PART TWO

National Treasure

The Young Professional, 1947–54

Gould in the early 1950s. (Photograph by Donald McKague.)

 

“Once I turned pro, so to speak, I put away childish things forever.”

In his last years with Alberto Guerrero, Gould, as both performer and thinker, gained quickly in maturity, self-confidence, and independence. He was voraciously curious, eager to absorb everything around him, and his late teens were a ferment of musical passions. He would discover some new repertoire or idea and drink up all he could of it–Bach and Schoenberg were just two of many examples. He had his “first Haydn period” at eleven, when he studied many of the piano sonatas, his “second Haydn period” at nineteen, when he discovered the string quartets; he seems to have tackled Beethoven’s piano music in a similar fit of enthusiasm. He told John Beckwith, in a 1951 letter, that he was exploring Purcell’s keyboard music (“really great stuff”), though he never played any of it in public. His conservatory friend Peter Yazbeck remembers him studying, of all things, the choral music of Buxtehude. Yet he did not accept everything he took in. “When I was in my teens,” he recalled in 1962, “I hated about ninety-five per cent of all music, of all periods. I had very strong opinions, much stronger than I would dare to have today.” He was judgemental and defensive in his thinking, not worldly or catholic, and his curiosity was balanced by a powerful filtering mechanism: he retained only what suited his highly constrained aesthetic. The combination of powerful curiosity and powerful constraint is hardly surprising in an excitable adolescent, though in this respect Gould’s mind retained a streak of adolescence throughout his life.

The outrageous opinions for which he became notorious were already in place in his teens, and he would defend them passionately to all who would listen. He would hold court in the conservatory cafeteria, discoursing and debating about his latest enthusiasms and bêtes noires, musical and otherwise, and Yazbeck remembers him startling one tableful by explaining that Mozart couldn’t really write a piano concerto. “He was a sweet guy, really the nicest kid you’d ever want to meet–a gentlemanly kind of kid–but you just talked mainly about musical things with him, and he had his strong opinions at a young age,” Yazbeck says. “He was not a snob in any sense. I never heard him say a bad thing about anyone. He was just always very opinionated, and yet not in an obnoxious way. He would just make statements about things, and that was it.” Robert Fulford saw in his young friend “the most breathtaking confidence I’ve ever known”: in his early teens Gould was already thinking of himself as part of the larger musical world. Ruth Watson-Henderson, a former Guerrero pupil, recalled that “he always seemed to be at the centre of any discussion”–even when he was with adults. Fellow-students were shocked, amused, intimidated, but always intrigued. Gould was already a curmudgeon, a young fogey, cultivating a serious, all-masterpiece diet of classical music and harbouring little patience for anything less. He liked some popular music (Cole Porter, Ella Fitzgerald, Porgy and Bess), later thought Leonard Bernstein’s score for West Side Story “a masterpiece,” confessed to being “rather fond of Gilbert and Sullivan in small doses,” and even acknowledged an interest in Dixieland, but mostly his taste did not stray beyond the usual classical canon. He hated simplistic, repetitive music–minimalism (“boring as hell”), rock (“offensive”), folk music (“I can be charmed by the peasant wrongheadedness of it all”)–and had no apparent interest in non-Western musics.

Even within his own field, his taste was already highly selective. “I’ve often said that I have something like a century-long blind spot with regard to music,” he told an interviewer in 1980. “It’s roughly demarcated by The Art of the Fugue on one side and Tristan on the other, and almost everything in between is, at best, the subject of admiration rather than love.” For a pianist that’s quite an admission: it means, in effect, rejecting the core of the conventional piano repertoire–and, by implication, the conventional approach to the tonal resources of the piano. Gould came to deplore middle-period Beethoven (too belligerent), Schubert (too repetitive),^*13 almost all of the “super-sensual,” virtuosic piano music of the early Romantics (Schumann, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt, and their contemporaries), and twentieth-century music in a similar vein: Rachmaninov, for instance, was “absolutely intolerable,” except for a couple of late works like the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, which he considered performing in the fifties. Music outside the Austro-German canon and its satellites was suspect; he dismissed whole repertoires from France, Italy, Spain, and almost all points south. His friend Barbara Little remembers him, as early as fourteen, berating her for singing “junk” like Fauré. He did not like the ballet, and considered opera, especially Italian opera, to be “rather less than music.” “I don’t go to the opera house very much,” he confessed, in a 1959 profile. “And when I do, I’m more interested in the actual music I hear than in what I see on the stage–in fact, quite often, when I do go to opera, I shut my eyes and just listen.” Often he barely knew the words or plot of the operatic music he listened to. In a diary entry from 1980, he admitted, after listening to Tannhäuser on the radio, that “I’d never even known what it was about (I’m ashamed to say)”–a surprising gap for a self-described Wagnerite. He was squeamish about the sensuousness and melodiousness and violent emotions of Italian opera; the music of Verdi and Puccini, he admitted, made him “intensely uncomfortable”–a revealing choice of words.

Gould’s studiously blinkered view of music was a by-product of his puritanism. Randiness or delinquency are not the only extreme reactions a boy can have to puberty; no less a cliché is the teenage puritan, in whom the physical and emotional upheavals of adolescence induce a powerful repressive reaction. Gould was precisely the sort to use repression and rationalization to deal with what he called “the harrowing business of being a teenager.” As his teen years progressed, his puritanism yielded an increasingly rational and idealistic approach to music. Fulford noticed the change: “In Glenn’s mind, music was becoming refined and bodiless, almost entirely separated from the physical. Sometimes he spoke of music as if it existed in some distant and abstract sphere, beyond physicality.” If, during his school years, Gould turned to the piano as a kind of refuge, it is hardly surprising that he should have been drawn to the music least wrapped up with worldly things. In a letter to John Roberts in 1971, he wrote of the “therapeutic and remedial” value of art: “for me all music which lacks that ability to isolate its listeners from the world in which they live is intrinsically less valuable than that which manages the feat.” He liked to talk about “ecstasy” as the highest goal of playing or listening to music, and he meant not exultation but the sense of standing outside oneself, of stopping time, of being in touch with an otherworldly realm.

There was a moral basis to his artistic views. Like his parents, though in a more sophisticated sense, and like countless musicians and thinkers since the ancient Greeks, he was devoted to the idea that music can and should, finally, be judged on moral rather than aesthetic grounds. The music that he admired aesthetically, from Byrd to Krenek, was music that he also considered morally uplifting, because it was rational, abstract, introspective, and encouraged contemplation and repose. This was the “therapeutic” music that could “isolate its listeners from the world in which they live,” could offer “the peace the earth cannot give.” The music that he criticized aesthetically, from Scarlatti to Bartók, was music that he also considered downright sinful, because it was sensual, self-aggrandizing, and encouraged excitation, competition, hysteria–music stained with “worldly grime” (as he once said of Scarlatti). Like a Methodist of old, he thought all the performing arts disreputable–he thought it immoral to test people in live situations–and he was disturbed by all of the musical corollaries of “live-ness”: staged opera, the concert hall, audience-grabbing concertos, improvisation, chance music. He never attended a jazz concert, and was, by his own admission, “a complete flop” as a performer of jazz. He took a stab at enjoying Charlie Parker and other bebop performers in his teens, “but it was a very passing fancy” despite occasional praise for, say, Lennie Tristano or Bill Evans,^*14 he admitted that jazz appealed to him only in “very small doses.” He pompously dismissed jazz as “a minor and transitory offshoot of the romantic movement”–and besides, he said, “no one ever swung more than Bach.” (Jazz musicians have always been fond of Gould, by the way, usually because of the drive and “swing” of his rhythm.)

 

Gould’s debut recital program, in 1947, marked the beginning of the end for the student phase of his musical life. In his earliest professional recitals, given while he was still a conservatory student, he played Scarlatti and Couperin, Czerny and Mendelssohn, Chopin and Liszt, and enjoyed doing so. But by the time he was nineteen and had stopped taking lessons, he quickly phased out most such repertoire in favour of his adult preferences, which were focusing increasingly on early and modern music. He retained a few sonatas by Haydn and Mozart and a few (mostly late) sonatas and variation sets by Beethoven, but his repertoire of solo works in the Romantic style was limited almost exclusively to a few intermezzi by Brahms. Early music figured rarely in his earliest programs, but around 1950 he began to perform, in concert and on the radio, substantial works of Bach’s like the Italian Concerto (which he added to his public repertoire in 1950), the Partita No. 5 in G Major (1951), some preludes and fugues (1952), the three-part Sinfonias (1953), and the Goldberg Variations (1954), as well as Gibbons’s “Earl of Salisbury” Pavan and Galliard (1951) and Sweelinck’s “Fitzwilliam” Fantasia in G (1952)–all of which were staples of his repertoire in his concert years. His twentieth-century repertoire began with the Seventh Sonata of Prokofiev, whom he considered the only post-Revolutionary Russian composer of genius. He performed the sonata for the first time in 1949, and soon added other modern works to his concert and broadcast programs: Hindemith’s Third Sonata (1950); Krenek’s Third Sonata and Morawetz’s Fantasy in D (1951); Berg’s Sonata and Schoenberg’s songs and Opp. 11 and 25 piano pieces (1952); and Webern’s Variations (1953).

When he performed at Hart House on February 12, 1950, at age seventeen, he offered what we may call the first truly characteristic Gould program: Bach’s Italian Concerto, Beethoven’s “Eroica” Variations, and Hindemith’s Third Sonata. But it was his program for the Ladies’ Morning Musical Club, in Montreal, on November 6, 1952–Gibbons, Bach, late Beethoven, Brahms, Berg–that really set a pattern. A smattering of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century pieces, a generous helping of Bach and of (mostly) Austro-German twentieth-century music, a very select handful of Classical works, a little Brahms–that, with few exceptions, was Gould’s recital repertoire for the next dozen years.

His concerto repertoire was no more catholic: it would always focus largely on the Beethoven concertos he had played since his early teens (his specialty was the Second, his least favourite the popular “Emperor”). In the early fifties he added Schoenberg’s concerto and a few by Bach, in 1955 Strauss’s early, rarely played Burleske (which he once said was “not a very good piece”), in the late fifties one concerto each by Mozart and Brahms. And that was it–not one of the popular Romantic concertos. He played Weber’s glittering, virtuosic Konzertstück in F minor–an early monument of the Romantic solo concerto–exactly once, with the Toronto Symphony, in 1951, and only because Guerrero had insisted. Gould was so adamant about not making concessions to contemporary tastes that he would play bits of Gibbons or Bach or Schoenberg, even whole works by Berg or Webern, as encores after the most challenging programs. Surprisingly, he did not encounter a lot of resistance. A reviewer in 1953, for instance, praised him for playing Sweelinck as an encore, rather than betraying his program by offering, say, Chopin’s “Minute” Waltz.

“The question which governs all art is to what degree is it entirely logical.”

It is with Bach that Gould has always been most closely associated, yet it was the music and thought of Schoenberg and his school–the twelve-tone idiom especially–that most crucially influenced his view of music in his formative years. He recognized that there was something arbitrary about the whole premise of twelve-tone music, and he willingly admitted that he found some of Schoenberg’s works “cold” and “relentless” and “austere,” but the passion for reason and order, economy and unity in this music could only appeal to a puritan like Gould. A twelve-tone piece is inherently organized: every pitch is accounted for, and the melodies, harmonies, and forms are (usually) logically derived from the piece’s tone row. Twelve-tone music, in effect, involves the constant variation of a single given idea, and as such is a model of music that unfolds organically–precisely what Gould admired. He said in 1952 that he admired the music of Webern, one of Schoenberg’s star pupils, because it represented “an approach which eliminates all but what can be felt as absolutely essential, which calls for the greatest economy of means.” Moreover, in the music of the Schoenberg school he, like the Schoenbergians themselves, saw an idealistic and moralistic aesthetic that suited his emerging adult personality.

Gould was particularly influenced by the French composer and musicologist René Leibowitz, who studied with Schoenberg and Webern and was an influential teacher, conductor, and advocate of twelve-tone music. His ground-breaking book Schoenberg et son école, published in 1947, appeared in English in 1949, and Gould devoured it, discussing it eagerly with friends like John Beckwith. The book became, as the composer Oskar Morawetz recalls, a kind of Bible for Gould, who could quote it by heart. His later writings on Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, including his most important, are indebted to Leibowitz in fundamental ways, and are peppered with terms and phrases picked up from Leibowitz (“Spiegelbild,” “new world of sound”).

