow is maybe his technique is not so good.” Some difficult passages Schonberg “couldn’t hear so good, but the inner voices . . . he played good and clear. He should be proud, Ossip. He invented them.” Schonberg ends the review by complimenting the assistant who had conducted a Nielsen overture at the concert; he calls him “very good. I mean, Ossip, he’s a professional. Not like some pianists I could name.”

While the tone of the Times review may disqualify it as a reasoned statement about a musical event, Schonberg’s response was no doubt reflective of a large section of sophisticated musical opinion, and can hardly have been without effect on the artist who thus found himself held up to derision and obloquy. Only Glenn Gould himself knows what the reception accorded his Brahms Concerto did to his own attitude toward his career and his future. He had often talked of giving up the concert stage some day, but the actual chronology is suggestive: his decision to stop playing at the end of the 1963-64 season must have been made, given the customary lead time in booking and contract-signing, about the spring of 1962, the same time as the Brahms incident. But whatever the real state of affairs may have been, there can be little doubt that that incident surrounded Gould’s retirement from concert life with an aura of failure rather than triumph.

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Nevertheless, by any standards wider than those of the concert business, Glenn Gould has triumphed. And unlike those who have made great careers by pandering to their audience, Gould has had his success on his own terms. To an even greater extent than the publicly touchy Vladimir Horowitz, Gould plays the music he wants to play in the often deeply unsettling way he chooses to play it. Given the pressures to conform in the musical world, one wonders how he has found the resources to be different and to survive in that difference, and what accounts for his unique public acceptance.

Material to answer the first question—only supplementing, of course, Gould’s playing itself—lies primarily in his large and windy mass of written and spoken words. The spoken words are most easily available on a Columbia bonus LP (1968) entitled Glenn Gould, Concert Dropout, and his written words are frequently on the jackets of his records. Excerpts from all of this, along with copious analyses and philosophical speculations, have been assembled in a recent book by the Canadian musician and academic Geoffrey Payzant, Glenn Gould, Music and Mind.¹ This wealth of explanatory material provides a rare opportunity to understand a performing artist’s work from the human and intellectual as well as the musical stand-point.

Before the sources and significance of Gould’s dissent can be discussed, though, a subsidiary (and perhaps ultimately misleading and irrelevant) matter must be disposed of. Much has been made, by Gould himself as well as by his admirers and detractors, of his choice of recording over concerts. The pianist has not been bashful in urging recorded music as the wave of the future, replacing the old-fashioned and moribund concert atmosphere with a medium in which music can find continued and new life. In addition, of all artists he has been the most frank in discussing the manipulative and transforming procedures used in making recordings. These procedures can only be described as unprecedented in the degree to which they disregard the old ideal of a recording as a copy of a continuous, real-time musical performance. To Gould, splicing is king, for it permits, without any audible evidence of the fact, the linking at will of elements of any length from any number of different “takes.”

The purpose of this splicing is not just to remedy errors, though Gould does use the technique to produce a note-perfect result. More importantly, multiple “takes” enable him to approach a recording session with no fixed conception of a work; at the session he can try out a variety of conceptions and afterward, during the editing process, select what seems to him to have worked well. He is thus fully free, after the physical act of playing is over, to yoke passages from radically opposed views of the music and forge them into one final performance. It is an article of faith with him that the listener is not only unaware of all this chicanery—Gould calls it being “creatively dishonest”—but is actually the beneficiary of a more integrated, because more consciously put together, performance.

Still, Gould’s preference for recording and its technology aside, it cannot be said that there is any fundamental discontinuity between what is remembered of his concert playing—and confirmed by the Brahms Concerto tape—and the present evidence of his records. If one ignores inconsequential finger-slips, Gould’s playing in both formats is identical in its characteristic features of freedom, discipline, and originality, and also in its ability to charm the receptive listener and infuriate the non-receptive. All in all, it is likely that Gould’s love affair with recording turns on personal factors; there seem to be no overriding musical reasons for the choice.

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Any attempt to analyze the real wellsprings of Gould’s special position in music must begin by recognizing the imponderables of a musical talent verging in many respects on genius. At the foundation of his great abilities lie almost unrivaled digital skills. Exemplary among these are effortless clarity and evenness in running passages, and seemingly total control over the touch and dynamic level of separate thematic lines being played simultaneously. In particular it is this technical control over melodic material which makes for the most notable feature—at least to non-musicians—of Gould’s playing: his delight and sometimes trancelike absorption in pure melody.

On a more self-conscious level, Gould is a calculating thinker whose decisions, though arising out of fundamental musicality, are informed by a streak of healthy perversity. In this connection it is relevant to cite his recorded answer to the question of why his tempos are always different from those of other pianists: “If there’s any excuse at all for making a recording it’s to do [the composition] differently . . . as if it’s never been heard before.” In some cases—such as the recordings of Mozart and Beethoven discussed earlier—his playing is instantly recognizable for its audacious idiosyncrasy. And even where the differences from tradition are not so blatant or where, as in the case of the Brahms Concerto, they are respectfully based on the composer’s own directions, Gould’s individuality remains unmistakable.

