Method & madness: The oddities of the virtuosi

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Method & madness: The oddities of the virtuosi
What is it about elite pianists? Some are charmingly eccentric, others just insane. Michael Church looks at the oddities of the virtuosi
Wednesday, 12 March 2008

"It's like a horse before the race," said the great Vladimir Horowitz of his feelings before a recital. "You start to perspire, you feel already in you electricity. I am a general, my soldiers are the keys."

Marshalling their mountains of notes from memory, concert pianists need the skill of jugglers and the strength and stamina of athletes. Meanwhile, in their fusion of instinct and intellect, they must be supreme aesthetes. And they must do all this without safety nets: if their memory fails, or their fingers foul up, all they have is an unforgiving crowd. It takes an unusual person to put their life on the line like this. No wonder many pianists are oddballs; no wonder some go mad.Such thoughts are prompted by the recent release of yet more posthumous discs on the BBC Legends label of those wonderfully eccentric Russians Shura Cherkassky and Sviatoslav Richter; and by two other massive projects: the four-CD box plus book from Naxos entitled A-Z of Pianists; and the 80-CD box of the original Sony-Columbia recordings by Glenn Gould, who was both a god of the keyboard and more than a little mad. And these are just the tip of the iceberg: we can now survey an entire century of pianism's brilliant weirdness, thanks to the voluminous evidence that record companies are now putting out. Between eccentricity and madness lies a whole spectrum. When the Finnish pianist Olli Mustonen justifies his silent hand ballet over the keyboard with analogies to tennis and the Earth's curvature, we accept it as part of his fanciful virtuosity. When we learn that the Russian maestro Grigory Sokolov takes each piano apart before playing it, and notes his findings in a book, we see this as a facet of his infinitely subtle art. On the other hand, there are fine pianists who are close to the psychologically dangerous end of the spectrum, and one or two – no names, no writs – who have tragically dropped off the edge. It's safer to talk about the glorious dead.

When I interviewed Shura Cherkassky, then a sprightly octogenarian, in the hotel room he inhabited with a shockingly out-of-tune piano, I vainly tried to get him to talk about music; all he wanted to discuss was which Hawaiian shirt would make him most attractive to possible conquests. He had many pre-concert rituals, and could only perform comfortably if he had stepped on to the platform, right foot first. Yet his Chopin and Schumann had such panache that dozens of live recordings have been issued since his death.

I regret never having heard Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli live, but Testament's CD of his Royal Festival Hall concert in 1957, which includes a sound-check, almost fills the gap. He was a reclusive dandy who claimed to be an ace flyer, Ferrari-racer and piano-maker, and said he was descended from St Francis of Assisi; his cancellations far outnumbered his rare appearances. Yet what emerges on this CD is a surprise: he goes over and over phrases, tests every note for evenness of tone, and occasionally lets rip with that high-octane perfection that made him a legend – and to hell with his tenuous grip on reality.Horowitz's technique left rivals speechless, but he was such a tangle of terrors – at one stage, they forced him into a 12-year "retirement" – that he only found sanity in his Eighties. And he shared his agoraphobia with other players. Adolf Henselt practised 10 hours a day and was regarded as the pianistic equal of Liszt, but so great was his fear of crowds that he only managed one concert a year; for concertos, he would lurk in the wings while the orchestra played, until the time came for his terrified dash to the keyboard. Sviatoslav Richter felt comfortable on the stage, but at times he was unable to go anywhere else without clutching his pink plastic lobster.

