At no point has the extremism and severity of the contemporary performance experience been more clearly affirmed than in Arturo Toscanini’s combination of scrupulously fanatic attention and supernally dominating musical technique—the fabulous memory, the total grasp of the score, the authoritative understanding of each instrument, and so on. Both during his American career and more or less uninterruptedly since his death, there has been a strenuous debate about Toscanini’s achievements, his impressive legacy, his influence on conducting, and his musicianship in general, as well as his shortcomings. It is worth citing as one often quite interesting and provocative monument to the Toscanini debate Joseph Horowitz’s 1987 book Understanding Toscanini.15 Horowitz is steeped in the debate, even though his argument that Toscanini’s style of taut, literalist objectivism coincided perfectly with the NBC corporate ethos in its ambition to create, Barnum-like, a vast popular audience for classical music is an argument that often either ignores or unjustly diminishes the genuinely electrifying—albeit exaggerated—quality of Toscanini’s performances.
On the other hand, for all the generous detail he provides, as well as his admiring yet disapproving accounts of the sometimes unconscious cooperation between Toscanini’s narrow aesthetic perspectives and David Sarnoff’s corporate ideology, Horowitz does not go as far in severity as Adorno’s characterization of Toscanini’s Führerlike Meisterschaft, based as it is, in Adorno’s words, on “iron discipline—but precisely iron.” In Adorno’s view Toscanini’s performances, with their predetermined dynamics, their eliminated tensions, and “the protective fixation of the work,” obliterate the symphonic work altogether. In Toscanini’s performances, control forbids music from going where it might want to go: he is incapable of letting a phrase “play out,” he foregrounds soprano parts (as in Wagner) and “cleans up” complex counterpoint, he refuses to stray from the restricted nineteenth-century repertory that imposes an avoidance either of Baroque or of advanced modern music. Because of this pretended objectivity (sachlichkeit) Toscanini for Adorno comes to embody “the triumph of technology and administration over music,” even if in performances of Italian opera he produced a sort of exactness (without lingering or sentiment) for which there was no equivalent in the presentation of opera in Germany.16
One can actually accept both the Adorno and the Horowitz position—particularly as they discuss Toscanini’s complicity in the creation of a basically illiterate mass-market appetite more interested in stereotypes about “the world’s greatest conductor conducting the world’s greatest music” than in refined and illuminating performances of the kind given by Eugen Jochum, Otto Klemperer, and Wilhelm Furtwängler (all of whom, according to Horowitz, were defeated by Toscanini in America)—that is, one can accept the positions without altogether conceding the point that Toscanini’s work clarified what is extreme about the concert occasion itself. This is something I think centrally missing in both their accounts of the Toscanini phenomenon. What stamps the still available 1938 performance by Toscanini of the Eroica is the absolute rigor of the logic that he lets unfold in Beethoven’s music, and in so doing discloses a process, almost a narrative, that is irreducibly unique, eccentric, contrary to everyday life. So highly wrought is this that it feels like a clear aesthetic alternative to the travails of ordinary human experience.
As Toscanini characteristically takes them, the opening E-flat chords of the Eroica announce this process with the distinctive authority of two successive thunderclaps. Thereafter, without a whit of sentimentality or of rubato, the cellos begin the principal theme, passing it to the flutes and horns, until in measure 41 a gigantic tutti recaptures the theme for the full ensemble: all this occurs in a block of time that communicates the rigor and straightforward compression of a wind tunnel, stripped of any sort of palliative adornment or lingering nostalgia. It is not that Toscanini highlights only the melody (as Adorno charged) but that each of the measures of the score is realized with a taut inevitability suggesting the expressivity of pure forward movement that seems to be making only provisional or convenient use of music, rather than communicating the orchestral equivalent of shaped phrasings that derive from the human voice.
What Toscanini seems to me to be doing here is trying to force into prominence, or perhaps enforce, the utterly contrary quality of the performance occasion, its total discontinuity with the ordinary, regular, or normative processes of everyday life. No wonder that Adorno preferred a Furtwängler for whom the performance of, say, the Bruckner or Schubert Ninth symphonies was felt to derive from his private, intuitive interpretation brought out and displayed, as if by the sheerest coincidence, on a public concert platform. In the drier, more unyielding acoustical and expressive contours of a Toscanini performance the concert stage is the public occasion, and only that; it stands before us stripped of any vestiges of home, individual subject, family, tradition, or national style. And because it is really very difficult to prove that from a logical point of view Toscanini is wrong, or that concerts under late capitalism are really “music-making” or “communities of interpretation” or shared “subjectivity,” and that traditions of performance established in nineteenth-century Berlin and Vienna are being violated, there has been in general an unwillingness to grant that the unrelaxed emotional pressure projected on his audiences by his performances stems immediately from what is extreme in the occasion itself. Out of touch with a reflective composing tradition that was never really his, having lost contact with the vagaries and permissiveness of amateurish musical practice, specialized into the ascetic discipline of a concert repertory based entirely on masterpieces from the past, Toscanini’s conducting, I believe, rarified and concentrated the whole business several steps further, and made it for a time the dominant musical paradigm. That the paradigm was endorsed and subsidized by a corporate patron is a precise index of business acumen, and of course of the way in which the culture industry operates.
