Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould

Rating:
Summary: Distinctive probe of Gould's memorable traits and influences
Review: Twenty years of interviews with friends and colleagues of classical pianist Glenn Gould contribute to the biography Wonderous Strange: The Life And Art Of Glenn Gould: a masterpiece probing not just Gould's artistic life, but his family and social relationships. Kevin Bazzana holds a doctorate in music history: perhaps this is why his coverage is so scholarly and detailed in scope: yet as a freelance writer and editor, he's also more than able to add spice and insight into his work, making Wonderous Strange a distinctive probe of Gould's memorable traits and influences.



Rating:
Summary: The Idea of Glenn Gould
Review: With this book, Otto Friedrich's biography of Glenn Gould is finally surpassed. Kevin Bazzana was able to get more people to talk about their memories of Gould, and the result is this very readable biography. The author brings back the impact that Gould's 1955 Goldberg Variations had on the music world. One record executive said that it was as if there had been a big run on a new printing of the Enneads of Plotinus. Throughout, Gould's career and life is told in satisfying detail and insight. He tries hard to explain Gould's musical contrariness, as in his mauling of Mozart's sonatas, but often has to simply yield and accept Gould's contrariness as such (though he intriguingly suggests that Gould may have been a musical forerunner of the postmodernists). And of course there is ample celebration of Gould's genius and his enduring cult.

According to Bazzana, he's a regular Victor Borge in the humor department. But on this score as on so many others, Bazzana must largely concur with the received legend, while offering scattered counter-examples. On balance, Gould was an excruciatingly unfunny humorist, a clotted, unreadable essayist, but also an entertaining raconteur, an unaffected star, and a proud Canadian.

Bazzana's biography of Gould succeeds, but I was left wanting more. For example, there doesn't seem to be any discussion of Gould's mysterious failure to record the crown jewel of Bach's oeuvre, The Art of the Fugue. His organ rendition doesn't count, and may be seen as Gould's way of side-stepping the issue. He could certainly play the fugues: they appear in any number of his concerts, and I especially treasure those that appear in his Russian lecture/concert on a Harmonia Mundi disc I own. Fugue no. 1 sounds like the dawning of some grand insight. Yet Gould never committed the whole thing to record on piano, and disappointingly, Bazzana doesn't offer any insight on why.

There are some very minor errors of fact here and there. For example, Bazzana apparently didn't realize that the Last Letters From Stalingrad, for which Gould wrote vocal sketches, were later proven to be forgeries.

It is very good to have a mini-biography of Gould's teacher, Alberto Guerrero. It's a shame that he made no commercial recordings, so that we could assess his influence on his famous pupil.

Bazzana seeks to explain the oft-rumored Canadian Identity to his readers, as it applies to Gould. Marshal McLuhan and Stephen Leacock are presented as exemplars of the Canadian spirit in communications technology and understated humor, respectively. Like McLuhan, Gould's ideas about communications were ahead of their time. Indeed, even with satellite communications and the technological miracles of the Internet Age, we may doubt that we have caught up with him yet. Oscar Wilde would have been a natural on TV chat shows; maybe Gould would have fit right in sometime in the future, after a few more revolutions in technology. It's as if he was a natural born genius at some field of endeavor that hadn't been invented yet, and so had to settle for realizing his visions by splicing magnetic tape. And playing piano, of course.