Some pianists based brilliant careers on seeming mad, when they weren't, the most notable being the diminutive Viennese "pianissimist" Vladimir de Pachmann, aka "the Chopinzee", whose antics prompted George Bernard Shaw to write of his "pantomimic performance, with accompaniments by Chopin". Yet, if you listen to the Dal Segno CD of his piano-roll recordings made a century ago, you realise what a serious artist he was: as well as being a showman, he was a keyboard poet.In other cases, of course, the madness is all too real. Everyone who saw the film Shine knows the story of the Australian pianist David Helfgott, whose youthful promise was cut short by psychotic illness. The case of the British pianist John Ogdon was even more tragic. This titanic figure claimed at 19 that he stood in line with Beethoven, Brahms and Busoni as a pianist, and, starting with his win at the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, went on to prove that this was true. In middle age, he was felled by schizophrenia. It's now for critics and psychiatrists to debate how that illness might have related to his majestic way with Liszt and Rachmaninov, and to his championing of new music.

And so to Glenn Gould. Not only was he a hypochondriac, but he had his own special chair. It had been made for him by his father when he was small, and he carried it round the world – it got progressively more dilapidated – like a metaphorical bit of blue blanket. The posture in which he played, the chair so low he was almost on the floor, was another way of replicating his infant relationship with the instrument, as was his humming and clucking, stamping and swaying, and flailing when a hand was free.

Gould never risked a handshake; his physical phobias caused trouble at Steinway, where an employee once dared to pat him on the shoulder. Gould decided he'd been injured, spent the next month in a body cast, and sued Steinway for grievous bodily harm. After nine years of superstardom, he turned his back on the concert platform to devote himself to recording, and became a recluse; if he did venture out, he dressed like a tramp.Sony's 80-CD box is a powerful reminder of why Gould had such an army of fans: he had a unique sound, and his playing could be as fleet and joyous as the wind, while always preserving needle-sharp clarity. One of these CDs contains a telling interview. As Gould parries, thrusts and provokes, you realise that though he lived on a different planet, his "madness" was that of a visionary who had the misfortune to be misunderstood.

Glenn Gould

[Herbert Gould, remembering his son's infancy]

As soon as Glenn was old enough to be held on his grandmother's knee at the piano, he would never pound the keyboard as most children will with the whole hand, striking a number of keys at a time; instead he would always insist on pressing down a single key and holding it down until the resulting sound had completely died away. The fading vibrations entirely fascinated him.

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Glenn had no difficulty directing his mind. He played multiple chess games blindfolded, memorised complex scores while talking on the telephone, and listened to two radios simultaneously while studying Schoenberg's difficult Opus 23. He aroused attention, however, when he appeard to fidget on stage during the orchestral tuttis of the Beethoven concerto in his first performance with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. The critic had no idea that before leaving home for the concert Glenn had bid a loving farewell to Nicky, his shedding dog. By the time of the concerto's rondo movement, he realised his black trousers were covered in dog hair and was busying himself picking them off. All went well until he lost track of which tutti was in progress, but he quickly composed his thoughts and played well to the end: "I had learned the fist valuable lesson of my association with the T.S.O - either pay attention or keep short-haired dogs"

Glenn Gould records Bach's Italian Concerto

Glenn Gould [Elyse Mach]

That is not to say that there were not occasional moments- perhaps when I was giving a concert with an esteemed conductor or playing a solo work in an especially fine hall- when some special feeling took hold of me. I wouldn't deny that. But it didn't happen because the audience was there; it could just as well have happened at rehearsal or in a practice session. I can honestly say that I do not recall ever feeling better about the quality of a performance because of the presence of an audience. Indeed, it's precisely for that reason that when I record, I banish everybody from the studio except the people actually working on the recording....
But I found that even the presence of one person would make me tend to show off and, to that extent, it acutlaly got in the way of the performance. It meant that I was more concerned with their reaction than I was with what I was doing. Consequently, it simply did not serve the musical end. Now if you multiply that one person by two or three thousand at a large concert, you have some idea as to the extent of my reservations about public performances as an appropriate medium for music making.

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During those concert experiences I had to project that particular piece to a very large audience in most cases and, as a consequence, I had added hairpins - crescendi and diminuendi, and similar un-Bachian affectations- where they didn't need to be; I had exaggerated cadences in order to emphasize the separation of sentences or paragraphs, and so on. In other words, I was making an unnecessarily rhetorical statement about the music, simply as a consequence of having attempted to project it in very spacious acoustic environments.