And, I further contend, in its artificiality and restrictive boundaries, the entire mix produces a further clarification, at a notch up from Toscanini, in the career and performances of Glenn Gould. Here I should be perfectly clear about what I do and do not mean. I am not saying that Toscanini and Gould are the only performers who are interesting; far from it. I am also not saying that the two of them define all the options for the interpretation and reproduction of Western classical music. I am, however, saying that they elucidate and dramatize the fate of music and music-making as it gets concentrated and constricted into the performance occasion in the period after the one Adorno describes as both heroic and tragic in Philosophy of Modern Music . In a society with important ongoing (if perhaps only vestigial) commitments to the central classical canon of the main European tradition, we can say that the concert occasion has superseded the contemporary composer (who, with a few exceptions, has been marginalized by becoming important mainly to other professional composers) or, if the idea of a competition between performer and contemporary composer appears to be too coarse for a cultural phenomenon, we can say that the social configuration in which the concert occasion is the most important factor has provided a wholly separate alternative for the production of music. Whereas a century ago the composer occupied stage center as author and performer, now only the performer (star singer, pianist, violinist, trumpeter, or conductor) remains. There is thus a special importance to be given to a performance that emerges, as Poirier remarks, “out of an accumulation of secretive acts.” This, he says, becomes “at last a form that presumes to compete with reality itself for control of the minds exposed to it.”
Gould’s career as a performing musician begins (almost too neatly) at just about the time of Toscanini’s death in 1957. A recently published biography of Gould by Otto Friedrich provides sufficient detail for us to understand the relentless artificiality and, from the point of view of what is socially and culturally considered to be “normal,” the unyieldingly abnormal contours of Gould’s life. So strong are they that Gould appears not just unna
tural but anti-natural, his feelings about his hands, for example, making it impossible and frightening for him as a child even to contemplate playing marbles. In addition, Gould’s rather ordinary family (from which he seemed if not estranged then at least disengaged), his calculated solitude and celibacy, his unencumbered and debtless playing style (his only teacher in Toronto appears to have handed on practically none of his ideas to Gould) fostered the illusion of a self-born man, re-creating and even reinventing piano-playing as if from scratch.17
Gould died in 1982 at age fifty; yet, as I said earlier, he only played concerts in public for about ten years—between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s—and after retiring from concert life permanently devoted himself to making records, TV broadcasts, films, and radio programs, most, but not all, featuring him playing the piano. In short, the phenomenally gifted Gould seemed never to have done anything that was not in some way purposefully eccentric. He claimed to avoid the romantic composers (Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Rachmaninoff) whose work forms the core of the performing pianists’ main repertory, and concentrated instead on Bach, or on twentieth-century composers like Schoenberg, Krenek, and Hindemith; in addition, he seemed inclined to an odd assortment of other composers (Beethoven, Brahms, Richard Strauss, Sibelius, Bizet, Grieg, and Wagner, for example) whose work he sometimes approached as no one else did, often playing compositions by them that no other pianist played. On occasion he played works he did not like by composers he seemed to disdain: his nearly integral recording of the Mozart piano sonatas is a case in point, and even though other musicians have also performed works they did not care for, no one except Gould advertised the fact and played accordingly.
Gould’s astounding virtuosity and rhythmic grace produced a sound ideally suited to making complex music sound clearer and more intelligently understood and organized than the sound produced by other pianists. His first recording, Bach’s Goldberg Variations, was made when he was barely out of his teens, but the work’s extraordinary contrapuntal logic, its dazzlingly beautiful and yet rigorous structures, its brilliant keyboard configurations were rendered by the young pianist with a pianistic flair that was unprecedented. And that of course is the principal point to be made about Gould’s sound, his style, and his entire deportment: his complete separation from the world of other pianists, of other people, of other prerogatives. His career seemed to be constructed like a self-conscious counternarrative to the careers of all other musicians. Once the initial constraints were understood and accepted by Gould the rest of what he did can be read retrospectively to have followed consequentially.
These constraints—together with the discipline they impose constituting what I have been calling “performance as an extreme occasion”—were those provided by the frame of the performance itself and, within that, by the illusion of the performer’s inaccessibility to the routine demands not just of other performing styles but also of human life as lived by other human beings. Friedrich’s book makes that point with almost devastating force. Gould neither ate, slept, nor behaved socially like anyone else. He kept himself alive with drugs, his musical and intellectual habits were ringed with insomnia and endless quasi-clinical self-observation, and in every way imaginable he allowed himself to be absorbed into a sort of airless but pure performance enclave that in turn paradoxically kept reminding one of the very concert platform he had deserted. Occasionally what Gould did seemed as if he was stepping past the platform into a strange world beyond it.