He did not absorb every aspect of the Schoenberg aesthetic. The Schoenbergians, for instance, propounded the notion of musical progress: they insisted that Schoenberg’s revolution was an inevitable, necessary step in the history of music, in comparison to which the music of his contemporaries was not “genuine.” But Gould rejected the teleological approach to music history–what he called “the curse of the zeitgeist”–and the competitive factionalism that goes along with it. In this respect he was a postmodernist avant la lettre, who insisted that one could love the “revolutionary” music of Schoenberg without rejecting, say, the “reactionary” music of Strauss, and he deplored the propagandizing of the young Pierre Boulez, an ardent serialist who insisted that “history is much like the guillotine,” and that any composer “who is not moving in the right direction”–that is, writing twelve-tone music–“will be killed, metaphorically speaking.” Still, Gould did take up many of the prejudices of the Schoenberg school, principally the belief that their highly rational approach to music should apply to all music, of whatever period or orientation, and that whatever stubborn, wicked composers of the past and present choose not to partake of such rationalism were to be banned from serious consideration. Gould never could see the values he picked up from Schoenberg as embedded in their time; he insisted that they were permanently valid. He admitted that in adolescence he had been influenced by Schoenberg’s “type of molecular analysis in which every facet of a work has to prove itself of structural necessity” and then “applied this kind of analysis to the music of all earlier times as well.” Naturally, he was drawn to the earlier music that most repaid such anachronistic analysis–which meant fugues rather than nocturnes, which meant Bach.

Like the Schoenbergians, Gould viewed Bach as the fountain-head of the Austro-German canon and an early exponent of rational, modern musical values. Schoenberg once described Bach’s art as that of “producing everything from one thing,” and, with Bach in mind, defined fugue as “a composition with maximum self-sufficiency of content.” For Gould, too, Bach was a paragon of order, logic, and structural integrity, and he conveniently ignored those aspects of Bach’s music that did not support this view. He had little to say about Bach as a rhetorician, a Lutheran, a tone-painter, a man of the theatre, a keyboard performer; his Bach was an architect, a “contrapuntal craftsman,” an idealist whose music stood apart from mundane matters like instrumental realization, and his preferences among Bach’s works (fugues rather than toccatas, suites rather than fantasias) were of a piece with this view. With Bach and Schoenberg–and Schoenberg’s Bach–as his models, it is no wonder Gould was enthralled with counterpoint, particularly the strict forms of counterpoint like canon and fugue that most lent themselves to rigorous analysis. (The flexible, “poetic” counterpoint of, say, Chopin or Schumann, he, like Leibowitz, did not even recognize as counterpoint.) “I’ve always been attracted to music that is in one way or another contrapuntal, whereas I’m essentially bored by homophonic music,” he said in 1980. Whatever composer he championed, from whatever century, had a pronounced contrapuntal bent, and with composers about whom he was ambivalent he gravitated to their most contrapuntal essays–Mozart’s K. 394 fugue, Beethoven’s Große Fuge. Even Verdi’s Falstaff was tolerable because it has a fugue at the end.

Gould took up not just enthusiasms of the Schoenbergians but prejudices, too. For instance, he was never interested in Handel the way he was in Bach.^*15 Schoenberg derided Handel’s music as full of “empty, meaningless” figuration, even “trash,” and it is significant that when Gould recorded Handel’s A-major harpsichord suite, in 1972, he did not improvise his way through the sketchily notated Prelude, as Handel had intended, but instead composed an arrangement of the piece, creating a tightly unified, Schoenbergian network of recurring motifs. Gould always preferred Haydn to Mozart, for the commonplace reason that Haydn’s music was better “developed” he shared the Schoenbergians’ discomfort with sensuous and heterogeneous music, even when it was by Mozart. He also shared their disdain for Italian music (not just opera), which Schoenberg derided for “the poverty of its ideas and development.” (In Gould’s words, “the Italians are always churning out the top line.”) And Gould had little patience for the music of most of Schoenberg’s contemporaries. He derided “bloated Slavic tone poems” like Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, and was skeptical of Ives. Stravinsky, above all, was the enemy, and all his life Gould regurgitated the anti-Stravinsky polemics of Schoenberg, Leibowitz, Theodor W. Adorno, and others. He found Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring a “very offensive work,” his Soldier’s Tale a “piece of trash,” and he heaped scorn on Stravinsky’s neo-Classicism as cold, mechanistic, barren, shallow, trivial, mere pastiche, technique for technique’s sake–as the work of a “nose-thumbing enfant terrible” (his comments on this subject rarely were more subtle than that). Predictably, he had kind words only for Stravinsky’s late twelve-tone works, like the ballet Agon and the Movements for piano and orchestra, which he once considered playing.

Gould’s characteristic piano style, in all music, was decisively influenced by Schoenbergian values, too. Schoenberg advocated performances in which architectural and thematic relationships were made explicit to the listener: “The highest principle for all reproduction of music would have to be that what the composer has written is made to sound in such a way that every note is really heard, and that all the sounds, whether successive or simultaneous, are in such relationship to each other that no part at any moment obscures another, but, on the contrary, makes its contribution towards ensuring that they all stand out clearly from one another.” That could stand as a motto for Gould’s own immaculate and analytical playing. Robert Fulford recalled that Gould once described his approach to music as “architectonic,” by which he meant seeing a piece “three-dimensionally,” in all its facets simultaneously, so it is hardly surprising that transparency of counterpoint would become perhaps the most lauded aspect of the Gould style.

The young Gould pointedly rejected the Romantic approach to Bach that he associated with venerable (though still living) performers like Wanda Landowska, the pianist Edwin Fischer, the cellist Pablo Casals, and, closer to home, Ernest MacMillan, who took a devotional approach to Bach, with slow tempos that earned him the nickname “Lord Largo.” Gould was listening to the more cutting-edge performers then advocating clear, strict readings of Bach with some attention to historical performance practices, particularly the American pianist Rosalyn Tureck, who had had a reputation as a Bach specialist since the mid-thirties. The fifteen-year-old Gould was in the audience when she made her Toronto debut in 1948, and he studied her early recordings, which came out in the late forties and early fifties. “Back in the forties, when I was a teenager, she was the first person who played Bach in what seemed to me a sensible way,” he said in a 1974 interview; “her records were the first evidence that one did not fight alone. It was playing of such uprightness, to put it into the moral sphere. There was such a sense of repose that had nothing to do with languor, but rather with moral rectitude in the liturgical sense.” Tureck’s style–cleanly articulated, sparsely pedalled, contrapuntally transparent, at once analytical and historically informed–reinforced his own evolving ideas about Bach performance. Though he differed with her in some ways, his Bach being more dynamic, with a greater preponderance of fast tempos, he also clearly took much inspiration, and even some details like ornamentation, from Tureck.^*16

 

Gould was composing throughout these heady years, and his various musical discoveries inevitably found voice in original works. “The manuscripts of junior masterpieces occupy many drawers in my home,” he once wrote. “They are tokens of that swift-moving parade of enthusiasms which is the student life, and they exhibit attempts at every style from Palestrina (which was done to please my teachers) to Schoenberg (which was done to annoy them).” His music was not always secure technically, or of high quality, but he nonetheless learned to move with confidence in a variety of idioms. It was generally contrapuntal, full of canons and fugues, though only once, apparently, did he actually emulate his beloved Bach, in Prelude, Cantilena and Gigue, a little suite for clarinet and bassoon in the texture of a two-part invention, composed in 1951 for two conservatory friends, the clarinetist Norman Glick and the bassoonist Nicholas Kilburn, who performed it once, probably at a private musicale. It is a slight work, perhaps written in haste. Two other early works reflect the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century tonal idioms that Gould absorbed through the conventional piano repertoire. The loquacious Rondo in D Major (1948), set in a well-behaved sonata-rondo form, sounds like an early-Romantic takeoff on Mozart, while Variations in G Minor (1949), prefaced with an unexplained heading–“And so, from the light of Fantasy, we enter the dark of reality”–consists of a banal chorale-like theme and sketches for six mildly virtuosic variations.

Once he became more familiar with twentieth-century music, Gould tried his hand at more chromatic tonal styles–for instance, in 3 Fugues on one Subject (1952), of which only No. 2 survives, a work on three staves with no indications for instrumentation (it is clearly not for organ). More ambitious was the Sonata for Piano, composed sometime before spring 1950, perhaps as early as 1948. Just over four hundred bars, headed “Movement I,” survive for this angular, brooding work, in which the combination of post-Romantic tonality, formal counterpoint, motivic development, and heavy late-Romantic piano textures says much about Gould’s various musical preoccupations at the time. He told a newspaper reporter that the sonata was written in the style of Hindemith, and in fact one of the themes alludes to the fugue subject from the finale of Hindemith’s Third Sonata.

In early 1950, not long after Guerrero introduced him to the music of Schoenberg, Gould composed his earliest surviving work in that style: 5 Short Piano Pieces, influenced by Webern’s Op. 5 miniatures for string quartet and by Schoenberg’s Op. 19 miniatures for piano (the ethereal last piece pays homage to the last piece of Op. 19). All five pieces are atonal, though only the first two feature some twelve-tone writing. (Gould felt confident enough to send the newly completed pieces to the CBC, apparently without result; his own brilliant, impetuous private recording of them survives, however.) In a three-movement Sonata for Bassoon and Piano (1950), he attempted a stricter twelve-tone style, without relinquishing his usual priorities: there is an extended fugue in the second movement. (A private recording of this piece, too, with Nicholas Kilburn, survives.) Other twelve-tone works quickly followed: 2 Pieces for Organ (1950), his only known composition for the organ, of which just fifteen bars survive, laid out for a large English-style church organ with pedals; a String Trio (1950), his first work for strings, of which just a few pages survive; and 2 Pieces, for piano (1951–52).

“Actually, I am very much a romantic.”

Among pianists, the hero of Gould’s youth was Artur Schnabel, whom he, like many others, considered the greatest of all Beethoven interpreters, and indeed “the greatest pianist of his generation.” Schnabel’s records, Gould said, were “Biblical” to him when he was young. In 1969, for a CBC radio program, Gould gave an entertaining account of his Schnabel-worship. While preparing for his orchestral debut with Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, he listened almost every day to his 78-r.p.m. discs of Schnabel’s 1942 RCA Victor recording of the work and copied all of Schnabel’s nuances, sometimes going so far as to practise while the record played; he claimed even to have allowed the breaks required to change discs to influence his conception of the music’s structure. Finally, he said, Guerrero compelled him to hand over the Schnabel album and to give a more streamlined performance, though he claimed to have resorted to Schnabel’s interpretation when it came time for the public performance. It is a tall tale, but there is no doubt that Schnabel had a huge impact on Gould.

Schnabel was a serious, intellectual musician of great integrity, and a true polymath–a composer, editor, writer, and teacher, as well as a pianist. (Gould studied his 1935 edition of Beethoven’s sonatas.) Schnabel’s own teacher, Theodor Leschetizky, had famously told him, “You will never be a pianist; you are a musician,” a distinction Gould always held dear. As a pianist Schnabel had no patience for crowd-pleasing virtuosity or sensuality; his repertoire was chaste and substantial, focused on the Austro-German canon, and his playing revealed a strong grasp of musical architecture and a command of counterpoint. The performer’s task, in Schnabel’s view, was to serve great music, not merely to display himself and ingratiate himself with the audience; as he once said, applause is the receipt, not the bill. From Schnabel’s recordings the young Gould took away the image of a fellow-idealist, a pianist who transcended the piano and cared only about “the structural concept behind the music.” But this is not the whole story. Schnabel was also a highly individual and profoundly Romantic pianist. His famous recordings of Beethoven’s sonatas from the 1930s, for all their intellectual insight, are impulsive and passionate, rhythmically flexible and dynamic, often extreme in tempo, rich in tone, and insistently contrapuntal. Moreover, his interpretive insights were often eccentric, for he was a truly creative performer, never a literalist. In Gould’s brash, gripping, caution-to-the-winds early concert performances and broadcasts of Beethoven, even his commercial recordings well into the 1960s, one often hears almost an imitation and sometimes an exaggeration of Schnabel.

This is not so surprising. Notwithstanding many of his published remarks, Gould owed far more to the Romantic view of music, even in the days of his twelve-tone kick, than he was willing to admit. He was a person of deep feelings and great sensitivity, but uncomfortable with the overt expression of emotion, and in his music he needed always to rationalize his Romantic tendencies through high-modernist rhetoric about structure. But to rationalize one’s passions is not to suppress them: he was a Romantic at heart. In his teens his absorption of the Schoenberg aesthetic was balanced by the powerful impact of late-Romantic music. He would come to describe himself as “a total Wagnerite–hopelessly addicted to the later things especially.” He once wrote, “I love Tristan. I was fifteen when I first heard it, and wept”–hardly the words of a dry rationalist. Around the same time, he was drawn to the music of Richard Strauss–the tone poem Ein Heldenleben, the Burleske, and especially such late (and then rarely heard) works as Metamorphosen, the Oboe Concerto, and the Duett-Concertino, which he discovered on the radio. By his late teens he was a confirmed admirer of other late-Romantic figures like Bruckner, Mahler, Reger, and even (surprisingly) Saint-Saëns and Tchaikovsky, though the early post-war years were precisely those when overt Romanticism was very much out of fashion. A few months before he died, he told a friend that his favourite opera was Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel.