In a studio, where the pick-up is close to the piano, you can achieve a very similar effect to that which the listener enjoys at home. The relationship of the piano to a microphone which is, eight feet away is very similar to the relationship between the listener at home and his speakers. There's a one-to-one aspect in both situations. But no such relationship exists when one is sitting on a stage, like the Tchaikovsky Hall in Moscow, and projecting a Bach partita to the first row of seats and to the top balcony simultaneously.

So the result was that the record made in the summer of '57 is a very glib, facile effort, because a series of little party tricks which just don't need to be there had been added to the piece.

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What is it about Schoenberg's music that attracts you?
I think I was first attracted to it because some of my teachers hated it; advocacy can be a useful weapon in a teenage rebellion. Actually I've always been attracted to music that is in one way or another contrapntal, whereas I'm essentially bored by homophonic music. Indeed, I've often said that I have something like a century-long blind spot with regard to music. ..........
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When my recording of the complete Mozart sonatas was released recently, I devoted about 7000 words to explaining why I really don't like Mozart's music very much. And one of the main reasons, certainly, is that it's not especially contrapuntal and worked out, so to speak. When I have to deal with such music, I confess that I tend to emphasize tenor parts to alto parts- anything to give it the semblance of a contrapuntal presence, to give it the illusion of a polyphonic lay-out.

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What about the format, the representation, for example, of the recital? There are rumours that the recital format is out, or at least is on the way out.

Well I don't go to concerts- I rarely did, even when I was giving them, .... so I can't honestly tell you that such a format has no validity in today's scheme of things. But it doesn't for me, certainly; as far as I'm concerned, music is something that ought to be listened to in private. I do not believe that it should be treated as group therapy or any other kind of communcal experience. I think that music ought to lead the listener- and, indeed, the performer- to a state of contemplation, and I don't think it's really possible to attain that condition with 2999 other souls sitting around. So my strongest objections to the concert are primarily moral rather than musical. But as far as the format of the recital is concerned, I personally don't particularly relish a sequence of the same instrumental sounds all evening, especially if htey're piano sounds. There are, as you well know, many piano freaks. I just don't happen to be one of them. I don't much care for piano music.

You don't care much for the music from the instrument you play? That's hard to believe.
Well, I'm really not hooked on the instrument per se- on any instrument, per se. I'm kind of instrumentally indifferent, I guess. Of course, if I hear a very scintillating performance I get great pleasure from it; I certainly don't mean to say that I don't get pleasure from listening to performances that involve the piano, but I don't get pleasure from performances because they invovle the piano. And I think that that really has laways been true. I've never been a piano buff in that sense.

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What are you like outside the recording studio? What is your lifestyle?
First of all, I can't divorce the studio from my personal life. The recording studio and the kind of womblike security that it gives is very much integrated with my lifestyle. I guess tis' all part of my fantasy to develop to the fullest extent a kind of Howard Hughesian secrecy. I'm a very private person, I think, I'm alone, or quasi-alone, a lot because the recording studio, with its small crew, provides me with the atmosphere that I need to work productively- to make music or indeed, to work on a radio or tv program. I stay up all night mostly. I very rarely go to bed until 5 or 6 oclock in the morning, and it's not unusual for me to hear the headlines on "Today Show" before turning in. I tend to get up around three in the afternoon.

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What about your views in areas other than music? Your views, for example, on a life hereafter?
I can only say that I was brought up as a Presbyterian; I stopped being a church-goer at the age of about 18, but I have had all my life a tremendously strong sense that, indeed , there is a hereafter, and the transformation of the spirit is a phenomenon with which one must reckon, and in the light of which, indeed, one must attempt to live one's life. As a consequence, I find all here-and-now philosphies repellent. On the other hand, I don't have any objective images to build around my notion of a hereafter, and I recognise that it's a great temptationto formulate a comforting theory of eternal life, so as to reconsile one's self to the inevitability of deat. But I'd like to think that's not what I'm doing; I'd like to think that I'm not emplying it as a deliverate self-reassuring process. For me, it intuitively seems right; I've never had to work at convincing myself about the likelihood of a life hereafter. It is simply something that appears to me infinitely more plausible than its opposite, which would be oblivion.

