Geoffrey Payzant: The Gould problem was a big problem. It would not go away and could not be ignored. At times he seemed desperate - he seemed urgently trying to tell us something, that for whatever reason we weren't prepared to listen to. Vincent Tovell: The Gould problem has not gone away. Glenn Gould dared to be himself. GP: Gould was concerned with thought, and the piano was just another instrument of thought; another means for articulating and organising his thought. VT: He read the future. GP: Who was this piano player? Who does he think he is, claiming to
be composing? VT: Who was Glenn Gould? Glenn Gould's father Russell Herbert
Gould: When Glenn was three days old, Glenn's fingers never stopped moving just like this: if he was playing a scale his arms would be swinging back and forth, his fingers going. It showed us that Glenn was musical and the doctor said, "that boy is going to be either a physician or a pianist - one or the other." John P L Roberts: Glenn Gould has passed across the horizon of the 20th century like
a dazzling meteor. Thanks to Glenn's far-seeing use of mass media, his musical performances touched the hearts and minds of millions of people. He was always intent on reading the future and foreseeing the place of music and new forms of art in mass media. In these ways and others he will long be considered one of the most important thinkers of his time. Glenn Gould: Music at the moment is at a crossroads, and there are so many possibilities for it that everybody has a chance to be right. I think that music in Canada is in a very very healthy state. Vincent Tovell: He was born and lived all his life in Toronto. Robert Fulford: Toronto was the perfect place for Glenn. It didn't provide any rules. There was nothing here that was oppressive in the way of a musical tradition. He chose to stay in Toronto because it was open and free, and you could be anything here you wanted to be. In Toronto you can carve out your own space, in a sense, which is exactly what
he did. In Toronto you can decide for yourself what role you'll play.
GG: I have absolutely no intention or desire to leave Canada. I can't see first of all any reason for it. Canada has been terribly good to me; and the second thing: I'm
much too fond of the country. VT: Well, not so fond of the proud towers of finance and high tech
though, nor its cathedrals for consumers. GG: I don't believe it! It's absurd. It's absolutely absurd! Vincent Tovell: In fact, Glenn preferred isolation
from crowds, cities. His haven: a modest apartment. Margaret Pacsu: He was an unpretentious person who was not impressed nor particularly involved with material things. VT: Simply furnished, the address was unknown except to a few friends. MP: In terms
of glory as other people think of it in the 20th century, he couldn't have cared less. VT: A hermit; a man of mystery; a supreme pianist; a genius of divine guidance, it was said. Dozens of recordings carry his name around the world today. The touch, the technical action
of a piano mattered to him, and few were just right. Clothes didn't
matter much. He sat unusually low to the keyboard so the folding chair his
father made for him became a part of him. He took it everywhere. The condition of his arms and fingers was a constant worry, and which piano would be just right
for which composer. A spontaneous, friendly person. A great star who didn't think of himself as a star. His oldest friends knew that, friends like a fellow musician, the conductor and impresario Nicholas Goldschmidt. NG: Well, I think he was always different from that point of view, because he had this endearing quality where you were absolutely unaware that you had this great artist, great musician, great personality with you. He became just like anyone else. VT: But Glenn Gould did feel the cold NG: I will tell you a
little story because it's adorable. You know in my house I have a beautiful old Bechstein, and he always wanted to buy it from me. You know he collected practically pianos - we could say that. So one day he came and it was not very hot in the room or very warm so you know at that time. So he came and sat down at the piano and said, "oh I'm too cold. Bring me a scarf", and so I brought him a scarf and put it around his neck. In the meantime he had taken off his shoes, you know. He played the piano with pedalling the piano with no shoes on. He said, "no, not around the neck. Put it on my feet!" So you know this is also one of the things which only a Glenn Gould could say...putting a scarf on his feet. VT: For years, Glenn spent many happy hours at the family cottage north of Toronto on Lake Simcoe. Here was peace, solitude. All his life he needed this, and yes, indeed, he often did hum along, just as critics often reminded him, and he wished he could stop. His parents both sang. Bert Gould: This Sunday afternoon in Uxbridge: this church held around 2,000 people and it was full and we were singing, and Glenn played for us, and I remember he was just five years old at the time.
