TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/052289/05228900.063

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 4KB | 62 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.