Glenn Gould’s Box of Bach: Clavier-Übung++

from the Amazon.com Web page for the collection being discussed

Among the many artists that recorded for Columbia Records before the label was absorbed into Sony Music Entertainment, pianist Glenn Gould probably commanded one of the largest number of releases. Indeed when a box set was released of The Complete Columbia Album Collection, the contents amounted to 81 CDs, putting Gould in a “quantity league” alongside pianist Arthur Rubinstein and conductors such as Wilhelm Furtwängler and Herbert von Karajan. For all of Gould’s broad repertoire, however, his specialty was always Johann Sebastian Bach. As a result, this past June Sony released The Bach Box of 30 CDs of Gould’s albums devoted to that composer.

It would be a bit unfair to begin writing about Gould without first acknowledging a key sentence on his Wikipedia page:

Gould was known for his eccentricities, from his unorthodox musical interpretations and mannerisms at the keyboard to aspects of his lifestyle and behaviour.

The extent to which his reputation for interpretations extends to Bach recalls one of those anecdotes that deserves to be true, even if it isn’t. It purports to account for an encounter that harpsichordist Wanda Landowska had with cellist Pablo Casals. When the conservation turned to Bach, the exchanges grew increasingly heated until Landowska brought matters to a close saying, “Very well, Pablo, you play Bach your way; and I’ll play it his!” I would not be surprised if “Gould’s way” provoked both Landowska and Casals!

As has been the case with past anthologies, The Bach Box is too big to be given a fair account in a single article. Sadly, finding a good way to sort the content involved contending with one of the most frustrating Sony productions that I have ever encountered. The pages of track listings are interspersed between moderately lengthy episodes discussing the content of the respective recordings; and, to add insult to injury, there is not index at the end of the book (which is hard-bound) that will direct the reader to content (both recorded and in text) about any specific composition. As a result, simply getting an overview of the entire collection is no easy matter.

Consequently, I have tried to draw upon my own Bach scholarship in planning a set of four categories. However, because these categories do not necessarily accommodate themselves to any useful chronology, I have chosen to order them according to the number of the first CD in each collection. The results are as follows:

1. The first category is based primarily on the Clavier-Übung (keyboard exercise) publications. These include the six partitas (BWV 825–830) that constitute the first volume, the BWV 971 (“Italian”) concerto from the second, and the BWV 988 set of “Goldberg” variations from the fourth. (The third volume consisted of organ music.) To these I added the BWV 910–916 keyboard toccatas.
2. The second category can be called the “plays well with others” (with or without an appended question mark) collection, including both keyboard concertos and instrumental sonatas.
3. The third category covers different approaches to preludes and fugues, including The Well-Tempered Clavier, The Art of Fugue, the BWV 903 “Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue,” the so-called “Inventions and Sinfonias” (BWV 772–801), and additional preludes.
4. The final category takes in the keyboard suites based on dance forms and the BWV 831 “Overture in the French style” (because Gould includes it on his recordings of the French suites); for the record, BWV 831 is the second composition included in the second Clavier-Übung volume.

For better or worse I am familiar with much of this repertoire. I have even tried to play much of it for my own edification. This is particularly true of the first two Clavier-Übung volumes. I figured that if the intentions behind that music was pedagogical, I might as well approach it that way through my own groping attempts at self-education.

In that context I would propose that, if Gould was interested in pedagogy at all, it was for the case of showcasing idiosyncratic interpretations of the marks on paper. Most frustrating were the experiences of listening to the dance movements in the partitas. I shall always remember observing a master class taught by violinist Elizabeth Blumenstock at which she informed her student, “Bach certainly knew his dances!” One would be hard-pressed to find any convincing way to dance to any of Gould’s partita movement performances.

I also came away with the impression that Gould was dead-serious in his idiosyncrasies. The only recording that offered the slightest sign that he was enjoying himself behind the keyboard was his account of BWV 971. It would not surprise me to learn that Bach, himself, took considerable delight in being able to capture the rich interplay between a soloist and his/her accompanying ensemble with only two hands on a two-manual harpsichord keyboard. So this particular selection may be the closest Gould came to “channeling” Bach’s own high spirits.

Nevertheless, at least some of those spirits can also be found in the toccata performances. If I agree with Gould about anything, it is that there are too few opportunities to appreciate the pleasures of these seven multi-movement compositions. I also have fond memories of the film The Beat That My Heart Sklpped about a hit-man that wants to be a concert pianist and is studying BWV 914 throughout most of the film’s narrative. Once again, however, I have to take issue with Sony. These toccatas are multi-movement compositions. Even if each one is allocated a single track, the track listings could still enumerate how the movements are distinguished!

As to the fact that Gould recorded BWV 988 twice, that no longer strikes me as idiosyncratic. After all, I just wrote about Lang Lang doing the same thing over a much shorter interval of time. However, if Lang Lang served up a convincing account of BWV 988 as a “journey” through the 30 variations, both Gould versions (along with the stereophonic remastering of the first version) come across as little more than “one damned thing after another” (as Arnold Toynbee put it about history).