Glenn Gould - Part 1 – An introduction and an overview.

The Music

The Words

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of the ‘Classical For Everyone’ Podcast… five hundred years of incredible music. My name is Peter Cudlipp and… If you enjoy any music at all then I’m convinced you can enjoy classical music. All you need are ears. No expertise is necessary. If you’ve ever been curious about classical music… or explored it for a while once upon a time… or just quietly wondered what all the fuss was about… then this is the podcast is for you.

And because there’s a lot of music out there each episode has something of a theme. And for this one it is… the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould. This is the first episode of ‘Classical For Everyone’ to be devoted to just one musician so I better have some good reasons… apart from just a personal affection for his recordings. In the English speaking world Gould was I think the most recognised and popular classical pianist of the second half of the 20th century. In fact even today, over forty years since his death at the age of 50 in 1982, it is hard to think of a pianist of similar stature.

Ok, so he has enduring popularity. But why is that? At the heart of it is sheer technical skill. Which of course many pianists had and have… but Gould had a quite specific dexterity… a way of playing that articulated each note with a very precise individuality that could be applied at the same time, when required, at extraordinary speed. And in particular he applied this to the, then relatively unknown, keyboard works of Johann Sebastian Bach. His recording of Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations’ in 1955 at the age of 22… incidentally the first thing he chose to record despite a certain hesitancy from the good people at CBS…  was an unanticipated hit and accelerated the shift of Bach’s reputation from an academic footnote to the central position in classical music he commands today.

In this episode there’s going to be music from Beethoven, Scarlatti, Brahms and Byrd as well as a very good amount of Bach, given that was 65% of what Gould recorded on the 40 odd albums released in his lifetime…  but let’s start with the first six minutes of that 1955 recording of the Johann Sebastian Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations’. And I will tell you a little more about this remarkable musician as we go along.

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That was the first six minutes of Glenn Gould’s 1955 recording of Johann Sebastian Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations’ which was published in 1741. The title raises a couple of questions I’ll try to very briefly cover. Who was Goldberg?. Johann Gottlieb Goldberg was a virtuoso keyboard player in the employ of one Count Hermann von Keyserling and apparently briefly a student of Bach’s. The story, written down 60 years after Bach’s death, is that the Count commissioned the piece for Goldberg to play on the nights the Count couldn’t sleep. And from that story, whether fiction or fact… and no one’s quite sure… came the first part of the name… Goldberg.

Now, what does the term ‘variations’ mean? Well, there is an interesting analogy with jazz… which is largely improvised music. If you are improvising as a group you generally want to have an agreed melody or theme that you are basing your improvisations on. For example the 1930’s song ‘All The Things You Are’ has been recorded by dozens and dozens of jazz players. And these are not copies of the song. The song is the basis for largely improvised versions. And you could say each one is a ‘variation’ on the original song.

Now in classical music the idea of improvising over a known melodic or harmonic structure… of making variations on a theme… goes back over five centuries. But by Bach’s time, the early 1700s, composers had also adopted it as a compositional device. The completed pieces felt like they were a set of improvisations based on a theme… but they were fully composed… they were written down… and they were published. The form of ‘theme and variations’ went on to take a central position in western classical music… especially if the composer wanted to display their imaginative skills. And the ‘Goldberg Variations’ is one of the best known and best regarded. And whilst there had been a handful of recordings before Glenn Gould’s, it was his that resurrected it.

Alright, I’m going to stop talking for a moment and play you a small gem. This is a sonata by Domenico Scarlatti probably written a few years before Bach wrote the Goldberg Variations. It is about two and a half minutes long. If you want to track it down amongst Scarlatti’s more than 500 sonatas, it has the catalogue number of K 13.

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That was Domenico Scarlatti’s Sonata No. K 13. And the pianist was Glenn Gould… who is being featured in this episode of Classical For Everyone.

Ok, here is a quick biography of Gould. He was born in Toronto in 1932. His father was an amateur violinist and his mother was a pianist and his first teacher. He showed extraordinary musical facility at a very early age. His first public performance was at the age of 12 playing the organ and by his late teens he was in demand as a performer across Canada. In 1955 he made his debuts in New York and Washington. The following year his recording of the Goldberg Variations was released to great acclaim. The year after that he toured Europe including the USSR, becoming at the age of 24, the first North American pianist to tour behind the Iron Curtain since WWII.

