A cantata (literally 'sung', derived from the Italian word 'cantare') is a vocal composition with an instrumental accompaniment, typically in several movements, often involving a choir.

The meaning of the term changed over time, from the simple single voice madrigal of the early 17th century, to the multi-voice 'cantata da camera' and the 'cantata da chiesa' of the later part of that century, from the more substantial dramatic forms of the 18th century (including the 200-odd church and secular cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach) to the usually sacred-texted 19th-century cantata, which was effectively a type of short oratorio.

Historical context

The term originated in the early 17th century simultaneously with opera and oratorio. Prior to that all "cultured" music was vocal. With the rise of instrumental music the term appeared, while the instrumental art became sufficiently developed to be embodied in sonatas. From the beginning of the 17th century until late in the 18th, the cantata for one or two solo voices with accompaniment of basso continuo (and perhaps a few solo instruments) was a principal form of Italian vocal chamber music.

A cantata consisted first of a declamatory narrative or scene in recitative, held together by a primitive aria repeated at intervals. Fine examples may be found in the church music of Giacomo Carissimi; and the English vocal solos of Henry Purcell (such as Mad Tom and Mad Bess) show the utmost that can be made of this archaic form. With the rise of the da capo aria, the cantata became a group of two or three arias joined by recitative. George Frideric Handel's numerous Italian duets and trios are examples on a rather large scale. His Latin motet Silete Venti, for soprano solo, shows the use of this form in church music.

Differences from other musical forms

The Italian solo cantata tended, when on a large scale, to become indistinguishable from a scene in an opera, in the same way the church cantata, solo or choral, is indistinguishable from a small oratorio or portion of an oratorio. This is equally evident whether we examine the unparalleled church cantatas of Bach, of which nearly 200 are extant (see list of cantatas by Johann Sebastian Bach), or the Chandos Anthems of Handel. In Johann Sebastian Bach's case many of the larger cantatas are actually called oratorios; and the Christmas Oratorio is a collection of six church cantatas actually intended for performance on six different days, though together forming as complete an artistic whole as any classical oratorio.

Baroque

Cantatas were in great demand for the services of the Lutheran church. Sacred cantatas for the liturgy or other occasions were not only composed by Bach but also by Dieterich Buxtehude, Christoph Graupner, Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel and Georg Philipp Telemann, to name a few. Many secular cantatas were composed for events in the nobility. They were so similar in form to the sacred ones that many of them were parodied (in parts or completely) to sacred cantatas, for example in Bach's Christmas Oratorio.

Classical and romantic period

The term cantata came to be applied almost exclusively to choral works, as distinguished from solo vocal music. In early 19th-century cantatas the chorus is the vehicle for music more lyric and songlike than in oratorio, not excluding the possibility of a brilliant climax in a fugue as in Ludwig van Beethoven's Glorreiche Augenblick, Carl Maria von Weber's Jubel-Kantate, and Felix Mendelssohn's Die erste Walpurgisnacht. Mendelssohn's Symphony Cantata, the Lobgesang, is a hybrid work, partly in the oratorio style. It is preceded by three symphonic movements, a device avowedly suggested by Beethoven's ninth symphony; but the analogy is not accurate, as Beethoven's work is a symphony of which the fourth movement is a choral finale of essentially single design, whereas Mendelssohn's Symphony Cantata is a cantata with three symphonic preludes. Robert Schumann wrote the cantata Paradise and the Peri. The full lyric possibilities of a string of choral songs were realized by Johannes Brahms in his Rinaldo, that—like the Walpurgisnacht—was set to a text by Goethe. Other cantatas, Beethoven's Meeresstille, works of Brahms and many notable small English choral works, such as cantatas of John Henry Maunder and John Stanley, find various ways to set poetry to choral music. The competition for the French Prix de Rome prescribed that each candidate submit a cantata. Hector Berlioz failed in three attempts before finally winning in 1830 with Sardanapale. While almost all of the Prix de Rome cantatas have long since been forgotten (along with their composers, for the most part), Debussy's prize-winning L'enfant prodigue (1884, following his unsuccessful Le gladiateur of 1883) is still performed occasionally today. Late in the century, Gustav Mahler wrote his early Das klagende Lied on his own words, between 1878 and 1880, and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor created a successful trilogy of cantatas The Song of Hiawatha between 1898 and 1900.

Twentieth century and beyond

Cantatas, both of the chamber variety and on a grand scale, were composed after 1900 as well. In the early part of the century, secular cantatas once again became prominent, while the 19th-century tradition of sacred cantatas also continued. Ralph Vaughan Williams composed both kinds: "festival" cantatas such as Toward the Unknown Region (1907), Five Mystical Songs (1911), and Five Tudor Portraits (1936), and sacred cantatas including Sancta civitas (1926), Benedicite (1930), Dona nobis pacem (1936), and Hodie (1954). Joseph Ryelandt also composed secular and sacred cantatas, such as Le chant de la pauvreté Op.92 in 1928 and Veni creator Op.123 in 1938. Béla Bartók composed the secular Cantata Profana, subtitled "The Nine Splendid Stags" and based on a Romanian folk tale, in 1930. Of Anton Webern's last three compositions, two are secular cantatas: Cantata No. 1, op. 29 (1938–39), and Cantata No. 2, op. 31 (1941–43), both setting texts by Hildegard Jone. Webern had begun sketching a Third Cantata by the time he was killed in 1945. Sergei Prokofiev composed Semero ikh (1917–18; rev. 1933), and in 1939 premiered a cantata drawn from the film music for Alexander Nevsky.

Patriotic cantatas celebrating anniversaries of events in the Revolution or extolling state leaders were frequently commissioned in the Soviet Union between 1930 and the middle of the century, though these occasional works were seldom among their composers' best. Examples include Dmitri Shostakovich's Poem of the Motherland, op. 47 (1947) and The Sun Shines over Our Motherland, op. 90 (1952), and thee works by Prokofiev, Zdravitsa! [Hail to Stalin] (1939), along with two festival cantatas, the Cantata for the Twentieth Anniversary of the October Revolution, op. 74, and Flourish, Mighty Homeland, op. 114, for the thirtieth anniversary of the same event. Dmitry Kabalevsky also composed four such cantatas, The Great Homeland, op. 35 (1941–42), The Song of Morning, Spring and Peace, op. 57 (1957–58), Leninists, op.63 (1959), and About Our Native Land, op. 82 (1965).

In 1940, the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos created a secular cantata titled Mandu çarará, based on an Indian legend collected by Barbosa Rodrigues. Igor Stravinsky composed a work titled simply Cantata in 1951–52, which used stanzas from the 15th-century "Lyke-wake Dirge" as a narrative frame for other anonymous English lyrics. Hans Werner Henze composed a Cantata della fiaba estrema (1963), as well as a number of other works that might be regarded as cantatas, such as Kammermusik (1958, rev. 1963), Muzen Siziliens (1966), and El Cimarrón (1969–70). Momente (1962–64/1969), one of the most important works of Karlheinz Stockhausen, is often described as a cantata. Benjamin Britten composed at least three works he designated as cantatas: the Cantata Academica, op. 62 (1959), the Cantata Misericordium, op. 69 (1963), and Phaedra, op. 93 (1975). Alberto Ginastera also composed three works in this form: the Cantata para América Mágica, op. 27 (1960), Bomarzo, op. 32 (1964), and Milena, op. 37 (1971), and Gottfried von Einem composed in 1973 An die Nachgeborenen based on diverse texts, the title taken from a poem of Bertolt Brecht. Mikis Theodorakis composed the cantatas According to the Sadducees and Canto Olympico. Ivan Moody wrote in 1995 Revelation. Cantatas were also composed by Erik Bergman, Osvald Chlubna, and Dimitri Nicolau.