He read the music right off. VT: Had Glenn sung publicly? BG: Well yes, he did like to sing to the cows, but as a child at the cottage, oh, would he be in his early teens?, he'd
strike off on a bicycle and it would be lunchtime and his mother would get
a little anxious wanting to know where he was, and I'd say, "well he's
gone on his bike", so I'd take the car, maybe find him five miles away on the side of the road, and one day I came along and he was singing to a bunch of cows. They were all lined up inside the fence. VT: Glenn often joked about that day, discovering unexpected fans. GG: It was an extraordinarily touching occasion. I really felt that a very special bond had
been established. Certainly I've never encountered so attentive an audience before. In any event, I have no idea whether such repertoire has any appeal for elephants but I am here to find out, so...[sings] Nicholas Goldschmidt: I would like to say that the most perfect example of collaboration of Glenn with a singer - there are some recordings now, but I witnessed the time when Kerstin Meyer came to Vancouver during the Vancouver International Festival, and I organised for Glenn, I organised a Schoenberg evening and he prepared Ode to Napoleon and then the song cycle of Die Hangenden Garten by Schoenberg. Well you should have seen what happened when Kerstin Meyer and Glenn Gould got together. I think she was there about ten days and he was there a week. Whenever I wanted to rehearse with her something she said, "I'm sorry, I'm rehearsing with Glenn Gould", and there was a total love-in, and when you say about a good accompanist, I think he was a perfect partner for a singer when he liked the music he had to play and when he liked the singer. But that thing - it's a great pity that was never recorded. Is that the recording from that time? How did you know? I must have told you in advance. That's interesting. You clever people, you. Well, that brings back memories, I can
tell you. VT: Glenn Gould's world was the world of sound: not just music, but new forms of communication; human links over space and time. Recording techniques - radio and television - fascinated and challenged him. He was at home with new communications technologies. The Canadian critic Robert Fulford was his best friend at school and his neighbour. RF: I claim that I took part in Glenn Gould's first experiment in technology when we had tin cans with silk string between them held between our two backyards, and we tried to speak over them. That didn't work, but later on we got something set up with electricity where we had a microphone in each house, and I guess we were at that time 11 or 12,
and we had a microphone at each house. I've forgotten how we set it up, but we could speak back and forth. I did a news broadcast from my side, and Glenn played something from his side, and that was about all. We couldn't think of anything more to do so we had to shut down our network. VT: A restless, hungry mind, exploring philosophy, history, psychology, music, and theories of communication: a characteristic Canadian concern. RF: Some of our best thinkers have been thinkers about communication, and the world's most important thinker on communication in the last few decades is Marshall McLuhan, and it always seemed to me absolutely natural that McLuhan should come out of Canada. Gould's theories come naturally out of Canada too. VT: His output was enormous: not just dozens of recordings, but articles and essays rethinking and challenging traditions; analyzing the evolution of music; and arguing that our concert halls are obsolete, being replaced by recording, radio, and TV. In fact he stopped playing in public early in life and went on to show, if he could, that technology could bring music musicians and you the listener close together again, intimately, one-to-one. A man of high purpose. He let the world think him a recluse, a hermit. In fact, all his life he was spontaneous and funny with friends. Margaret Pacsu: That was what was so delightful about this personality: he was growing and trying things all the time. There was nothing because of pretensions and what one should do as a grown-up - as an adult. We were down on the floor doing animal noises, and here was this man who was one of the greatest musicians of our century, if not of all time, and he was an unpretentious
person. JR: He was a very compassionate person: he really cared about people and situations.
