Wondrous Strange by Kevin Bazzana (OUP, $35)
He occupies a unique niche. Other great pianists, even giants like Sviatoslav Richter, Artur Rubinstein, and Rudolf Serkin, exist on a continuum with their lesser colleagues, but Glenn Gould, whether good, bad, or indifferent (and he could be all three) stands in splendid isolation. A Gould performance is immediately recognisable, impossible to mistake for any other pianist's; touch, phrasing, tempo, voicing, rhythm are all distinctive and incomparable. His reputation is similarly unique. The impeccable technical apparatus, the vehement musical enthusiasms and anti-pathies, the well documented eccentricities contribute to a sort of cult. There is everybody else, and then there is Glenn Gould.
Gould, a likely subject for biography, has already had many books written about him. But he presents biographers with one formidable challenge: his adult life was largely devoid of incident. After a precocious childhood, early stardom (he was 22 at his American debut), and a successful decade or so on the concert circuit, he retired from live performance, rarely left his home base in Toronto, and led an almost hermitic existence. He wrote, made records, produced several radio documentaries for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. With rare exceptions, nothing much else happened to him, nothing that didn't take place inside his head or at the end of his fingers.
It is one of the many virtues of Kevin Bazzana's excellent Wondrous Strange that he accepts this limitation and works within it, efficiently covering the salient facts of Gould's life while providing the fullest and most convincing portrait of the man and artist we have thus far had. Exceedingly well researched - Bazzana enjoyed unrestricted access to the Glenn Gould archive in the National Library of Canada, and seems to have secured the co-operation of most surviving friends and associates of the pianist - the book is both vivid and judicious. Bazzana is neither debunker nor hagiographer. The Glenn Gould who emerges from his pages has the solidity of a real person, and possesses the foibles of a real person along with the miraculous, incomprehensible strengths one expects of a genius.
The man seems to be a recognisable type: a coddled mummy's boy who combines a vast range of emotional frailties and anxieties with a will of iron. Born in 1932, he was the only son of a woman in her forties (she was ten years older than her husband) and was regarded as a miraculous gift by both his parents, who indulged him from earliest childhood. When he turned out to be prodigiously talented, he became the focus of his mother's life (he reported to a friend that he was a disappointment to his father, an extraordinary notion which may tell us more about son than father). He spent every other night in his mother's bed, alternating with his father according to a negotiated rota. He did not move away from home until he was 30; his parents provided a perfect cocoon for him, precisely moulded to fit his desires and accommodate his insecurities, and he was loath to leave it.
Such an upbringing can only give a child, genius or not, a profoundly distorted notion of his place in the grand scheme of things, and unquestionably contributed to prima donna qualities which Gould professed to scorn in others. While many colleagues and friends attest to his good nature, his friendly manner, his easy humour, his freedom from snobbery, he nevertheless managed to construct a world around himself that answered precisely to his needs and whims and kept perceived threats at bay. Conversations tended to be monologues, usually conducted by telephone rather than face to face; he could rarely stand to be touched, once going so far as to initiate legal proceedings against the Steinway corporation after one of its employees clapped him on the back in greeting; people who did not share his opinions or abide by his rules were often ostracised; his ideas grew stranger and more extreme as he got older, frequently, one suspects, post hoc rationalisations for his fears and weaknesses rather than a coherent credo; some of his performances ventured beyond the idiosyncratic and became downright bizarre. Bazzana suggests all this was necessary for his art, but the assertion is unsupported, and certainly not self-evident. By isolating himself from all intellectual opposition, and from the abrading challenges of most professional and social intercourse, Gould may have lapsed into a state of artistic solipsism that shaped his least satisfying interpretations. When he played Mozart, for example, his avowed purpose was to demonstrate the music's manifold deficiencies. In a sense, he succeeded. It is almost impossible to derive pleasure from most of his Mozart recordings. But one is more inclined to blame the pianist's perversity than any fault in the composer.
Modern biographical praxis encourages the delving into intimate matters once thought private and out of bounds. One may entertain abstract doubts about the propriety of this - especially when it involves someone as phobic about intimacy as Glenn Gould - but there's no doubt it is often irresistibly interesting. Bazzana does not disappoint on this score.
Widely rumoured to be homosexual, Gould almost certainly was nothing of the kind. While his existence was predominantly solitary and monastic, and he tended toward an almost Victorian priggishness in his attitudes and conversation, he was also capable of a courtly flirtatiousness with female colleagues, and conducted a number (probably a relatively small number) of sexual relationships over the years. One such relationship, with the wife of a well known musician - Bazzana does not name her, and nor shall I, but her identity is no secret among musicians and Gould aficionados - was of considerable duration, and was serious enough to prompt her to relocate to Toronto with her children for four years. At other times, and to a number of trusted friends, Gould occasionally mentioned being in love, and once even mentioned a woman with whom he had had "a torrid affair." Gould was temperamentally reclusive, and by all accounts ill at ease with his own body, but he wasn't always celibate.
Bazzana also takes us deeply into Gould's medical records. Hypochondriacal from childhood (his mother's hovering concern for his health no doubt played a role), obsessed all his life with ills real and imagined, he became by middle age a genuinely sickly man. Habitual insomnia, bad diet, terrible posture, a sedentary lifestyle, reckless reliance on pills of all sorts, all contributed to a severely compromised constitution and premature death in 1982, at the age of 50. This history makes for depressing reading, and one wonders whether it is really useful to know such minutiae as, for example, the shape and texture of Gould's stools; but once this door has been unlatched, deciding how far to open it is a matter of individual judgement. Bazzana opts for opening it all the way.
Does any of this information illuminate the music? Not that it needs to: we are interested in the lives of artists we admire even when the lives seem unrelated to the art. In Gould's case, however, I believe it does. His best playing (in Bach, pre-eminently) evokes a transcendent, almost religious purity far removed from any earthly passions - at most, recollecting those passions in supernal tranquillity - and his worst betrays a stubborn disregard for audience pleasure, or indeed for any human connection at all. This is all of a piece with what Bazzana has to tell us about a spiritual, introverted, awkward, and yet oddly ardent and lovable character. Nothing can fully explain the workings of genius, but Wondrous Strange establishes provocative connections between the troubled person and the uniquely gifted artist named Glenn Gould.
