Variations on the theme of genius

Glenn Gould: The Ecstasy and Tragedy of Genius by Peter F. Ostwald Norton 368pp, £20 in UK

Glenn Gould: The Ecstasy and Tragedy of Genius by Peter F. Ostwald Norton 368pp, £20 in UK

At first glance, Glenn Gould would appear to have a lot in common with David Helfgott. Both were child prodigies with ambitious parents, both became highly eccentric performers who spent long periods away from the concert stage, both have recently had films made about them celebrating the emotionally stunted pianist as a feelgood icon for our times. On another level, however, the two men could not be further apart. No amount of his twee charm can disguise the fact that Helfgott is, to be frank, a talentless pianist, while Gould for all his quirks was a profoundly gifted musician.

As he makes clear in his subtitle, Peter Ostwald believes Gould paid a high price for his gifts: there is no Shine-like happy ending to a life that in many ways makes sad and dispiriting reading. Gould was born in Toronto in 1932. His mother's maiden name was Greig, a fact which inspired the pianist to claim the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg as a blood relation. The young Gould's genius was never in question, but his parents were careful to shield him from excessive public exposure ("Mozart" became a dirty word in the Gould household).

His mother was a disciplinarian teacher from whom Gould inherited his streak of perfectionism and neurotic fear of germs and crowds. Both were contributory factors in his early retirement from the stage in 1964, after which he limited his performances to the recording studio. Only here, he felt, could he pursue his dream of the "total elimination of audience response". He was one of the first performers to recognise the potentials of studio technology, and the results were frequently startling.

READ MORE

When Gould recorded The Goldberg Variations in 1955, the work was out of critical fashion and rarely performed. His breathtaking performance remains one of the best ever recorded. The hallmarks of Gould's playing were already in place: complete technical control, minimal pedalling, strongly contrasted staccato and legato, and sensitivity to contrapuntal textures. As a style it was ideally suited to Bach, and Gould's recordings of virtually the entire Bach keyboard oeuvre are surely his most lasting achievement. Gould was always most at home with polyphonic music, and championed the work of Byrd, Gibbons and Sweelinck in keyboard adaptations.

Elsewhere he was more opinionated. With the exception of his beloved Richard Strauss, the 19th century seems hardly to have existed for Gould. He disliked the Romantic cult of the virtuoso, and rubbished Schumann, Schubert, Chopin and Liszt. He called Beethoven's Emperor Concerto "such junk", and claimed that Mozart's tragedy was that he died "too late" rather than too early. This did not stop him recording all of Mozart's sonatas, which he took a sadistic delight in playing at wildly exaggerated speeds. His interest in 20th-century music, by contrast, was brave and adventurous, with Schoenberg numbering among his favourite composers.

Retirement from live performance allowed Gould to develop his interest in broadcasting. He loved radio and made several documentaries, including one on the frozen Canadian north, for which he had a lifelong fascination. He was also a prolific writer of essays, sleeve notes and broadcasts, inventing numerous comic personae such as Myron Chianti, his ironic take on Marlon Brando, and Marta Hortavanyi, fictional author of Fascistic Implications of the 6/4 Chord in Richard Strauss.

Always eccentric, Gould became ever more so in his last years. His second favourite instrument, as Ostwald jokes, was the telephone, which he used for long, rambling calls well after midnight. He was colossally hypochondriac, took his blood pressure several times a day, and lived on a diet of pills and scrambled eggs. Though Ostwald is unforthcoming on the subject, Gould's private life appears to have been sad and empty. He died of a stroke in 1982.

Glenn Gould: The Ecstasy and Tragedy of Genius complements but does not replace Otto Friedrich's lively biography of 1984, A Life and Variations. Ostwald died shortly after completing the book, but many passages still read like a not quite final draft. Otherwise, it is a useful and informative study, if one which falls inevitably short of capturing the real Glenn Gould. For that you'll need The Goldberg Variations.

David Wheatley is a poet and critic