Glenn Gould is the second person I ever heard who plays Bach properly. The first one is my father, who is not a very good pianist.
My father has the ear of a great musician. He takes orchestral scores to bed as a little night reading. Haydn eludes me, but his music brings my father to tears. Once, when he was striving to explain sonata form, I coolly answered that I’d rather let the music just wash over me, instead of wrecking the mood by overthinking it. By the look he gave me, I think he heard me say something like, ”I prefer to let small children be mutilated by elephants, rather than harsh my buzz.”
The radio always played classical music as I was growing up, and the awkward, melancholy voice of Peter Fox Smith was the sound of Saturday afternoon at our house. We didn’t learn table manners or social skills, but we knew how to behave at a concert, and sneered mercilessly at the dolts who clapped between movements.
We drove 45 minutes in a snowstorm to hear Sally Pinkas play (stopping only when we skidded and rear-ended another driver, who turned out to be the local choir director), and once hauled the old red minivan four hours to watch The Marriage of Figaro at the Met. We pulled over to the shoulder at the outskirts of the city, hung sheets on the car windows, and changed into our fanciest dresses (and were appalled to see other opera lovers show up in jeans).
But the best music lesson I had was at night, when the sounds of my father’s upright piano floated up through the floorboards of our bedroom. He often played Bach at night. He would play the same fugues and partitas over and over again, and he never got any better at them — his fingers just wouldn’t perform what his mind was hearing. So what I heard as I fell asleep was a halting, passionate, pleadingly tender rendition of these gorgeous melodies — all largo, grave, and always con espressivo — never in the prestissimo that Bach directed.
I remember first learning that some people are emotionally repelled by the music of Bach, and hear nothing but a dazzlingly intricate array of sound, mathematical, impersonal, elegant and impenetrable. I was dumbfounded. My father, with his meager technical skills, laid Bach out bare. Again and again, struggling to perfect an unusual chord, he would string it out, one note at a time, five or six or seven times in a row. Occasionally, to our glee, he would call out, “Yahhhhh . . . ” in the note he was trying to find—as if his lost fingers would hearken to him and realize which piano key they were aching for.
So to me, Bach sounds like struggle, longing, and tireless devotion. That is still how I hear Bach, even when some hotshot virtuoso zips over the keyboard in the time key that Bach called for. When I discovered that Glenn Gould is known for slowing Bach down, for drawing out the tempo and turning those breakneck intricacies into vulnerable or exultant songs of the human heart, then it sounded like the real Bach to me. In fact, Bach sounds like Music to me — like the heart, the tendons, the inner workings of music. My other cherished composers – Brahms, Schubert, Mahler – wouldn’t have anything to say if Bach hadn’t said it first, somehow cocooned in a code of speed and density.
I am grateful to Glenn Gould for revealing the heartbreaking beauty of Bach, and I’m grateful to my father for revealing his unburnished talent to his family. From him came music. A clever teacher can produce clever students; but, in music as in all other things, only love begets love.
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You should have one of those survey thingies with this post, asking which is better, the 1955 or the 1981 recording. (I assume from your post that you’re a 1981 fan?) But then the comment box might get too violent. . . By the way, have you seen “Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould”? It’s awesome, in a weird way - just like Glenn Gould himself.
Simcha — What a joy to read! Of course, your dad was in “teacher” mode, and when you said you’d rather just let the music wash over you, what he heard (I’ve been there) was, “I deliberately choose ignorance, thanks, Dad.” I also know what you mean about Bach ... he was the Swiss watchmaker of classical music, but you can unpack him by slowing him down a bit.
I’m not that well-versed in classical music, and couldn’t tell you the difference between Glenn Gould and Elliott Gould, but I do know that I wouldn’t have loved music so much if my father, an excellent brass musician (God be good to him), hadn’t loved it first.
Wow. I was thinking that my poor kids have been listening for years now to me struggle my way through the Well-Tempered Clavier (I’ll learn them all! all I need to do is live to about 156), thinking that they’ll end up hating (or worse, indifferent to) Bach - this puts a different spin on it.
Maybe they, too, will end up with fond memories of Dad beating up a poor helpless piano…
Have a wonderful father’s day.
Such beautiful sentiments! And it’s funny your father had those difficulties with Bach, as mine did too. Only I grew up to Suzanne Bona and Sunday Morning Baroque, and my dad played Saturday mornings instead of nights. As I’ve honed my musical sensibilities, though, I’ve grown to like Handel best (but Bach will always have a special place in my heart).
I too, love Bach. He came to life for me when my husband played the Cello suites for me when we were dating. He played with such passion.
Thank you for sharing this!