References

Timms, Colin, Nigel Fortune, Malcolm Boyd, Friedhelm Krummacher, David Tunley, James R. Goodall, and Juan José Carreras. 2001. "Cantata". 2001. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan Publishers.

External links

Dolmetsch music dictionary: C–Car

Multimedia Dictionary: Cantata at Virginia Tech

Category:Italian loanwords Category:Christian music Category:Western classical music styles

Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns () (9 October 183516 December 1921) was a French Late-Romantic composer, organist, conductor, and pianist, known especially for The Carnival of the Animals, Danse macabre, Samson and Delilah, Piano Concerto No. 2, Havanaise, Introduction and Rondo capriccioso, Cello Concerto No.1 in A minor, and his Symphony No. 3 (Organ Symphony).

Early years

Saint-Saëns was born in Paris, France on 9 October 1835. His father, a government clerk, died three months after his birth. He was raised by his mother, Clémence, with the assistance of her aunt, Charlotte Masson, who moved in. Masson introduced Saint-Saëns to the piano, and began giving him lessons on the instrument. At about this time, age two, Saint-Saëns was found to possess perfect pitch. His first composition, a little piece for the piano dated 22 March 1839, is now kept in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Saint-Saëns's precociousness was not limited to music. He learned to read and write by age three, and had some mastery of Latin by the age of seven. His first public concert appearance occurred when he was five years old, when he accompanied a Beethoven violin sonata. He went on to begin in-depth study of the full score of Don Giovanni. In 1842, Saint-Saëns began piano lessons with Camille-Marie Stamaty, a pupil of Friedrich Kalkbrenner, who had his students play the piano while resting their forearms on a bar situated in front of the keyboard, so that all the pianist's power came from the hands and fingers but not the arms. At ten years of age, Saint-Saëns gave his debut public recital at the Salle Pleyel, with a performance of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 15 in B-flat major (K. 450), and various pieces by Handel, Kalkbrenner, Hummel, and Bach. As an encore, Saint-Saëns offered to play any of Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas from memory. Word of this incredible concert spread across Europe, and as far as the United States with an article in a Boston newspaper.

He then studied composition under Fromental Halévy at the Conservatoire de Paris. Saint-Saëns won many top prizes and gained a reputation that resulted in his introduction to Franz Liszt, who would become one of his closest friends. At the age of sixteen, Saint-Saëns wrote his first symphony; his second, published as Symphony No. 1 in E-flat major, was performed in 1853 to the astonishment of many critics and fellow composers. Hector Berlioz, who also became a good friend, famously remarked, Il sait tout, mais il manque d'inexpérience ("He knows everything, but lacks inexperience").

Middle years

For income, Saint-Saëns played the organ at various churches in Paris, with his first appointment being at the Saint-Merri in the Beaubourg area. In 1857, he replaced Lefébure-Wely at the eminent position of organist at the Église de la Madeleine, which he kept until 1877. His weekly improvisations stunned the Parisian public and earned Liszt's 1866 observation that Saint-Saëns was the greatest organist in the world. He also composed a famous piece called Danse Macabre at this time.

From 1861 to 1865, Saint-Saëns held his only teaching position as professor of piano at the École Niedermeyer, where he raised eyebrows by including contemporary music—Liszt, Gounod, Schumann, Berlioz, and Wagner—along with the school's otherwise conservative curriculum of Bach and Mozart. His most successful students at the Niedermeyer were André Messager and Gabriel Fauré, who was Saint-Saëns's favourite pupil and soon his closest friend.

Saint-Saëns was a multi-faceted intellectual. From an early age, he studied geology, archaeology, botany, and lepidoptery. He was an expert at mathematics. Later, in addition to composing, performing, and writing musical criticism, he held discussions with Europe's finest scientists and wrote scholarly articles on acoustics, occult sciences, Roman theatre decoration, and ancient instruments. He wrote a philosophical work, Problèmes et mystères, which spoke of science and art replacing religion; Saint-Saëns's pessimistic and atheistic ideas foreshadowed Existentialism. Other literary achievements included Rimes familières, a volume of poetry, and La crampe des écrivains, a successful farcical play. He was also a member of the Astronomical Society of France; he gave lectures on mirages, had a telescope made to his own specifications, and even planned concerts to correspond to astronomical events such as solar eclipses.

In 1870, the Franco-Prussian War, despite being over in barely six months, left an indelible mark on the composer. He was relieved from fighting duty as one of the favourites of a relative of emperor Napoleon III, but fled nonetheless to London for several months when the Paris Commune broke out in the besieged Paris of winter 1871, his fame and societal status posing a threat to his survival. In the same year, he co-founded with Romain Bussine the Société Nationale de Musique in order to promote a new and specifically French music. After the fall of the Paris Commune, the Society premiered works by members such as Fauré, César Franck, Édouard Lalo, and Saint-Saëns himself, who served as the society's co-president. In this way, Saint-Saëns became a powerful figure in shaping the future of French music.

In 1875, Saint-Saëns married Marie-Laure Truffot and they had two children, André and Jean-François, who died within six weeks of each other in 1878. Saint-Saëns left his wife three years later. The two never divorced, but lived the rest of their lives apart from one another.

Later years

In 1886 Saint-Saëns debuted two of his most renowned compositions: The Carnival of the Animals and Symphony No. 3, dedicated to Franz Liszt, who died that year. That same year, however, Vincent d'Indy and his allies had Saint-Saëns removed from the Société Nationale de Musique. Two years later, Saint-Saëns's mother died, driving the mourning composer away from France to the Canary Islands under the alias "Sannois". Over the next several years he travelled around the world, visiting exotic locations in Europe, North Africa, Southeast Asia, and South America. Saint-Saëns chronicled his travels in many popular books using his nom de plume, Sannois.

In 1908, he had the distinction of being the first celebrated composer to write a musical score to a motion picture, The Assassination of the Duke of Guise (L'assassinat du duc de Guise), directed by Charles Le Bargy and André Calmettes, adapted by Henri Lavedan, featuring actors of the Comédie Française. It was 18 minutes long, a considerable run time for the day.

In 1915, Saint-Saëns traveled to San Francisco, California and guest conducted the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra during the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, one of two world's fairs celebrating the completion of the Panama Canal.

Saint-Saëns continued to write on musical, scientific and historical topics, travelling frequently before spending his last years in Algiers, Algeria. In recognition of his accomplishments, the government of France awarded him the Légion d'honneur.

Saint-Saëns died of pneumonia on 16 December 1921 at the Hôtel de l'Oasis in Algiers. His body was repatriated to Paris, honoured by state funeral at La Madeleine, and interred at Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris.

Relationships with other composers

Saint-Saëns was either friend or enemy to some of Europe's most distinguished musicians. He stayed close to Franz Liszt and maintained a fast friendship with his pupil Gabriel Fauré, who replaced him as organist and choirmaster when he retired. Additionally, he was a teacher and friend to Isidor Philipp, who headed the piano department at the Paris Conservatory for several decades and was a composer and editor of the music of many composers. But despite his strong advocacy of French music, Saint-Saëns openly despised many of his fellow-composers in France such as Franck and d'Indy, and while he praises the musical genius of Jules Massenet in his 1919 book Musical Memories, he also states pointedly in the same chapter that he had no use for Massenet personally. Saint-Saëns also hated the music of Claude Debussy; he is reported to have told Pierre Lalo, music critic, and son of composer Édouard Lalo, "I have stayed in Paris to speak ill of Pelléas et Mélisande." The personal animosity was mutual; Debussy quipped: "I have a horror of sentimentality, and I cannot forget that its name is Saint-Saëns." On other occasions, however, Debussy acknowledged an admiration for Saint-Saëns's musical talents.