It was only early-Romantic piano music that he really rejected; in fact, he regretted that late-Romantic composers like Mahler and Strauss wrote almost nothing of consequence for the piano. Even from the early-Romantic period there was much music, mostly orchestral and vocal, that he admired–Cherubini, Berlioz, Bizet, Mendelssohn. When he played transcriptions on the piano, as he loved to do, it was usually the most luxuriant late-Romantic scores: operas by Wagner and Strauss (some of which he apparently knew by heart in their entirety), symphonies by Bruckner and Mahler, tone poems by Strauss and Elgar and Schoenberg. Of course he had his rationalizations. Strauss, for instance, he could safely admire for his dense counterpoint, his harmonic control, a degree of “abstraction.” In truth, though, he loved a good wallow in Romantic excess: it was the “contrapuntally bombastic” Mahler of the Second and Eighth symphonies he admired, not the “thinness” of Mahler in, say, the more neo-classical Fourth.

Significantly, his early heroes among performers tended to be mystical or flamboyant figures of previous generations, particularly conductors like Wilhelm Furtwängler, Willem Mengelberg, Leopold Stokowski, and Felix Weingartner, and he was practically alone among his contemporaries in refusing to be won over by the more literal, “objective” style of Toscanini, whom he once dubbed “a good Xeroxer.” Gould did not necessarily play in the style of his heroes; what he called “the Furtwängler tradition of legato-at-all-costs-and-the-counterpoint-be-damned” hardly sounds like him. But he did admire the tradition of “Romantic self revelation,” he said, “the tradition of intense personal involvement, possibly even self-indulgence.” He admired “ecstatic” performers whose idiosyncratic engagement with the music yielded “transcendent” and “spiritual” performances–again, hardly the words of a dry rationalist. Gould may not have sounded like a Romantic with his transparent, articulated readings of Sweelinck and Bach and Webern, yet he advocated the Romantic notion that the performer should creatively impose his own personality on the music he plays, a notion that, in the years after the Second World War, was unfashionable and almost universally discredited. He was a rare, fascinating case of a performer who combined high-modernist traits as a performer with an utterly Romantic approach to interpretation.

Moreover, Romanticism had a profound impact on his advocacy of modern music. Schoenberg, after all, was a product of German Romanticism and never abandoned its tenets. It is certainly revealing that Gould was attracted to Schoenberg and not to those modern composers whose music might be called anti-Romantic in spirit, like Stravinsky and Bartók, whom he dubbed the “most over-estimated modern composers” as early as 1952. Gould always took the view that Schoenberg remained a Romantic at heart, and he liked to stress the forces of “conciliation” rather than revolution in Schoenberg’s development. His first surviving writing on Schoenberg, a 1953 lecture, notes “contradictory influences” in Schoenberg’s music–that is, forms and procedures of tonal music persisting in twelve-tone contexts–and includes the startling suggestion that Schoenberg’s spirit “was, in many respects, incompatible with the twelve tone technique.” Young modernists like Pierre Boulez, in those days, were already complaining that Schoenberg’s lingering Romanticism was a betrayal of his own twelve-tone innovations, yet here was Gould approving of precisely this stylistic contradiction.

Besides Schoenberg, the modern music in Gould’s repertoire was often overtly Romantic in its rhetoric and piano textures–works like Berg’s Sonata, Morawetz’s Fantasy in D, and even twelve-tone pieces like Krenek’s Third Sonata and István Anhalt’s Fantasia. And he preferred the approachable, neo-classical Hindemith of the thirties and forties to the more pungent Hindemith of the twenties. A Romantic sensibility lurks behind Gould’s own twelve-tone compositions, in which a yearning lyricism is generally present, and which often sound suspiciously like turn-of-the-century, pre-twelve-tone music. Significantly, he never composed in the more pristine style of Webern, much as he admired it, nor did he ever play or compose or profess to admire music in the post-Webern, total-serialist style, which was all the rage after the war. It is revealing that, though a professed advocate of musical logic, he was skeptical about the most logical, most organized music of all.

Gould was certainly influenced by some of the older pianists active in his youth, his own comments notwithstanding. Most of the leading performers of the day passed through Toronto: Clifford Curzon, Walter Gieseking, Myra Hess, William Kapell, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, Benno Moiseiwitsch, Arthur Rubinstein, and many others, including the Chilean-born Claudio Arrau, who visited his friend Alberto Guerrero whenever he was in town. Gould especially admired some of these pianists, notably Rudolf Serkin and Robert Casadesus, but he heard them all. In those days, the one pianist whom all the students talked about and tried to emulate was Vladimir Horowitz, and the teenage Gould was not immune to his spell. Horowitz gave four recitals in Toronto between 1940 and 1950, usually advertised as an appearance by “the world’s greatest pianist,” always drawing huge crowds and glowing reviews. Gould attended at least two of these recitals, in 1947 and 1949, and he listened to Horowitz’s recordings.

Horowitz was in many ways Gould’s antithesis as a pianist, and to Gould he represented everything that was wrong with the standard piano repertoire, with Romantic pianism, with concert life. Gould rarely had a bad word to say (out loud) about a colleague, but Horowitz was an exception. On that subject he was grudging, petulant: about Horowitz’s famed octave technique, for instance, he once said, “He fakes them.” But he protested too much. He was entranced enough by Horowitz to take up some of his repertoire. In his debut recital, six months after Horowitz’s 1947 appearance in Toronto, Gould adopted the older pianist’s practice of opening with a group of Scarlatti sonatas, and did so in other early recitals. The debut recital included another Horowitz specialty, Liszt’s Au bord d’une source, which he had recorded in May of that year. Gould added two more pieces that Horowitz recorded in the mid-forties to his early concert programs: a set of variations, by Carl Czerny, on Rode’s aria “La Ricordanza” and Mendelssohn’s virtuosic Variations sérieuses, which he greatly admired. (Guerrero had suggested both works.) A sometimes stunning private recording survives of the young Gould practising the latter work, and another early recording survives of a Clementi sonata–music that, in those days, no one but Horowitz played. Ray Dudley recalls that Gould enthusiastically took up Prokofiev’s Seventh Sonata, in 1949, after hearing Horowitz’s recording, released four years earlier.

Gould seems to have acknowledged a debt to Horowitz only once, in an unpublished interview in 1979,^*17 and he took pains on that occasion to minimize the debts. “There was only one period in my life–very brief period–when I was influenced by Horowitz,” he said, a “brief, slightly giddy period when I was around fifteen…one strange, quirky, utterly odd year in my life in which I imitated Horowitz like mad, and after that I stopped doing it–as far as I know.” After he sobered up and turned sixteen, that was all past, and he dropped “utterly banal music” like Czerny’s from his repertoire. It is revealing that he did not mention Prokofiev’s sonata: he was willing to acknowledge Horowitz’s impact only in repertoire that he could point to as a trivial youthful indiscretion quickly set right.

The influence was deeper and more lasting than Gould would admit. “I think I was probably attracted by the sense of space that very often infiltrated his playing,” he said, “the way in which, sometimes very unexpectedly, an alto voice or a tenor voice would appear that you weren’t aware of…. It suddenly gave a sense of a three-dimensional aspect to the playing.” He is talking about Horowitz’s counterpoint, his astonishing command of simultaneous lines and colours–that “may have had some small influence, perhaps.” Not small, and not perhaps: Gould’s rendering of counterpoint was often precisely of the Romantic variety, the revelation of unexpected but colourful details. For all his structural rationales, his counterpoint was not as consistently analytical and calculated as, say, Tureck’s, but more spontaneous, dynamic, expressive. He may well have learned from other performers whom he claimed to reject. In his Bach, for instance, one sometimes hears the dynamic rhythm and phrasing of Landowska, even some of her idiosyncracies (like the occasional staccato ornament).

The earliest professional judges of Gould’s playing, conservatory and festival adjudicators in the early and mid-forties, already praised his rhythmic vitality, clear phrasing, and part-playing, and his maturity and command of musical architecture. But they also complained, at times, about Romantic excesses: too much pedal and too much legato (even in early music), overly fast tempos and too much fluctuation of tempo, a tone that could be too brilliant or violently nuanced. An adjudicator at the 1945 Kiwanis festival wrote, “‘Sings’ well at the piano, left hand rubato a trifle overdone, but a poetical idea of the piece,” which sounds more like Paderewski than Glenn Gould. The adjudicator also noted “too much left-hand anticipation,” referring to the Romantic practice–a favourite of Paderewski’s–of not playing the two hands precisely together, usually with the bass part slightly anticipating the melody, to get an expressive effect resembling the portamento of a string instrument or human voice. The practice was almost universally dismissed as sloppiness in the later twentieth century, and Gould was just about the only major pianist of his generation to make use of it pervasively. These adjudications, and the early private recordings, reveal that the old Romantic style of playing was very much in his bones as a young musician. His teenage recording of Mendelssohn’s Rondo capriccioso, for instance, so teases the listener with its little rhythmic pushes and pulls that it might almost pass for a turn-of-the-century performance by, say, de Pachmann or Godowsky or Hofmann. In many of his professional concerts, especially his early ones, he was criticized for overly effusive Romantic playing, and in fact one hears more of this sort of thing in his later recordings than his avowed theories on the matter would lead one to expect.

The private recordings reveal another surprising fact: Gould was never a pianistic prodigy of the highest order, even leaving aside the likes of Mozart, Mendelssohn, Saint-Saëns, and Strauss. He was not nearly as advanced as such past prodigies as Josef Hofmann, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Claudio Arrau, and Ervin Nyiregyházi, and there were few top pianists of his own generation who could not boast of childhood musical gifts at least as impressive as his. Van Cliburn, for instance, showed no less precocity than Gould at age three, gave adult recitals before age ten, first played his signature piece, the Tchaikovsky concerto, at twelve, and made his Carnegie Hall debut at thirteen. Daniel Barenboim made his debut at seven, was taking Europe by storm at ten, and recorded all of Mozart’s sonatas at twelve. The list can easily be extended, and it is not necessary to look outside Canada. Torontonians had marvelled at the precocity of Ernest MacMillan a generation before Gould (at nine he was composing an oratorio based on the Resurrection, and at ten he made his debut as an organist), and in 1940, the ten-year-old André Mathieu, from Montreal, played at Town Hall in New York, including a series of études he had composed at age four. Gould’s concerto debut in January 1947 was in fact upstaged two months later by that of another local pianist, nine-year-old Patsy Parr, who played several short works (some of her own composition) with the Toronto Symphony, and, the following year, made her recital and Philharmonic debuts in New York. Admittedly, the Beethoven Fourth is no walk in the park for most thirteen-year-olds, but the evidence at our disposal suggests that Gould did not have the technical skill, at comparable ages, of the greatest prodigies. The private recordings from around the late forties reveal, for instance, his struggles with Romantic showpieces like Mendelssohn’s Rondo capriccioso and “The Bee’s Wedding,” and include a dry, lumpy performance of Chopin’s A-flat-major impromptu.

This is not to belittle Gould, but to stress that his proclivities were never those of a typical prodigy. It was interpretive wisdom beyond his years that most impressed his listeners as a child, not bravura technique. The private recordings sometimes reveal mature musical insights even where the technique is less secure. The recording of Chopin’s F-sharp-major impromptu, one of the pieces in his 1947 debut, offers a subtle, poetic, beautifully nuanced performance that weaves a real emotional spell, despite some clinkers and a tubby piano, and reveals a true command of the Romantic style. In any event, Gould’s progress, both technically and interpretively, was rapid through his teens, especially when he began devoting more time to practising than to schoolwork. If Gould at twelve or fifteen had his betters in the prodigy department, Gould at sixteen and seventeen was something else altogether: his recording of his Twelfth Night suite, from (presumably) 1949, reveals a fluent and brilliant technique, superb control of counterpoint and tone colour, great range and depth of expression. And Gould at eighteen and nineteen and twenty was one of the most impressive and original pianists in the world; his live and broadcast recordings from those years are sometimes breathtaking. His dazzling concert performance of Weber’s Konzertstück from 1951, for instance, leaves no doubt that he could have commanded more such bravura repertoire had he wanted to do so. “It went extremely well,” he wrote to John Beckwith of that concert, “to the surprise of everybody (including me).”

“Throughout my teens I rather resisted
the idea of a career as a concert pianist.”

