There is something Jamesian about the last part of Gould’s career: he can be interpreted like one of the symbolic figures appearing in Henry James’s parables of the 1880s that were meditations on both the problems of the craft of writing and the personality of the artist. One can imagine James fashioning a story about an artist called Glenn Gould who after ten years of concerts at the mercy of ticket-holders, schedules, and impresarios decides to become the author of his own scripts and so forces upon the whole process of performance—which is, after all, what he has been condemned to in the age of specialization—his own individualistic transformation: he invites friends home to perform for them. Gould’s audience nonetheless continued to hear in the records that he was to make during his post concert-giving period the same recognizable stylistic signature, although now—if we take his record of Wagner transcriptions as an instance of the new transformation— the playing has expanded from Bach into a late twentieth-century transcription of late nineteenth-century Wagnerian counterpoint and melody, conveyed in the modern idiom already pioneered by Gould for the contemporary piano.
The most typically Gouldian extracts are the Meistersinger prelude and his considerably edited version of the Siegfried Idyll. The orchestral piece that begins Wagner’s only comic opera is seen by Gould as no conductor or orchestra has ever played it: it becomes a compendium of eighteenth-century contrapuntal writing displayed for an audience with a sort of anatomical glee by Gould, who plays the piece with such neat virtuosity as to make you forget that human hands are involved. Near the end, as Wagner’s orchestral writing becomes too thick and the number of simultaneous themes too great even for Gould, the pianist resorts (he tells us in a liner note) to overdubbing, superimposing his recording of one part of the dense score on his recording of another part. This is as if by doubling the electronic prerogatives of the performing occasion Gould had exponentially also increased the rarity and power of the performer’s hold on the duration of a concert favorite. In his transcription of the Siegfried Idyll Gould tampers with Wagner’s notes so as somewhat to reduce the similarity between piano transcription and orchestra original in order to elevate the special character of a twentieth-century pianistic reproduction. In both instances, however, Gould’s ideas of Wagner are supplementally reinforced by his prose notes for the record jacket.
As Gould seems to have suspected, his choice of Wagner itself would be most fully commented on not just by playing his ideas, so to speak, but also by his “additional” prose. Note that Gould’s ideas are worth looking into not so much only because they are of inherent validity (they have, for instance a fascinating resonance in the Canadian context as shown by B. W. Powe in The Solitary Outlaw)19 but because they also show us Gould grappling publicly with his predicament as a performing pianist who discursively notes everything that he can comment on as pianist and as critic along the way. As such, then, Gould’s observations furnish the most intense example of the performance occasion being forcibly pulled out of the tired routine and unthinking consensus that ordinarily support the concert performance as a relatively lifeless social form. But what I am also saying is that Gould’s restless forays into writing, radio, television, and film enhanced, enlivened, and illuminated his playing itself, giving it a self-conscious aesthetic and cultural presence whose aim, while not always clear, was to enable performance to engage or to affiliate with the world itself, without compromising the essentially reinterpretive, reproductive quality of the process. This, I think, is the Adornian measure of Gould’s achievement, and also its limitations, which are those of a late capitalism that has condemned classical music to an impoverished marginality and anti-intellectualism sheltered underneath the umbrella of “autonomy.” Yet like Toscanini before him, Gould sets the standard by which in an art without an easily graspable ideological or social value (perhaps an aspect of what Poirier calls its moral neutrality and innocence) it could itself be interpreted.
From his writing it seems quite clear that Gould saw nothing at all exceptional about playing the piano well. What he wanted was an escape from everything that determined or conditioned his reality as a human being. Consider, for example, that his favorite state was “ecstasy,” his favorite music was music ideally not written for specific instruments and hence “essentially incorporeal,” and his highest words of praise were repose, detachment, isolation. To this, Friedrich’s biography contributes the notion of control, which is the motif of much of Gould’s life. Moreover, Gould seems to have believed that art was “mysterious,” but that it allowed “the gradual, life-long construction of a state of wonder and serenity” that, when conveyed through radio and recordings, shapes “the elements of aesthetic narcissism” and responds “‘to the challenge that each man contemplatively creates his own divinity.”20
This is not complete metaphysical nonsense, at least not if it is read as a comment on Gould’s peculiar situation. He seems to have been finally discontent both with the nonverbal, nondiscursive nature of music—its silence about itself—and with the actual physical achievement of being a performing pianist. In the amusing interviews he did with Jonathan Cott in 1974, first published in Rolling Stone and now done up as a little book adorned with handsome photographs,21 Gould speaks with laughable exaggeration of being able to teach anyone the skills of pianism in half an hour. Elsewhere he says he hardly practiced or bothered with playing the piano for its own sake. He was more interested in those aspects of music and of his own talents that spilled over from musical expression into language, in how the daily reminders of his indebtedness both to composer and to audience might be transmuted into the utopia of an infinitely changeable and extendable world where time or history did not occur, and because of which all expression was transparent, logical, and not hampered by flesh-and-blood performers or people at all.