Saint-Saëns had been an early champion of Richard Wagner's music in France, teaching his pieces during his tenure at the École Niedermeyer and premiering the March from Tannhäuser. He had stunned even Wagner himself when he sight-read the entire orchestral scores of Lohengrin, Tristan und Isolde, and Siegfried, prompting Hans von Bülow to refer to him as "the greatest musical mind" of the era. However, despite admitting appreciation for the power of Wagner's work, Saint-Saëns defiantly stated that he was not an aficionado. In 1886, Saint-Saëns was punished for some particularly harsh and anti-German comments on the Paris production of Lohengrin by losing engagements and receiving negative reviews throughout Germany. Later, after World War I, Saint-Saëns angered both French and Germans with his inflammatory articles entitled Germanophilie, which ruthlessly attacked Wagner.

Saint-Saëns edited Jean-Philippe Rameau's Pièces de clavecin, and published them in 1895 through Durand in Paris (re-printed by Dover in 1993).

According to a well known anecdote which has not been confirmed, however, Saint-Saëns stormed out of the première of Igor Stravinsky's Le sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) On 29 May 1913, allegedly infuriated over what he considered the misuse of the bassoon in the ballet's opening bars.

Reputation

Saint-Saëns began his musical career as a musical pioneer, introducing to France the symphonic poem and championing the radical works of Liszt and Wagner at a time when Bach and Mozart were the norms. By the dawn of the 20th century, Saint-Saëns was an ultra-conservative, fighting the influence of Debussy and Richard Strauss. This is hardly surprising—Saint-Saëns's career began while Chopin and Mendelssohn were in their prime, and ended at the commencement of the Jazz Age; but his image endured for years after his death.

As a composer, Saint-Saëns was often criticized for his refusal to embrace romanticism and at the same time, rather paradoxically, for his adherence to the conventions of 19th-century musical language. He is remembered chiefly for works such as The Carnival of the Animals, which was not published in full until after his death - reportedly because Saint-Saëns feared it would affect his reputation as a serious composer; the Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso for violin and orchestra, the operas Samson and Delilah and Henry VIII (of which only the first is frequently performed today), the Symphony No. 3; the second, fourth and fifth piano concertos; the third violin concerto; the first cello concerto; and the first violin sonata.

Music

Style

Saint-Saëns' concertos and many of his chamber music works are both technically difficult and transparent, requiring the skills of a virtuoso. The later chamber music pieces, such as the second violin sonata, the second cello sonata, and the second piano trio, are less accessible to a listener than earlier pieces in the same form. They were composed and performed when Saint-Saëns was already slipping in popularity and, as a result, they are little known. They show a willingness to experiment with more progressive musical language and to abandon lyricism and charm for more profound expression.

The piano music, while not as deep or as challenging as that of some of his contemporaries, occupies the stylistic ground between Liszt and Ravel. At times brilliant, transparent and idiomatic, the music for two pianos includes the Variations on a Theme by Beethoven, the Scherzo, a palindromic piece that uses a blend of modern tonalities and conventional gestures, and the Caprice arabe, a rhythmically inventive fantasy that pays homage to the music of northern Africa. Although Saint-Saëns was considered old-fashioned in later life, he explored many new forms and reinvigorated some older ones. His compositional approach was inspired by French classicism, which makes him an important forerunner of the neoclassicism of Ravel and others.

In performance, Saint-Saëns is said to have been "unequalled on the organ", and rivaled by only a few on the piano. However, Saint-Saëns's concert style was restrained, subtle, and cool; he sat unmoving at the piano. His playing was marked by extraordinarily even scales and passagework, great speed, and aristocratic refinement. The recordings he left at the end of his life give glimpses of these traits. He was often charged with being unemotional and business-like, less memorable than other more charismatic performers. He was probably the first pianist to publicly perform a cycle of all the Mozart piano concertos. In some cases these influenced his own piano concertos; for example, the first movement of his 4th Piano Concerto in C minor strongly resembles the last movement of Mozart's 24th Concerto, which is in the same key. In turn, his own concertos appear to have influenced those of Sergei Rachmaninoff and other later Romantic composers. Throughout his life, Saint-Saëns continued to play with the technique taught to him by Stamaty, using the strength of the hand rather than the arm. Claudio Arrau never forgot the ease with which Saint-Saëns played (he cites Chopin's fourth scherzo as an example).

Musical works

Saint-Saëns's early start and his long life provided him with time to write hundreds of compositions; during his career, he wrote many dramatic works, including four symphonic poems, and thirteen operas, of which Samson et Dalila and the symphonic poem Danse macabre are among his most famous. In all, he composed over 300 works and was the first major composer to write music specifically for the cinema, for Henri Lavedan's film The Assassination of the Duke of Guise (Op. 128, 1908).

Saint-Saëns wrote five symphonies, although only three of these are numbered. He withdrew the first, written for a Mozartian-scale orchestra, and the third, a competition piece. His symphonies are a significant contribution to the genre during a period when the French symphonic tradition was otherwise in decline. Saint-Saëns also contributed voluminously to the French concertante literature; he wrote five piano concertos, three violin concertos, two cello concertos, and about twenty smaller concertante works for soloist and orchestra, including a colorfully orchestrated piano fantasy, Africa; the Havanaise and the Introduction and Rondo capriccioso for violin and orchestra; and the Morceau de concert for harp and orchestra. Of the concertos, the Second Piano concerto is one of the most popular of virtuoso piano concertos, and the Third Violin Concerto and First Cello Concerto also remain popular.

In 1886 he wrote his final symphony, the Symphony No. 3, avec orgue (with organ), one of his best-known works. The motif of the third became the inspiration for the 1978 song If I Had Words by Scott Fitzgerald and Yvonne Keeley. Aided by the monumental symphonic organs built in France by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, at that time the world's foremost organ builder, this work demonstrates the spirit of "gigantism" and the confidence of France in the Belle Époque at the end of the 19th century, a period that produced the Eiffel Tower, the Universal Exposition at Paris. The confident Maestoso fourth movement perhaps reflects the confidence of Europe in its technology, its science, its "age of reason". He was frequently named as "the most German of all the French composers", perhaps due to his use of counterpoint.

In 1886, Saint-Saëns also completed The Carnival of the Animals, which was first performed privately on 9 March. In contrast with the work's later popularity, Saint-Saëns forbade complete performances of it shortly after its première, allowing only one movement, Le cygne (The Swan) for cello and two pianos, to be published in his lifetime. Carnival was written as a musical jest, and Saint-Saëns believed it would damage his reputation as a serious composer. In fact, since its posthumous publication, this work's imagination and musical brilliance have impressed listeners and critics.

Saint-Saëns also wrote six preludes and fugues for organ, three in Op. 99 and three in Op. 109, of which Op. 99, no. 3 in E flat major is most often performed.

The opera Hélène was composed by Saint-Saëns for the great Australian soprano, Dame Nellie Melba, in 1904. Unstaged after its premiere in Monaco, it was performed in the soprano's home city (Melbourne) during January 2008.

One of Saint-Saëns's symphonic poems, Le rouet d'Omphale, Op. 31, became famous to a new generation of listeners beginning in 1937 through its use of the ominous middle section of it as the theme to the long-running radio program, The Shadow.

Media

Controversies

Saint-Saëns was thought to have ethnically Jewish traits, especially in his youth. Adolphe Boschot said that Saint-Saëns could not be of Jewish origin because his uncle was a priest,

He was also rumoured to be homosexual.