Between the wars there was no national concert-management business in Canada, and New York–based organizations like the Community Concert Service and the Civic Concert Service had a virtual stranglehold on Canadian concert life, hampering the efforts of native musicians to control and profit from their concerts. In the late forties there were still only a few professional managers in Canada, and it was the teenage Gould’s great good fortune to attract the attention of one of them: Walter Homburger. “As Gould’s manager,” the Toronto Daily Star reported in 1962, Homburger “became the first person to handle the world-wide career of a concert artist from Canada, something experienced New Yorkers told him was impossible.” Born in Germany in 1924 into a banking family, Homburger went to England as a “friendly enemy alien” before the Second World War, but in 1940 he was sent to Canada, where he spent time in internment camps–not the only important figure in Canadian music to have been introduced to his adopted country that way. In 1947, after having organized a few concerts in Toronto, he founded his own concert agency, International Artists, through which he would present annual concert series featuring the best local and international musicians. He immediately offered to manage the fourteen-year-old Gould, whom he had heard play Beethoven’s G-major concerto at the 1946 Kiwanis festival (“I thought it was phenomenal”), and the boy’s parents agreed, with the understanding that he never be exploited as a prodigy. On March 13, 1947, Homburger signed Gould for a single concert, his October 20 debut, and the experience was obviously mutually satisfying: for the remainder of his concert career, Gould never had another manager.

Homburger was a canny and resourceful manager, and a sympathetic shepherd of Gould’s career. He had a maverick on his hands, a performer who refused to play the expected repertoire and loathed most of the trappings of concert life, fame, and the music business. “Walter and I never disagree about anything,” Gould once said, “except money, pianos, programming, concert dates, my relations with the press and the way I dress.” Homburger did occasionally try to convince Gould to moderate some of his more radical ideas and more eccentric behaviours, but “Glenn in those days already knew what he wanted,” he said. For the most part, he weathered his star client’s idiosyncracies with patience and good humour, and helped to protect his fragile constitution, and Gould, despite the odd barbed wisecrack, appreciated the support. Homburger, as an independent manager, was not beholden to the American concert organizations, and Gould, as the son of prosperous parents, was not wanting for money; as a result, he did not, like many Canadian classical musicians, have to scramble to earn a living in a country with then only four major orchestras and a concert circuit that could be remarkably provincial. (The contralto Maureen Forrester recalled singing, as a young artist, in church basements and in high-school gyms pervaded by “the smell of over-ripe socks.”) Besides, Gould’s talent was so great that it effectively sold itself.

As a teenager the serious-minded Gould already considered a concert career “a kind of superficial thing, some sort of pleasant adjunct to a scholastic interest in music,” as he told an interviewer in 1962. “I imagined that only a career that was musicologically motivated was worthy and that everything else was a little bit frivolous.” A concert career was necessary if he wanted to make a name for himself, of course, but he was not willing to expose himself publicly more than was necessary. Between 1947 and 1954 he sometimes gave only a few major concerts in a single season, and never more than seven or eight. He was still playing from time to time at Malvern, at the conservatory, in local churches, still appearing occasionally as an “assisting artist” or accompanist, and in benefit concerts. He performed at the CNE, too, when it reopened after the war. His last appearance there was in the summer of 1952, on which occasion he finished with Prokofiev’s Seventh Sonata. He was supposed to stop by 6:00 p.m., but his performance ran two minutes long. The CNE, he recalled years later, ran on a tight schedule, and a dive-bombing demonstration had been scheduled for 6:01, so as he stormed to the end of the noisy, hard-driving finale of the Seventh–appropriately, one of Prokofiev’s “War Sonatas”–he was drowned out by planes overhead. That performance, he said, “would have warmed the cockles of P. T. Barnum’s heart.”

But Gould was also, by this time, making high-profile appearances in more prestigious venues, including several Ontario universities, the Art Gallery of Toronto (now the AGO), Eaton Auditorium, and Massey Hall, which he, like musicians from Stravinsky to Dizzy Gillespie, considered “one of the great acoustical properties of the continent.” Like Guerrero, he had a special fondness for the more intimate surroundings of Hart House, where he gave three recitals between 1949 and 1952. He also gave recitals under the auspices of women’s musical societies, then among the most active sponsors of classical recitals, in cities large and small. In Toronto he played for the Heliconian Club in 1948, and for the Women’s Musical Club in 1953, and he was sponsored by women’s groups in Ottawa, Montreal, Winnipeg, Calgary, and other cities.

In the 1950–51 season he began to appear regularly in other major Ontario cities, and in fall 1951 he undertook his first western tour, appearing in Vancouver and Calgary. His mother went with him–it was the first time in the West for both of them–though she was now past sixty and admitted that the trip exhausted her. (According to Ray Dudley, she was upset that she could no longer control Glenn, and refused to tour with him again.) Gould’s reputation was growing quickly. By the time he was twenty he had performed with the Toronto Symphony five times–“I’m generally regarded as a brat in those circles,” he once said–usually under Ernest MacMillan, who led the orchestra from 1931 to 1956. He appeared in Montreal for the first time in 1952, the Maritimes (Saint John, New Brunswick) in 1953, and Winnipeg in 1954. He was not yet making a lot of money. Recital fees of a few hundred dollars were typical, and at Hart House he played for an honorarium of 25 in 1950, 50 in 1952. But his reception among audiences was often tumultuous–for instance, five curtain calls from a crowd of two thousand in Vancouver.

As early as 1950, Gould was subscribing to a press-clipping service, and needing one: he already had a national reputation, and some critics were ranking him with the greatest pianists in Canada and abroad. He was also being recognized for his exciting musical personality and flamboyant platform manner–the rumpled appearance, the simian crouch over the keyboard, the flailing arms and gyrating torso and bobbing head, the glass of water to his side and the little Oriental rug beneath his stomping feet, and of course the singing, which could sometimes be heard at the back of the largest halls. His mother begged him to tone down his mannerisms, and even the Governor General of Canada, Vincent Massey, weighed in on the subject: “You must tell him to stop it!” he said to Maureen Forrester. Homburger, too, told Gould forthrightly to improve his onstage appearance, and Gould once tried sincerely to do so for a couple of weeks, but his musical concentration was compromised, and he gave up. “I’m incapable of changing the way I play the piano,” he concluded. “People will have to accept or reject me as I am.”

Then there was the most enduring symbol of Gould’s eccentricity: his chair. He wanted an unusually low chair, one that had the “give” he needed, both front-to-back and diagonally, in order to accommodate his movements while he played. It required a seat that sloped forward (“I have to sit on the edge”) and a backrest at a greater than ninety-degree pitch to accommodate the “leisurely angle” at which he liked to sit. No conventional piano bench met his needs, so in 1953 his father customized a light, high-backed, wooden folding chair. “I had to saw about four inches off each leg,” he told Otto Friedrich, “and I made a brass bracket to go around each leg and screw into it, and then welded the half of a turnbuckle to the brass bracket so that each leg could be adjusted individually.” The chair placed Gould about fourteen inches off the ground, which was still not low enough, but since his knees were already higher than his buttocks it was not practical to lower the seat any more. So he fabricated a set of black wooden blocks that allowed him to raise the piano up about an inch and a quarter–in effect, placing him barely a foot from the floor.

Bert’s chair was perfect, and Gould would use it for every concert and recording, every rehearsal and practice session, for the rest of his life. He carried and shipped it around, as required, in a special case, often at considerable expense, and it was occasionally lost or damaged in transit. By the later fifties the chair was already so well worn that his audiences sometimes feared its collapse. Oiling it became one of his pre-performance rituals, though it still squeaked in concerts, and some of its squeaks are permanently enshrined in his recordings. The frame had eventually to be taped and wired together, and the seat deteriorated with use: the padding oozed gradually out of the green leatherette cover, which itself fell apart–one can almost date Gould’s photographs and films by the condition of the seat. By the mid-seventies he was sitting on a bare frame only, with one wooden support running front-to-back along his crotch, yet he was never heard to complain about it. Over the years he made sincere efforts to find (or have made) a new, sturdier wood or metal chair, but no substitute was ever right. Bert’s chair became a talisman for Gould–a security blanket upon which he depended.

“I thought of myself as a valiant defender of twelve-tone music and of its leading exponents.”

Gould became a passionate proselytizer on behalf of the Schoenberg school, and he spread the word to all who would listen. In a Grade 13 English essay, “My Pet Antipathy,” he produced a polemic against the general public’s resistance to contemporary music, and when asked to say a few words about his musical tastes in 1952 on a personnel questionnaire for the CBC, he responded with a four-hundred-word defence of the Schoenberg school and its place in music history. His first public lecture was delivered at the conservatory in 1951, in observance of the death of Schoenberg that summer (the text has not survived), and on December 17, 1953, also for the conservatory, he delivered a long, densely analytical lecture on Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto,^*18 of which he gave the Canadian premiere a few days later.

His efforts to educate himself about modern music were impressive. There are letters from early 1952 in which he solicits Oskar Morawetz, then in Europe, to find him scores of twentieth-century piano music and of works like Hindemith’s Kammermusik, Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No. 1 and Op. 10 string quartet, Webern’s songs and Op. 24 concerto–hardly standard fare for a young Canadian pianist in the early fifties. He read books and articles on twentieth-century music, and studied many scores, including those of his Canadian contemporaries. One never knew what modern repertoire he would poke his fingers into next: operas by Alban Berg or William Walton, symphonies by Aulis Sallinen or Wilhelm Furtwängler, sonatas by Charles Ives or Fartein Valen or Leon Kirchner, piano concertos by Ernst Krenek or Wolfgang Fortner, music by Frank Martin (which he greatly admired) or Alfredo Casella. Over the years, some composers (like Krenek, whom he came to know personally in the fifties, and Vincent Persichetti) tried to get him to perform their music, and in modern-music circles he acquired a reputation as a mainstream performer sympathetic to their cause.

Yet, Gould was never really a new-music specialist. The music he actually incorporated into his active repertoire, and his personal canon, rarely extended beyond that which was new in his teens, most of it Austro-German. He kept informed about what was going on in the musical world, but had little sympathy for most of the post-war trends in composition: serialism, electronics, musique concrète, aleatory music, minimalism, the fusion of classical and jazz idioms in a “third stream,” and so on. And he had almost no direct contact with the more adventurous young Toronto composers like Harry Freedman, Harry Somers, and John Weinzweig, who, in his Suite for Piano No. 1 (1939), had been the first Canadian composer to make use of twelve-tone principles. Still, Schoenberg and Berg and Webern were plenty dissonant enough for most Torontonians even long after the war, and to the general public, anyway, Gould had a reputation as a champion of modern music, and as a performer was widely admired for his ability to make difficult twentieth-century music comprehensible, to communicate its lyricism, tonal beauty, and passion. He first attracted notice as a modernist by organizing an ambitious Recital of Contemporary Music at the conservatory on January 4, 1951. The program–all of the music was composed between 1936 and 1950–was astonishing for its time and place: Hindemith’s Third Sonata, Krenek’s Third Sonata, the premiere of Morawetz’s Fantasy in D, and two of Gould’s own atonal works: the 5 Short Piano Pieces and the Bassoon Sonata. For an eighteen-year-old high-school student, the evening was a tour de force.

In spring 1952, Gould joined forces with his old classmate Robert Fulford, by then a sports writer for the Globe and Mail, to form a legally registered company: New Music Associates. The official mandate was to present concerts of twentieth-century music; the more immediate motivation was to commemorate the death of Arnold Schoenberg. Gould looked after all matters musical, while Fulford rented the hall, sold the tickets, did the publicity, found the ushers, and kept the books. In all, New Music Associates sponsored three concerts in the conservatory’s concert hall, the first two of which consisted almost entirely of Canadian premieres. The Schoenberg Memorial Concert, on October 4, 1952, included six early songs, with soprano Elizabeth Benson Guy; two piano works, Opp. 11 and 25; and the Ode to Napoleon, Op. 41, for string quartet, piano, and reciter, with Victor Feldbrill conducting. By this time Gould had already developed a fondness for making impromptu speeches from the stage in order to introduce the modern music on his programs, though at the Memorial Concert, strangely, he was more reticent. His specially written essay on Schoenberg’s development was read to the audience by the CBC announcer Frank Herbert, who later admitted that he had understood almost nothing of what he had been reading. On January 9, 1954, Gould presented an even more ambitious program exploring the whole Second Viennese School: Schoenberg’s song cycle The Book of the Hanging Gardens, with soprano Roma Butler; Webern’s Five Movements for string quartet, Op. 5; Webern’s Saxophone Quartet, Op. 22, conducted by Feldbrill; and two piano works, Webern’s Variations and Berg’s Sonata. Gould’s printed program note was a dense, verbose essay, “A Consideration of Anton Webern.”