Considered as the record of Gould’s lifelong struggle to be more than just a performing pianist, his prose is thus eminently worth consideration. Whether Gould’s writing is a sign that he regarded his career as a luxury item to be transcended, or whether his verbal energies concealed the deeper personal crisis of someone with nowhere really to go, as afraid of maturity as of commitment to the processes of life in human society, I cannot say. But beneath the tinkle of his often cheerful words there lurks something far less assured and satisfied than Gould’s tone explicitly permits: of that one can be certain.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about Gould’s writing is how it seems like an attempt to extend his ideas about musical performance into other realms. And clearly his writings remind one of Gould’s music, not because they refer specifically to or summarize how he plays, but in the way they touch one with their restless energy and their remorseless articulation of meanings, neither stable nor fully attainable. There is much the same play of counterpoint here between words and performance that one also hears in Gould’s recordings of Bach fugues. Their sheer vitality makes such experiences rare and precious as a result.
Another dimension is added by Gould’s films, the most interesting and riveting of which show Gould performing pieces either contrapuntal (fugues and canons, mainly) or variational in nature. One hour-long program is devoted to fugue, and it comprises selections from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, the last movement of Beethoven’s opus 110 sonata, and a stunningly fluent and demonic rendition of the last fugal movement of Hindemith’s Third Sonata, a fine piece hardly ever played in concert today for reasons that have to do with the intellectual cowardice and low aesthetic standards of a majority of today’s musicians, which Gould’s career as a whole so strenuously impugns.
The variations program climaxes with performances of Webern’s Variations and Beethoven’s E major Sonata, opus 109. Gould links the two by a brilliant highlighting of the structural finesse and expressive detail that is so similar in both works. This is a considerable achievement since the pieces are written out of tonal idioms with diametrically opposed consequences, one (Beethoven’s) exfoliative and elaborate, the other (Webern?
??s) concentrated and crabbed. In addition, Gould delivers a severely restrained performance of a Sweelinck Organ Fantasy on the same program. I recall hearing it during a Gould recital in 1959 or 1960, struck at the time (and again in watching the film) by how Gould could apparently disappear as a performer into the work’s long complications, thereby providing an instance of the ecstasy he characterized as the state of standing outside time and within an integral artistic structure.
Yet by far the most moving and affecting of all of Gould’s films is Bruno Monsaingeon’s 1981 rendition of Gould as he first speaks about, then plays through, the Goldberg Variations. Gould in this film is no longer the lean and youthfully eager intellectual who has the caustic wit to say (as he does in an earlier film) of Beethoven that he was always going to meet his destiny at the next modulation. He has now become a potbellied, bald, and somewhat mournful middle-aged aesthete whose jowly face and slightly decadent lips suggest secret vices and too many rich meals. Even his fingers, which have retained their fabulously efficient elegance and economy, are now evidently older, and more worldly. Indeed, Gould’s performance of these thirty extraordinary pieces has acquired layers of sophistication and cleverness in added ornaments, in oddly varied and usually slower tempi, in surprising repetitions, in more sharply inflected lines (for example, the heavily strummed bass line in Variation One, or the underlinings of the theme in Bach’s unison canon in the Third Variation, etc.).
This is one of the very few films I have seen of Gould that is in color and quite obviously the work of a film-maker, not simply of a TV cameraman. Its autumnal hues are made more startling by the realization that this was to be Gould’s very last performance of, fittingly enough, the work that first brought him widespread attention: it is impossible not to imagine the film as an act of closure. I was told by Professor Geoffrey Payzant of the University of Toronto (a philosopher whose excellent book on Gould is the only work on the pianist even to begin to do him some justice)22 that Monsaingeon had a cache of 52 hour-long films of Gould performances that he was trying unsuccessfully to sell to various TV companies in Europe and the United States. But, I think, Monsaingeon was right so singlemindedly to want to film Gould at work: the man was quite literally a full-scale cultural enterprise, endlessly at work on performance.
But the most interesting thing about Gould is, as Monsaingeon saw, that he constantly oversteps boundaries and bursts confining restraints, thereby, sometimes poignantly sometimes comically, confirming the performance space itself. In 1987 Monsaingeon himself published a book about Gould in France whose last section is a “video montage” of Gould being interviewed by five critics after his death:23 Clearly Monsaingeon saw the man as someone for whom ordinary mortality was no limit at all. Gould certainly cultivated this notion in his audience. Not only was it clear that Gould could, and in fact did (with a few puzzling omissions, noted by Friedrich), command the entire range of Western music from the Renaissance until the present—there are instances in some of the films of Gould talking away about a series of musical examples and then turning to the piano, illustrating them from memory—he also could do with it what he liked, improvise, transpose, parody, reproduce, etc.
Most good musicians do in fact have at their fingertips, or lips, or hearts, much more music than they perform in public. Memory is part of the gift every performer carries within, so to speak. Yet we see performances only on the stage, in a program confined by the performance occasion itself. Thus Gould went to very great lengths after he left the concert stage in 1964 to communicate his diverse talents to an audience as he spilled out his knowledge, his articulate analyses, his prodigious technical facility into other forms and styles well beyond the two-hour concert experience. Everything that Gould did was in a continuum with the original place and time that he had afforded as a performer, the concert platform. And whenever he seemed to have settled into a niche, say, as a Bach pianist, he would up and record Wagner transcriptions, or the Grieg sonata, repertory that could not have been more unexpected, or he would become a writer, or a television personality.