References

Further reading

Michael Stegemann: Camille Saint-Saëns and the French Solo Concerto from 1850 to 1920. Portland OR: Amadeus Press, 1991. ISBN 0-931340-35-7

External links

Piano Rolls (The Reproducing Piano Roll Foundation)

Saint-Saens playing his own Piano Concerto #2 (opening)

Saint-Saens playing Valse Nonchalente Op.110

Saint-Saens playing Rhapsodie d'Auvergne Op.73

Category:1835 births Category:1921 deaths Category:People from Paris Category:Child classical musicians Category:Composers for violin Category:Composers for pipe organ Category:French classical pianists Category:French composers Category:French Roman Catholics Category:French classical organists Category:Opera composers Category:Romantic composers Category:French military personnel of the Franco-Prussian War Category:Recipients of the Pour le Mérite (civil class) Category:Alumni of the Conservatoire de Paris Category:Honorary Members of the Royal Philharmonic Society Category:Burials at Montparnasse Cemetery

Name	Glenn Gould
Caption	Statue of Glenn Gould, Toronto
Birthdate	September 25, 1932
Birthplace	Toronto, Ontario
Deathdate	October 04, 1982
Deathplace	Toronto, Ontario
Occupation	Pianist, writer, broadcaster
Influenced	}}

Glenn Herbert Gould (September 25, 1932 October 4, 1982) was a Canadian pianist who became one of the best-known and most celebrated classical pianists of the 20th century. He was particularly renowned as an interpreter of the keyboard music of Johann Sebastian Bach. His playing was distinguished by a remarkable technical proficiency and a capacity to articulate the polyphonic texture of Bach’s music.

Gould rejected most of the standard Romantic piano literature and shunned the performance of several of its composers such as Franz Liszt, Robert Schumann, and Frédéric Chopin. Although his recordings were dominated by Bach, Gould's oeuvre was diverse, including works by Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Brahms, pre-Baroque composers such as Jan Sweelinck, and 20th-century composers such as Paul Hindemith and Arnold Schoenberg. Gould was well-known for various eccentricities, ranging from his unorthodox musical interpretations and mannerisms at the keyboard, to aspects of his lifestyle and personal behavior. He abandoned the concert platform at the age of 31 to concentrate on studio recording and other projects.

Gould was also known as a writer, composer, conductor, and broadcaster. He was a prolific contributor to musical journals, in which he discussed musical theory and outlined his musical philosophy. His career as a composer was less distinguished; his output was minimal and many projects were left unfinished. There is evidence that, if he had lived beyond the age of 50, he intended to abandon the piano, and devote the remainder of his career to conducting and other projects. As a broadcaster, Gould was prolific. His output ranged from television and radio broadcasts of studio performances to musique concrète radio documentaries about life in the Canadian wilderness.

Life

Glenn Herbert Gould was born at home in Toronto on September 25, 1932, to Russell Herbert ("Bert") Gold and Florence ("Flora") Emma Gold (née Greig), Presbyterians of Scottish and English ancestry. His maternal grandfather was a cousin of Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg. The family's surname was changed to Gould informally around 1939 in order to avoid being mistaken as Jewish, because of a series of reasons centering on the prevailing anti-Semitism of prewar Toronto and the Gold surname's Jewish association. Gould had no Jewish ancestry, though he sometimes made jokes on the subject, like "When people ask me if I'm Jewish, I always tell them that I was Jewish during the war."

Gould's interest in music and his talent as a pianist became evident very early on. Both his parents were musical, and his mother, especially, encouraged the infant Gould's early musical development. Prior to his birth, his mother planned for Glenn to become a successful musician, especially a pianist, and thus exposed him to music during her pregnancy. As a baby, he reportedly hummed instead of crying and wiggled his fingers as if playing chords, leading his doctor to predict that Glenn would "be either a physician or a pianist". By the age of three, Glenn's perfect pitch was noticed and Glenn learned to read music before he could read words. When presented with a piano, young Glenn was reported to strike single notes and listen to their long decay, a practice his father Bert noted was different from typical children. When he was six, Glenn was taken for the first time to hear a live musical performance by a celebrated soloist; this had a tremendous effect on him. He later described the experience:

It was Hofmann. It was, I think, his last performance in Toronto, and it was a staggering impression. The only thing I can really remember is that, when I was being brought home in a car, I was in that wonderful state of half-awakeness in which you hear all sorts of incredible sounds going through your mind. They were all orchestral sounds, but I was playing them all, and suddenly I was Hofmann. I was enchanted.

As a young child, Glenn was taught by his mother. He began attending The Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, where he studied piano with Alberto Guerrero, organ with Frederick C. Silvester, and music theory with Leo Smith, at the age of 10. Gould passed his final Conservatory examination in piano at the age of 12 (achieving the "highest marks of any candidate"), thus attaining "professional standing as a pianist" at that age. One year later he passed the written theory exams, qualifying for the ATCM diploma (Associate, Toronto Conservatory of Music). and the following year, he made his first appearance with an orchestra, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, in a performance of the first movement of Beethoven's 4th piano concerto. His first solo recital followed in 1947, and his first recital on radio was with the CBC in 1950. This was the beginning of his long association with radio and recording. He founded the Festival Trio chamber group in 1953 with the cellist Isaac Mamott and the violinist Albert Pratz.

In 1957 Gould embarked on a tour of the Soviet Union, becoming the first North American to play there since World War II. His concerts featured Bach, Beethoven, and the serial music of Schoenberg and Berg, which had been suppressed in the Soviet Union during the era of Socialist Realism. Gould made his Boston debut in 1958, playing for the Peabody Mason Concert Series. One audience member was so moved that she wrote a letter to the editor of the Boston Herald commenting, "If I never hear Bach's Goldberg Variations again, I feel with all my heart that I have heard the ultimate, and am grateful".

On April 10, 1964, Gould gave his last public performance, playing in Los Angeles, at the Wilshire Ebell Theater. Among the pieces he performed that night were Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 30, selections from Bach's The Art of Fugue, and Paul Hindemith's Piano Sonata No. 3. Gould performed fewer than two hundred concerts over the course of his career, of which fewer than 40 were overseas. For pianists such as Van Cliburn, 200 concerts would have amounted to about two year's touring. For the rest of his life, Gould eschewed live performance, focusing instead on recording, writing, and broadcasting.

Later years

Towards the end of his life, he began conducting; he had earlier directed Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 and the cantata Widerstehe doch der Sünde from the harpsipiano (a piano with metal hammers to simulate a harpsichord's sound), and Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 2 (Urlicht part) in the 1960s. His last recording was as a conductor, conducting Wagner's Siegfried Idyll in its original chamber music scoring. He had intended to give up the piano at the age of 50, spending later years conducting, writing about music, and composing.

Death

On September 27, 1982, after experiencing a severe headache, he suffered a stroke, which paralyzed the left side of his body. He was admitted to the Toronto General Hospital, and his condition rapidly deteriorated. By October 4, there was evidence of brain damage, and Gould's father decided that his son should be taken off life support. He is buried in Toronto's Mount Pleasant Cemetery, next to his parents. The first few measures of the Goldberg Variations are carved on his marker.

Gould as a pianist

Gould was known for his vivid musical imagination, and listeners regarded his interpretations as ranging from brilliantly creative to, on occasion, outright eccentric. His piano playing had great clarity, particularly in contrapuntal passages, and extraordinary control. He was considered a child prodigy, and in adulthood was also described as a musical phenomenon. As he played, he often swayed his torso in a clockwise motion.

, demonstrating Guerrero's technical idea that Gould should pull down at keys instead of striking them from above. The photo was taken in 1945 before Gould fully developed this technique.]] When Gould was around ten years old, he injured his back as a result of a fall from a boat ramp on the shore of Lake Simcoe. This incident is almost certainly related to his father's subsequent construction for him of an adjustable-height chair, which he used for the rest of his life. This famous chair was designed so that Gould could sit very low at the keyboard, with the object of pulling down on the keys rather than striking them from above – a central technical idea of his teacher, Alberto Guerrero. Gould's mother urged the young Gould to sit up straight at the keyboard.

