Secret Life Of Glenn Gould

Michael Clarkson

Description

Long after his death, Glenn Gould still lures new listeners to his piano. Of the 18 books and 19 documentaries by or about the arguably most compelling virtuoso of the 20th century, none have contained details about Gould's many love affairs and how they affected his life, his music and filmmaking. The vault to his private life has remained locked since his untimely death in 1982 because of his obsession for privacy and the control of his image. This is the first true expos about Gould, his life, music and eccentricities.

Sujets

• Art music
• Musique savante

Informations

• Publié par: Ecw Press
• Date de parution: 15 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781554906819
• Langue: English

Extrait

A GENIUS IN LOVE

Michael Clarkson
ECW Press

ECW Press
Copyright © Michael Clarkson, 2010
Published by ECW Press
2120 Queen Street East, Suite 200, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4E 1E2
416.694.3348 / [e-mail]
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Clarkson, Michael, 1948–
The secret life of Glenn Gould : a genius in love / Michael Clarkson.
ISBN 978-1-55022-919-6
1. Gould, Glenn, 1932-1982. 2. Pianists — Canada — Biography. I. Title.
ML417.G69C62 2009 786.2092 C2009-905965-7
Editor: Jennifer Hale
Cover Design: David Gee
Cover photo © City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1257, Series 1057, Item 3068
Text Design: Tania Craan
Typesetting: Mary Bowness
Printing: Friesens 1 2 3 4 5
The publication of The Secret Life of Glenn Gould has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and
publishing throughout Canada, by the Ontario Arts Council, by the
Government of Ontario through Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit,
by the OMDC Book Fund, an initiative of the Ontario Media
Development Corporation, and by the Government of Canada through
the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).
PRINTED AND BOUND IN CANADA











To Jennifer (Vanderklei) Clarkson,
the virtuoso in my life

Contents

Cover

Imprint

Dedication


Introduction


FLORA


FRANNY and GOULDIE


SLEEPING with the PIED PIPER


A PROPOSAL


GLADYS and CYNTHIA


Overlapping VOICES


The EMPTY SEAT in the AUDIENCE


That SPRING in BERKELEY SQUARE


Lots of FEMALE FRIENDS


The BEGINNING of a TRIANGLE


The MUSIC INTENSIFIES


Crushed by CAROL


To TORONTO


The BREAKUP


The VOICE on the RADIO


CATHARSIS through MUSIC


TRANSITION


RHAPSODY in MOO


The LIST


MONICA – The LINK between two SECRET KINGDOMS?


The LAUGH HEARD around the WORLD


SUSAN K.


DEATH


Whatever HAPPENED TO . . .