VT: John Roberts was one of his oldest friends. JR: In his own way he did help a lot of people, but he tried to do so anonymously and very quietly. Perhaps this side of him won't come
out for quite some time, because the people who he helped perhaps don't want to talk about that just now. His cousin Jessie Greig was specially close. JG: Glenn
was so tender and kind and gentle. There just aren't adjectives to describe him. He really was. Recording Engineer: Third movement, Take 1. JR: I always felt that Glenn had more will
than strength. He had a will of iron. VT: Here was home: with colleagues
making music the new way. Bach's Italian Concerto, one of his earlier records, made when he was still learning the critical differences between a
concert performance picked up by a microphone and the work of a true recording artist. To be successful is one thing; to be creative is something else. To be creative
would be his lifelong concern. Orillia Ontario: a quiet place. An old settlement by Canadian standards. The very first Canadian
hero wintered here: an explorer Samuel de Champlain. That was almost 400 years ago. The Gould's summer cottage was just a step down the road. Glenn grew up knowing about explorers who dared to think and do differently. BG: He always loved the water; loved any kind of a boat. If we missed Glenn, somebody had to get another boat and get out on the lake to hunt for him. He might be 14, 15 miles away but we'd still find him coming home singing, conducting. VT: Boats, tricycles, bicycles, and cars. Glenn loved driving. BG: He'd sit on my knee and he'd steer; and as long as I could keep his mind on the driving and forget about the conducting at the same time; it was fine. VT: Music and cars. He always associated a concert by the pianist Joseph Hoffman with cars. GG: I was about six years old; and it was a staggering impression, really. The only thing I can really remember is that when I was being brought home in the car I was falling asleep; and I was in that wonderful state of half-awakeness in which you heard all sorts of incredible sounds going through your mind; and they were all orchestral sounds but I
was playing them all; and I suddenly was Hoffman you know, I was... and this was something I'll never forget. VT: Had the six year
old already sensed his destiny? Had the baby sensed it?: BG: He wouldn't bother playing ball from the time he was a tiny child. Roll a rubber ball across the floor to him, and he wouldn't let it touch his hand at all. If it looks as if it's going to hit him; he'd turn his back. It was almost as if he knew that he had to protect those fingers for some reason. VT: Glenn's mother Florence Gould was his first teacher. Cousin Jessie remembers her hopes. JG: Even before he was born she had determined he was going to be a special child. She played classical music all the time she was carrying Glenn, and she was very determined that he was going to be an outstanding musician. BG: He was never allowed to go to the piano and play a wrong note. If he did she'd stop immediately and make sure he
corrected right there and then. VT: Presumably he was made to practice scales? BG: You know; you put it in a peculiar way! Glenn was never made to do anything at the piano in his life except close it down. You could tell him stop practicing, go on out. That didn't have a bit of effect at all. But if Glenn ever
did anything wrong that he had to be punished for, his mother just shut the piano down and locked it. "That's that for today now, no more piano." That was far worse than any corporal punishment that could have been administered. JG: I think that he was very fortunate. His parents couldn't have been more supportive - both of them - not one more than the other. VT: Both were musical? JG: Yes they were. His father the violin and his mother the piano, and they both sang. They both had beautiful voices. So you know, I think that Glenn underestimated their musical talent - both of them. VT: He had rare gifts. As a very young conservatory graduate he had a commanding musical intelligence, absolute pitch, and a photographic memory. BG: He used to go into the bedroom, take a score - I've seen him take a Beethoven concerto score that he didn't know at all, and never come out until he memorised that completely. He'd go to the piano and play it without the music. VT: The kids at school were impressed. RF: We all knew he was going to become a great pianist, and I've often thought since then how silly we were to think that, because we had no knowledge of what a great pianist was, or a great talent. He was by far the best pianist in Malvern Collegiate, that's for sure, and even some of us might have said he was the best in the east end of Toronto, but we actually believed that he was going to be the greatest in the world. Now, why we thought that, I have no idea. It was curious that we all looked upon him as a genius without the knowledge to recognise a genius. VT: Glenn never graduated formally from high school. Music prevailed. Actually history, literature, and mathematics had never been a problem but, RF: on the other hand he didn't really want to work very hard, and didn't really want to do what the teachers wanted him to do a lot of the time. He was terrible in penmanship. All his essays and books and so on were always messy, but he was very good at history and English, of course in English, and mathematics. He was an extremely likeable person - Glenn was loveable, in