Product Description

When Mikhail Baryshnikov defected in Toronto in 1974, he admitted that he knew only three things about Canada: It had great hockey teams, a lot of wheatfields, and Glenn Gould. In Wondrous Strange, Kevin Bazzana vividly recaptures the life of Glenn Gould, one of the most celebrated pianists of our time. Drawing on twenty years of intensive research, including unrestricted access to Gould's private papers and interviews with scores of friends and colleagues, many of them never interviewed before, Bazzana sheds new light on such topics as Gould's family history, his secretive sexual life, and the mysterious problems that afflicted his hands in his later years. The author places Gould's distinctive traits--his eccentric interpretations, his garish onstage demeanor, his resistance to convention--against the backdrop of his religious, upper- middle-class Canadian childhood, illuminating the influence of Gould's mother as well as the lasting impact of the only piano teacher Gould ever had. Bazzana offers a fresh appreciation of Gould's concert career--his high-profile but illness-plagued international tours, his adventurous work for Canadian music festivals, his musical and legal problems with Steinway & Sons. In 1964, Gould made the extraordinary decision to perform only for records, radio, television, and film, a turning point that the author examines with unprecedented thoroughness (discussing, for example, his far-seeing interest in new recording technology). Here, too, are Gould's interests away from the piano, from his ambitious but failed effort to be a composer to his innovative brand of "contrapuntal radio." Richly illustrated with rare photographs, Wondrous Strange is a superbly written account of one of the most memorable and accomplished musicians of our times.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #457827 in Books
• Published on: 2005-05-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 560 pages

From Publishers Weekly
More than two decades after his death at the age of 50, Glenn Gould remains one of the most famous (and in some circles controversial) pianists of the 20th century. Bazzana, who previously wrote a musicological study of Gould's technique, broadens his focus to encompass the performer's brief life in an engaging biography that will captivate classical music lovers and casual listeners alike. Nimble analysis explores the influences of various composers on Gould's playing style while avoiding technical jargon. More importantly Bazzana portrays Gould as a vivid, engaging personality-no mean feat considering his subject withdrew from the concert stage in 1964 and spent the following 18 years addressing the public only through studio recordings and other electronic media. Bazzana confronts all the major clichés that have built up around Gould's history and then makes a persuasive argument against considering them as an indication of mental illness, suggesting that eccentricities like refusing to shake hands and sitting in a custom-designed piano chair were for the most part no more unusual than the habits adopted by any dedicated artist. He also provides ample evidence that the most widely spread stories obscure how resolutely normal Gould was (and, one repeatedly discovers, utterly and charmingly Canadian). For those who already love Gould's performances with all his extraneous noises, this biography provides welcome and equal insight into his life and music, while anyone new to the subject may not even want to wait until finishing the book to run out and buy their first CD.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker
Opinion on the eccentric Canadian pianist Glenn Gould is polarized between idolatry and detestation. Bazzana's portrait—the most balanced yet—ingeniously provides contexts for Gould's behavior, situating his hermeticism in the dour Anglo world of mid-century Toronto. A keen deflater of myths, Bazzana shows that Gould, often assumed to be asexual or gay, had a number of quasi-girlfriends, though his need for solitude always came first. Similarly, although it's true that he sued Steinway, alleging injury from an employee's effusive greeting, among friends handshakes were common. Still, those for whom the eccentricities are half the fun will find endless delight in the meticulous accounts of Gould's diet, hypochondria, and near-suicidal driving. "It's true that I've driven through a number of red lights on occasion," he once said, "but on the other hand, I've stopped at a lot of green ones but never gotten credit for it."
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

From Booklist
Whenever pianists are discussed, Glenn Gould (1932-82) is sure to be mentioned. Blessed with a phenomenal memory, a logically organized mind, manual dexterity, and superb analytical capacity, Gould was able to clarify and interpret music in unconventional ways. He preferred contrapuntal to harmonic music, and his recordings of Bach hold a unique place in musical literature. Preferring to be in control of his life, he kept to himself much of the time. A hypochondriac full of neuroses and anxieties, he nonetheless conversed with friends and colleagues frequently, often in very humorous ways (his long phone calls are legendary). He gave up concert performance in 1964 to concentrate on recordings, media documentaries, writing, and compiling and composing film music. Bazzana, whose doctoral dissertation is on Gould's performance practices and interpretations, and who now edits GlennGould, the magazine of the Glenn Gould Foundation, treats the pianist clinically and analytically, by means of many anecdotes. His biography is a complete portrait of the artist and a thorough investigation of the psyche of an enigmatic renaissance man. For insight into this genuine genius, it can't be beat. Alan Hirsch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

The Idea of Glenn Gould
With this book, Otto Friedrich's biography of Glenn Gould is finally surpassed. Kevin Bazzana was able to get more people to talk about their memories of Gould, and the result is this very readable biography. The author brings back the impact that Gould's 1955 Goldberg Variations had on the music world. One record executive said that it was as if there had been a big run on a new printing of the Enneads of Plotinus. Throughout, Gould's career and life is told in satisfying detail and insight. He tries hard to explain Gould's musical contrariness, as in his mauling of Mozart's sonatas, but often has to simply yield and accept Gould's contrariness as such (though he intriguingly suggests that Gould may have been a musical forerunner of the postmodernists). And of course there is ample celebration of Gould's genius and his enduring cult.