FRANNY (BATCHEN) BARRAULT

CORNELIA FOSS

ROXOLANA ROSLAK

VERNA (SANDERCOCK) POST

GLADYS (SHENNER) RISKIND

MONICA GAYLORD

BIRGIT JOHANSSON

ANAHID ALEXANIAN

SUSAN KOSCIS

ANGELA ADDISON

CAROL (HODGDON) GOODFRIEND

SONIA MARIE DE LEÓN DE VEGA

MARILYN KECSKES

CYNTHIA (MILLMAN) FLOYD

JESSIE GREIG

BERT GOULD

MORRY KERNERMAN

ANDREW KAZDIN

BARBARA FRANKLIN

ANTONIN KUBALEK

STUART HAMILTON

JOAN MAXWELL

JOHN L. ROBERTS

PAUL MYERS

RAY ROBERTS

SUSANNE HAMEL-MICHAUD

GLENN GOULD


Acknowledgments




Sources

AUTHOR INTERVIEWS

BOOKS

MAGAZINES AND NEWSPAPERS

FILMS AND TELEVISION

ALSO


Photos

We both fell in love talking about tranquility of spirit and we re-enforced each other’s determination to find that quality and bring it into our lives.
— Glenn Gould, writing about a woman two years before he died
Introduction
The slow, impending death of a great entertainer. It’s rare that we could actually see such a thing, but there it is, in Glenn Gould’s legendary 1981 performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Fans have watched the video for decades as if it were his epitaph.
And, in a way, an epitaph is what it turned out to be.
As the camera slowly zooms in on the solitary pianist, at first we see Gould with his head all but buried in his Steinway, hunched over and getting as close to the keyboard as possible, an old man shriveling before our eyes. It is difficult to distinguish what is more compelling — the stark visual of the man or his melancholic music, slow and contemplative, surely a reflection, an outpouring of his troubled soul, a lonely artist losing control of his environment. He looks ill, as though he has taken a pounding, physically and emotionally, as though life should not have required five decades to bring him to his knees. Wearing heavy-rimmed glasses, he could be blind. And yet there is poetry to this scene — a bittersweet self-consciousness as Gould chatters and sings quietly to himself. Tender and loving is the voice from his piano. The video ends with Gould dramatically dropping his hands and, finally, his weary head. Arguably the greatest piano virtuoso of his time was expiring. And, in ways, these Goldberg Variations — a beautifully complex score written by Johann Sebastian Bach — reportedly as a charming sleeping pill in 1740 to please an insomniac Russian count — helped put Glenn Gould, age fifty, to sleep. Within seventeen months of this recording, he was dead and the album was released posthumously to rave reviews, winning a Grammy award.
History tells us that Gould died from a stroke and a blood clot, possibly because his immune system had been weakened through prescription drug abuse and an unhealthy lifestyle, and more than forty books and twenty documentaries by or about Gould would seem to back this conclusion. But now, nearly three decades later, we discover through this book perhaps another important cause of his demise — heartsickness.
In his last seven years, Gould suffered an unprecedented string of heartbreaks with women, beginning with the death of his mother, Flora, in 1975, and reportedly ending with a marriage rejection from Birgit Johansson, a piano teacher in Stockholm, several days before his stroke. “Oh why couldn’t I have given him the time? Was it because of me he died?” the charismatic Johansson told relatives. “Why didn’t I do more for him?”
Sandwiched between the loss of Gould’s two beloved “piano teachers” were the collapse of his ten-year affair with Cornelia Foss, the wife of famous composer Lukas Foss, and two shadowy relationships which ended mysteriously — with soprano Roxolana Roslak and pianist Monica Gaylord. “Don’t tell anybody about me and Glenn,” Gaylord told Gould’s assistant at his funeral.
Many of these relationships were painful enough for the sensitive Gould, but perhaps even more so because he kept them secret. He confided in no one when they fell apart, often due to his own emotional shortcomings and personal demands.
Gould, who told friends he would not live past fifty, may have known what was coming. Some evidence of this is seen in the two recordings of his signature Goldberg Variations. In the twenty-six years between those records, released in 1956 and 1982, something happened to Gould, and even he saw it. In the early 1980s, while reviewing his initial recording, Gould remarked, “I could not recognize, or identify with, the spirit of the person who made that recording. It really seemed like some other person, some other spirit had been involved.” In this statement, Gould seemed to be admitting what many people thought impossible — that Gould had matured, had been swayed by his life experiences and by the outside world to the point his spirit had changed. There is additional video evidence to support the changes in the two “Gould-berg” signatures. A 1964 film shows a spritely Gould as a hip artist on a more passionate, hopeful mission — a man in a hurry to get somewhere. Perhaps what helped to change Gould through the years was the ebb and flow of his personal life, the bumps and the bruises of his romances with Foss, Roslak and Johansson, and with piano instructor Franny Batchen in the 1950s. The turmoil in those relationships was something that perhaps affected his music as well. And yet, Gould’s clandestine, somewhat eccentric romances were not all sad songs. They seemed to enrich his life and his art in positive ways, giving to both deeper meaning, spiced with emotions he reluctantly was forced to acknowledge.
Meanwhile, long after his death, Gould still lures new listeners to his piano, connecting with them on a haunting, personal level. “He feels and you feel,” says New York writer Nicole Audrey. “I can feel his pain and joy — it touches me. He speaks directly to me.” But during his career, just who was Gould playing for? His audience? Himself? His demanding mother? All are likely true, but he was also richly inspired by — and bared his soul at the keyboard to — a secret society of women, the girlfriends who stirred his hard-to-fetch feelings, compelled him to propose marriage and acted as sounding boards and motivators for his unforgettable interpretations of the classics and his own compositions. They were the voices, the silent chorus behind the solitary genius.
Fast-forward to a snowy, “warm-as-toast-in-your-parka” kind of December day in 2006, the sort of day that Glenn Gould would have adored, when the first seed for this book was planted. My granddaughter, Skye, and I tossed crumbs on the frozen ground to pigeons in a small park in midtown Toronto. She looked up innocently at a sign that read: glenn gould park.
“Who was he, Papa?” she asked.
“He was a famous pianist from years ago.”
“Who was he, Papa?” Skye repeated.
Beyond his famous music, I knew that some of Gould’s appeal was his eccentricity and the mystery surrounding his private life, that he supposedly gave up his earthly pleasures for his art as a monk might do, but I suspected there was more to his story. An inquisitive writer/researcher for four decades, I was not satisfied with the answer I had given my granddaughter and I decided to find out mo