Re: Fw: Re: Gould vrs Horowitz?

[Jim Morrison <jim_morrison@sprynet.com>]

 Elmer Elevator wrote:
> >I don't know much about Gould's negative feelings about Horowitz, but I
> >recall a famous rumor/legend that Gould stumbled across an editing
session
> >of Horowitz in the studio one night. The editors/engineers were having
> >trouble with a short badly recorded passage, so, with great glee, Gould
> >(allegedly, purportedly) ran to the piano and mimicked the passage a la
> >Horowitz so the editors could splice it into the Horowitz recording.
Later
> >he loved to point to the Horowitz recording and whisper, "I'm on that,
can
> >you find my playing on that?"
>
>

And then Brad replied.

> Maybe.  I think I've heard that legend somewhere too.  But it seems
> suspiciously close to the story of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf inserting a high
> note for Kirsten Flagstad.
>

I just checked two biographies of Gould.

This from Ostwald's, pages 222-223

"...he even made the outlandish claim that he once showed the RCA Victor
technicians in New York how to repair a Horowitz tape by inserting a measure
by Gould."

Ostwald footnotes the claim of Gould's was reported to him in an interview
he did with Robert Silverman in 1995.  Remember that name, Silverman.


Friedrich, on pages 239-240, goes into more detail concerning this alleged
incident, this time using a writer named Joseph Roddy as the source.
(Notice that this is all hearsay and no one names the recording in question.
If they did, we might be able to go listen to it and judge for ourselves.)

In the Roddy version Gould, while working on the tape and helping the
engineers do their technical work said "Well, if you do this and this, and
get that off there and this off here, then that's it, and you've got it,
except that you'll be missing this bar, which I will get for you."

>From this angle, it looks like Gould was more supplying a part that was
simply missing from the tape due to the editing process, and less his
playing a passage that Horowitz could not handle.  Either the editing
process or the recording work or Horowtiz's playing could have caused the
missing bar.

Friedrich goes on to say that the people at RCA don't recall this.  And
according to Friedrich, the above mentioned Robert Silverman told him a
similar story, that Gould had told him about helping the people with the
editing but Gould never said that he had added some music to Horowitz's
tape.  Friedrich goes on to directly quote Silverman concerning the Gouldian
addition to the tape  "I don't believe that part...That part's not true."

Wow.  I've said it many times, and I'll say it again.  The more you look
into the sources, the more you check you facts, the more you compare
stories, the more closely you look into these biographies the less factual
and the more fictional they seem.  Reader beware.  These books should have
warning labels.

Jim

(Who happens to be a fan of Horowitz and suggests people listen to his
Scriabin, Prokofiev, Barber, and Scarlatti before writing him off.)