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The term eccentric has been applied to you many times. How do you react to it?
I don't think that my life style is like most other people's and I'm rather glad for that; I think it's in some way integrated with the kind of work that I want to do. As I said previously, the two things, life style and work, have become one. Now if that's eccentricity, then I'm eccentric. If eccentricity consists of wearing a scarf in an air-conditioned environment while recording, or playing with an overcoat on during my stay in Jerusalem, I'm guilty; but those things are organic to what I have to do.

Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould

"There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion"
~ Sir Francis Bacon

Gould was emotionally reticent even in infancy. He never cried; he hummed instead.

His private motto: "Behind every silver lining there's a cloud"
"My ability to work varies inversely with the niceness of the weather."
He identified himself as a Nordic man, and all things southern and Mediterranean were anathema to him: sunshine and blue skies, spicy food, physical exertion, easy sensuality, emotional openness, Italian opera. He hated bright colours, and equated red with violence; at the age of four or five he flew into a tantrum when someone gave him a red fire engine. His favourite colours were "battleship gray and midnight blue" and he loved black and white movies, including war movies, ....
When he was eight, is parents took him to wee Walt Disney's Fantasia, and he hated its "awful riot of colour" as he recalled years later. "I went home depressed, feeling faintly nauseous, and with the first headache I can remember".

His hands were naturally agile and flexible, and he instinctively guarded them. Even as an infant he would pull them away or turn his back if someone threw or rolled a ball at him. Once, when he was just weven or eight, Jessie Greig asked him to join in a game of marbles. He wanted to play, but when he put his hand down and found the ground cold, he withdrew it at once, and said "I'm afraid I can't".

Gould's first name is frequently misspelled as "Glen",..... and Gould himself used both spellings interchangeably throughout his life. In fact, it is difficult to find a specimen of his signature which a second "n" is clearly discernable. To his record producer Andrew Kazdin, Gould offered a lame explanation: he had discovered early on that if he started to write the second 'n' he would be unable to stop and would end up writing three 'n's.





The organ, Gould later said, gave him a taste for Bach and other early music, and had a profound influence on his piano style. It taught him to "think with his feet", which led to a fondness for bringing out basslines (he was also left-handed, incidentally); taught him to "think of music as being played by three hands - the feet acting as the third hand," which led to a passion for counterpoint unusual among pianists; and it taught him not to pound the keys but to develop a technique based on "the tips of the fingers," to make expressive nuances through slight shifts of tempo instead of dynamics, both of which encouraged his clean, "upright" clearly articulated piano playing.

Arthur Rubinstein was once asked on television what he would wish for if he were given a second chance at life; he replied, " to be born with Glenn Gould's hands."
And there is the testimony of colleagues like Jaime Laredo, who recalled that he was open-mouthed as he listened to Gould play transcriptions between takes in their recording sessions; he thought Gould's technique superior to that of any other pianist.
"He really did have a magnificent technique," Charles Rosen said. "He could have developed terrific octaves quite easily if he'd wanted to. he just didn't want to."
In an interoffice memo from 1981, a Steinway and Sons employee referred to Gould as the one pianist of his generation with "complete tonal command" - comparable to Horowitz - and more than one critic and fellow musician considered his technique to have been perfect, perhaps the greatest of the age.
Still, to acknowledge that Gould could have played Chopin's etudes or Liszt's B-minor sonata or the Rach3 does not mean that he was physically (never mind temperementally) suited to making a career of such music.