Simcha,
Can you believe that my son’s piano teacher, Phillip Evans, was personal dear friends with GLENN GOULD? They met in the basement of the Steinway Store in NYC while selecting their pianos they would be performing on for their piano performances in Carnegie Hall! Glenn heard Philip playing one of the Prelude and Fugue from the WTC and came over to him to compliment him. That was the start of a life-long friendship. It is so sad that Glenn died so young! My son, Anthony, is a 14-year-old piano virtuoso and is so blessed to have Maestro Evans as his teacher. Maestro Evans is 83 years old and a Back and Bartok specialist! He is a former FACULTY MEMBER of The Juilliard and Manhattan Schools of Music and also graduated at the top of his class in piano on a full scholarship from Juilliard with both a Bachelor’s and Masters degree. At that time, Juilliard did not have a Doctorate program in Music. He received his doctorate from the Italian conservatory. He has studied Bach’s Prelude and Fugues for over 70 years and Anthony is so very blessed that Maestro Evans is meticulously teaching Bach’s preludes and fugues one by one to my son! Anthony gave a solo concert just two nights ago in Highland Beach with a crowd of 100 people and played two Bach pieces. One of them (Prelude in C Minor, BTW 847, WTC Book 1) he did as his encore with lightening speed while lying down on the piano bench with the his head touching the front of the piano while his hands were criss-crossed upside down - the crowd went wild! I taped him doing this and will be uploading it soon to his YouTube channel. At that concert, there was a former piano teacher of 30 years there trained at the Moscow conservatory and told me specifically that Anthony reminded her of Glenn Gould how he plays the piano! It is amazing that you wrote this article when you did because I rarely see good commentary in the Catholic market about classical music - THANK YOU! I have become a big fan of classical music and my son has such a wonderful story to share of how God has used music to heal him and change his life. Composers like Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Gershwin, and Debussy, helped heal this kid from the devastation of being diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at age 9. I knew he needed an outlet to express his emotions and he wasn’t really into sports so I enrolled in him in a local music school for piano lessons. Before that, he had never read or played a note of music in his life. Within 3 years, he had progressed in his playing that he won 2nd in the State of Florida for the prestigious Music Teachers National Association piano competition’s Junior performance division. He has a photographic memory and graduated top of his 8th grade class and is 1st in the county in Math and 3rd in Science. He prays the rosary daily, in which he experienced a miracle in his life from when a generous couple donated a brand new Yamaha U1 piano to our door shipped from Alabama after he prayed to the Blessed Virgin Mary for 6 months asking her to intercede for God to somehow allow him to have a new piano to play on because the one he had keys broken and was damaging to his fingers and especially because this would be so difficult in this downward economy…and God delivered! This is when he started his “Music for Smiles” volunteer program and where he volunteers much of his time to playing for the blind, elderly, and just now started teaching piano lessons at our Archdiocesan center for those with severe disabilities and special needs! For more information on Anthony, visit www.YouTube.com/grandpiano9 or e-mail me at grandpiano9@bellsouth.net. I would love to hear your father play - do you have any videos on line? Blessings and thanks, Gail
P.S. This year marks my 10th year working for Fr. Mitch Pacwa, S.J. as his Director of Marketing for Ignatius Productions - I am so happy the NCR is now part of the EWTN family!
Well it’s no “Pants” but this is still a fantastic post. I especially like how you find the love of the music in the imperfect performance. In a purely “letting the music wash over me” sense, I never felt like I needed the perfect sound system to enjoy music, always just using whatever medium was available to let it accompany the soundtrack in my head.
I too have never understood how people could think of Bach as cold or “mathematical”. The Glenn Gould Goldbergs express the yearning and grandeur of the human soul in my opinion. Thanks so much too for the story of your dad’s night time playing. My father, who doesn’t have the world’s greatest sense of pitch, used to sing us his favorite folks songs, hymns and Gilbert and Sullivan when we were going to sleep. We would occasionally laugh at him (jerky little kids) when he couldn’t hit the high note, but there was so much love for us and the music in his singing. I miss it.
AHHHH LOVE LOVE LOVE. Based on composers…we are the same person. Except for the clapping between movements stuff. I heartily encourage clapping when the inherent musical and body language cues suggest it; nothing is more awkward than having a rousing first movement that ends with the pianist practically launching off the bench meet with the sound of shuffling feet and coughing, knowing that in less ‘enlightened’ eras the crowd might have demanded an encore on the spot.
You know the violin sonatas and partitas, don’t you? Bach was a Lutheran I believe, but to hear the Chaconne, I might as well be standing in the Cathedrale de Notre Dame. Brahms has one foot in heaven and one firmly on earth, lofty and proud and full of heart…Mendelssohn, ever the sparkling wit, cheerful but not disgustingly so…Schubert, an incredibly gifted and tender melodist…and Mahler. Mahler Mahler Mahler. What can I say, I have a special love for him (along with that other late Romantic who outlived him, Elgar, an English Catholic, nudge nudge!). Some people are very turned off by his music but it always puts me the most in touch with my humanity. I am a sucker for all that poignancy—the Resurrection Symphony makes me bawl like a baby.
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