Gould developed a formidable technique. It enabled him to choose very fast tempos whilst retaining the separateness and clarity of each note. His extremely low position at the instrument arguably permitted more control over the keyboard. Gould showed considerable technical skill in performing and recording a wide repertoire including virtuosic and romantic works, such as his own arrangement of Ravel's La valse and Liszt's transcriptions of Beethoven's fifth and sixth symphonies. Gould worked from a young age with his teacher Alberto Guerrero on a technique known as finger-tapping: a method of training the fingers to act more independently from the arm.

Gould claimed he almost never practiced on the piano, preferring to study music by reading it rather than playing it|group=N}} another technique he had learned from Guerrero. His manual practicing focused on articulation, rather than basic facility. He may have spoken ironically about his practicing, but there is evidence that on occasion, he did practice quite hard, sometimes using his own drills and techniques.

He stated that he didn't understand the requirement of other pianists to continuously reinforce their relationship with the instrument by practicing many hours a day. It seems that Gould was able to practice mentally without access to an instrument, and even took this so far as to prepare for a recording of Brahms piano works without ever playing them until a few weeks before the recording sessions. This is all the more staggering considering the absolute accuracy and phenomenal dexterity exhibited in his playing. Gould's large repertoire also demonstrated this natural mnemonic gift.

The piano, Gould said, "is not an instrument for which I have any great love as such... [but] I have played it all my life, and it is the best vehicle I have to express my ideas." In the case of Bach, Gould admitted, "[I] fixed the action in some of the instruments I play on—and the piano I use for all recordings is now so fixed—so that it is a shallower and more responsive action than the standard. It tends to have a mechanism which is rather like an automobile without power steering: you are in control and not it; it doesn't drive you, you drive it. This is the secret of doing Bach on the piano at all. You must have that immediacy of response, that control over fine definitions of things."

Of significant influence upon the teenage Gould were Artur Schnabel (Gould: "The piano was a means to an end for him, and the end was to approach Beethoven."); Rosalyn Tureck's recordings of Bach ("upright, with a sense of repose and positiveness"); and Leopold Stokowski.

Gould had a pronounced aversion to what he termed a "hedonistic" approach to the piano repertoire, performance, and music generally. For Gould, "hedonism" in this sense denoted a superficial theatricality, something to which he felt Mozart, for example, became increasingly susceptible later in his career. He associated this drift towards hedonism with the emergence of a cult of showmanship and gratuitous virtuosity on the concert platform in the nineteenth century and later. The institution of the public concert, he felt, degenerated into the "blood sport" with which he struggled, and which he ultimately rejected.

Recordings and compositions

In creating music, Gould much preferred the control and intimacy provided by the recording studio; he disliked the concert hall, which he compared to a competitive sporting arena. After his final public performance in 1964, he devoted his career solely to the studio, recording albums and several radio documentaries. He was attracted to the technical aspects of recording, and considered the manipulation of tape to be another part of the creative process. Although Gould's recording studio producers have testified that 'he needed splicing, less than most performers', Gould used the process to give him total artistic control over the recording process. He recounted his recording of the A minor fugue from Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier and how it was spliced together from two takes, with the fugue's expositions from one take and its episodes from another.

The pianist's first recording, Bach: The Goldberg Variations, came in 1955, at Columbia Records 30th Street Studios in New York City. Although there was initially some controversy at CBS as to whether this was the most appropriate piece to record, the finished product received phenomenal praise and was among the best-selling classical music albums of its time. Gould became closely associated with the piece, playing it in full or in part at many of his recitals. Another version of the Goldberg Variations, recorded in 1981, would be among his last recordings, and one of only a few pieces he recorded twice in the studio. The 1981 recording was one of CBS Masterworks' first digital recordings. The two recordings are very different: the first, highly energetic and often frenetic; the second, slower and more introspective. In the latter, Gould treats the aria and its 30 variations as one cohesive piece.

Gould revered Bach: "[he was] first and last an architect, a constructor of sound, and what makes him so inestimably valuable to us is that he was beyond a doubt the greatest architect of sound who ever lived". He recorded most of Bach's other keyboard works, including the complete Well-Tempered Clavier, Partitas, French Suites, English Suites, and keyboard concertos. For his only recording at the organ, he recorded about half of The Art of Fugue. He also recorded all five of Beethoven's piano concertos and 23 of the 32 piano sonatas.

Gould also recorded works by Brahms, Mozart, and many other prominent piano composers, though he was outspoken in his criticism of some of them. He was extremely critical of Frédéric Chopin. In a radio interview, when asked if he didn't find himself wanting to play Chopin, he replied: "No, I don't. I play it in a weak moment – maybe once a year or twice a year for myself. But it doesn't convince me." Although Gould recorded all of Mozart's sonatas and admitted enjoying the "actual playing" of them, he claimed to dislike Mozart's later works, to the extent of arguing (perhaps facetiously) that Mozart died too late rather than too early. He was fond of many lesser-known composers, such as Orlando Gibbons, whose Anthems he had heard as a teenager, and for whose music he felt a "spiritual attachment". He recorded a number of Gibbons's keyboard works and nominated him as his all-time favourite composer, despite his better-known admiration for the technical mastery of Bach. He made recordings of piano music little-known in North America, including music by Jean Sibelius (the Sonatines and Kyllikki); Georges Bizet (the Variations Chromatiques de Concert and the Premier nocturne); Richard Strauss (the Piano Sonata, the Five Pieces, and Enoch Arden with Claude Rains); and Paul Hindemith (the three piano sonatas and the sonatas for brass and piano). He also made recordings of the complete piano works and Lieder of Arnold Schoenberg.

One of Gould's performances of the Prelude and Fugue in C major from Book II of The Well-Tempered Clavier was chosen for inclusion on the NASA Voyager Golden Record by a committee headed by Carl Sagan. The disc of recordings was placed on the spacecraft Voyager 1, which is now approaching interstellar space and is the farthest human-made object from Earth.

Arrangements and compositions

Gould was not only a composer, but also a prolific arranger of orchestral repertoire for piano. His arrangements include his recorded Wagner and Ravel transcriptions, as well as the operas of Richard Strauss and the symphonies of Schubert and Bruckner, which he played privately for own pleasure.

As a teenager, Gould wrote chamber music and piano works in the style of the Second Viennese school of composition. His only significant work was the String Quartet, Op. 1, which he finished when he was in his 20s, and perhaps his cadenzas to Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 1. Later works include the Lieberson Madrigal (SATB and piano), and So You Want to Write a Fugue? (SATB with piano or string quartet accompaniment). The majority of his work is published by Schott Music. The recording Glenn Gould: The Composer contains his original works.

The String Quartet Op. 1 (published in 1956 and recorded in 1960) had a mixed reception from critics. For example, the notices from the Christian Science Monitor and The Saturday Review were quite laudatory, while the response from the Montreal Star was less so. There is little critical commentary on Gould's compositional work for the simple reason that there are few compositions; he did not proceed beyond Opus 1. Gould left many compositions unfinished; he ultimately failed in his ambition to become a composer because, as he admitted himself, he lacked a 'personal voice'.

Collaborations

The success of Gould's collaborations with other artists was to a degree dependent upon their receptiveness to his sometimes unconventional readings of the music. His television collaboration with Yehudi Menuhin in 1965, recording works by Bach, Beethoven and Schoenberg, was deemed a success because "Menuhin was ready to embrace the new perspective opened up by an unorthodox view."

Radio documentaries

Less well-known is Gould's work in radio. This work was, in part, the result of Gould's long association with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, for which he produced numerous television and radio programs. Notable recordings include his music-concrète Solitude Trilogy, which consists of The Idea of North, a meditation on Northern Canada and its people; The Latecomers, about Newfoundland; and The Quiet in the Land, on Mennonites in Manitoba. All three use a radiophonic electronic-music technique that Gould called contrapuntal radio, in which several people are heard speaking at once—much like the voices in a fugue—manipulated through the use of tape.

