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Dear F minors, for celebrating the double Glenn Gould anniversary the Italian Magazine "Diario" published an articleby Giuseppe Montesano. The article is very beautiful and wide: I send You the first part in my translation. I will send you the second part of it in another Email Best Valeria Massari
The boundless Gould Variations By Giuseppe Montesano I put the Cd "Goldberg Variations" but I did’nt be able to concentrate about the music.What were the the continuous scrunches like of disk scratched, the small crashing of wood that crack, the metallic creaking that appeared on the surface in the middle of the sublime almost for disprove it? From what part to appair that sudden complaint that seemed inseparable from Bach, vocal entity imprisoned in the disk and that did hour infest my room but that didn't/it succeed to prevent that does the song grow, does he/she/it/you be screwed, she/it/you climb more and more hypnotic and triumphant? Only any time after I discovered that I had not bought the defective compacts and that those squeaky and murmuring presences were inevitable in the Glenn Gould’s performances. The canadian pianist carried always a ruined chair tht permit him to stay below compared with the piano. Clinging to the keyboard for feel it next and avoid the show of power of the professional from concert. And also the complaint was the his, because in the playing Gould loved to sing, convinced in this way of be able to play very better. But also after this discovery I continued to along to think that this "ectoplasma" of song originates from an other world in which the author of the "Flowers of the evil" picked up the complain of a man imprisoned in the melancholy and he wrote "The soul of an old poet errs in the eaves with the sad voice of a cold ghost." Only that when he recorded for the first time The "Goldberg Variations" he didn't have the face a little bit monkey- like and thickset of the last photo but he was a young man of 23 years who danced in the studies intoxicated by Music oand by Mineral water. A young man spoiled and full of tic but sink in the secret abysses of Bach so that to be able to write in the comments of cover of the disk:" Is a music that doesn't know nor begins nor end, a music without a culminating point and without a true resolution: This Music is like the lovers of Baudelaire "feebly balanced on the wing of an intelligent whirlwind" and it reveal yourself us in the vision of a sketch unconscious that exults on a peak of creative power". It was not only an intuition acute of alternation almost Taoist between male and female in the"Goldberg Variations" but also a splinter of underground autobiography. We knew many page about analysis of music, statement of poetics, interview and self –interview, television bradcasting, confessions of musical love and aversion. Mozart? A fun who play to seem an adult., an overrate. Schonberg? The true hero of the contemporary music but despite his theoretical system. Stravinskij and Bartok? Two overrates. The"Appassionata",The Violin Concert" and quite a lot other of Beethoven? Work blow up, rhetorics, empty of true musical and animate substance from too much wish of power. Strauss? Thank you to the his last compositions, the beloved: because the eighty year old is a little bit "rétro." Strauss denied the uprightness of the progress in art and furnished a form secularized of transcendence through the work : "We are therefore forced to see again our criterions of judgment no fit to criticize about that union of music and metaphysics that is the field of the technical transcendence" TO KEEP AN EYE ON ANECDOTE We know much about Gould : the gloves of rubber like Batman for protect the hands from the cold when he swam. The habit of spend the hands under the hot water before the concerts because suffered of troubles to the circulation; the definitivewithdrawal from the scenes when he was thirty two years old and, up to the death, the others eighteen past in the studies of recording.But all this finishes for carry very distant from the center, far from the place preserve in which raised his astonishing performances. Perhaps something more reveals his passion for the isolation, sleep in the daytime and at night stay awake to read Dostoevskij or to play only for himself the "Prelude of the Tristano? How the fallen in love with the technique of recording meet the mystical who in the music looked for the ecstasy,and it go out of himself? .Gould declared that before his recordings he did'nt practice at the piano, but he performed the only pieces only in the thought. He wanted to arrive to play those notes, that he knew to memory, they like one are an absolute novelty. For him the true job of deciphering happened in the unconscious, most distant possible from any external pressure or common place, pits also that of an own preceding performance. This was a procedure of a poet, a technique of author of haiku: but up to a point a performer have the right of being creative like Catullo that performs Saffo, of change times and indications of the author without betray it? .......... To be continued
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