Canadian artists continue to interpret our greatest interpreter

IT'S EIGHTEEN YEARS AND COUNTING SINCE GLENN GOULD DIED, AT THE AGE OF FIFTY, FROM A STROKE THAT HALTED FOREVER THE PROCESSES OF ONE OF THE MOST REMARKABLE of Canadian minds. There are those who say that he is overrated on some counts -- that he made some bad Beethoven recordings, and so on. But no one listening to his Bach recordings could disagree that Gould had a most unusually acute ability to comprehend and interpret musical structures with a rare brilliance and clarity.

His was a mind and a life that, coming when they did in Canadian history, expanded the possibilities for the arts in Canada. They have also intrigued and inspired others, both directly and indirectly, since the time of his early, shatteringly brilliant, recordings. Artists in a variety of disciplines have tried to get to the bottom of his particular talent. How did this Toronto boy turn out to be the one-of-a-kind genius -- the word is not too strong -- whose recordings were chosen by NASA to be sent into space to demonstrate the calibre of human sophistication to alien life forms?

The external clues, what we know about the man, don't tell us much. We know that he had an intense relationship with his mother, also a pianist, who liked to play a game when he was young wherein she would play a note on the piano keyboard and he would call out which one it was. (Don't feel discouraged if your toddler doesn't excel at this; it's not a game most kids do well at.)

We know that he suffered all his life from general discomfort -- physical and otherwise. There are medical terms that would account for the facts that he muffled himself in mittens and woolly hats, that he subsisted on a terrifying diet of pills of all descriptions. Perhaps they are at the root of his refusal to perform in the "blood sport" (his term) of live performance after he reached his thirties, and of his obsession with the recording studio (and the telephone).

But lots of parents encourage their young children into music; many artists are uncomfortable with the distractions that most of us consider to be normal parts of life. There aren't very many Glenn Goulds. (The Russians understood this when they asked him to become the first Western artist to tour the Soviet Union in 1956. He is still revered there today, as he is still in Japan.)

Maybe one way to understand him is to look at the structure of the fugue. That's essentially the approach taken by playwright David Young when he wrote Glenn, a searching drama about Gould's mysterious creativity. Recognizing that just one voice wouldn't adequately depict the life of this complex man, he chose to write the part of Gould for four actors, who play the Prodigy, the Performer, the Perfectionist and the Puritan.

Taking his cue from Bach's famous Goldberg Variations, which Gould recorded both in 1955 (at the age of 23) and in 1981 (a year before he died), Young created a play that blends Gould's own words and writings from different periods of his life into a moving and provocative exploration. In fact, Young actually conceived the scenes as having the same structure as the Goldbergs: matching the parts of Bach's music with theatrical vignettes according to tempo, number of voices, mood, key and so on.

The National Ballet of Canada's 1999-2000 season saw the creation of an innovative production called Inspired by Gould, a collaboration with Margie Gillis, Ballet British Columbia, John Oswald and others. Director Francois Girard attempted something similar to Young's drama with his film Thirty-two Short Films About Glenn Gould, which, by one of those synchronicitous chances of the art world, was released not long after Young wrote his play. Using a filmic vocabulary, he attempts a similar exercise, with a series of short, self-contained scenes. Some of these movements, as they might be called, are dramatized moments from the life of Gould. One is simply the treatment of a Gould recording by the great National Film Board animator Norman McLaren, in which elegant spheres split and merge along with the repeating themes and melodies of the music.

Young and Gould are fascinated by some of the same aspects of Gould's life: especially his departure from the live stage and his embracing of the technology of sound recording. In Girard's film we see Gould soaking his bare forearms in hot water before a concert, and it gives some sense of the physical pain of the pianist's art. On his way through the labyrinthine backstage corridors of the concert hall, he is beset by various apparently uncomprehending and insensitive backstage staff. (These include Don McKellar, who assisted in the creation of the screenplay, in a funny cameo as an awful tour manager.) They are appalled and amazed when Gould autographs a programme with the note "final concert", but Girard has given us an inkling of the reason why.

In another segment, he depicts Gould at a truckstop diner. Unlike the rest of us, he simply can't tune out the conversations around him. He hears every single voice and follows all the lines of conversation at once as they rise and fall around him: the blessing that makes him able to hear Baroque subtleties is a curse in any ordinary public setting.

Young has similar insights. When I saw Glenn in its 1992 Toronto debut each member of the audience was given a single rose. During the show we were asked to toss them to the stage, drowning "Gould" in a lovely, overwhelming sea of flowers. Since that time the show has been performed in Ottawa, and to acclaim at the Stratford Festival. This season it is being remounted in Montreal through late October, and then moves back to Harbourfront Centre in Toronto, where it debuted, through November.

It seems typical of the mythology surrounding Glenn Gould that I should just happen to interview playwright David Young precisely on the day that would have been Gould's 68th birthday. On the CBC his music is being played all day long.

"He was an extreme case of that case of viral infection in every artist," says Young; "outside their time a little. When I was working on the play, a lot of what I was doing was writing parts rather than a traditional story. It did feel like a kind of three-dimensional hopscotch. The reason why this makes sense is because of the kind of guy Gould was. He was a deeply analytical guy, but inside of that were all the cross-currents of a chaotic life."

In Glenn, the four performers are plagued by the horror of frying to transmit perfect music through an imperfect instrument: the fingers ache, the keyboard creaks, the chair is ungainly. In life Gould loved the calm order of a quiet lake. He yearned for the hugeness and simplicity of the far north. He shunned the unpredictable public concert hail for the controllable near-perfection of recording.

"I was trying to evoke the creative path the guy was on by mirroring it inside a technical structure," Young continues. "It's like a cubist portrait. Music has its own order and time. Gould lives in all these moments when he's playing. He's also all these different guys."

"The whole idea of the power of structure... I'd never begun to understand how structure is the most important part of music or theatre or dance or painting," says R.H. Thomson, who created the role of Gould as Perfectionist in 1992, and returns to it in the current production of Glenn. Now, he says, "I listen with different ears. Structure is the whole difference between melody and music or plot and story."

(Perhaps there's a little more Gouldian symmetry in operation at this point: by sheer fluke I am calling Thomson from a remote lakeside cottage. Gould, who loved both telephones and cottages, might have smiled upon both this conversation and the one with David Young, who was at Georgian Bay when I called him.)

"When I rehearsed Glenn in 1992 it was so much of a learning experience that I hadn't had time to digest the play," says Thomson. "Lines like 'Music is a pulse of intense feeling which illuminates the means of its own transmission'. Or 'Art is a life force released by the noblest aspirations in man...' You take time digesting that. These are things you can meditate on. In the intervening years these have become more held beliefs rather than recited lines."

Young believes that Gould fascinates other artists because, as he says, "I think you want to enter his space. We're all reaching for whatever purity you can find. This is somebody who was transported by his process. He tried to live there all the time. We may try to get there; he lived there. That's what we all want in our lives. His approach -- as kinky as it was -- just cuts right down to the centre of what people are trying to do when they put pen to paper, or write music. It's absolute commitment."

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