Neither concert sold out, and Gould’s programs challenged local audiences; he did not make things easier by insisting that Webern’s Opp. 22 and 27, because of their difficulty, both be played twice. Some reviewers were not impressed. “Babies’ Rhythm Practice Sounds Better Than This” was the headline in the conservative Telegram after the second concert. But the more sophisticated critics and listeners, and fellow-musicians, recognized the importance of Gould’s modern-music concerts, and remembered them for years.

The third New Music Associates concert, on October 16, 1954, was devoted to Bach. (Fulford: “Why Bach?” Gould, loftily: “Bach is ever new.”) Maureen Forrester, making her Toronto debut, sang arias, and Gould joined in performances of the trio sonata from the Musical Offering and the C-minor violin sonata, with Morry Kernerman, and gave his first live performance of the Goldberg Variations.^*19 The concert was poorly attended because of the deadly flooding and devastation caused the night before by Hurricane Hazel, the worst natural disaster in Toronto’s history. Those who did attend included critics as well as luminaries like Ernest MacMillan, and all were dazzled by Gould’s bold performance of the Goldberg Variations, then still widely considered to be an academic, even unplayable work. The musicologist Harvey Olnick was stunned, and the following month, in Gould’s first American notice, in the Musical Courier, pronounced him the equal of Landowska and Serkin. The concert made a big impact musically, and the small financial loss was easily covered; Forrester earned the stately sum of 50. But that was the last hurrah for New Music Associates. Gould and Fulford were beginning to drift apart, and soon Gould, even in Baroque and modern repertoire, would no longer need to create his own opportunities; they would come to him.

“The Stratford Music Festival is an adventure for us.”

Stratford, Ontario, about 140 kilometres west of Toronto, was a small industrial town and railway stop in the middle of the countryside, with no history as a cultural centre, when a local businessman decided to create an annual drama festival focused on the plays of Shakespeare. In July 1953, the Stratford Festival was officially launched, with a six-week season of two Shakespeare plays held in a specially constructed tent seating just over eleven hundred. The festival, which received national and international recognition, proved to be crucial to the development of professional theatre in Canada, but from the beginning there was music, too. The Canadian composer Louis Applebaum organized a series of sixteen hour-long afternoon concerts for the 1953 season, with help from Walter Homburger, the CBC, and others. Soon the festival was attracting some of the best musicians in Canada and the world, and with them visitors who came more for the music than the theatre.

Gould performed in three concerts in 1953, making his debut in a chamber-music setting on July 31, in the first and only concert of the Festival Trio: he joined the violinist Albert Pratz and the cellist Isaac Mamott in works by Beethoven and Brahms.^*20 He gave two recitals, too, on August 4 and 14, offering characteristic programs of works by Bach, Beethoven, Berg, and Morawetz–he was not about to compromise even for afternoon crowds of summer tourists in a relatively informal venue. He had to endure “leaky dressing rooms, a prevailing humidity to which even I responded by playing in shirt sleeves, a miserable instrument and no organization whatsoever,” as he recalled a decade later–and he left out the acoustically poor theatre, the haphazard publicity, the very poor attendance, the thunderstorm that drowned him out in one of his concerts, and earnings of just 127 for the season. Yet he enjoyed that chaotic first summer, because he saw the festival as a forum in which he could explore repertoire and ideas and approaches to performance that had no place in his regular concert season.

There were only a few informal performances in the summer of 1954;^*21 it was the ambitious series of concerts in the summer of 1955 that was officially designated the “inaugural season of music” at Stratford. Applebaum had little money to spend but enticed musicians like Gould by offering almost unlimited creative freedom. He attracted soloists including Maureen Forrester, Lois Marshall, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, and Isaac Stern, and mounted a legendary production of Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale, in which the French mime Marcel Marceau made his North American debut. On July 12, Gould played Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto with the Hart House Orchestra, a chamber orchestra under the direction of Boyd Neel, and on July 29, he gave a performance of the Goldberg Variations that Jacob Siskind, the Montreal Star critic, compared “with those by a Landowska, a Kirkpatrick, or a Tureck.” His eccentricities, onstage and off, caused some comment, too. Summers in Stratford are hot and humid at the best of times, but in 1955 temperatures reached 41°C (105°F), and the afternoon concerts were moved from the scorching tent to the Casino, a barnlike building that originally served as a badminton hall. That didn’t stop Gould from living up to his own publicity, walking around town dressed in a coat, scarf, cap, and gloves, and demanding that windows be closed before he could rehearse. The bundled-up Gould, a strange but lovable figure, became a fixture on the Stratford scene for most of the next decade.

The 1956 music season was even more ambitious, with stellar talent and adventurous programming. Half of the concerts were devoted to high-profile jazz performers, while the classical concerts included piano recitals by Claudio Arrau and Rudolf Serkin, and a variety of vocal, chamber, orchestral, and choral music, with works drawn from the Renaissance through the twentieth century, including several specially commissioned new works, and a production of Britten’s chamber opera The Rape of Lucretia. In the busy year since his last visit to Stratford, Gould had become a concert and recording artist of international renown, and he took the whole summer of 1956 off except for one concert at the festival, on July 9. It was a tour de force before a packed house. He dazzled his audience with his versatility, appearing in the roles of pianist, conductor, composer, and writer, in an unusual program: solo works by Sweelinck, Krenek, and Berg; the premiere of his own String Quartet (more on that later); and Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, with the soprano Bethany Beardslee. Gould directed the proceedings from the piano and wrote the program notes. The critics, including visitors from New York (Time, Musical America) were impressed by his virtuosity and versatility. “On paper it looked awful,” wrote Ross Parmenter, in the New York Times. “But it turned out to be an absorbing evening, largely because Mr. Gould is as gifted as a musical thinker as he is as a pianist.”

“Canada’s been terribly good to me.”

Gould longed to do more than give concerts. He wanted to record and broadcast, to write and compose and conduct, and in his early years as a professional performer he would produce work in all of these fields, and earn a national reputation as a musician of unusual breadth. But talent and ambition are useless where opportunity is wanting, and he was lucky to have been in the right place at the right time. The beginning of his professional career coincided with a period of great artistic ferment in Canada and the burgeoning of cultural institutions in which he found venues and support for his increasingly multifarious work. Economic prosperity and newly invigorated nationalistic sentiments combined to create widespread optimism about Canada’s future as an independent nation of enormous potential rather than a colony–look no further than the spate of books published after the war with titles like Canada on the March, Canada Looks Ahead, Canada in the Making, Canada’s Tomorrow, Prospect of Canada, Colony to Nation…These were fertile conditions for Canadian culture. The years from the Second World War to about 1960 were a heady time for the younger Canadian artists who sought to move beyond the parochialism of the past toward a more personal and professional brand of art that was both distinctly Canadian and in touch with international movements. It showed in a flowering of sophisticated, adventurous Canadian fiction and poetry–in the fifties, as one poet wrote, Canada was a veritable “nest of singing birds”–in which there was unprecedented public, commercial, and academic interest. It showed in the growth and the innovations of the Canadian film industry, in features, documentaries, and animation. It showed in the acceptance of radical modern developments in the visual arts–Expressionism, Surrealism, Abstractionism, “automatic painting”–by, for instance, the Plasticiens and Automatistes of Montreal, and, later, non-objective Toronto artists like the Painters Eleven.

And it showed in music, for which the forties and fifties are now remembered as a coming of age. The generation of composers then finishing their formal studies were belatedly but enthusiastically absorbing modern idioms–Impressionism, Expressionism, neo-Classicism, twelve-tone music, and later serialism, electronics, aleatory music, and so on–despite the hostility of older colleagues and audiences, and were working prolifically in genres like orchestral and chamber and large-scale keyboard music that had previously been relatively neglected. “We are actually the first generation of Canadian composers,” the thirty-eight-year-old Barbara Pentland wrote in 1950, by which she meant the first generation to have received most of its training, and to have begun earning serious national and international recognition, without leaving Canada. She could have included performers like Lois Marshall and Maureen Forrester and Gould, too. True, many composers and performers at that time were still going to Europe or the United States to finish their professional educations and to nourish their avant-garde ambitions, but through the post-war period a career in classical music based in Canada became increasingly possible.

New institutional support was crucial in helping all this talent to flower. When Gould was a child, the sort of sustained, co-ordinated government support of the arts taken for granted after the war scarcely existed, and corporate and private patronage was neither widespread nor systematic. But the war, which itself inspired much art, some with government funding, helped to reinforce the notion that culture had a social role that made it worthy of state support and aroused widespread support for a sort of “New Deal” for the arts in the form of state-sponsored cultural institutions or even a sort of “ministry of culture.” After a decade of fierce debate and passionate lobbying on cultural policy, a Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters, and Sciences (the Massey Commission) was appointed, in 1949, to examine cultural, educational, and scientific institutions and make recommendations for their future. The Commission became a kind of crusade for cultural nationalism. Its report, delivered in May 1951, documented the increased cultural activity since the war, but still noted a “lack of nourishment” for Canadian art and artists, and underscored the importance of government-funded organization in a vast but sparsely populated country besieged by the “menace” of American popular culture, American economic control of arts, and its own legacy of colonialism. As one brief to the Commission reported,

 

No novelist, poet, short story writer, historian, biographer, or other writer of non-technical books can make even a modestly comfortable living by selling his work in Canada.

No composer of music can live at all on what Canada pays him for his compositions.

Apart from radio drama, no playwright, and only a few actors and producers, can live by working in the theatre in Canada.

Few painters and sculptors, outside the fields of commercial art and teaching, can live by sale of their work in Canada.

 

But the situation was improving, precisely because all of that cultural lobbying in the forties spurred an extraordinary development of cultural organizations. A striking number of the most important arts institutions came into being in the forties and fifties, from the Canadian Arts Council (1945) to the Canada Council (1957), the latter the centrepiece of the Massey Commission’s recommendations, or, in music, from the Canadian Music Council (1944) to the Canadian Music Centre (1959). Other organizations created new opportunities for performers and composers in these years: the Canadian League of Composers (1951), which organized its own concerts for fifteen years; the National Ballet of Canada (1951) and other major dance companies; the CBC Symphony Orchestra (1952); the Royal Conservatory Opera School (1946); the CBC Opera Company (1948); and the Opera Festival Association of Toronto (1950), which evolved into the Canadian Opera Company. Hugh Le Caine did innovative work in electronic music after the war, in his own studio and later for the National Research Council, and Canada’s first electronic-music studio was established at the University of Toronto in 1959. In academia, younger Canadian composers, and many post-war immigrants, began to assume positions of authority and create forums for their work. Standards of music education improved at all levels, including the professional. In 1952, at the University of Toronto, the music faculty and the Royal Conservatory were enlarged and reorganized, and among the consequences were advanced degree programs and the introduction of proper courses in composition and musicology. The First Symposium of Canadian Music was held in Vancouver in 1950, and an International Conference of Composers was held at the Stratford Festival in 1960. The business of classical music expanded significantly after the war–particularly publishing. Important periodicals appeared, albeit briefly: the Canadian Review of Music and Art (1942–48) and the more substantial Canadian Music Journal (1956–62). The first major catalogues of Canadian composers and their works appeared at this time, as did retrospective surveys like the 1955 collection Music in Canada, edited by Ernest MacMillan. The first comprehensive history of Canadian music was published in 1960.

And it was precisely in these years that Glenn Gould went from being a local to an international phenomenon. He was, indeed, one of the great success stories of mid-twentieth-century Canadian culture, and though he was talented enough to have found success anywhere at any time, his career might have taken another path, perhaps less congenial, had he not had the opportunities that arose at home during his early professional career–above all, opportunities in broadcasting.

“My career was spawned in a radio studio.”

Canada was a pioneer in the field of radio broadcasting and other electronic media. The Marconi company’s station XWA in Montreal (later CFCF) became North America’s (and perhaps the world’s) first regular broadcaster in 1919, and Toronto’s first radio station, CFCA, began broadcasting in 1922 from the offices of the Daily Star. Interest in radio exploded through the twenties, and network radio first appeared in the form of stations operated by the major Canadian railways, whose programming included a good deal of classical music. But like so much of Canadian culture in those days, early radio was monopolized by American commercial interests. In many quarters there was fierce lobbying against the influx of American popular culture over the airwaves, and in favour of a more unifying and edifying Canadian system modelled on the BBC, which was founded in 1922. The result was the establishment, in 1932, of the ambitious though controversial Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission, and, in 1936, of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Before long, the CBC was widely perceived as Canada’s greatest cultural asset.

