Glenn Gould. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Los Angeles, 10 April 1964. Glenn Gould, thirty-one, the most famous pianist on the planet after the triumph of the Goldberg Variations recorded in 1955, plays a recital at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre: Bach, Beethoven, Hindemith. No announcement, no farewell. Simply, from that evening on, he would never play in public again. He had eighteen years left to live: he spent all of them in the recording studio, at night, in Toronto.
He explained the reasons himself, in interviews and essays, with the lucidity of a theorist. The concert, he said, is a blood sport: the audience waits for the mistake as the circus waits for the fall, and the performer plays the gladiator. In the studio, instead, you can seek perfection without witnesses, redo, edit, choose: technology is not a fallback, it is a moral instrument, which frees the performance from vanity and the listener from ritual. He went so far as to prophesy that the public concert would be dead by the year 2000, replaced by records and broadcasts: a wrong prophecy, but only slightly bolder than what streaming has since made normal.
It is exactly the mirror image of the position of Celibidache, who wanted nothing to do with records: one considered true only the music that happens once before witnesses, the other only the music built without witnesses to last. Both were wrong, fortunately, and the two halves of that error, between them, sketch out the whole problem of modern interpretation.
What remains of Gould are the eccentricities, which were real and were also armour: the little wooden chair built by his father, carried around the world until it wore out; the coat and gloves in the height of summer; the irrepressible humming that the sound engineers never managed to remove from the recordings. And what remains is the most perfect farewell in the history of recording: in 1981, a year before dying at fifty, he returned to the Goldbergs and recorded them again, very slow where in 1955 they had been lightning-fast, pensive where they had been insolent. Two records with the same title that are two autobiographies: youth and leave-taking, and in between the loudest silence a performer ever chose.