Most important in all this, however, was Gould’s talent for doing one thing brilliantly (playing the piano well, for example) and suggesting that he was doing something else too. Hence his predilection for contrapuntal or variational forms or, on a slightly different level, his habit of playing the piano and conducting and singing, or his way of being able to quote both musically and intellectually more or less any thing at any time. In a sense then Gould was gradually moving toward a kind of nontheatrical and anti-aesthetic Gesamstkunstwerk, a description that sounds antiformal and contradictory at the same time. I am not sure how aware he was of this, and how conscious he was of Rimbaud’s deracinement du sens, but it strikes me as apt since the idea seems to me to approach the unsettling and yet attractively intelligent qualities in Gould’s unusual enterprise, which was at once to make the performance more—because packed, bustling, overflowing—of an occasion, and more extreme, more odd, more unlike the lived reality of humankind, and still more unlike other concerts. By its radical force Gould’s career in fine has supplied us with a largely but not completely new concept of what performance is all about, which like most things in musical elaboration—because it is still ideologically and commercially linked to the past and to present society—is neither a total disruption nor a total transformation of customary practice.
The distensions and peculiarities in what Gould did may in time come to seem totally innocuous, tamed or incorporated by the ongoing culture business, of which classical musical performance is only one component. An index of this diminishment to Gould’s real activity is that he is known today almost exclusively either as a curiosity or as a very gifted pianist, just as Toscanini is known entirely as a great conductor about whose interpretations one may have opinions, but the social and aesthetic meanings of whose career are now generally screened from attention or study. The critical discourse of ongoing musical performance allows itself to report on concert life only in the manner of a scoresheet. But when we look from the rigid (and rigidly enforced) habits of concert life and journalism to the more extravagant excursions of performance art or rock music, only then can we assess the resourcefulness and imagination at work in performers like Toscanini or Gould who first accepted, then elaborated the logic of what contemporary classical music offered them, and did so with at least some measure of self-consciousness and spirit.
from Musical Elaborations
13
Jane Austen and Empire (1990)
Almost without exception, reviewers of Culture and Imperialism focused on the chapter “Jane Austen and Empire.” The New York Times, The London Review of Books, The Nation, and Dissent all published articles that emphasized Said’s criticism of Mansfield Park, Jane Austen’s novel about Fanny Price, who is raised by her aunt’s family on a English country estate, financed by the slave labor of her uncle’s sugar plantation in Antigua. In a full-page review by Michael Gorra, The New York Times Book Review asked, “Who Paid the Bills at Mansfield Park?” In The Nation, John Leonard wrote: “See Jane sit in the poise and order of Mansfield Park, not much bothering her pretty head about the fact that harmonious ‘social space,’ Sir Thomas Bertram’s country estate, is sustained by slave labor.”1
By drawing connections between Mansfield Park and the slave trade in Antigua, Said’s criticism was often mistaken for an attempt to diminish the literary significance of Jane Austen. Yet Said’s argument was far from an attack on Austen’s literary value, a fact that confounded Irving Howe in his review of Culture and Imperialism in Dissent. Instead, Said’s essay was, among other things, a response to Raymond Williams’s influential reading of Jane Austen in The Country and the City.2 While Williams overlooked the colonial foundations upon which the immaculately groomed country estates of Austen’s novels rested, Said restored Mansfield Park to the geographical and historical situation of colonialism to which it refers yet which it conceals: “We should . . . regard the geographical
division of the world—after all significant in Mansfield Park—as not neutral, but as politically charged, beseeching the attention and elucidation its considerable proportions require. The question is not only how to understand and with what to connect Austen’s morality and its social basis, but what to read of it.”
We are on solid ground with V. G. Kiernan when he says that “empires must have a mould of ideas or conditioned reflexes to flow into, and youthful nations dream of a great place in the world as young men dream of fame and fortunes.”3 It is too simple and reductive to argue that everything in European or American culture therefore prepares for or consolidates the grand idea of empire. It is also, however, historically inaccurate to ignore those tendencies—whether in narrative, political theory, or pictorial technique—that enabled, encouraged, and otherwise assured the West’s readiness to assume and enjoy the experience of empire. If there was cultural resistance to the notion of an imperial mission, there was not much support for that resistance in the main departments of cultural thought. Liberal though he was, John Stuart Mill—as a telling case in point—could still say, “The sacred duties which civilized nations owe to the independence and nationality of each other, are not binding towards those to whom nationality and independence are certain evil, or at best a questionable good.” Ideas like this were not original with Mill; they were already current in the English subjugation of Ireland during the sixteenth century and, as Nicholas Canny has persuasively demonstrated, were equally useful in the ideology of English colonization in the Americas.4 Almost all colonial schemes begin with an assumption of native backwardness and general inadequacy to be independent, “equal,” and fit.