News

Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould
By Kevin Bazzana
McClelland & Stewart, 528 pages, $39.99

In 1866, a former American diplomat, Albert Wheelock Thayer, published the first of three volumes of his Life of Beethoven, a conscious attempt to cut through the mythologizing and hagiography that had surrounded the life story of the "world's greatest composer" for half a century. In so doing, Thayer produced the standard reference book on Beethoven for the next century, a model for dozens of similar musical biographies to follow.

It may be a bit audacious to suggest that Kevin Bazzana's excellent new biography of Glenn Gould, Wondrous Strange, is in the Thayer league, but it does serve many of the same purposes. With a Canadian penchant for scrupulous fairness and balance, Bazzana, a British Columbian who has written a previous book on Gould's musicianship and is editor of GlennGould magazine, has produced a biography of Gould that attempts, and I think succeeds, in harmonizing the man and the myth, the musician who was nothing short of a saint to his legions of adoring admirers, but ate every night at Fran's, a man who might be the greatest pianist of the 20th century but who had names for his cars, who adored Mary Tyler Moore and never really advanced beyond a simple adolescent sexuality.

While Thayer had his Schindlers and Rieses to deal with before he got to Beethoven, early biographers full of more disinformation than information, Bazzana was preceded in the Gould biographical field by several interesting specialized books on Gould, and one immensely disappointing general biography. Otto Friedrich's authorized version of Gould's life, Glenn Gould: A Life and Variations, was at least refreshingly candid about the areas of Gould's life it chose not to deal with, including Gould's sexuality, the circumstances surrounding his death and a few other telling areas one would have thought de rigeur for any serious biography. Although Bazzana would be far too fair-minded to admit it, his book is, if nothing else, an attempt to fill in these glaring lacunae in Friedrich's earlier opus. It actually turns out to be a great deal more.

Bazzana notes in his introduction that there are some areas he does want to illuminate that have up to now been bathed in relative darkness in the Gould tale, including the story of Gould's early days (the first 20 or so years of his life), his relationship to his one-and-only piano teacher outside of his mother, Alberto Guererro, and the larger question of Gould's relationship to the country which bore him, nourished him and in which he stayed his entire life, Canada. In each of these areas, Bazzana has proved quite successful, and his book is powerful and timely because of these successes.

Bazzana is especially clever in focusing on Gould's early life, growing up in Toronto's Beach district, for two reasons. One is that Gould was so precocious that almost his entire musical and artistic being was formed by the time he was 14 or 15, that is by 1946 or 1947, and changed little after that. That's basically why, we now understand, Gould could be so forward looking and so backward looking at the same time, a radical musical mind that was fixated on the standard repertoire of classical music, a champion of the avant-garde of the 1930s who hated the avant-garde of the '60s. Gould stopped developing in many ways before 1950 and this insight alone explains much of what has previously seemed inexplicable in his life.

As well, Gould was basically an enormously conservative person, and so, transmuted here and there, but only a bit, he never stopped living the life he led in the '30s and '40s as he was growing up, surrounded by his parents' strict Protestant views on religion, responsibility, sexuality and propriety. The well-mannered little boy of 14 never really lost those manners, the sexually repressed young man stayed that way all his life, and his parents' religiosity was taken, more or less whole, into his own world view, although art came to replace for Gould the role that organized religion played for Bert and Florrie Gould. When Bazzana tells us that the Goulds believed that "God should be manifest in all aspects of life," it sounds like an early description of Gould's playing.

In fact, it was clear early on that there was something in Glenn Gould that inspired others to think otherworldly and transcendent thoughts in his presence. Bert Gould wrote to a friend when his son was just 15, "My wife and I have always prayed that Glenn's music might be able to touch men's hearts in such a way that it would be a turning point in their lives. In some ways, our prayers have been answered. One mother telephoned us after her son had heard Glenn play. She said that her son came home after the concert and said 'Mom, you've been telling me that there was such a thing as a hereafter and a life eternal. I never really believed it until I heard Glenn Gould play tonight. Now I know.'."

When all is said and done, that's as good a summary of much of the world's reaction to Glenn Gould, child and adult, as one might come across. The problem for those of us who have thought long and hard about Gould all these years has never been to explain how a "charlatan" could con all these unsuspecting people into thinking he was saintly, but to understand how a human being could have legitimately earned such a reputation. Because a good part of Gould's reputation as a guru, a musical guru, was definitely earned, and this fact awed many and outraged others, and awed and outraged many at exactly the same time. With his insistence on fairness, objectivity and deep respect for his subject (respect, but not sycophancy), Bazzana helps us to unravel many of the complex conundrums that have been tightly wound around Gould for decades.

Once Bazzana leaves Gould's early years, the story enters more well-travelled terrain, but inevitably, for all the familiar territory he covers (the 1962 Brahms performance with the New York Philharmonic, the hypochondria, the eccentricities, the "ruthless" behaviour toward former friends), Bazzana has gone the extra biographical mile, thoroughly and scrupulously discovering the exact truth behind inevitably embellished stories. Not afraid to pass judgment when needed, in clear, lively prose, Bazzana wins his reader's respect and trust in page after page of well-researched biography.

We believe what Bazzana tells us and, ultimately, he paints a picture of something of a sad man, and a lonely man, although a fiercely active and intellectually aggressive man, one who, as Ferdinard Ries said of Beethoven, was fundamentally decent, but whose demons got the better of him.

And of course, he was a piano player, and a genius at it, if that word has any meaning any more. That is the true source of his power over us. That such an overheated and European concept could play itself out within the body and spirit of a cool, North American individual is just one of the factors that has made Gould so ambiguous and confusing over the years, and will undoubtedly continue to do so. Glenn Gould will always be an enigma, but thanks to Kevin Bazzana's excellent new biography, he is now something less of a mystery.

Robert Harris is the host of CBC Radio Two's I Hear Music.