fact. He was very funny; he did not take himself very seriously. He took music very seriously, but he didn't take himself very seriously. He was very sweet-tempered and fun to be with. JG: Well, he was always full of fun, but I think he was unhappy. He was so vastly different and ahead of his age group that it was impossible for him to have much in common. I remember seeing Glenn at recess, standing up against the fence, all by himself, and that picture has always stayed with me, because he was lonely even in those days. He didn't relate well; in fact Bob Fulford was the only one I really ever remember him bringing to the house. VT: The Gould home in east Toronto sheltered him from the despair of the depression and the atrocities of war but radio - and he always loved listening to the radio - fired his imagination. It brought in the outside world - news, music, and plays. JG: Even when I was living there he was writing plays that he wanted to produce and he wanted each family member to be one of the actors or actresses in his plays. VT: Starring himself? JG: Always he was the star. You were always a secondary character. GG: Well actually if I had not turned out to be a musician, I think the thing I would most like to have done would have been to be a writer. VT: Really? Not an actor? GG: Well, the ham is in me in large proportion, but I've always been strongly tempted to try writing fiction. I am completely unprepared for it. It would be a real gamble, but one of these times I'll write my autobiography, which will certainly be fiction. VT: No biography is going to be complete without a chapter about Glenn's pets. JG: His happiness came from his pets, I think: Mozart his bird, and Nicky his dog. They just loved and adored him, and he them. He loved to take the dog out to exercise him, and he would start and run in a circle, and Nicky would follow behind him and run after him, and then he would work Nicky up to such a frantic pace that Nicky would become excited and one day he grabbed Glenn by the seat of the pants and pulled the whole rear end out of his pants, and Glenn fled into the house in just absolute horror because this had happened to him. VT: And then there was Banquo. Banquo too was special - splendid enough to have his portrait painted. Strays were drawn to Glenn. One day he brought home a skunk. BG: He got sent right back with it anyway. But the following day he started again. He had to have a skunk. He liked skunks. So I said, "well that was a deodorised skunk that you had here and that wouldn't give any trouble but you catch a wild one and you may be in trouble." He didn't care - he wanted to see a wild skunk, so I made him a box trap and he set it, and the next morning he had his skunk. He was out there inside of 15 minutes from the time Glenn went out to see it, he was feeding it strips of bacon out of his hand - a wild skunk. JR: Well, Glenn certainly identified with animals. I remember once we were driving down from Manitoulin Island. We were playing a guessing game: if you were a dog what sort of dog would you be? And my sister was visiting from England and she said immediately the game started, she said to him, "Glenn, you would be a collie dog", and he turned around and looked at her and said, "you are my friend for life because that's exactly what I am, a collie dog. Woof woof!" BG: At one time Glenn used to love to go out in the boat with me and go fishing, but after several very big ones were caught, and Glenn saw them being displayed and weighed and so on, he wouldn't have any more to do with fishing and I had to stop, too. VT: He hated cruelty. He feared and tried to escape crowds, aggressive competition, and that sometimes had meant schoolyards. When he was young, he did enjoy Sunday evening church, playing the organ and seeking 'the peace the earth cannot give'. GG: Monday mornings, you see, meant going back to school and encountering all sorts of terrifying situations out there in the city, so those moments of Sunday evening sanctuary became very special to me. They meant that one could find a certain tranquility, even in the city, but only if one opted not to be a part of it. VT:He played the organ before he was 10 and he loved it. GG: Well, the organ was a great great influence not only on my later taste in repertoire, but I think also on the physical manner in which I tried to play the piano. VT: Chopin had to be played one way, he learned, GG: When it was Bach, one had to have an entirely different approach: something that was based really on the tips of the fingers doing the whole action for you: something that could be ... almost have the wonderful whistling, whistling [mimics sound] whistling gasp of the of the tracker action of the old organs. VT: At home Glenn was happy. His father's fur business gave him security and Bert and Florence Gould gave him time to grow up, mature. Jessie Greig: They held him back until they felt that he was ready, and never did they exploit him and they stayed in the background, and I think that that was a marvellous way for them to behave. Robert Fulford: What was there
