DVD of the Week: Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould

One of the key decisions by François Girard, the director of “Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould” (which I discuss in this clip), is to include performances by Gould of lots of music besides that of Bach. Of course, there’s some Bach there (notably, but not solely, the Goldberg Variations, Gould’s 1955 recording of which propelled him, at the age of twenty-three, to instant stardom), but there’s also Beethoven, Schoenberg, Richard Strauss, and even Scriabin and Prokofiev (the whirling finale of the Seventh Sonata), with whose music the pianist is hardly identified.

Gould’s fascination with Bach is utterly trans-historical and marks one of the great intellectual acts of identification, and self-identification, in modern art: the blend of harmonic complexity, contrapuntal density, and often-turbulent propulsiveness comes off, in Gould’s playing, as something of a sonic representation beyond words of his inner life, a sort of idealized self-portrait. In his 1974 interviews with Jonathan Cott, Gould speaks of his musical dream of “the divorce of tactilia from expressive manifestations of music.” He wanted to get straight to the idea, to the emotion, and Bach seemed to let him achieve this ideal to the greatest extent (even though, of course, Gould’s singular touch at the keyboard is a crucial aspect of his realization of the score).

That identification is why Gould so often reveals significant aspects of his character in performances of other music. There’s a terrible vulnerability in his early recording of ten Brahms intermezzi, an agonized tenderness in his late recording of Haydn sonatas, a titanic struggle with the very notion of musical power in his recordings of Beethoven sonatas (as well as in his rendition of Liszt’s transcription of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony), and even, in his Mozart sonatas (many of which he held in disdain), a sense of nose-thumbing humor that it’s easy to imagine Mozart enjoying gleefully. The underlying drama and fascination of Gould’s life and work is that he’s one of the few performers who can stand alongside the great composers as an artistic equal. Girard’s film teems with distinctive ways to evoke Gould’s remarkably creative re-creative genius.