Character and personal life

Eccentricities

Gould is widely known for his unusual habits. He usually hummed while he played the piano, and his recording engineers had mixed results in how successfully they were able to exclude his voice from recordings. Gould claimed that his singing was subconscious and increased proportionately with the inability of the piano in question to realize the music as he intended. It is likely that this habit originated in Gould's having been taught by his mother to "sing everything that he played", as Kevin Bazzana puts it. This became "an unbreakable (and notorious) habit". Some of Gould's recordings were severely criticised because of the background "vocalise". For example, a reviewer of his 1981 re-recording of the Goldberg Variations opined that many listeners would "find the groans and croons intolerable".

Gould was renowned for his peculiar body movements while playing and for his insistence on absolute control over every aspect of his playing environment. The temperature of the recording studio had to be exactly regulated; he invariably insisted that it be extremely warm. According to Friedrich, the air conditioning engineer had to work just as hard as the recording engineers. The piano had to be set at a certain height and would be raised on wooden blocks if necessary. A small rug would sometimes be required for his feet underneath the piano. He had to sit fourteen inches above the floor and would only play concerts while sitting on the old chair his father had made. He continued to use this chair even when the seat was completely worn through. His chair is so closely identified with him that it is shown in a place of honor in a glass case at the National Library of Canada.

Conductors responded diversely to Gould and his playing habits. George Szell, who led Gould in 1957 with the Cleveland Orchestra, remarked to his assistant, "That nut's a genius." Leonard Bernstein said, "There is nobody quite like him, and I just love playing with him." He also disliked social functions. He hated being touched, and in later life he limited personal contact, relying on the telephone and letters for communication. Upon one visit to historic Steinway Hall in New York City in 1959, the chief piano technician at the time, William Hupfer, greeted Gould by giving him a slap on the back. Gould was shocked by this, and complained of aching, lack of coordination, and fatigue because of the incident; he even went on to explore the possibility of litigation against Steinway & Sons if his apparent injuries were permanent. He was known for cancelling performances at the last minute, which is why Bernstein's above-mentioned public disclaimer opens with, "Don't be frightened, Mr. Gould is here; will appear in a moment."

In his liner notes and broadcasts, Gould created more than two dozen alter egos for satirical, humorous, or didactic purposes, permitting him to write hostile reviews or incomprehensible commentaries on his own performances. Probably the best-known are the German musicologist "Karlheinz Klopweisser", the English conductor "Sir Nigel Twitt-Thornwaite", and the American critic "Theodore Slutz". These facets of Gould, whether interpreted as neurosis or "play", have provided ample material for psychobiography.

Fran's Restaurant in Toronto was a regular haunt of Gould's. A CBC profile noted, "sometime between two and three every morning, Gould would go to Fran's, a 24-hour diner a block away from his Toronto apartment, sit in the same booth, and order the same meal of scrambled eggs."

Gould is one of many historical figures sometimes considered autistic, or, more accurately, to have been on the autism spectrum. The diagnosis was first suggested by the psychiatrist Peter Ostwald, a friend of Gould's, in a 1998 book, Glenn Gould: The Ecstasy and Tragedy of Genius. It has been disputed by, among others, Kevin Bazzana.

Health

Gould suffered many pains and ailments, though he was something of a hypochondriac (admitting it himself on at least one occasion), and his autopsy revealed few underlying problems in areas that often troubled him. Early in his life, Gould suffered a spine injury. His physicians prescribed, usually independently, an assortment of analgesics, anxiolytics, and other drugs. Some speculate that his extensive use of prescription medications throughout his career had a deleterious effect on his health.

He was highly concerned about his health throughout his life, worrying about everything from high blood pressure (which in his later years he recorded in diary form) to the safety of his hands. Gould rarely shook hands with anyone and usually wore gloves.

Relationships

Gould lived a private life: Bruno Monsaingeon said of him, "No supreme pianist has ever given of his heart and mind so overwhelmingly while showing himself so sparingly."

In 2007, Cornelia Foss, wife of composer and conductor Lukas Foss, publicly claimed that she and Gould had had a love affair lasting several years. Cornelia left Lukas in 1967 for Gould, taking her two children with her to Toronto, where she purchased a house near Gould's apartment, at 110 St. Clair Avenue West. According to Cornelia, "There were a lot of misconceptions about Glenn, and it was partly because he was so very private. But I assure you, he was an extremely heterosexual man. Our relationship was, among other things, quite sexual." Their affair lasted until 1972, when she returned to Lukas. As early as two weeks after leaving her husband, she had noticed disturbing signs in Gould. She describes a serious paranoid episode:

Philosophical and aesthetic views

Gould said that if he had not been a musician, he would have been a writer. He expounded his criticism and philosophy of music and art in lectures, convocation speeches, periodicals, and radio and television documentaries for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Gould participated in many interviews, and had a predilection for scripting them to the extent that they may be seen as much as "works" as off-the-cuff discussions. His writing style was highly articulate but sometimes florid, indulgent, or rhetorical. This is especially evident in those works in which he attempts humour or irony, which he did often.

In these he praised certain composers and rejected what he deemed banal in music composition and its consumption by the public, and also gave insightful analyses of the music of Richard Strauss, Alban Berg and Anton Webern. Despite certain modernist sympathies, Gould's attitude to popular music was ambivalent or negative. He enjoyed a jazz concert with his friends as a youth, mentioned jazz in his writings, and once criticized The Beatles for "bad voice leading"—while praising Petula Clark and Barbra Streisand. He shared a mutual admiration with jazz pianist Bill Evans, who made his seminal record Conversations with Myself using Gould's celebrated Steinway CD 318 piano. Gould believed that the keyboard is fulfilled as an instrument primarily through counterpoint, a musical style that reached its zenith during the Baroque era. Much of the homophony that followed, he felt, belongs to a less serious and less spiritual period of art.

On performance

Gould was convinced that the institution of the public concert was not only an anachronism, but also a "force of evil", leading to his retirement from concert performance. He argued that public performance devolved into a sort of competition, with a non-empathetic audience (musically and otherwise) mostly attendant to the possibility of the performer erring or not meeting critical expectation. This doctrine he set forth, only half in jest, in "GPAADAK", the Gould Plan for the Abolition of Applause and Demonstrations of All Kinds.

One of Gould's reasons for abandoning live performance was his aesthetic preference for the recording studio, where, in his words, he developed a "love affair with the microphone". There, he could control every aspect of the final musical "product" by selecting parts of various takes. He felt that he could realize a musical score more fully this way. Thus, the act of musical composition, to Gould, did not entirely end with the original score; the performer had to make creative choices, and Gould felt strongly that there was little point in re-recording centuries-old pieces if the performer had no new perspective to bring to the work.

Technology and authenticity

The issue of "authenticity" in relation to an approach like Gould's has been a topic of great debate, although diminished by the end of the 20th century—a development that Gould seems to have anticipated. It asks whether a recording is less authentic or "direct" for having been highly refined by technical means in the studio. Gould likened his process to that of a film director—one does not perceive that a two-hour film was made in two hours—and implicitly asks why the act of listening to music should be any different. He went so far as to conduct an "experiment" with musicians, sound engineers, and laypeople in which they were to listen to a recording and determine where the splices occurred. Each group chose different points based on their relationship to music, but none successfully. While the conclusion was hardly scientific, Gould remarked, "The tape does lie, and nearly always gets away with it".

In a lecture and essay titled "Forgery and Imitation in the Creative Process", one of Gould's most significant texts, he makes explicit his views on authenticity and creativity. Gould asks why the epoch in which a work is received influences its reception as "art", postulating a sonata he composes that sounds so much like Haydn that it is received as such. If, instead, the same sonata had been attributed to a somewhat earlier or later composer, it becomes more or less interesting as a piece of music. Yet it is not the work that has changed but its relation within the accepted narrative of music history. Similarly, Gould notes the "pathetic duplicity" in the reception of high-quality forgeries by Hans van Meegeren of new paintings attributed to Dutch Golden Age master Vermeer, before and after the forgery was known.

