Forty years ago, on October 4, 1982, the famous Canadian pianist Glenn Gould died in Toronto at the age of fifty, after a stroke. A gifted and brilliant musician, admired on…

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Anniversary of the disappearance of Glenn Gould: "He destroyed the basis of interpretation"

Glenn Gould in 1965. Toronto Star via Getty Images – Harold Whyte

Text by: Nicolas Sanders Follow

8 mins

Forty years ago, on October 4, 1982, the famous Canadian pianist Glenn Gould died in Toronto at the age of fifty, after a stroke.

A gifted and brilliant musician, admired on all continents, he is known as one of the greatest interpreters of Johann Sebastian Bach.

Much more than a pianist, Glenn Gould is an artist of profound originality, explains Bruno Monsaingeon who worked alongside him for a long time in the context of musical films that have become legendary.

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RFI: How do you view the past 40 years without and with Glenn Gould?

Bruno Monsaingeon:

It is something very curious.

First of all, 40 years seems grotesque to me because it's almost half a century!

And I have the curious impression that he is not dead.

What happened ?

He is physically dead.

But the rest of his message is absolutely present.

It was widely rumored that I was a liar and that I had been hired by Glenn to spread the lie, and that in reality he was alive and hiding in my house!

I had messages, especially from America, emphatically stating that everyone knew that Glenn was hiding at my house to observe the reactions to the announcement of his death.

In a way, they are right.

A number of people around the world, and I'm not talking about a sect, have a very strong sense of Gould's presence,

because the impact he had on them was not just the impact of a great pianist.

There was something more that belonged only to him.

It is perhaps simply the fact that we are gradually gaining access to what is Gould's thought, expressed with an absolutely extraordinary literary force.

Prelude No. 1 BWV 846 from the Well-Tempered Clavier (1st book) - JS.

Bach

Recently, a music magazine wondered about what remains of Gould 40 years after his disappearance…

I read this magazine, there is a whole series of texts which are not so bad.

And it ends with “of Glenn Gould there is nothing left”.

Placed in this perspective, in 4 billion years the solar system will have disappeared.

I think whoever wrote that on Gould was anticipating 4 billion years, that's a bit much.

What's left of Gould is what lives on in thousands and thousands of people.

Gould is not only Johann Sebastian Bach, it is a transcendent message.

That's why it just survives.

With Gould, we adhere to something.

It is not a religion or a fanaticism, we adhere to a way of thinking.

No need to agree or disagree, it's something from another domain.

Gould had a modesty, through a sense of relativism.

I believe that the outside opinion did not interest him.

He was not someone who sought praise.

With music, we can play the game of comparisons.

Beethoven's violin concerto, which is better, Oistrakh or Menuhin?

Etc.

With

Glenn Gould

, the comparison is a useless game.

Because you're listening to a record and you're literally overwhelmed.

Partita No. 6 in E minor - JS.

Bach

If Gould touched the human race so much, did he not ultimately leave an unsurpassable horizon behind him?

Yes, especially when he says: “

what's the point of practicing this profession if you have nothing original to say, if you just repeat

”.

Gould has a way of seeing as an abstract painter, even if it remains very concrete.

He has a specific vision in an extraordinarily telling way in music.

It is an independence with respect to the score.

He executes the notes with clinical precision, but he has that very individual look that ultimately corresponded to the Bach revival.

Gould's idea

is that if you have something to say, that's fine, otherwise you're a parasite, you're useless.

Which sets the bar horribly high.

Sonata No. 7 in B flat major op.

83 - Sergei Prokoviev

How was his vision of interpretation perceived at the time?

He was misunderstood and also a threat.

The musical milieu accepted Gould much less than the intellectual milieu or the general milieu of the population.

The musicians were threatened in their very existence.

From year to year, we reproduce, we give concerts again... So Gould is a threat to people who rest on their laurels, that's clear.

If it was poorly received by the musical community, it is for this reason and it is also because it destroyed the bases on which the interpretation was based.

In Mozart's sonatas, Gould introduced the humorous dimension that is there in an extraordinary way, for example by inverting chords.

It's a wonderful way to see Mozart, but when this record came out people said that Gould was crazy, that he was a demented character.

In fact,

Prelude No. 2 BWV 847 from the Well-Tempered Clavier (1st book) - JS.

Bach

How was your work with Glenn Gould going?

A total complicity in the staging and in the scenario.

My work with Gould was a work on him of course, but also on me.

I think I expressed myself in this in a total way.

But we resorted to all the tricks.

The Goldbergs is something that took a considerable amount of time.

I had prepared everything in a precise breakdown, and we worked variation by variation, then segment by segment.

Most of the time we did a take, and we went to listen and watch, and there I never had the slightest remark from him from a visual point of view.

Afterwards, he would call the tuner and he would work on the piano, which had to be in perfect condition.

Every 10 minutes there was a retouching of the piano.

If the piano had the slightest unevenness, it had to be corrected because it was not bearable for him.

Goldberg Variations - 1981 - JS.

Bach

On October 4, 1982, you lost more than a work partner...

Our conversations began in July 1972 and ended in September 1982 with his death, finally this stroke on September 25, the day of his birthday, the day after our last conversation.

The last time I saw him physically, in June 1982, he was more and more in a contemplative form.

We could spend hours with him without speaking.

It usually happened with listening to music, because there was an almost obsessive way of having the presence of the music.

The last thing we heard in 1982 was Strauss' Alpine Symphony conducted by Karajan.

He had a passion for these things, we listened to it five times during the night.

He was someone who had left a kind of exuberance behind.

He had repeated to me that at 50 he would stop playing the piano to devote himself to his literary work, probably a fictional autobiography.

He also always told me that if he suddenly wanted to record something, he would be ready.

And he died on his 50th birthday with a stroke that put him in a coma until October 4.

It's something extraordinarily premonitory of which I had no obvious sign.