And if, as an aside,  you are a little sceptical about the fuss about Gould and there is a little voice asking, ‘can he have really been that good?’; then I hope I have found a review from the USSR tour that might answer that question. Heinrich Neuhaus taught piano at the Moscow Conservatory from 1922 to 1964 and, with students who included Emil Gilels and Sviatoslav Richter, I think you can say he was well qualified to judge the performances of the young Canadian. In the Soviet journal ‘Culture & Life’ Neuhaus wrote…

‘I tell you quite frankly that Gould is not a pianist, he is a phenomenon, His interpretations were so convincing, that he might have been a pupil of Bach himself. In this sense Gould is not 24, he is nearly 300… the possessor of great talent, great mastery, high spirit, and deep soul.'

Following the European tour Gould had several years of very successful performance tours mixing solo recitals with performances with orchestras. At the same time he was recording two or three albums a year with more than half being devoted to the keyboard music of J S Bach. It could be expected that this would have continued indefinitely. Certainly there are pianists who have played professionally well into their 80s. But in 1964 at the age of 31, Gould retired from public performance. And he never returned. No string of farewell tours. Even at his final concert in Los Angeles he made no announcement that this was to be his last live recital. He took his bows, enjoyed the applause (you’d assume) and walked off the stage. I will continue the story after the next pieces of music.

In 1967 Gould made a recording of works by the English Renaissance composers William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons. As far as I can tell these were the very first recordings of these works… at least on the piano. In a way they show a quite different side of Gould compared to the dazzling technique of the Bach and Scarlatti I played earlier. The clarity and the articulation are still there but he has found a way into the beauty of what was then almost four hundred year old music and given it an astonishing freshness. Here are the Pavan & Galliard No. 1 by William Byrd. A bit over 7 minutes of music from the 1580s. And, just so you know, pavans and galliards were types of dances.

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That was the Pavan & Galliard No. 1 by William Byrd performed by Glenn Gould who I am featuring in this episode of ‘Classical For Everyone’.

There are several theories as to why Gould in 1964 ceased performing publicly. Trying to string them together I suspect that he wanted more power and more creativity. Regarding power… Even the most celebrated instrumentalist is something of a cog in a machine. Seasons and schedules are booked years ahead. The player agrees that on a certain day at the very least a year ahead that he or she will play a particular piece possibly with an orchestra and/or conductor they have never worked with in a city they have never been to.

If you are an absolute perfectionist, and I think Glenn Gould was the perfectionist’s perfectionist, then this ‘gun for hire’ performer’s life is not a recipe for a ‘perfect’ outcome. He also stated after this retirement from performing that he was not a fan of audiences. He felt that there was a deeper way to make music and to connect with music than turning up as a group… and to an extent devoting just that couple of hours to engaging with art was actually harmful.

I suggested that the move away from performing was also about creativity. Once freed from the concert stage Gould wrote extensively and produced and hosted television shows and documentaries… not as a dilettante… he was extremely good at this work. But where I think he put the majority of his creativity to work was in the recording studio. He was almost the complete opposite of most classical musicians who are nervous of the recording process and worry that their artistry loses something without an audience and without the momentum and shape of a complete uninterrupted performance. Gould saw only opportunities. No doubt the record company executives and the studio engineers had moments of frustration but in a sense they at last had an artist who wanted to use all this extraordinary technology to fully express his very personal interpretations of the work and to craft results that came as close as possible to what he wanted to say with the music.

In practical terms this meant that Gould would record multiple takes of a piece or a section of a piece and then spend hours listening back to the takes and then sometimes hours, sometimes days and sometimes months later start a process that frequently meant editing multiple takes together to create a finished piece. Or starting the recording process all over again.