Gould, therefore, prefers an ahistorical, or at least pre-Renaissance, view of art, minimizing the identity of the artist and the attendant historical context in evaluating the artwork: "What gives us the right to assume that in the work of art we must receive a direct communication with the historical attitudes of another period? ... moreover, what makes us assume that the situation of the man who wrote it accurately or faithfully reflects the situation of his time? ... What if the composer, as historian, is faulty?"

"The Last Puritan"

A 1962 quote is often used to summarize Gould's perspective on art: "The justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity."

Gould referred to himself repeatedly as "the last puritan", a reference to philosopher George Santayana's novel of the same name.Weighing this statement against Gould's highly individualistic lifestyle and artistic vision leads to an apparent contradiction. He was progressive in many ways, promulgating the controversial atonal composers, and anticipating, through his deep involvement with the recording process, the vast changes that technology would have on the production and distribution of music. Mark Kingwell summarizes the paradox, never resolved by Gould nor his biographers:

He was progressive and anti-progressive at once, and likewise at once both a critic of the Zeitgeist and its most interesting expression. He was, in effect, stranded on a beachhead of his own thinking between past and future. That he was not able, by himself, to fashion a bridge between them is neither surprising, nor, in the end, disappointing. We should see this failure, rather, as an aspect of his genius. He both was and was not a man of his time.

Legacy

Gould is one of the most acclaimed 20th-century classical musicians. His unique pianistic method, insight into the architecture of compositions, and relatively free interpretation of scores created performances and recordings that were revelatory to many listeners while highly objectionable to others. Philosopher Mark Kingwell writes that "his influence is made inescapable; no performer after him can avoid the example he sets... Now, everyone must perform through him: he can be emulated or rejected, but he cannot be ignored."

Gould left an extensive body of work beyond the keyboard. After his retirement from concert performance, he was increasingly interested in other media, including audio and film documentary and writing, through which he mused on aesthetics, composition, music history, and the effect of the electronic age on the consumption of media. (Gould grew up in Toronto at the same time that Canadian theorists Marshall McLuhan, Northrop Frye, and Harold Innis were making their mark on communications studies.) Anthologies of his writing and letters have been published. The National Library of Canada retains an archive called the Glenn Gould Fonds.

Gould is a popular subject of biography and even critical analysis. Philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben and Mark Kingwell have interpreted Gould's life and ideas. References to Gould and his work are plentiful in the visual arts, fiction, and poetry.

Awards and recognition

Glenn Gould received many honors before and after his death, although he personally claimed to despise competition in music. In 1983, he was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame.

The Glenn Gould Foundation was established in Toronto in 1983 to honour Gould and preserve his memory. Among other activities, the foundation awards the Glenn Gould Prize every three years to "an individual who has earned international recognition as the result of a highly exceptional contribution to music and its communication, through the use of any communications technologies." The prize consists of CAD$50,000 and an original work by a Canadian artist.

The Glenn Gould School of The Royal Conservatory of Music was founded and named after him in 1997.

The Glenn Gould Studio at the Canadian Broadcasting Centre in Toronto was named after him.

Gould won four Grammy Awards:

1974 – Grammy Award for Best Album Notes – Classical: Glenn Gould (notes writer), for Hindemith: Sonatas for Piano (Complete) performed by Glenn Gould;

1983 – Grammy Award for Best Classical Album: Samuel H. Carter (producer) & Glenn Gould, for Bach: The Goldberg Variations;

1983 – Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Soloist Performance (without orchestra), for Bach: The Goldberg Variations;

1984 – Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Soloist Performance (without orchestra), for Beethoven: Piano Sonatas Nos. 12 & 13.

See also

Music of Canada

Canadian Music Hall of Fame

List of Canadian composers

Notes

;Footnotes

;Citations

Bibliography

External links

The Glenn Gould Foundation

The Glenn Gould Archive at the National Library of Canada – Contains sound clips, articles and pictures.

Glenn Gould Website (Sony Music Entertainment of Canada)

Text and pictures from Glenn Gould by french film director Bruno Monsaingeon

GlennGould Magazine

CBC Digital Archives: Glenn Gould: Variations on an Artist

Writings and Works, etc. by and about Glenn Gould

Throwing Down the Baton: A Look at How Audiences Ruin Concerts

;Sound

Glenn Gould Broadcasts from UbuWeb.

;Video

Bach & Friends: Glenn Gould (2010)

Genius Within: The inner life of Glenn Gould (2010) http://glenngouldmovie.com/

Glenn Gould Category:Canadian classical pianists Category:Canadian composers Category:20th-century classical composers Category:Canadian Music Hall of Fame inductees Category:Grammy Award winners Category:People from Toronto Category:Deaths from stroke Category:1932 births Category:Sony Classical artists Category:Electronic musicians Category:1982 deaths Category:The Royal Conservatory of Music alumni

Elizabeth Parcells (; December 28, 1951, Detroit, Michigan – December 29, 2005, Detroit, Michigan) was an American coloratura soprano. In the USA, she sang at the Michigan Opera Theater, the Boston Lyric Opera and The Washington (D.C.) Opera, among others.

Aged 16 she began her voice lessons and went on to study at the Interlochen Arts Academy. She earned her undergraduate and graduate degrees with honors from the New England Conservatory of Music (Boston).

Parcells was a winner of the 1977 Metropolitan Opera Council National Finals in New York City and was awarded a Pro Musicis Foundation sponsorship which helped launch her professional singing career. She moved to Switzerland Operastudio Zurich then moved to Germany where she sang at Augsburg, Wiesbaden, Frankfurt am Main, West Berlin, Basel, Switzerland and Stuttgart. During her concert career, Elizabeth Parcells sang at international festivals such as Tanglewood, Salzburg, Touraine, Bologne, Colorado, Luxembourg, Melk, Lisbon, Rheingau, Huddersfield and Torino. She recorded with the BBC, National Public Radio, Radio France, WDR Cologne and the Radio Luxembourg Orchestra.

Her roles included: "Olympia" in Tales of Hoffmann, "Norina" in Don Pasquale, "Zerbinetta" in Ariadne auf Naxos, "Queen of the Night" in The Magic Flute, and the title characters in Lucia di Lammermoor and Maria Stuarda.

Parcells' farewell recital was given at the Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall in February 2005 under the sponsorship of the Pro Musicis Foundation, whose award so many years earlier had helped launch her career.

After living and working in Europe for over twenty years, where she was married in Germany since 1985 to Dierk-Eckhard Becker, Hamburg, Parcells returned home to Grosse Pointe, Michigan in 1997 to coach voice students at Oakland University in Rochester Hills and at Schoolcraft College in Livonia, Michigan. In Germany Parcells worked as voice instructor at Bremen University until 1997.

She battled cancer for two and a half years and died the day after her 54th birthday.

References

New York Times review by Allen Hughes (February 18, 1978), accessed 8 February 2010

New York Times review byEdward Rothstein (October 18, 1981), accessed 8 February 2010

New York Times obituary (January 8, 2006), accessed 8 February 2010

Boston Globe obituary (January 8, 2006), accessed 8 February 2010

External links

Elizabeth Parcells' website, accessed 8 February 2010

Parcells' Bach Cantatas biographical page, accessed 8 February 2010

Fightcolorectalcancer.org site

Category:1951 births Category:2005 deaths Category:American expatriates in Germany Category:American opera singers Category:Operatic sopranos Category:Oakland University faculty Category:Deaths from colorectal cancer Category:People from Detroit, Michigan Category:Cancer deaths in Michigan

Name	Dinu Lipatti
Background	classical_ensemble
Born	March 19, 1917 Bucharest, Romania
Died	December 02, 1950 Geneva, Switzerland
Genre	Classical Music
Occupation	Pianist, Composer
Label	EMI

Dinu Lipatti (1 April [19 March o.s.]1917 2 December 1950) was a Romanian classical pianist and composer whose career was cut short by his death from Hodgkin's disease at age 33.