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"I don't want to think too much about my playing or I'll get like that centipede who was asked which foot he moved first and became paralysed, just thinking about it."

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Glenn's take on his father's relationships, which I believe is spot on in general.
not appropriate for a person to change their spots so radically for the sake of another person
all relationships are addictive - just as much as alcohol or tobacco
one develops what one thinks of as an intense need to be with a particular person, to translate all your activity, everything that you do in the course of a day, and while that may be a fascinating exercise, it's also exhausting and it has one other great disadvantage - that it distracts you from contemplation, from looking inward, to really meditate upon the shape of your life - one doesn't do that (in a relationship) because one thinks one is starting one's life. When a relationship is new, there's a much greater intensity.

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Gould and Yamaha

He was testing Steinways as late as May 1981, but never found one to replace his old friend (CD318) permanently, not even instruments which has served artists like Rachmaninov and Horowitz. As always he found the new Steinways, especially the American ones, ranged from "terrible to pathetic" in tone or action or both, and he was not the only Steinway artist to complain at this time: the 70s is generally considered to have been the low point in the company's history.

He tested other pianos - German Steinways, Bechsteins - and finally defected to Yamaha. He first tried a Yamaha ...... and was deepley impressed by the piano's action, which had the responsiveness and the minimal aftertouch he craved. He also liked he intimacy, clarity and brightness of Yamaha's tone, and though he did not consider the sound completely satisfactory - he found the bass unfocused - he knew he could work with it.

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"The Wars" soundtrack
.... the most important classical theme is that of Brahm's tender Intermezzo in E-flat major, Op.117 No.1, which Gould called "Rowena's Theme". When it first appears in the film, it is associated with Robert's beloved, disabled sister Rowena, who dies before he goes off to war - according to Nielsen and Philips, Gould developed one of his obsessive adolescent crushes on Rowena, and was for a time watching one of her scenes every day. Brahms, incidentally, noted that the piece was based on a Scottish folk song, "Sleep Softly, My Child". The theme is woven throughout the score. In its original key, it is assoc with images of farewell, longing, remembrance; Gould wrote, "If you want the musical-mystical-metaphorical significance, E flat major is a key which composers have frequently assoc with the idea of resurrection (he was probably thinking of Mahler's 2nd symph). The theme also appears in Eflat minor, usually in a hauting version for one or two choirboys when someone dies. The theme hovers over the score like the Angel of Death. The score is in fact unified harmonically, with E flat (major and minor) as principal key. The most important Hymn, "Abide With Me" appears in E flat, and when Gould needed a new theme for the sequence involving Harris's ashes he chose Brahm's dark Intermezzo in Eflat minor, Op 118 No6.

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Gould as conductor
..... wearing layers of shapeless dark jackets, flannel shirts and pants (plural) despite the summer's heat, and carrying a large, gree plastic garbage bag containing his musical score, notepads and paraphernalia.
Wholly dedicated to the music at hand, Gould was not interested, like so many conductors, in matters of power and personality, and so came across unpretentious.
"What struck me the most about my encounter with Glenn was his unfailing politeness and encouragement to the musicians. He was animated, resourceful, inspiring and sympathique throughout. He did his best to make us all feel like partners in the endeavour rather than sidemen to his maestro. We were all on a first name basis. In fact, he had taken time to commit everyone's name to memory before meeting us, and he made sure to shake everyone's hand at the end of the final session, something none of us expected." ~Timothy Maloney, clarinetist

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Gould on Pedalling
"We are not trying to sacrifice in the piano what the harpsichord did not have, but rather to create an impressionistic effect of what the harpsichord did have."

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"I'm not anti-social, but if an artist wants to use his mind for creative work, then self-discipline, in the form of cutting oneself off from society, is a necessary thing."

"These aren't personal eccentricities, they're simply the occupational hazard of a highly subjective business"

"I don't go to concerts, sometimes not even to my own!"

"The greatest of all teachers is the tape recorder"

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