Re: Glenn Gould Conducting the Siegfried Idyll

[Tim Conway <timcon@comswest.net.au>]

Anne M. Marble wrote:

>What are the opinions on this piece? I know a lot of the critics hated it.
>It's certainly not your (ahem) normal version of the piece. But I'd like
>some *real* opinions. What do other Glenn Gould fans think?

The Gould SI was my introduction to this piece as I had for many years an 
aversion to Wagner's music, which was strange because my grandfather 
played trombone in a brass band and loved Wagner (and Berlioz and all 
other composers who knew, in his opinion, how to write for brass 
instruments).

The first time I played it I fell asleep for a short while, so had to 
play it again when I awoke. It soon became one of my favourite GG pieces. 
It is, to me, one of the most serene recordings ever made.

When Timothy Maloney, who played clarinet on the GG recording, was 
interviewed by Andrew Ford on (Australian) ABC radio last year, part of 
the interview went as follows:

____________

AF:	Did he explain to the players why his interpretation of this piece 
was so slow?

TM:	No.

AF:	Do you think it was anything to do...I mean, because you said he knew 
all about the breathing and bowing... I mean there would have to be a lot 
more bowing and breathing than usual in this piece because of the tempo.

TM:	Indeed.

AF:	I mean, there¹s a famously-long second-horn note in this piece which 
goes on for pages, and even if you play the piece at a normal tempo it¹s 
almost impossible for the horn player to do it. But a horn player would 
clearly have breathed in a couple of places to get that -- in the middle 
of the note! -- so Gould must have been aware of that. Do you think he 
was trying to inject more kind of punctuation into the music?

TM:	[Sighs] I honestly can¹t say. I do know that he had a penchant for 
playing pieces that he found particularly interesting as slow as he 
possibly could and, conversely, pieces in which he had little interest he 
would race through and dash them off, and it was just one of these 
perverse qualities of the man. We definitely had to find new places to 
breathe in our lines; the strings definitely had to find new places to 
change bowings, change direction in bowings, and in some cases try to 
make it as surreptitious as they could, so it did impose new problems on 
us. Absolutely.

______________

I try to spot any Gouldian "punctuations" in the recording when I now 
listen to it, but without the score it's hard to know what's Wagner and 
what's Gould. Besides, listening to it still makes me drift off -- much 
better than the Goldbergs as a balm.


Tim Conway
Broome, WA, Oz