Biography

Lipatti was born in Bucharest into a musical family: his father was a violinist who had studied with Pablo de Sarasate and Carl Flesch, his mother a pianist. For his baptism, which occurred not shortly after birth as is usual, but when Lipatti was old enough to play the piano, the violinist and composer George Enescu agreed to be his godfather. Lipatti played a minuet by Mozart at his own baptism. Lipatti subsequently studied in Paris under Cortot, Nadia Boulanger (with whom he recorded some of Johannes Brahms's Waltzes Op. 39), Paul Dukas (composition) and Charles Munch (conducting). He gave his first concert, at the École Normale, on 20 May 1935. However, three days before the concert, Paul Dukas died; in memory of Dukas, Lipatti's first piece at his concert, and the piece he first publicly performed as an adult pianist, was J. S. Bach's Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring. As a result, his public performances became considerably less frequent after the war.

Lipatti gave his final recital, which was recorded, on 16 September 1950 in Besançon, France. Despite severe illness, he gave unmatched performances of Bach's Partita in B flat major, Mozart's A minor Sonata, Schubert's G flat major and E flat major Impromptus, and thirteen of Chopin's Waltzes. He excluded No. 2, which he was too exhausted to play; he offered instead Myra Hess's transcription of Bach's Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring, the piece with which he had started his professional career as a pianist in 1935. He died less than 3 months later, in Geneva. Lipatti is buried at the cemetery of Chêne-Bourg next to his wife Madeleine, a noted piano teacher.

Repertoire

Lipatti's playing was hailed as having reached the highest degree of integrity and pianistic technique. Pulitzer Prize-winning music critic Harold Schonberg wrote of Lipatti's 1947/1948 Chopin recordings "this is piano-playing of a stature that few artists of his generation could have come near approaching."

Lipatti is particularly noted for his interpretations of Chopin, Mozart and Bach, but he also made recordings of Ravel's Alborada del Gracioso, Liszt, Enescu, the Schumann Piano Concerto, and the Grieg Piano Concerto. His recording of Chopin's Waltzes has remained in print since its release and has long been a favorite of many classical music-lovers.

Lipatti never recorded any music of Beethoven. It is a common misconception, however, that Lipatti did not perform Beethoven's music until late in his career. The Waldstein Sonata had been a feature of Lipatti's repertoire since 1935. He also performed the Emperor Concerto in Bucharest twice during the 1940-41 season, and even stood ready to record it for EMI in 1949. An internal memo from Lipatti's recording producer Walter Legge, dated 23 February 1948, states that "Lipatti ha[d] his heart set on doing a Beethoven Concerto in 1949" and nominates the Emperor Concerto given that Lipatti had already performed it.

A recording of Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minor, originally released under Lipatti's name, and said to have been a recording of a live performance in Switzerland in May 1948, proved not to be his contribution at all. In 1981, it emerged that the soloist on this recording was in fact a Polish pianist (and a fellow Cortot pupil), Halina Czerny-Stefańska, the joint winner of the 4th International Chopin Piano Competition, playing with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra under Václav Smetáček. However, later on, an authentic recording by Lipatti of the Chopin Concerto was found.

Legacy

The power, beauty and sincerity of his recordings continue to inspire and uplift pianists and music lovers worldwide. In addition to his pianistic accomplishments, Lipatti was a composer, who wrote in a neoclassical style with French and Romanian influences. He was posthumously made a member of the Romanian Academy in 1997.

Notable recordings

1937 - Brahms, Waltzes, Op. 39, with Nadia Boulanger

1947 - Grieg, Piano Concerto in A minor, with Alceo Galliera and the Philharmonia

1948 - Schumann, Piano Concerto in A minor, with Herbert von Karajan and the Philharmonia

1947/1948 - Frédéric Chopin, Sonata No. 3 in B minor, Op. 58; Barcarole in F-sharp minor, Op. 60; Nocturne No. 8 in D-flat major, Op. 27, No. 2

1950 - Chopin, Waltzes; Mazurka No. 32 in C-sharp minor, Op. 50, No. 3

1950 - Schumann, Piano Concerto in A minor, with Ernest Ansermet and the Suisse Romande Orchestra

1950 - Final Recital at Besançon (music of Bach, Mozart, Schubert, and Chopin).

External links

The Lipatti-Haskil Foundation

"Lipatti" by Kevin Shihoten

Lipatti discography

"Dinu Lipatti - The Last Recital"

"Dinu Lipatti - Prince of Pianists"

The Chopin Concerto Scandal

References

Category:1917 births Category:1950 deaths Category:Deaths from leukemia Category:Deaths from lymphoma Category:Members of the Romanian Academy elected post-mortem Category:People from Bucharest Category:Romanian classical pianists Category:Romanian composers Category:Romanian defectors Category:Gheorghe Lazăr High School alumni Category:Cancer deaths in Switzerland Category:École Normale de Musique de Paris alumni Category:Child classical musicians

Diane Joyce Bish, born on May 25, 1941, in Kansas, is an organist and composer as well as executive producer of the Joy of Music television series. As a concert organist, she performs frequently at recitals throughout North America and Europe. She had played on the 1925 Austin Organ installed in the school auditorium. In 1984, she returned there to play a benefit concert, which raised enough money for the organ to be restored.

Bish began studying organ as a student of Dorothy Addy, then of Mildred Andrews. Later, she was a recipient of Fulbright and French government grants for study in Amsterdam with Gustav Leonhardt, and in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, and Marie-Claire Alain.

Career

Beginning in the 1970s, Bish served for more than 20 years as organist at the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where she designed the 117 rank Ruffatti organ in the sanctuary. While at the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, she began producing a weekly television program of organ music, The Joy of Music.

As of 2009, The Joy of Music is broadcast on EWTN, TBN, WTLU and various PBS stations, and continues to feature her performances taped on-location at prominent organs in North America and Europe. Since the program's beginning in the early 1980s, she has recorded over 500 episodes as of 2009, each of which shows her playing one or more different pipe or digital organs.

No longer resident organist at the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, Bish now makes frequent concert appearances at recitals throughout North America. She is the first American woman to record at the organ of Freiburg Cathedral in Freiburg, Germany. Her recordings include music for organ and orchestra, brass and organ, cello and organ, most of the great organ masterpieces, original compositions and hymn arrangements.

Christmas Festival (1970)

Favorites from Freiburg Cathedral

Glorious pipes (1990)

The Glory of the Organ (1980) Great European Organs (1990), featuring organs of Austria, France, Germany, and the Netherlands

Hymns on Coral Ridge Organ

The Joy of Christmas (1980), accompanying the Diane Bish Chorale at organ The Joy of Music presents Hymns and Classics (1990) Pipes and More Pipes (1978), organ and bagpipes Praise to the Lord (1985) The Passion Symphony (1979) ''Sixty-six hundred voices of praises

Works

Bish has also published seven books and numerous solo pieces for organ, along with arrangements of various hymns including Christ the Lord Is Risen Today. Her compositions include:

Festival Te Deum, for organ and orchestra

Lead On, O King Eternal, for organ and choir

Joy of Music, organ settings of hymns

Passion Symphony, for organ and narrator

Symphony of Psalms, for organ, choir, orchestra and soloist

Morning Has Broken, for organ, choir, orchestra and narrator.

"German Carol Fantasy", for organ solo

"Dance of the Trumpets", for organ solo

"Introduction, Theme and Variations on "All Creatures of Our God and King", for solo organ

References

External links

The Official Diane Bish Website

Category:American classical organists Category:Musicians from Kansas Category:1941 births Category:Living people Category:Fulbright Scholars