Now strangely , as this approach became part of the Gould legend, some critics attacked his recordings for this. They argued that this reliance on technology was de-humanizing the process, removing chance and losing an imagined ‘unified architectural conception’ that came with a ‘one-take’ approach. Gould’s counter-argument was that feature films were never shot in real time and the completed works were a masterful collection of discrete pieces. My own feeling is that these critics would have objected to the invention of the wheel.

Ok. Time for some more Johann Sebastian Bach. It is his Partita No. 1 for Keyboard. ‘Partita’ was a term that had come from the Italian verb ‘partire’ meaning ‘to divide’ because the origin was pieces  of music that were divided into short dance sections. By Bach’s day they were not intended for actual dancing but the connection remained in the use of the titles and rhythms of various dances as starting points for the composition. Here is Glenn Gould playing Bach’s Partita No. 1. It is in 6 parts and is about 12 minutes long.

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That was Johann Sebastian Bach’s Partita No. 1 for Keyboard. Played by Glenn Gould.

Ok. So far everything I have played you has been for solo keyboard. And that makes some sense as about 90% of Gould’s recordings were for solo piano. But in the 12 years Gould performed publicly, giving about 270 concerts, more than half of them were with orchestras. And whilst his approach to recording probably meant that after he retired from the concert stage the cumbersome nature of having another 90 or so musicians sitting around on the clock and on the payroll was not going to suit him; in the late 1950’s he did record all five Ludwig van Beethoven concertos for piano and orchestra.

Here is the opening section to the first piano concerto. The Columbia Symphony Orchestra is conducted by Vladimir Golschmann and Glenn Gould is the soloist. It is about 13 minutes long.

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That was opening section of Ludwig van Beethoven’s first piano concerto. The Columbia Symphony Orchestra was conducted by Vladimir Golschmann and Glenn Gould was the soloist.

One of Gould’s best regarded recordings is of Johann Sebastian Bach’s ‘The Well-Tempered Clavier’. Now if there was ever a classical music title that can drive the curious new listener back into the arms of Talyor Swift, Ozzy Osborne and Andrew Lloyd Webber, then this has to be it. ‘The Well-Tempered Clavier’. I was recently discussing this title with a certain Barbara Schmidt, who some listeners to the podcast may know and who, to give credit where credit is due, is the person most responsible for me starting this podcast.  She suggested that ‘well-tempered clavier’ could mean ‘a well-behaved piano player’ or a ‘piano player in a good mood’. I like this rather a lot and it is much simpler than the explanation I am about to give you… but sadly it is not true.

Let me take the title apart for a moment. ‘Clavier’ is just the German word for keyboard. So we now if we put the whole title into just one language, we have ‘The Well-tempered Keyboard’. Better, but not much. So what is this ‘well-tempered’? It refers to the way a keyboard instrument is tuned. I think most of us, if we ever happen to have thought about it, take for granted that there is one way to tune a musical instrument… that, for example, the change in pitch between each note on a piano should be exactly the same interval.

But historically that was not the case. I’m not going to digress into the physics of harmonics but to try to put it simply… equal spacing between the pitches of notes is a relatively recent compromise. The old way of tuning with subtly different sized gaps between notes actually yielded a better sounding result… playing the notes together gave more ringing clarity and more resonance. The problem was that this only really worked for the one sequence of notes, or ‘key’, for which that tuning of varied gaps was designed. So, for those of you who like me suffered piano lessons as a kid, it would mean that if the tuning was designed for the scale of C… you could play a C major scale and it would sound amazing. But if you then played an F major scale, it would sound oddly or even badly out of tune.

In Bach’s day addressing this frustrating difference in quality between the sound of different scales, or sequences of notes, on keyboard instruments was a challenge and one of the solutions was given the name ‘well-tempering’. It was a way of tuning the keyboard so that everything is in fact just slightly out of tune but this compromise meant pretty much all the notes could be played together and sound ok. Now ‘tempering’ is still used to describe the tightening and loosening of piano strings as the instruments are tuned…  but unless you are making a sword you are not going to encounter the term that often.