Of course, Canadians already had access to British and American music programs, and, according to Jessie Greig, Gould, like many Canadians, listened to the New York Philharmonic, Toscanini and the NBC Symphony, the Metropolitan Opera, and other American offerings. But he was listening avidly to the CBC, too, and it is difficult to overstate how vital a resource the early CBC was for Canadian musicians. It greatly increased public appreciation of serious music and awareness of Canadian music, musicians, and musical life. Gould gleaned much of his understanding of the larger world of music from the CBC, which supported experimental ventures of little appeal. The CBC was a vital source of revenue and promotion and artistic inspiration for Canadian musicians. It commissioned and premiered many new works by Canadian composers, offered countless opportunities for Canadian performers, even maintained its own orchestras. More than one Canadian musical career was literally saved, or at least kept in Canada, because of the CBC. Moreover, through its International Service, established in Montreal in 1945, the CBC brought Canadian music to other countries, where it was practically unknown. The resources, programming, and artistic range of the corporation expanded rapidly through the late thirties and during the war, and spectacularly after the war; between 1944 and 1962 there were two English-language networks, the Trans-Canada and the Dominion, the latter reserved for lighter fare, in addition to the French-language network, Radio-Canada. By 1948, half of the music on the CBC was classical, much of it live and Canadian; a decade later, Canadian content accounted for about 95 per cent of music programming. Moreover, the music department was largely controlled by creative people rather than businessmen; Geoffrey Waddington, a violinist and conductor sympathetic to Canadian music, became music adviser for the English networks in 1947, and director of music in 1952.

Gould made his CBC debut at the age of eighteen, and recalled the event in 1974 in his article “Music and Technology”:

One Sunday morning in December 1950, I wandered into a living-room-sized radio-studio, placed my services at the disposal of a single microphone belonging to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and proceeded to broadcast “live”–tape was already a fact of life in the recording industry but, in those days, radio broadcasting still observed the first-note-to-last-and-damn-the-consequences syndrome of the concert-hall–two sonatas, one by Mozart [K. 281], one by Hindemith [No. 3]. It was my first network broadcast…a memorable one…that moment in my life when I first caught a vague impression of the direction it would take, when I realised that the collected wisdom of my peers and elders to the effect that technology represented a compromising, dehumanising intrusion into art was nonsense, when my love affair with the microphone began.

It was not literally Gould’s radio debut, incidentally. On the afternoon of Sunday, December 4, 1938, six-year-old “Master Glen Gold” appeared at a local theatre in the Reliable Doll All-Star Revue “Today’s Children,” which was sponsored by a toy company and broadcast on CFRB. He played several pieces, and took a pitch test, which he passed with what one newspaper called “flying honors.” On March 10, 1945, he appeared on CFRB again in a concert of Kiwanis Festival winners, for which he received 10, and we may assume there were other childhood broadcasts on local radio. But it was the CBC, more than concert appearances, that first made him a national figure, and he himself acknowledged the enormous impact of the broadcaster on his musical development in the early fifties. Moreover, through his early CBC experiences he became an eager convert to the electronic media before he had even given a concert outside Canada, and came to view his broadcasting (and later recording) as his real career. He viewed his concert schedule as an adjunct to his media work, not the reverse, and in this light his ultimate rejection of concert life seems less an aberration than an inevitability.

From 1950 through 1955, Gould appeared almost thirty times on CBC radio, in studio recitals, which were then still broadcast live, as well as live relays of concert appearances with various orchestras, on both networks and often in prestige series like Distinguished Artists and CBC Wednesday Night, an innovative mélange of music, drama, news, documentaries, panels, and much else. At first his broadcasting repertoire was largely the same as his concert repertoire, plus a little chamber music, and the network had no qualms about giving him a forum for early and modern music. Indeed, his first public performances of some of the staples of his repertoire–Sweelinck’s “Fitzwilliam” Fantasia, Bach’s Partita No. 5, Berg’s Sonata–were on the radio, and he gave the Canadian premiere of Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto on the air, with the CBC’s own orchestra. His first public performance of the Goldberg Variations, too, was in a CBC studio, on June 21, 1954.

Television came late to Canada. The BBC established the world’s first regular television service in 1936 and it was more than fifteen years before Canada caught up: for an immense country covering six time zones with a sparse population and two official languages, television was an expensive and technologically complicated business. The CBC finally presented Canada’s first telecast, from Montreal, on Saturday, September 6, 1952. The first telecast from Toronto’s station, CBLT, followed two days later–a live, three-hour extravaganza of speeches, news, music, drama, and more, featuring some of Canada’s best musical and dramatic performers, including Gould, who provided some unintended comedy. After performing part of a Beethoven concerto with orchestra, he became so absorbed backstage watching the next act, a brass sextet, that he set a decorative fake-marble column to tottering and had to wrestle with it to keep it from collapsing, while the brass players struggled to contain their laughter. (“Extremely unprofessional to say the least,” snarled the conductor, Geoffrey Waddington.)

There followed a craze for TV in the fifties that rivalled the craze for radio in the twenties, and as in radio the CBC proved to be dedicated and innovative and financially generous when it came to music-related programming. Ambitious, too: in its second year CBC television was already broadcasting full-length operas, operettas, ballets, orchestral and concerto concerts, and solo recitals, including modern works (sometimes North American or world television premieres) as well as classics, along with music documentaries, children’s and educational music shows, and more. Gould appeared on television in a variety of CBC series in his twenties–Chrysler Festival, Folio, Ford Startime, Graphic, Scope–and, several times, in the Radio-Canada series L’Heure du concert. Already he had innovative producers to work with, though it would be almost a decade before he began to experiment with television formats other than the conventional filmed concert. The first visual document of Gould performing dates from December 16, 1954, his second appearance in the inaugural season of L’Heure du concert: he gave a dashing performance of the first movement of Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto with the CBC Symphony, featuring his own new cadenza. He had composed cadenzas for the first and last movements, and performed them for the first time two days earlier with the Montreal Symphony. Both cadenzas are openly anachronistic: the first, Gould wrote, is “a rather Regerian fugue” based on the themes of the first movement, the other, a “rhapsody” in a highly chromatic idiom. Both, he claimed, were intended to subvert “the original purpose of cadenza writing as a virtuosic display.” Yet the cadenzas are so eccentric that they call far more attention to themselves than would Beethoven’s own cadenzas or any more conventional specimens.

“I’ve always been a record-buff.”

Like many children, Gould and Robert Fulford created a tin-cans-and-string system connecting their two houses. Later, when they were about twelve, Fulford recalled, Gould “organized more sophisticated equipment, microphones and little speakers, so that we could make radio broadcasts, from our house to his and vice versa. This time the equipment worked fine, but our problem was content; after he did a brief concert and my brother Wayne and I did a newscast, we had trouble figuring what to put on the air.” Gould was comfortable from an early age with more professional communications technologies, too, and he came by his technophilia honestly: his father enjoyed mechanical gadgets. On June 15, 1922, the North Ontario Times in Uxbridge reported, “Thursday evening last, Mr. Bert Gold managed to get in communication with the Star Radio Concert [in Toronto] at 7 o’clock. This is the first time that radio has been heard in town and it is due to the active efforts of Mr. Gold that the new entertainment has arrived.” Bert installed radio sets and phonograph speakers for the Gold Medal Radio & Phonograph Company for a time in the early twenties, and he was shooting eight-millimetre film footage of the family at the cottage as early as the summer of 1948.

The revolution of magnetic tape was introduced to radio and recording in the late forties, and the Goulds were among the first people in Toronto to acquire a recorder for use at home, despite the high cost; friends’ recollections and the surviving recordings suggest that Glenn was using one as early as 1947 or 1948. He immediately recognized the value of recording, not only for preserving his repertoire and interpretations for posterity, but for analyzing his own playing. Recording, for him, became a practice technique. He also documented some of his compositions and the occasional improvisation, made recordings with Guerrero, including concertos on two pianos, taped some of his early concerts, and recorded performances and compositions by some of his friends. Among these private recordings are pieces of which no other Gould performance survives: Mozart’s K. 488 concerto, études and impromptus by Chopin, short works by Scarlatti, Mendelssohn, Debussy, and others. Some of them include Gould’s spoken introductions. The Couperin-Guerrero Passacaille, recorded when Gould was about fifteen, is preceded by a hilariously pompous little speech that says much about his attitude toward Romantic piano playing in his mid-teens–and toward his teacher:

 

Glenn Gould: I would like to record now Couperin’s Passacaille in B Minor. Now, a great many people, when they hear that someone is going to play a work of this age and of this type, they’ll say, “Now, my boy, the first thing to do is to play it very dully, and of course without any pedals.” Now, there are two mistakes. For we must remember that we are not trying to sacrifice in the piano what the harpsichord did not have, but rather to create an impressionistic effect of what the harpsichord did have. I shall try and do that for you now. Here is Couperin’s Passacaille in B Minor.

Male voice in the background (Bert Gould?): As arranged by–Glenn Gould: As arranged by Mr. Alberto Guerrero.

As soon as he began to work for the CBC he was purchasing acetate discs of his broadcasts from local companies. Some of these, still in his possession when he died, preserved the only known recordings of certain performances.

Gould began to make commercial recordings as soon as the opportunity arose–first for the CBC. The network’s International Service began a Transcription Service in 1947, and by Gould’s time it had captured young Canadian musicians like Lois Marshall and Oscar Peterson on high-quality records, pressed in small quantities for use by the CBC itself and distributed to Canada’s embassies abroad and to foreign radio stations. Gould made three recordings for the International Service, the first in 1954, featuring a vibrant and fully mature reading of Bach’s Partita No. 5, coupled with Morawetz’s Fantasy in D. Even though records had been produced in Canada since at least 1900, only a few companies were making classical recordings when Gould was a teenager–Quality Records and Beaver, for instance, both founded in 1950, and Hallmark Recordings, which claimed to be “the only Canadian recording company producing and cutting its own high-grade long-playing records.” In November 1952, Keith MacMillan, the son of Ernest MacMillan and a producer of music programs for CBC radio, joined four friends to found Hallmark and set up a studio and lab in downtown Toronto. The company folded in 1959, but in the interim it amassed a small yet adventurous catalogue that included Canadian performers and composers in sometimes offbeat repertoire, and it even had some foreign distribution through Decca.

Ernest MacMillan had already tipped Keith off about Gould, so Keith was receptive when, in fall 1953, Albert Pratz, having played with Gould at Stratford that summer, approached Hallmark to suggest a duo recording with him.^*22 On November 3, at the age of twenty-one, Gould taped his first commercial recording, a magnificent reading of Berg’s Sonata, at the Bloor Street United Church in downtown Toronto; later that week, he and Pratz recorded transcriptions of light pieces by Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and Taneyev. “He wasn’t too eager to record the Russian pieces,” Pratz recalled shortly after Gould’s death, “but he was very gracious about it, and even seemed to enjoy himself at the time. He did a wonderful job, too.” When the album was released, John Beckwith wrote that those Russian pieces were “the only really cheap music he has ever been associated with professionally,” and Gould himself, in 1958, sent the album to a friend with the admonition, “Please remember your promise about never listening to the second side!”

The Hallmark album brought Gould less than 150 in 1953, but it gave him his first opportunity to publish his writing, in the form of liner notes on the Berg Sonata. Even in school he had demonstrated, if not much literary talent, at least literary ambition and eagerness to express himself. Jessie Greig recalled that he used to write little plays for family and friends to perform in–“Always he was the star.” His earliest professional writings took the form of championing the Schoenberg school–the Berg liner notes, the lectures and program notes on Schoenberg and Webern in the early fifties–though he branched out into Bach in November 1955 with a program essay on the Goldberg Variations for a concert in Montreal. His first published article, a wide-ranging look at the current state of the twelve-tone idiom with special emphasis on Boulez and his generation, appeared in fall 1956, in the inaugural issue of the Canadian Music Journal, in itself evidence of his position by then within Canadian music. Informed, provocative, and deeply personal, the article was a harbinger of things to come, as was (alas) its lamely punning title, “The Dodecacophonist’s Dilemma.” At its best, Gould’s early writing was engaging and fresh, as well as thoughtful, but often it was awkward, pretentious, and verbose (or, more politely, baroque)–he made the prodigy’s error of mistaking pomposity for sophistication–and his train of thought was often difficult to follow, especially where intricate musical analysis was involved. Still, his early writing heralded the emergence of a thinking performer who was likely to become something more than just a piano player.

“I decided it was time for me to set out on my own snowshoes.”

The Beach, Robert Fulford wrote, was

the best place in the world to spend childhood, the worst place in the world to spend adolescence. For a child the Beach was a richness of grass and sand and water, of hockey “cushions” (as we called them then) and tennis courts and softball diamonds. For an adolescent it was a closed, deadening Wasp world, a suspicious and narrow and clique-ish little compartment in which we all worked hard to avoid knowing both ourselves and our neighbours. A Beach boy was emotionally fixated at age sixteen or less, bound to a code of athletic good-guyism that admitted the existence of no emotional, spiritual, or intellectual ambiguities.

