Vol. 19 No. 14 · 17 July 1997
pages 3-6 | 4044 words
In the Chair
Edward Said
- Glenn Gould: The Ecstasy and the Tragedy of Genius by Peter Ostwald
Norton, 368 pp, $29.95, May 1997, ISBN 0 393 04077 1
- When the Music Stops: Managers, Maestros and the Corporate Murder of Classical Music by Norman Lebrecht
Simon and Schuster, 400 pp, £7.99, July 1997, ISBN 0 671 01025 5
One of the most talked and written about musicians after World War Two, Glenn Gould quite consciously set about making himself interesting and eccentric. Most performers do, but Gould went beyond anyone. It helped a great deal that he had a phenomenal digital gift, a perfect memory, a very high intelligence, but in addition he was self-conscious and self-observant to an extent most other performers would scarcely be able to imagine. This was not just a matter of takes and re-takes of everything he played, but also of imagining and thinking about himself playing in the greatest detail. In 1964, when he was 34, he deserted the concert stage and retired into an appallingly claustrophobic world of his own making: he never woke up before three in the afternoon, rarely left his hotel room in Toronto, worked all night with his own tape-recorders and splicing-machines, and with a few exceptions, confined his social life to long phone calls after midnight. He was very secretive, despite his loquacity, and hated any criticism, even though his playing was so original and compelling that he became a cult figure among other musicians and the general public when he was still in his twenties.
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Letters
Vol. 19 No. 15 · 31 July 1997
From Rosalind Cressy
The mental torture and paranoia of professional performers is a fascinating subject, but I feel it was ill-considered of Edward Said, in his piece on Glenn Gould (LRB, 17 July), to speak of audiences waiting for the isolated genius on stage to make a mistake. As a professional performer myself, in theatre and music, I can truly say that no colleague of mine has ever felt that an error would be applauded by a paying audience, or that any member of it would feel satisfaction at witnessing failure. We might be walked out on, or booed (rare in Britain), but we would never experience anything like the ordeal undergone by Richard Krajicek when every mistake he made against Tim Henman at Wimbledon was greeted with glee. Performers compete against each other, but it is only in the performer’s own mind that the audience is against him. Has Edward Said ever wanted a great performer, whom he has paid to see, to come out with substandard work? The pressures are huge for a performer, but it is the professionals surrounding him who bay for blood.
Rosalind Cressy
Frittenden, Kent
From Ariadne van de Ven
Norton will be publishing Peter Ostwald’s Glenn Gould in the UK and the rest of Europe on 17 September at £20.
Ariadne van de Ven
W.W. Norton
Vol. 19 No. 17 · 4 September 1997
From Timothy Barnard
Now it is Edward Said’s turn (LRB, 17 July) to have mangled a small corner of Canadian history and geography: Glenn Gould did not live in a Toronto hotel, as Said recounts, but in a modest postwar apartment block, on St Clair Avenue West. A plaque on the street commemorates the fact. I have often walked by late on a summer’s night and wondered what it would have been like, in the still staid and provincial Toronto of the Sixties, to hear Gould’s piano playing drifting out to the street in the wee hours of the morning.
Timothy Barnard
Iowa City
Vol. 19 No. 19 · 2 October 1997
From Edward Said
As a professional performer herself, Rosalind Cressy (Letters, 31 July) thinks it ‘ill-considered’ of me ‘to speak of audiences waiting for the isolated genius on stage to make a mistake’. Doubtless, but precisely that and a great deal more paranoiac anxiety is what Glenn Gould felt: I was paraphrasing his sentiments, not endorsing them, though I do think Cressy is a bit disingenuous to represent the commercial world of performing musicians and paying audiences so rosily. Timothy Barnard’s complaint (Letters, 4 September) that I ‘mangled a small corner of Canadian history and geography’ by not mentioning Gould’s apartment on St Clair Avenue West derives from an insufficient knowledge of the very history and geography he supposedly defends. The facts are that Gould did have the St Clair Avenue flat, but kept his recording equipment and pianos at the Inn on the Park, and also for a while had a room at the Windsor Arms. In any case, Barnard would never have heard Gould’s playing from the street, since the pianist always kept every window and door tightly shut, as well as soundproofed.
Edward Said
Columbia University
