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Dan Coren
I’d always wondered about the surrealistic brilliance and clarity of Glenn Gould’s playing. How was it that nobody else ever got that kind of sound? Was he using some sort of trick piano or recording-studio subterfuge? In A Romance on Three Legs, Katie Hafner comes as close to answering those questions as anyone ever will.
Brief though it is– about 250 pages of text— A Romance on Three Legs covers much more than Gould himself. It’s also about the rise and decline of the Steinway piano empire; about Steinway’s complicated relationship to the virtuosi who played its instruments; and about Gould’s notoriously contentious and neurotic relationship with the company.
Through her parallel biography of Charles Verne Edquist— the almost totally blind man who became Gould’s personal piano tuner— Hafner leads her readers into the arcane art of piano tuning and narrates Gould’s and Edquist’s fruitful but ultimately ill-fated relationship with one particular Steinway piano, an instrument as off-beat and quirky as Gould himself.
Although Gould was and remains (through his recordings) a polarizing figure with as many detractors as worshippers, Hafner is an impartial observer, coolly and objectively reporting the trajectory of Gould’s career and his pathetic descent into hypochondria and drug dependency.
An adolescent’s cult idol
I was about 15 when I first heard Gould’s 1955 debut recording, J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Although conventional wisdom considers Gould’s 1981 recording of the same work superior– Gould himself certainly thought so – the first version influenced me, for better or for worse, as no other single recording of classical music ever has again. Nobody had ever heard Bach’s music played like this.
To an impressionable teenager just discovering classical music, Gould— with his incredible pianistic prowess, his weird mannerisms and his controversial performances— quickly became a cult figure in my adolescent universe, as worthy of adoration and laughable attempts at emulation as Elvis. Even after I’d matured a bit and Gould had retired from concert life to the recording studio, for decades I operated under the assumption (without being fully aware that I was doing so) that Gould’s way was the only one true way to play Bach’s keyboard music.
At the time, I was all but completely oblivious to what Rosalyn Tureck had already achieved; and, I regretfully confess, I came to understand what I’d been missing only within the past decade or so. Listen again to the first example in this article (above), and then listen to Tureck playing the same Variation 5 from the Goldberg Variations.
Pioneering Bach on the piano
It’s not just Tureck’s lyricism— her ability to make every thread in Bach’s contrapuntal fabric sing as if it were an inner voice in Schumann’s piano music— that defines Tureck’s playing for me. Much of Tureck’s Bach has a meditative quality and an organic richness, as if those melodic lines were alive, arteries pulsating with the lifeblood of Bach’s counterpoint. Follow this link to Youtube and this one, and you can listen to Tureck and Gould, both at their best (and Gould at his oddest), playing the Sarabande from Bach’s Partita No. 4. Once you’re there, you’ll find that Youtube has a treasure trove of performances by both of them.
In 1955, Tureck, then in her early 40s, had already established herself as a pioneer by playing Bach’s keyboard works on the piano rather than the harpsichord. (Back then, in certain fundamentalist circles of musical political correctness, recording Bach on the piano was considered déclassé.) The recording of the Goldberg Variations was, in fact, her signature accomplishment. As Hafner puts it, “Not everyone was thrilled by the newcomer. Roslyn Tureck was mightily put out by Gould’s achievement. …[W]ith the advent of Glenn Gould, Tureck’s Bach became yesterday’s news.”
What Billie Jean said about Obama
Tureck’s plight reminds me of what Billie Jean King, a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton, said in an NPR interview with Cokie Roberts when it became apparent that Obama was about to win his party’s nomination:
“Here is this woman who's worked hard, she's done it all the way you're supposed to do it, and then this cute young man comes in and says a bunch of sweet, you know, nothings, and pushes you out of the way.”
No matter how much you may adore Gould, it’s hard to begrudge Tureck her anger.
Perhaps justice has been done, in a way. We’re blessed these days with a wealth of superb recordings and live performances of Bach’s music by the likes of Murray Perahia, Andras Schiff and, more recently, Simone Dinnerstein and Jeremy Denk. All are strong musical personalities in their own right, of course. But to my ears, at least, they all seem to owe a much greater debt to Tureck than they do to the inimitable Gould.
Of course, Gould’s legacy is anything but “sweet nothings.” Idiosyncratic as he was, there is still a miraculous quality about his Bach— and, indeed, about many of his other recordings. As a close friend of mine recently said, no musician played a greater role in introducing our generation to the works of our culture’s greatest composer.