 

Yet even as he was becoming a mature and unconventional artist, Gould continued to live at home, with his parents, and showed no inclination to move out. (Ray Dudley remembers the amusement of their peers when Gould appeared at a party, around age nineteen, in a car driven by his mother.) He had outgrown his parents artistically and intellectually, and was sometimes prodded to sarcasm and anger by their limitations. His real life now was in his head, in his music, where his parents no longer had any real input; he was independent where it mattered, and had no need to fly the nest to prove the point. Still, he remained close to his parents, and the house was hardly a hotbed of animosity. His parents continued to support him financially and emotionally, and he was content to let his mother look after his day-to-day needs (he would never become independent in that respect). He was asserting his independence in some ways, though. He stopped going to church around age eighteen, which must have disappointed his devout parents, and he grew increasingly cavalier about his studies, as the records for his last few school years show. His parents insisted that he finish high school, but after some discussion of college he decided against it.

In 1952, when he was nineteen, he ended his lessons with Alberto Guerrero, and Jessie Greig recalled seeing tears of anger and frustration in Gould’s eyes when his parents objected. He felt he had outgrown his teacher, and Guerrero himself once admitted to Sylvia Hunter that he had nothing more to offer Gould. While the notion that Gould and Guerrero did nothing but argue is pure legend, it is true that in his later teens Gould’s ideas about repertoire, interpretation, piano style, and much else diverged increasingly from Guerrero’s, making artistic clashes between the two inevitable. Guerrero was dismayed by some of Gould’s ideas, and by the onstage shenanigans that were increasingly part of his act; he refused to attend Gould’s triumphant Massey Hall recital in April 1956 because he could no longer stand to watch him on stage. But Gould remained friendly with Guerrero until his death in 1959, and their two families continued to socialize. From time to time Gould still sought his counsel (and approval?) about his career and ideas and interpretations, even after he had achieved international fame. “Never was there a sign of a split between them,” Ray Dudley insists, though rumours to that effect circulated even at the time. But as Gould wrote to the photographer Yousuf Karsh in 1958, “I felt that at a certain point I was equipped with everything, except the kind of solidarity of the ego which is, in the last analysis, the one important part of an artist’s equipment.” When he had developed the “insufferable amount of self-confidence” needed for the task, he decided to continue his education on his own.

Though the newspaper profiles called him “a healthy, happy boy” as well as a prodigy, Gould in his later teens was already an eccentric character, especially by his parents’ standards. It was clear that he was never going to sit up straight, dress properly, eat right, or keep his outrageous opinions to himself. His hypochondria, his overdressing, his night-owl proclivities–all were evident. “In those days,” he once said, “I was really a character.” He became increasingly uncomfortable with normal social life. He hated parties, particularly when it was musicians who gathered, and attended them only rarely. When he did, his puritanical personality–he couldn’t abide smoking, drinking, swearing, flirting–tended to constrain those around him. Though serious, in some ways old before his time, he was funny, too, always polite and usually friendly, and challenging and interesting to listen to even when unconventional, so he did not lack for people who wanted to be with him. Nevertheless, he resisted close friendships. “He is a confirmed bachelor at 13,” Fulford reported in the 9-D Bugle, and there is not a wisp of evidence to suggest that he took an active interest in sex at precisely that time when boys are most curious about it. When Florence was asked, by a reporter in Calgary, if her nineteen-year-old son was “interested in girls,” she replied, with a smile, “No, he hasn’t time for them yet, and I’m glad he hasn’t right now.” (He had girls as friends, however.) He was already convinced of the creative necessity of solitude. “I’m not anti-social,” he told the photojournalist Jock Carroll in 1956, “but if an artist wants to use his mind for creative work then self-discipline, in the form of cutting oneself off from society, is a necessary thing.”

He found that solitude at the cottage, where he was free to lead a tranquil, contemplative life. He had no desire to leave home completely, but his interests and his schedule were conflicting more and more with those of Bert and Florence, and even with his own studio at the back of the house he was becoming a burden to his devoted parents. He would stay up all night, sometimes in the company of others, laughing and talking or playing the piano or running the stereo at full volume without regard for his parents’ need to sleep. Finally, after leaving church and school and piano lessons behind, he retreated to the cottage more or less permanently. Dudley recalls that Gould would return to the house in Toronto when his parents wanted to use the cottage, and then switch back when they returned home, though he still saw them, and still had concerts and broadcasts and other work to draw him out of his retreat from time to time. He was becoming an incurable insomniac by his later teens, staying up most of the night reading or practising or listening to music, turning in at four or five in the morning and perhaps still having trouble falling asleep, getting up at noon. A neighbour, Doris Milligan, whose bedroom faced the Gould cottage, fondly remembered falling asleep with the sound of Gould’s piano drifting through her open window.

Gould felt at ease at the cottage and in the surrounding towns, away from the pressures of stardom, which he was beginning to feel before he ever left Canada, and he felt nourished physically, emotionally, and creatively by the close contact with nature. For years, between concert tours and recording sessions, he would spend as much time as possible at the cottage, which his parents effectively ceded to him. It was his sanctuary. Besides his parents, the odd local, the postman, and a few friends, he saw almost no one but his dog, with whom he took long walks and ventured out in his motorboats, the Arnold S. and the Alban B. He appreciated the unpretentious nature of rural people, whom he treated without condescension, and to whom, on his walks or his forays into town, he would talk with genuine interest about anything but classical music: movies, books, world affairs, nature, local news. He told a reporter about Mrs. Isabel Doolittle, “a farm lady who comes in once a day and gives me the gossip and tells me whose dog ate whose hen,” and Charles Amsden, proprietor of the Champlain Grill in Orillia, remembered Gould dropping in often just to have coffee and chat. He was open, friendly, and even playful with such people; their company seemed to relax him. Those locals who viewed his solitude as snobbery, he told Jock Carroll, “lost some of that feeling after I sat down with the local fife and drum band, played the autoharp and worked out some musical arrangements for them. Later we tape-recorded some pieces together. I’m afraid it was a bit of a shock to my music teacher, Alberto Guerrero, when he walked in on one of these recording sessions and heard me banging away in a slightly risque ballad, ‘The Hired Man’s Saturday Night.’” He enjoyed the company of children–that was true all his life–and he let them join in his walks or in experiments with his tape recorder. Everyone in the cottage country knew of his musical success and recognized that he was “different,” but they declined to fuss over him; they treated him as a friend, or at least a pleasant neighbour, rather than a great artist. Bill Seto, who ran a Chinese restaurant in Orillia, the Shangri-La Gardens, once chided Gould for cancelling a concert. Gould said he had felt ill on the train so decided to cancel and return home, but Seto felt that Gould’s integrity was at stake–he had promised to play, he had given his word–and Gould accepted the reproof with grace. That says something about his distance from the prima donna personality.

Gould was no homemaker. All his life he lived and worked contentedly in cluttered, chaotic spaces. At the cottage, his mother occasionally stocked the fridge; otherwise there was almost no food, except for tea. He appeared gaunt and gangly in those days, already into his lifelong habit of nibbling and sipping but eating only when ravenous, and then with reluctance. Mrs. Doolittle sometimes cooked and cleaned for him, though for most meals he would drive into Orillia. For almost twenty years, until the late sixties, Bill Seto served Gould at the Shangri-La Gardens. “He came into ‘The Shang’ at 5 o’clock, three or four times a week with the Toronto Star tucked under his arm,” Seto recalled. “I always seated him at the back of the room where he would be undisturbed by other diners and where, his meal finished, he could relax and watch television. He stayed until 10:30 or so and I could tell if he wanted to talk or not.” Seto stocked bottled Poland Water for Gould, who could not abide tap water, and played Gould’s recordings (even Krenek) on the jukebox as a sign of respect, though he would turn them off when Gould left. Gould disliked Chinese food, or anything fancy. “He was a steak and potatoes man,” Seto recalled, but he only appeared to be a hearty eater: what Seto saw was the only real meal he would eat in a day.

Between about 1952 and early 1955 Gould was not exactly in hiding but he was spending as much time as he could alone at the cottage, studying scores, practising on the battered upright, listening to records, experimenting with his recording equipment: “The greatest of all teachers is the tape recorder,” he told a friend. “I would be lost without it.” (Angela Addison recalls seeing wires strung treacherously throughout the cottage.)

He was surrounded by stacks of books. “I read in great splurges,” he said, and one of his self-appointed tasks at the cottage seems to have been to educate himself in those subjects besides music that interested him: literature, poetry, drama, history, philosophy, theology, aesthetics. He read classics of every denomination, from Plato to Thoreau, with a particular fondness for the Russians–Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in particular, but also Gogol, Goncharov, Turgenev. He was widely read in modern literature. His professed favourites included T. S. Eliot, Christopher Fry, and Franz Kafka, though he gave time to Borges, Camus, Capek, Gide, Hesse, Ionesco, Joyce, Malraux, Mishima, Santayana, Soseki, Strindberg, and much else. His friend Ben Sonnenberg, thinking back to 1959, gave a more recherché list of Gould’s then favourite writers: W. H. Hudson, R. B. Cunninghame-Graham, and John Cowper Powys. And at the head of the pack was Thomas Mann,^*23 especially Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, Doctor Faustus, and the early story “Tonio Kröger,” which he read around age eighteen and with whose title character, a passionate and excitable young aesthete described as “foreign and queer,” he identified throughout his life. Just as his repertoire included no fluff, his concert tours no pops, Gould’s reading included no murder mysteries or adventure stories. He liked books with a strong message, books that dealt with weighty ethical or theological or aesthetic ideas or espoused a philosophy of life with which he could engage intellectually. And he was disapproving of books in which ideas were sacrificed to aesthetics or ironic detachment. Among the Russians, for instance, he did not like Chekhov, or the dazzling Nabokov, whom he thought immoral. He read a little Truman Capote on the advice of friends, but could admire only his technique, not his ethics. He found Henry Miller’s writings “ponderous,” Jack Kerouac’s “flaccid.”

The same German Romanticism that had fed into the aesthetics of Wagner, Strauss, the Schoenberg school, and other music Gould loved also fed into much of the literature and philosophy he read–Mann, for instance, whose ideas about the relationship of the artist to society he liked to steal–and his idealistic, moralistic approach owed a lot to his reading in this tradition. He loved all things German, it seemed, and though he never learned more than a few words of the language he could not resist putting on the accent whenever he discussed a German subject. “The year he discovered Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra,” Fulford wrote, “the accent grew almost impenetrably thick.” One can imagine the appeal of Nietzsche’s individualism to a strong-willed young artist living in a tradition-minded town, but Schopenhauer, too, seems to have made a big impact. John Beckwith recalls that Gould, in the early fifties, discussed (admittedly vaguely) writing an opera based in some way on Schopenhauer. It was Schopenhauer, for instance, who advocated a disengagement from worldly matters and conventional values and a sublimation of the baser instincts in favour of a life devoted to art, and who insisted that the significance of art stood outside the empirical world in another, immaterial sphere. “The composer,” he wrote, “reveals the innermost nature of the world, and expresses the profoundest wisdom, in a language that his reasoning faculty does not understand.” Gould likely did not share Schopenhauer’s tragic, pessimistic, misanthropic view of life, but he certainly shared the idealistic thrust of the philosopher’s aesthetics–Schopenhauer has always had a special appeal to artists–and he shared Schopenhauer’s view of the redemptive power of art, of art as solace for an imperfect world. His Romantic notion of “ecstasy,” in fact, sounds suspiciously like the very union with that immaterial sphere that Schopenhauer advocated.

This, above all, is what Gould was engaged in at the cottage in the years after he left Guerrero’s studio: he was thinking, about matters theoretical and practical, about morals and aesthetics, about music and interpretation, about the piano and performance practice, about the future direction of his career and his adult relationship to the world of music. During these years of retreat, Gould was not in crisis; he was patiently laying the groundwork for a mature professional career. “He was just practising,” said Bert, “and preparing himself.” He was becoming Glenn Gould.

“I always thought of myself as a composer.”

By his mid-teens Gould had determined that his ultimate goal was to compose, not merely to write some music as a sideline to a concert career but really to be a composer in the fullest sense of the word. He considered his concert and recording careers as means of providing him with enough money and enough of a reputation to devote himself to composition, and he envisioned leaving performing behind altogether in favour of composing. His steady output of music during his mid-teens does suggest that he considered composing more than a hobby, even if none of that music hinted at a first-rate talent. After his flurry of twelve-tone pieces in the early fifties–all of which he later disowned–he composed nothing until he was settled into his retreat at the cottage, at which point he determined to make a proper case for himself as a composer, once and for all. And so, between April 1953 and October 1955, he devoted a large proportion of his time to composing a string quartet in F minor.

