By Arthur Kaptainis

The Montreal Gazette

August 24, 2012

“Why another book about Glenn Gould?” So asked Anton Kuerti before sitting down last year with Colin Eatock, the critic and musicologist responsible for Remembering Glenn Gould.

To a considerable degree, the Toronto pianist provided his own answer in the ensuing interview, one of 20 in this remarkably readable book. Rather than add to the hefty corpus of speculative commentary on Gould, Eatock has assembled a bracing collection of first-person reminiscences by people who actually knew Canada’s most indestructibly famous classical musician.

The timing is appropriate in a few ways. Sept. 25 marks the 80th anniversary of Gould’s birth, and Oct. 4 the 30th anniversary of his death. Many of the interview subjects are either pushing 80 or past that landmark. Some are notable figures in their own right. Their portraits of Gould are inevitably portraits of themselves.

Familiarity with the Gould biographical basics is helpful, but not essential: Meticulous footnotes keep newcomers in the loop. Even those who suppose themselves tolerably well briefed on the pianist and his art might encounter some revelations.

I confess to never having known that Gould wished to make Lorne Tulk, the CBC technician who helped him create the radio documentary The Idea of North, legally his brother. From Tulk we also learn that Gould’s fear of germs prevented the pianist from taking proper leave of his ailing mother in the hospital, a decision he greatly regretted.

Pianist/broadcaster Stuart Hamilton and composer John Beckwith, both fellow students at what is now the Royal Conservatory in Toronto, concur that Gould inherited much from his teacher Alberto Guerrero, including the trademark slouch at the piano and flat-fingered attack. “But the image of Gould as essentially self-taught made for a better story,” comments Beckwith, who numbers among the pianist’s more standoffish admirers.

There are interesting observations from the CBC producer John P.L. Roberts, whom Eatock credits with coming “very close to knowing the whole man.” The infamous super-slow 1962 performance of Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1 that prompted a disclaimer from Leonard Bernstein was followed by repeat performances, the last of which was in tempo and reportedly electrifying.

While we might not be too surprised — acquainted as we are with the magnitude of Gould’s talent — to read that he could spontaneously transcribe Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde at the piano, it is interesting to learn (again, from Roberts) that he could do the same with William Walton’s Troilus and Cressida, an opera he had acquainted himself with by looking over the score on a flight from London.

Piano fans get plenty of technical illumination from Gould’s personal tuner, Verne Edquist, who did not necessarily admire the instruments he was required to work on.

Kuerti, who alienated Gould with a sharp backstage comment after that Brahms night, tempers admiration for Gould’s pianistic ability (“It was amazing: his control, strength, speed, voicing …”) with skepticism about his artistic choices. (“Beethoven couldn’t have been wrong all the time!” Kuerti says about a Gould performance of the Sonata Op. 78 in which expressive markings are deliberately reversed.)

There is an interview with Gould’s one known paramour, Cornelia Foss, herself a visual artist.

“It’s not a question of being a genius, it’s a question of working like a genius,” she says in response to those who supposed that the pianist achieved what he did without much effort.

As for his alleged paranoia, it was not ill founded, considering some of the strange letters and phone calls he (as a handsome and charismatic celebrity) received.

Most of the interview subjects softpedal the eccentricities by which Gould was known to the larger public. Some say the reports of his pill-popping are exaggerated, although there is no doubt that his health declined precipitously in the months before his death. (Timothy Maloney, a clarinetist who worked under Gould when the latter attempted to start a new career as a conductor, supplies a chilling description of his sallow appearance.) Most describe him as a regular sort of guy, friendly, gregarious and full of humour.

Ezra Schabas felt in Stratford, Ont. (Gould’s musical summer home during the decade before his 1964 retirement from the concert stage) that the pianist rather enjoyed playing for the public.

“Basically, he was very well-adjusted,” says this veteran musician, educator and historian.

There are other apparent paradoxes. The Toronto critic William Littler (at one point a fellow resident of the Park Lane Apartments in Toronto) remarks that Gould the one-sided conversationalist “wanted an audience.” This, of course, is precisely what he did not want as a performer. One theory holds that Gould withdrew from the concert stage because he did not give his best in concert. Yet the accolades by people who heard him live are hardly restrained.

Eatock’s good work in this volume consists largely of asking the right questions, but there are thoughtful postscripts that give each interview a context. In a perceptive introduction, he draws attention to the “bewildering” inconsistencies of Gould’s personality. (“He was hard to work with; he was a good collaborator. He had a cool, rational mind; he was a bundle of superstitions and phobias.) Yet the totality seems clear — “like a Canadian lake,” as the author describes Gould’s performances of Bach.

Presenting all this interesting material as a series of preludes and fugues rather than a symphony is probably the surest way of creating a full portrait of this elusive artist. You can read the interviews in any order you please, much as you might flip between tracks on a recording. There is something quintessentially Gouldian about the process.