To read responses to this article, click here.
Brief though it is– about 250 pages of text— A Romance on Three Legs covers much more than Gould himself. It’s also about the rise and decline of the Steinway piano empire; about Steinway’s complicated relationship to the virtuosi who played its instruments; and about Gould’s notoriously contentious and neurotic relationship with the company.
Through her parallel biography of Charles Verne Edquist— the almost totally blind man who became Gould’s personal piano tuner— Hafner leads her readers into the arcane art of piano tuning and narrates Gould’s and Edquist’s fruitful but ultimately ill-fated relationship with one particular Steinway piano, an instrument as off-beat and quirky as Gould himself.
Although Gould was and remains (through his recordings) a polarizing figure with as many detractors as worshippers, Hafner is an impartial observer, coolly and objectively reporting the trajectory of Gould’s career and his pathetic descent into hypochondria and drug dependency.
An adolescent’s cult idol
I was about 15 when I first heard Gould’s 1955 debut recording, J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Although conventional wisdom considers Gould’s 1981 recording of the same work superior– Gould himself certainly thought so – the first version influenced me, for better or for worse, as no other single recording of classical music ever has again. Nobody had ever heard Bach’s music played like this.
To an impressionable teenager just discovering classical music, Gould— with his incredible pianistic prowess, his weird mannerisms and his controversial performances— quickly became a cult figure in my adolescent universe, as worthy of adoration and laughable attempts at emulation as Elvis. Even after I’d matured a bit and Gould had retired from concert life to the recording studio, for decades I operated under the assumption (without being fully aware that I was doing so) that Gould’s way was the only one true way to play Bach’s keyboard music.
At the time, I was all but completely oblivious to what Rosalyn Tureck had already achieved; and, I regretfully confess, I came to understand what I’d been missing only within the past decade or so. Listen again to the first example in this article (above), and then listen to Tureck playing the same Variation 5 from the Goldberg Variations.
Pioneering Bach on the piano
It’s not just Tureck’s lyricism— her ability to make every thread in Bach’s contrapuntal fabric sing as if it were an inner voice in Schumann’s piano music— that defines Tureck’s playing for me. Much of Tureck’s Bach has a meditative quality and an organic richness, as if those melodic lines were alive, arteries pulsating with the lifeblood of Bach’s counterpoint. Follow this link to Youtube and this one, and you can listen to Tureck and Gould, both at their best (and Gould at his oddest), playing the Sarabande from Bach’s Partita No. 4. Once you’re there, you’ll find that Youtube has a treasure trove of performances by both of them.
In 1955, Tureck, then in her early 40s, had already established herself as a pioneer by playing Bach’s keyboard works on the piano rather than the harpsichord. (Back then, in certain fundamentalist circles of musical political correctness, recording Bach on the piano was considered déclassé.) The recording of the Goldberg Variations was, in fact, her signature accomplishment. As Hafner puts it, “Not everyone was thrilled by the newcomer. Roslyn Tureck was mightily put out by Gould’s achievement. …[W]ith the advent of Glenn Gould, Tureck’s Bach became yesterday’s news.”
What Billie Jean said about Obama
Tureck’s plight reminds me of what Billie Jean King, a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton, said in an NPR interview with Cokie Roberts when it became apparent that Obama was about to win his party’s nomination:
“Here is this woman who's worked hard, she's done it all the way you're supposed to do it, and then this cute young man comes in and says a bunch of sweet, you know, nothings, and pushes you out of the way.”
No matter how much you may adore Gould, it’s hard to begrudge Tureck her anger.
Perhaps justice has been done, in a way. We’re blessed these days with a wealth of superb recordings and live performances of Bach’s music by the likes of Murray Perahia, Andras Schiff and, more recently, Simone Dinnerstein and Jeremy Denk. All are strong musical personalities in their own right, of course. But to my ears, at least, they all seem to owe a much greater debt to Tureck than they do to the inimitable Gould.
Of course, Gould’s legacy is anything but “sweet nothings.” Idiosyncratic as he was, there is still a miraculous quality about his Bach— and, indeed, about many of his other recordings. As a close friend of mine recently said, no musician played a greater role in introducing our generation to the works of our culture’s greatest composer.
To read responses to this article, click here.
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