He attacked the project enthusiastically, often neglecting the piano for long periods, though his lack of experience as a composer showed. His progress was slow–often just a few bars a day, as his dated sketches confirm. Being a pianist, even a great pianist, does not make one a composer, any more than being a waiter makes one a chef. Gould had evident talent and the right temperament to be a composer, but no training. He was fudging when he claimed, in an interview, that he had studied composition at the Toronto Conservatory: in his day, “studying composition” there meant at best learning a few rudiments as part of a music-theory class. And he was too proud to seek help from those more qualified than he. As he composed he often talked to musical friends about his work and played them excerpts, but he was not really seeking counsel, only approval; the advice he sought was on technical matters like bowing.

The end result was, to say the least, a curious piece. It shocked colleagues who knew Gould as one of Canada’s most passionate champions of the Schoenberg school. John Weinzweig had written a twelve-tone quartet in Toronto as early as 1946, and most people expected the same from Gould. But the music is resolutely tonal, in fact unapologetically Romantic. Its lush, sideslipping harmonies, and some of its wide-spaced themes and developmental strategies, recall Richard Strauss–and there was no composer less fashionable in the early fifties. Gould freely admitted the influence of Strauss, but in various sources acknowledged other late-Romantic models, too: Wagner, Mahler, Reger, Franck, and the String Quintet in F Major by Bruckner, which he had just recently come to know. (“This is the most wonderful thing he ever wrote, I think–the only thing in which you can’t have the tubas blasting out every climax.”) But late Romanticism is only one of many sides to this piece, which draws on three centuries’ worth of musical styles. Everything that interested the young Gould is here: late-Romantic harmony; Classical and Romantic sonata forms; fugue and other idioms of counterpoint drawn from the Renaissance through to the twentieth century; and, often, the near-atonal idiom of such early-twentieth-century works as Berg’s Sonata and Schoenberg’s Opp. 7 and 10 quartets (which Gould acknowledged as models).

A page from Gould’s String Quartet, from the German music publisher Schott’s 1999 edition. This excerpt, from a self-contained fugue in B minor in the first half of the quartet, shows the verbose, tangled part-writing characteristic of Gould’s style, but also his cleverness in developing ideas in counterpoint. In bars 247–49, one of the main themes of the quartet enters in stretto (viola, then cello, then first violin), and beginning in bar 254, a variant of this theme (second violin) accompanies the principal subject of the fugue (first violin). Both themes, moreover, incorporate the chromatic four-note motto on which the whole quartet is based–for instance, the first notes of the fugue subject (C-sharp–D–G-sharp–A), in bars 254–55. (Gould STRING QUARTET © 1999 Schott Musik International. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission of European American Music Distributors LLC, sole U.S. and Canadian agent for Schott Musik International.)

“I’ve always had a sweet tooth for fin de siècle characters,” Gould said on CBC radio in 1967, “for artists who sit perched at the very end of an epoch and who manage to reconcile two opposing tendencies within their work.” He thought of himself as one of those characters, and his stated main goal in the quartet was to mate the self-indulgence of late-Romantic harmony with the unifying constructive techniques of the twelve-tone school. He admitted that the work was a kind of an exercise in which he sought to take a single, unassuming, rising four-note motif (C–D-flat–G–A-flat)^*24 and make it the generating idea for all of the melodies, harmonies, and formal procedures in the piece. (Such thematic parsimony, what Schoenberg called “developing variation,” was prized by the composers of his school.) The quartet is set out as a single unbroken movement of just over eight hundred bars, taking about thirty-five minutes to play. It (loosely) conforms to the usual sonata-form divisions–exposition, development, recapitulation–though a coda of some three hundreds bars, the longest single section, upsets the Classical proportions. Gould was clearly influenced by those several-movements-in-one forms taken up by many nineteenth-and twentieth-century composers, including Schoenberg in his Chamber Symphony No. 1 and Op. 7 quartet. In short, he wrote a string quartet that was as pointedly eclectic as he was, and as such the work can stand as an early salvo in his lifelong campaign against the ideas of fashion and progress in music. As he put it, “I sought to challenge the zeitgeist,” to prove that one could love both Strauss and Schoenberg at the same time and even effect a rapprochement between them. But the work was autobiographical, too. At that time, he wrote, he felt “the urge to sum up in a composition all the influences in my adolescence [that] had most deeply affected me,” and in this sense the quartet is a revealing document–an essay on the state of the artist.

All of which makes Gould’s String Quartet a unique and fascinating piece, though not necessarily a great one. It has many merits, not least its very premise, to revisit Strauss in light of Schoenberg, which is indeed provocative and full of possibility. Notwithstanding what one reviewer (correctly) identified as “momentary tangles of ineptly-handled dissonance,” Gould manipulates his complicated, chromatic harmonic idiom with impressive assurance, and the tension between pungent Schoenbergian dissonance and glowing Straussian resolution is often genuinely touching. He demonstrates a real insight into counterpoint in the Baroque, Romantic, and modern manners, and a certain cleverness in developing ideas in counterpoint. And the lyricism of the music is affecting, even though the melodies are often angular and tortured.

But the piece has serious problems, too, and the impressiveness of Gould’s stylistic synthesis is sometimes undercut by his deficiencies of technique. His rhythms and counterpoint are often muddled. He had no experience writing for strings, as he admitted, and did not know how to dispose the instruments so as to put his material in its best light. (He hid behind the claim that he thought of the music as “abstract,” indifferent to instrumentation.) The four instruments tend to be cramped within a relatively narrow range, as though Gould wanted subconsciously to make the music playable on the piano,^*25 and the dense, knotty textures can be made clear to a listener only with difficulty, especially as Gould calls for almost continuous legato phrasing. His few stabs at string effects–pizzicato, sul ponticello–seem half-hearted, and there are some amateurish moments where one instrument runs out of notes and a musical line must be taken up, through double stopping, by another instrument. And there is not much relief from the four-part texture: everyone seems to be playing all the time. The work sounds as though it had been stitched together a few bars a day: it has an additive structure that, for all its complexity, lacks direction and drama, and for this reason its admittedly clever developments of the four-note motif can eventually become tiresome. The second half is particularly unconvincing, consisting of page after page of seemingly endless machinations of the main motif. It is the Pompidou Centre of string quartets–the guts are on the outside. Gould the composer had the same flaw as Gould the speaker and writer: reluctance to apply the blue pencil. Hence the loquaciousness and formal sprawl of the quartet, which lacks the grasp of large-scale architecture that was so infallible in Gould the performer. The composer Otto Joachim, who played viola in the Montreal String Quartet and composed an elegant, richly contrapuntal, and beautifully idiomatic twelve-tone quartet (which Gould knew) in 1956, said that Gould “made all the mistakes a young composer can make. He did not know when and how to bring his work to an end.” And it is true that the enormous coda, more than anything else, reflects Gould’s inexperience and insecurity. “In the end,” wrote Ken Winters, in the Canadian Music Journal, “the panorama of the piece is not grand, only extensive; not lively, only industrious; not rich, only thick; not fascinating, only complex.”

Apprentice work of mixed success, in short. But then, six months after completing the quartet, Gould suddenly became a world-famous recording artist, and so was able to get support for the piece out of proportion to its merits. The first performance was given on the CBC’s French radio network, by the Montreal String Quartet, on May 21, 1956, in the series Premières, and the first public performance soon followed, at Stratford, on July 9. Later that year the Montreal quartet recorded the piece for the CBC’s International Service, and in October Gould signed a contract for it with AM-CA Publishing Co., of Great Neck, New York, a small, enterprising company run by William C. Barger, a psychiatrist, and Robert L. Barclay, a Canadian-born composer. (A year later, the company changed its name to Barger and Barclay.) Several editions of the score and parts appeared beginning in the fall of 1956, and the same company also published Gould’s Beethoven cadenzas, in 1958. The quartet had its American premiere in November 1959 on a program of the Cleveland Orchestra Woman’s Committee, performed by the Symphonia Quartet, made up of members of the orchestra. Gould gave a lecture-recital on Schoenberg in the same program, and was so impressed by the Symphonia’s interpretation that he convinced Columbia Records to allow them to record it. He was present at the recording session, in Cleveland, on March 13, 1960, and pronounced himself “thrilled” with the album.^*26

This was a remarkable public career for a Canadian string quartet. At that time almost no Canadian chamber music was being published, and John Beckwith noted in a 1956 survey that only two recordings of Canadian compositions were then available, both on the Hallmark label. Yet here was an apprentice composition by a young pianist becoming the first Canadian composition of such length and seriousness to be made available to the record-buying public, and on a major American label. It was the sort of attention that Canadian composers could only dream of in those days. When it was first performed, the quartet earned some excellent notices in Toronto and New York newspapers (“a moving and impressive work,” “a work of vast maturity and clear-cut musical understanding,” “a powerful, melodious work”). Yet the critics most qualified to judge, including other Toronto composers, mostly differed. The quartet was “the work of a good student,” wrote the composer Graham George in the Canadian Music Journal. “A musician of Mr. Gould’s prominence has heavier responsibilities than obscure writers, who can experiment as often as they like with no one paying any attention; and it is perhaps unfortunate that he should have allowed the publication of a work so incongruous with his stature as a performer.” Other composers weighed in with similar judgements, and their opinions cannot be seen merely as sour grapes, or stereotypically Canadian undervaluing of homegrown talent, or the sniffing of modernists who felt that Gould had betrayed the avant-garde; it was sound criticism from competent judges. Perhaps if Gould had developed his compositional skills quietly, in private, rather than rushing into public with his first-born, he might have made a more auspicious debut as a composer. Still, he was more than pleased with the piece–“It’s my proudest achievement!” he said in 1959–but he also admitted that “it didn’t completely come off” owing to his lack of experience with strings. As late as 1974, he advised his publishers that he “had long planned to prepare a revised edition of the quartet,” though he never did.

“It would be some kind of betrayal not to live in Canada.”

There is an old joke (one of many) about the Canadian character: Why don’t you need to cover a lobster pot in Canada? Because if one of the lobsters tries to escape, the others will drag him down. It is an old commonplace–moribund today but not quite dead–that Canada recognizes her own talents belatedly, grudgingly, or not all, or only after they have made it big in the States. When Gould was young, it is true, foreign artists were generally thought superior to native artists as a matter of course, regardless of evidence to the contrary. “We in Canada,” wrote Ernest MacMillan in 1931, “find a tendency on the part of certain sections of our public to accept anything that comes to us stamped with the magic name of New York,” and Wyndham Lewis, writing during the war, noted Canadians’ “distrust for anything Canadian.” The Canadian artist who has a talent of international rank but chooses to stay home has always encountered surprise and suspicion: If you’re really so good, why are you still here?

But Gould never wanted for approval in his native land. His talent was recognized early, nurtured, and admired, and he was given many opportunities to display that talent even at its most offbeat. By the end of 1954 he was recognized throughout Canada as a brilliant and highly individual musician, and had already done professional work in every available medium. Many critics, in fact, held him up as an argument against the cliché of the self-denigrating Canadian. Hugh Thomson, for instance, wrote, “A 19-year-old Toronto pianist dealt a blow last night in Massey Hall to the assumption [that] the only worthwhile soloists for symphony concerts are those with foreign names and on the international circuit.” John Kraglund wrote in 1953 that Gould was evidence “that Canadian pianists can take their place among the top artists generally heard here,” and a reviewer in Kingston, Ontario, the same year predicted that Gould’s name would be a household word within ten years. (Three, as it turned out.)

Still, Canadian orchestras and broadcasters and record companies had little clout or means of dissemination in the United States or overseas, and the international music world, in those days, did not look to Canada for the Next Big Thing. It would be international concerts and a major American record label that assured Gould’s worldwide reputation. But he would never make his home anywhere but Canada. “I have absolutely no intention or desire to leave Canada,” he told an interviewer in 1959. “I can’t see, first of all, any reason for it. Canada’s been terribly good to me. And secondly, I’m much too fond of the country.” Of course, remaining in Toronto was convenient for Gould, who never relished change and never chose the strange over the familiar, but he also belonged in Toronto, the city in which his personality and thought had been forged. “My generation of Canadians grew up believing that, if we were very good or very smart, or both, we would someday graduate from Canada,” Robert Fulford wrote, but Gould proved that a Canadian no longer had to graduate from Canada–not in the electronic age, where an artist’s choice of hometown mattered less than ever before. Gould, moreover, did not merely continue to live in Canada; he made “Canadian-ness,” in many ways, the substance of his art, without compromising his international appeal. And while leaving Canada (temporarily) brought him fame and money, and with it power and freedom, staying in Canada, close to institutions like the CBC, allowed him to do the kind of work he wanted to do. That, for him, was the priority.