early was a tremendous sense of confidence: the most breathtaking confidence I've ever known. He knew he would be a terribly important figure in music. I'm not quite sure how he knew this, but he didn't brag about it, he didn't say that made him a great man and made the rest of us nothing, he didn't indicate anything of that kind. He certainly wasn't using it as a way of putting anyone else down, but it seemed to be clear to him when he was 13 years old - some age like that - that he would be a major figure. Certainly the idea of Glenn becoming part of the great musical world was locked in his head from the beginning, and he was among those people before they ever heard his name. In his mind he was already living with them and exchanging ideas with them. VT: Occasional concerts and radio recitals in his teens quickly made Glenn Gould known to Canadians coast to coast. He was soon identifiable, original, unpredictable, and fun - a radical conservative. With Alberto Guerrero his teacher, and his peers in Toronto, his horizons took in five centuries of English and European tradition, from the Elizabethans to the Vienna avant-garde: Schoenberg, Alban Berg. and Anton Webern. He took to writing on the avant-garde and lecturing, too. Glenn learned much from Guerrero, and they shared some enthusiasms - for Bach's Goldberg Variations for instance, which Guerrero performed; and for a good game of croquet. BG: He liked to win. He and Mr Guerrero used to play croquet by the hour and they both liked to win. VT: He began composing too - a bassoon sonata appeared and got played. Music among friends, summer days at the cottage. And in his early 20s, he wrote a major string quartet, surprisingly recalling his great god in the 20th century, Richard Strauss. But the virtuoso's life took over. He needed concert experience; a star's reputation. He had to do time in the public arena to establish a claim on his own destiny. Glenn already had strong views on many things: certainly on what he would and would not perform. John Beckwith was also a Guerrero pupil. JB: An odd one I remembered in the middle 50s, he told me that he was invited to play with one of the Canadian symphonies (I forget which). I said, "what are you going to play?" He said, "the Variations on a Theme of Paganini by Rachmaninoff." I said, "you're kidding! You've gotta be kidding. You hate that piece." He said, "it's a very good piece" - he started to fight with me - "it's a very good piece. I've always liked it", he said, and, you know, that was quite unexpected, totally unexpected. He had never played any Rachmaninoff. He never played
the piece, in fact. I think he cancelled the performance. VT: In his teens, triumph after triumph. JG: I remember coming home in the car and everyone being so upset because he had hummed, as he was playing, you know. It had surfaced to such a degree that they were becoming alarmed about it, but nothing fazed Glenn. It didn't matter to him whether he hummed or not. VT: January, 1955. Glenn was 22. It was time to cross the border to Washington DC. The critic for the Washington Post was Paul Hume. PH: From the time this young man, whose name was Glenn Gould - and it said he studied in Toronto with Alberto Guerrero - began to play the piano, I thought, I am hearing something extraordinary. He chose the music that appealed to him and he didn't play anything that didn't. He played the Webern Variations, which were almost totally unknown in those days, and rarely appeared on a pianist's recital. They're not long. JB: For Glenn, a young unknown, to go to the stage for his debut, and dictate what he was going to play, against all the conventional wisdom of what you played for the first recital, that was amazing. That was just amazing. PH: But he turned to the audience and at his very first U.S. recital, and made a very brief speech, and he said, "there is a relationship between the Webern Variations which you've just heard and the Beethoven sonata which is about to follow, and because of that I would like to play the Webern again", which he did. JB: Manager or no manager. Advice or no advice. Cocky as hell but you know, he got his way, and he
did it right. That was extraordinary. PH: This was an extraordinary young artist, one that we were certain would be heard again often, and proudly in the largest halls. There was not a moment, in my judgement, that afternoon when I didn't feel that opinion thoroughly reinforced. VT: Three days later in New York: the same story. BG: I remember it very well. He played beautifully and made quite a hit, but I think that we took it more or less in stride because that was the normal thing for him. He did the same thing wherever he went. JB: It was stunning for everybody,
but I think one of my reactions was, how could he do it with those
pieces? That was the astonishing thing. VT: Glenn, his first recording for Columbia Masterworks, and fame, worldwide. Here was something new, unconventional in the big concert world. A genius, and he didn't fit into any slot at all. NG: He was already a 'pianiste arivee', and he had Time magazine in his hand and said, "Nicky look, look at that. Look at it - that's me!", and I said, "what is it?" "Read it!" And then I start to read it and "take it away - I have to show it to someone else!" That was the kind of person he was. He was this spontaneous man who overwhelmed one with his personality but also with his boyishness and his his sense of humour and total lack of conceit. Maybe he was conceited, but he never showed it. VT: The world now laid claim to Glenn Gould with harsh demands. Public concerts were more contest than love affairs. How many quiet days by Lake Simcoe could he ever enjoy again? He was going to have to tour, travel the world. But was that the sort of explorer he wanted to be? a star turn and circuses?
