TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/052289/05228900.063

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 3.7 KB | 72 lines

                                                                                MUSIC, Page 115

Singing Mahler to the Elephants


A new biography explores the eccentric genius of Glenn Gould

By Pico Iyer


    Among the few modern concert performers whom even the
tone-deaf have heard of, none is more intriguing than the
Canadian pianist Glenn Gould -- not only because of his
electrifying reinventions of Bach's Goldberg Variations, among
other pieces, but also because of the strikingly eccentric
artistic creation that was his life. Who could forget the
singular genius who shuffled about on summer days swathed in
mufflers and overcoats (because of his hypochondria), and in
concerts sat himself down on a pygmy chair and proceeded to
sigh, groan, sing and wave his hands about as he played? Who
could resist the story of the monkish prodigy who burst onto the
scene at 23 only to abandon concerts for good eight years later?
When Gould died at 50 in 1982, he left behind a mess of
unanswered letters and a plethora of unanswered questions. Now,
for the first time, the whole jumble has been largely
straightened out in an admirably lucid and level-headed
biography by Otto Friedrich, author of such previous books as
Before the Deluge and City of Nets and a TIME senior writer. In
Glenn Gould: A Life and Variations (Random House; $24.95),
Friedrich counterpoints Gould's prolific writings with the
reminiscences of more than 80 people who knew him, from Leonard
Bernstein to his cousin Jessie Greig. The result is a guided
tour through the mind of a haunted original who dreamed of "a
world where nobody cared what anybody else was doing."

    There is, of course, plenty of strangeness here: Gould
rehearsing a children's choir while crouched in a pew, nothing
visible but his hand; Gould serenading the elephants at the
Toronto zoo by singing them Mahler at dawn. Yet at play within
him was something deeper than mere oddity. Able to read music
before he could read words, Gould found he could learn scores
most easily while listening simultaneously to TV shows or the
roar of a vacuum cleaner. Always, his remarkable gifts were
shadowed by a perversity that drove him to torture the works he
disliked (notably, most of Mozart), and by a habit of compulsive
experimentation that made him treat even human voices as little
more than sounds. Inspiringly, Gould saw music as his world;
chillingly, he also read the world as nothing more than music.

    His deepest relationships, then, were always with himself,
and with the luminous sounds he entertained in his head. In his
determination to control everything around him, he scripted,
down to the last pause, his "off-the-cuff" public interviews and
devoted himself to a technology that would allow him, he
thought, to create perfect pieces of music simply by splicing
together flawless passages. His ambition, he once said, was "to
try my hand at being a prisoner." He achieved that goal,
perhaps, by locking himself more and more inside the echo
chamber of his own mind, becoming, in the process, a man
possessed, and not only by genius.

    Gould's performances, writes Friedrich, had "a strange
power unlike anything in the work of any other pianist . . . a
power that made many people feel that their lives had somehow
been changed, deepened, enriched." Still, Friedrich respects
Gould's talents too much to canonize, or psychoanalyze, him.
Instead, he sends the reader back to the recordings. And there,
as one listens, one senses that in some deep but precise sense,
Gould and his piano were truly one. For the man himself was a
highly sensitive instrument, tuned to a fine pitch, capable of
many moods, and played upon at times by otherworldly forces that
found in him an unforgettable beauty.