Perhaps too little attention has been paid to the way in which Gould’s characteristic orientation to performance tradition has been shaped by the fact that he is a Canadian. What discussion there has been of nationality as a musical influence on his development has too often been restricted to a stereotyped view of Canadians as moody loners given to introspection and misanthropy. It would seem more pertinent to link Gould’s freedom from the crushing weight of musical convention to the relative lack of sophistication a generation ago of Canadian musical life, and its resultant powerlessness to exert a conforming influence on this extravagantly talented man. It was precisely the provincialism—so amply documented in Payzant’s book—of the world in which Gould grew up which allowed him not only the freedom to develop in his own way but also the ability to retain a primitive and childlike faith in his own rightness vis-à-vis his contemporaries.

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All these factors are, however, no more than necessary preconditions for survival; Gould has now been showing for a full quarter-century that he has the staying power to remain at the top in a fiercely competitive world. How has he managed this victory so completely on his own terms? Basically, by his willingness, which sometimes seems to verge on compulsion, to go beyond the piano to express his talents. It may well be this internal compulsion which explains his notorious habit of singing as he plays, a habit which has required the use of special recording techniques to minimize the resultant intrusive noise and which is still the continuing cause of much negative critical comment. Many explanations, fancy and homely, have been advanced to account for this mannerism, which the pianist himself would like to conquer. Most pianists sing because their fingers won’t obey them; it would seem that Gould sings because the piano is inadequate to express his musical vision, and his voice serves him in fantasy as a fulfilling instrument.

More constructively, Gould has gone beyond the piano and its traditions by spending a considerable part of his energies in exploring the wider musical repertory. Besides unfamiliar piano music, he has played more of the Bach harpsichord literature than any other famous virtuoso pianist in memory. In addition, he has recorded part of Bach’s The Art of the Fugue on the organ and some Handel Suites on the harpsichord. In this connection one can understand the importance for Gould of his performance of the Beethoven Fifth Symphony in Liszt’s transcription and Wagner’s works in his own. Indeed, should he wish to continue along this line of development and become a conductor—even if only on records—his qualifications would be high.

In considering Gould’s ability to transcend the piano, it must not be forgotten that he is also that rarity among today’s performing musicians, a composer. Unfortunately, only a single major work of his can now be heard, the String Quartet opus 1 (1953-55). One large work is hardly enough to make a serious reputation as a composer; still, this unfairly neglected quartet, obviously derived from romantic early Schoenberg but no less beautiful because of that derivation, is sufficient to demonstrate that Gould’s compositional talent is major. And as in the case of such gifted predecessors as Schnabel and Wilhelm Furtwängler, there can be little doubt that thinking as a composer has provided Gould the performer with a range of musical choices hardly available to artists whose mental horizons are limited to the more or less accurate recreation of the works of others.

Moreover, as a creative artist, Gould has gone entirely beyond music itself. Since his retirement from the concert stage, much of his time has been spent on non-musical activities. As one of Canada’s favorite cultural sons he has had easy access to the state-run broadcasting system. For the CBC he has made innovative radio programs about the Canadian heritage, using montage techniques derived from his own recording experiences, and for both the CBC and the French ORTF he has produced television films on music and related subject.

Despite all these activities Gould is still best known as a pianist, and the clearest sign of his public acceptance is his commercial success as a recording artist. Such success requires an enthusiastic public of a size possessed by few serious artists today. Yet it is strange, given the size of his public, and given the present concentration of performers on audience response, that Gould’s following among music lovers should not be matched by a commensurate favor with those for whom music is a profession. It is not simply that the reviews, after the early years of his concert career, have so often been mixed and grudging. It is rather that Gould’s playing has been largely without influence on colleagues and the countless piano students of his generation. Even where he might be thought at first glance to have had such an influence—in the tendency toward drier and clearer performances of Bach—the trend was present and gaining strength long before him and stemmed more from general musicological and technological considerations than from the work of any one person. Where Gould’s playing has been totally and startlingly original—the Brahms Concerto may serve as the supreme if not the only example—his contribution has been ignored by musicians where it has not been reviled. The reasons for this rejection—often, lack of imagination or courage—hardly do credit to today’s musical world.

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Many theories have been advanced to explain Gould’s success with the wider musical public: his personal eccentricity, the memory of his tortured platform demeanor, and the general fascination of the contemporary audience with stage figures who can be viewed as being in some kind of emotional trouble. But another possibility must be considered—namely, that relatively unsophisticated listeners are capable of responding strongly and enthusiastically to what they can perceive as musical power, commitment, and skill. That the untutored should, on occasion, reach sounder judgments than professionals should not be all that surprising. Indeed, colleagues, critics, and students are not the only judges of music, for the very conformity to tradition which makes them indispensable as conservers can function both to rob their own work of interest and to disable them as judges of a single, enormously rare, enormously gifted individual.

Still, to hail Gould’s achievement is not to suggest that its particular substance should be imitated. For what Gould has done is not to give definitive performances, but to prove again that old pieces, no matter how great and how familiar, can be seen as new and heard as if for the first time. For this he deserves the gratitude of all who still cherish a vision of musical performance as an independent art.

¹ Van Nostrand Reinhold, 192 pp., $14.95. Payzant's book includes a thorough listing of Gould's writings and a complete and informative catalogue of the pianist's records.