But back to Johnn Sebastian Bach. In 1722 Bach wrote a series of 24 pairs of short pieces for the keyboard. It is believed that he did this to illustrate that with this tuning innovation called ‘well-tempering’ you could successfully base the harmonic structure, and get a pleasing musical outcome, no matter which note you used on the keyboard as the home, or key, for the piece. Each pair was based around the major or minor scale of each different note. And as this collection of music was a slightly academic exercise and it was only ever circulated in manuscript form… he gave it the explicit title of ‘The Well-Tempered Keyboard’. (And finishing off my whine about the title… you can perhaps see why it’s hard to get rid of ‘well-tempered’). Now Bach, just to being even more superhuman wrote another set of 24 pairs twenty years later so ‘The Well Tempered Keyboard’ exists as Book 1 and Book 2. And… it took Glenn Gould thirty six days of recording over nine years to record them all. About three and a half hours of music.

And after all that introduction I feel I am short-changing you a little but here are just two pairs from the first book. About ten minutes of music.

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That was the first pair and the fourth pair of compositions from the first book of Johann Sebastian Bach’s ‘The Well-Tempered Keyboard’. And the pianist was Glenn Gould.

In the recordings I’ve played you in this episode if you have been listening in a pretty good acoustic environment you might have been puzzled to hear a faint humming or even a singing from time to time. This is in fact Gould and was one of several idiosyncrasies that became almost as famous as his tremendous musical gifts. It has been argued that this was connected perhaps to his mother’s early instructions to ‘sing’ the notes as he played them. Equally, Gould stated that it was an unconscious reflex to not quite hearing from his playing, or from the instrument, what he was intending… the singing bridged the gap. You can imagine the complex negotiations between Gould, recording engineers and record company executives over the degree to which these extraneous noises were ‘acceptable’… that they could become part of an artist’s recorded legacy.

It is unfair to describe anyone as a characterless machine but as music schools around the world continue to push out countless extraordinarily gifted players, it can frankly be hard to tell one from another. This was never the case with Glenn Gould. The personal quirks, like the humming, became part of the public persona. He played hunched over sitting on an ancient, low-slung chair that his father had modified for him as a child, and which he carried to concert halls and recording studios around the world.

In his forties, Gould deepened his retreat from public life while at the same time achieving some of his greatest artistic triumphs. He continued his prolific recording career with Columbia with 15 more LPs, he wrote extensively about music, produced more innovative radio documentaries and created television programs that explored music in fresh ways. He died suddenly in October 1982 at age 50, just days after suffering a stroke,

That sombre note perhaps calls for a dramatic change of mood in the next piece of music. For better or worse Gould is so strongly identified with the music of Bach that his recordings of other composers get a little lost. And one of the composers I think Gould recorded quite remarkable and moving interpretations of is Johannes Brahms. I’m going to play you his first Intermezzo from a group of three he wrote in 1892 when Brahms was an old man who despite his success seems to capture a melancholy with this piece and he called the group ‘lullabies for my sorrows’. If you want to track down this particular piece the catalogue number for it 117/1. It is a bit over five minutes long. And here is… Glenn Gould.

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That was the first of Johannes Brahms three Intermezzos with the catalogue number 117 from 1892 and it was played by the artist I have featured in today’s episode, Glenn Gould.

My name is Peter Cudlipp and you have been listening to the ‘Classical for Everyone’ Podcast. I have one more piece coming up but first a little information for you… If you would like to listen to past episodes, of which there are over forty, or get details of the music I’ve played please head to the website classicalforeveryone.net. That address again is classicalforeveryone.net. And on the individual episode pages of the website there are links to Spotify playlists with the full versions of most of the music played in each of the episodes. And if you want to get in touch then you can email… info@classicalforeveryone.net.

Now, ordinarily you would be hearing the credits about now but I am going to save them up for the conclusion of the next episode… which is really a partner of this one. I will again be focusing on the pianist Glenn Gould. But just one recording. I’m going to play you his entire 1981 recording of J S Bach’s ‘The Goldberg Variations’. It was the only piece of music that Gould recorded twice. All things being equal that episode will be available in the next couple of days. To tempt you, I am going to finish this episode with just the opening section of that recording… the aria, or the song, which is the theme which all the fallowing variations are based on. It is very quiet.
Thanks for listening.

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