Gould’s direct appropriation of Bach from the very outset of his career can be seen retrospectively to have been a brilliantly right, that is strategically created, beginning. Listen to the opening theme of the Goldberg Variations as he recorded the work in 1955: the listener will be struck by the unprotected directness of the proleptic announcement the theme makes (as if the gigantic work is somehow secreted within the theme in fragile outline), not just of the vastly proliferating variations that Bach elaborated out of it, but also of Gould’s fantastically brilliant performing style, its heady brash-ness even in quiet moments, its unidiomatic heightening of the piano’s percussive traits, its fearless negotiation of the most elaborate patterns and configurations. Gould used the Goldberg as a way of immediately setting himself apart from other debut recitalists (whose choice of repertory was always more predictable than his), as if instead of continuing the romantic tradition that sustained virtuoso performers, Gould was starting his pedigree earlier than theirs and then vaulting past them into the present.
Thereafter Gould recorded the Partitas, both books of the Well-Tempered Clavier, the Toccatas, the English and French suites, the inventions and short preludes and fugues, plus a major section of the Art of Fugue ; some concerted pieces (concerti and violin and gamba sonatas) were also performed and recorded. What stands out in all this is not so much a uniform style but a clear and immediately impressive continuity of attack and rhetorical address that, during the decades he performed in public, was italicized and highlighted by a massive catalogue of mannerisms—humming, conducting, low chair, slouch, etc. Even a short series of extracts from his recordings reveals the clarity of voices, the rhythmic inventiveness, and the effortless tonal and digital logic that permits an unbroken continuity of identity and performing signature to emerge.
I suggest, for instance, a handful of preludes and fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier, in which what in effect is a solemn, didactic exercise is refurbished by Gould, is transformed into a set of mood pieces, strictly delivered in correctly realized contrapuntal style, but always phrased, shaped, and rendered into a completely integrated characterization. His recording of the Toccatas, like that of the French Suites, gives the dance-inspired movements an astonishing vividness that separates them entirely from their social origins, and transfigures them into abstract typifications of particular rhythms and syncopations. Using the same technique Gould turned to a set of what are known as “little” preludes, a recording of one of which (BWV 933 in C major) delivers a fascinating study of interweaving patterns—turns with arpeggiated chords, running passages with highlighted themes—kept bright and bustling by the acutely stressed operation of Gould’s rhythmical vitality.
None of the remarkable things that Gould does, however, would have been possible without a truly rare digital mechanism that easily rivals those of “legendary” technicians like Vladimir Horowitz, Jorge Bolet, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, and one or two others. Gould always seemed to achieve a seamless unity among his fingers, the piano, and the music he was playing, one working by extension into the other, the three becoming indistinguishable from start to finish. It was as if Gould’s virtuosity finally derived its fluency from the piece and not from a residue of technical athleticism built up independently over the years. Pollini has some of the same quality as Gould in this respect, but it is the wonderfully intelligent exercise of his fingers in polyphonic music that separates Gould from every other pianist. Only a great Bach organist communicates in something like the same way, except that as a concert pianist Gould had an awareness of the essentially theatrical frame that calls attention to what keeps him on the distinct side of the divide between audience and performer.
But two more things about Gould distinguished him from other pianists. I have already mentioned the first. In 1964 he stopped playing concerts and, as I said, completely left public “live” performing in order to devote himself to recording, writing, and composing. Although his career on concert stages had been very successful, he said he quit “live” performances because, he now argued, they distorted the music theatrically, on the one hand, and on the other hand, concert-giving did not allow him the necessary “taketwoness” of the recording studio, the opportunity to replay sections of music requiring further elaboration and polish.
The second of Gould’s fateful attributes was his exceptional—if not prodigal—verbal gift, to which he gave increasingly wider play after he was no longer performing concerts (he began by giving lectures during the 1960s). Unlike many performing m
usicians, he seemed to have not only ideas and a mind but the ability to apply them to music both as performer and as critic. His performances, in short, approximated to an argument, and his discursive arguments were often borne out by his pianistic feats. This was never more evident (as we shall see presently) than in the remarkable series of films made about Gould by various British, Canadian, French, and German directors, films that allowed Gould to speak, perform, illustrate his ideas with scintillating wit, and to considerable effect, in settings that were a hybrid of living-room, practice studio, and lecture hall. He was thus musician, teacher, “personality,” and performer all at once.
To take from Gould one or another of these various roles is to end up with an actually more improbable, less interesting phenomenon. As a writer Gould, I think, requires the piano and the immediacy of his lively presence to make what he says work. The published material, collected in a one-volume potpourri of essays, articles, and record liners, is often overwritten and underargued.18 There are garrulous displays of wit and parody that are, to my taste, both forced and insufferably tedious. Gould was neither intellectually disciplined nor a fully cultivated man, and his learning, for all the exuberance with which he deployed it, often reveals the trying awkwardness of the naive village philosopher. The paradox is that his writings are nevertheless essential as the verbal counterpoint he provided for himself as a performer. Thus quite deliberately Gould extended the limited theatrical space provided by performance as an extreme occasion to one whose scope includes speech, time as duration, an interlude from daily life that is not controlled by mere consecutiveness. Thus for Gould performance was an inclusive phenomenon but it was still kept within the bounds and the inaccessibility imposed by his studied eccentricity. In addition, his performances were unmistakably affiliated with aspects of the contemporary technological and cultural environment, especially his longtime relationships with CBS records and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.