According to Bazzana, he's a regular Victor Borge in the humor department. But on this score as on so many others, Bazzana must largely concur with the received legend, while offering scattered counter-examples. On balance, Gould was an excruciatingly unfunny humorist, a clotted, unreadable essayist, but also an entertaining raconteur, an unaffected star, and a proud Canadian.

Bazzana's biography of Gould succeeds, but I was left wanting more. For example, there doesn't seem to be any discussion of Gould's mysterious failure to record the crown jewel of Bach's oeuvre, The Art of the Fugue. His organ rendition doesn't count, and may be seen as Gould's way of side-stepping the issue. He could certainly play the fugues: they appear in any number of his concerts, and I especially treasure those that appear in his Russian lecture/concert on a Harmonia Mundi disc I own. Fugue no. 1 sounds like the dawning of some grand insight. Yet Gould never committed the whole thing to record on piano, and disappointingly, Bazzana doesn't offer any insight on why.

There are some very minor errors of fact here and there. For example, Bazzana apparently didn't realize that the Last Letters From Stalingrad, for which Gould wrote vocal sketches, were later proven to be forgeries.

It is very good to have a mini-biography of Gould's teacher, Alberto Guerrero. It's a shame that he made no commercial recordings, so that we could assess his influence on his famous pupil.

Bazzana seeks to explain the oft-rumored Canadian Identity to his readers, as it applies to Gould. Marshal McLuhan and Stephen Leacock are presented as exemplars of the Canadian spirit in communications technology and understated humor, respectively. Like McLuhan, Gould's ideas about communications were ahead of their time. Indeed, even with satellite communications and the technological miracles of the Internet Age, we may doubt that we have caught up with him yet. Oscar Wilde would have been a natural on TV chat shows; maybe Gould would have fit right in sometime in the future, after a few more revolutions in technology. It's as if he was a natural born genius at some field of endeavor that hadn't been invented yet, and so had to settle for realizing his visions by splicing magnetic tape. And playing piano, of course.

A Worthy Biography
I can't exactly put a nail on why I have read so many biographies on Gould, but I dare say the story of his reclusiveness, isolation and his pursuit of his art has always intrigued me. Up to this point my favorite biography on Gould had been the Otto Fredrick "A Life in Variations", so I had a pre-conceived notion that this book may just have been be a re-telling of all the stories and interviews I heard in the past.

Bazzana appears to set himself apart here in that he was not asked to write a biography on Gould as he described in the book. There are many snippits of things I've allready knew about Gould here, but Bazzana also tries to put another angle on some of the eccentricities most have heard or read about prior. He encapsulates many different views of Gould, so much so that I feel that I have a bit more insite here. Also, Bazzana appears to set some of the record straight for other biographical sources such as Andrew Kazdin's work called "Glenn Gould At Work, Creative Lying" which is another book I gained knowledge from and did enjoy. It may not be entirely possible to have a true biographical account of Gould, but I still appreciate this additional account of his life although I am only giving it 4 stars because I feel there will never be a complete biography of an individual due to different sources and views, but this one is generally well researched. It does re-hash some of the other interview material, sources etc, but within the book there does appear to be an attempt here to rationalize his behaviour and give a better look beyond the stereotype.

The Enduring Fascination of Gould
What is it about Glenn Gould? He's been the subject of books, dvds, and one odd movie made up of a mosaic of short films. Gould's life and music has captured the attention and imagination of people who otherwise would not venture anywhere near classical performers.

"Wondrous Strange" doesn't delve deeply into opinions, or really attempt to explain why people were (and are) so affected by Gould--it simply lays out Gould's life in block-like sections, marking his attitudes and approaches to both music and life. The result is a thick book full of Gouldian lore, with many fascinating passages, that doesn't cohere quite as well as it could have. Bazzana develops themes, drops them, and then revisits them a few chapters on. Pages could have been trimmed where Bazzana is busy repeating himself. It's as if the book were trying to envelope Gould, like an octopus settling on a lobster.

Does it succeed? Mostly, yes. With repeated gleanings, Gould emerges to the reader as something of a "mutant"--a person slightly ahead of his time. He was a reclusive person, who came to hate concert limelight, and found great comfort in the controlled technology of the studio. He (probably correctly) discerned that an artist usually communicates better, and certainly more intimately, through recordings than through concerts.

Gould's belief in the classical music performer's right to interpret and reimagine great works of music put him at odds with many critics, as did his tendency to "sing" wordlessly as he played. These things only served to reinforce Gould's singularity, and mark him as a modernist. Like James Dean, or the Beatles, Gould transcended his time. He was a dreamer who continues to captivate and to inspire dreams in his legion of followers.