The Art of Fugue (original German: Die Kunst der Fuge), BWV 1080, is an incomplete masterpiece by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750). The work was most likely started at the beginning of the 1740s, if not earlier. The first known surviving version, which contained 12 fugues and 2 canons, was copied by the composer in 1745. This manuscript has a slightly different title, added afterwards by his son-in-law Johann Christoph Altnickol: Die Kunst der Fuga. Bach's second version was published in 1751 after his death. It contains 14 fugues and 4 canons. "The governing idea of the work", as the eminent Bach specialist Christoph Wolff put it, is "an exploration in depth of the contrapuntal possibilities inherent in a single musical subject."

Each of the 14 fugues except the final unfinished one (however, see below) use the same deceptively simple subject in D minor:

Structure

In the 1751 printed edition, the various movements are roughly arranged by increasing order of sophistication of the contrapuntal devices used. The Arabic number in the title indicates the number of voices in the fugue, with the exception of the last one, where a 3 Soggetti means "with 3 subjects":

Simple fugues: :1. Contrapunctus I, and :2. Contrapunctus II: Simple monothematic 4-voice fugues on main theme, accompanied by a 'French' style dotted rhythm motif. :3. Contrapunctus III, and :4. Contrapunctus IV: Simple monothematic 4-voice fugues on inversion of main theme, i.e. the theme is "turned upside down". Counter-fugues, in which a variation of the main subject is used in both regular and inverted form: :5. Contrapunctus V: Has many stretto entries, as do Contrapuncti VI and VII. :6. Contrapunctus VI, a 4 in Stylo Francese: This adds both forms of the theme in diminution (halving note lengths), with little rising and descending clusters of semiquavers in one voice answered or punctuated by similar groups in demisemiquavers in another, against sustained notes in the accompanying voices. The dotted rhythm, enhanced by these little rising and descending groups, suggests what is called "French style" in Bach's day, hence the name Stylo Francese. :7. Contrapunctus VII, a 4 per Augmentationem et Diminutionem: Uses augmented (doubling all note lengths) and diminished versions of the main subject and its inversion. Double and triple fugues, with two and three subjects respectively: :8. Contrapunctus VIII, a 3: Triple fugue. :9. Contrapunctus IX, a 4 alla Duodecima: Double fugue :10. Contrapunctus X, a 4 alla Decima: Double fugue. :11. Contrapunctus XI, a 4: Triple fugue. Mirror fugues, in which the complete score can be inverted without loss of musicality: :12. Contrapunctus XII, a 4: The rectus (normal) and inversus (upside-down) versions are generally played back to back. :13. Contrapunctus XIII, a 3: The second mirror fugue in 3 voices, also a counter-fugue. Canons, labeled by interval and technique: :14. Canon per Augmentationem in Contrario Motu: Augmented canon in inverted motion. :15. Canon alla Ottava: Canon at the Octave. The two imitating voices are separated by an octave. :16. Canon alla Decima in Contrapunto alla Terza: Canon at the tenth, counterpoint at the third. :17. Canon alla Duodecima in Contrapunto alla Quinta: Canon at the twelfth, counterpoint at the fifth. An arrangement of Contrapunctus XIII, see below. :18. Fuga a 2 (rectus), and Alio modo Fuga a 2 (inversus) Unfinished quadruple fugue: :19. Fuga a 3 Soggetti (Contrapunctus XIV): 4-voice triple, possibly quadruple, fugue, the third subject of which is based on the BACH motif, B - A – C – B ('H' in German letter notation).

Sources of the work

The order of the fugues and canons has been debated, especially as there are differences between the manuscript and the printed editions appearing immediately after Bach's death. Also musical reasons have been invoked to propose different orders for later publications and/or the execution of the work, e.g. by Wolfgang Graeser in 1927, who also published his own "completion" of the final Contrapunctus XIV.

The 1751 printed edition contained — apart from a high number of errors and other flaws — a four-part version of Contrapunctus XIII, arranged to be played on two keyboards (rectus BWV 1080/18,1 and inversus BWV 1080/18,2). It is however doubtful whether the printed indication "a 2 Clav.", and the fourth added voice, that is not mirrored according to Bach's usual practice, derive from him, or from his son(s) that supervised this first edition.

The engraving of the copper plates for the printed edition would however have started shortly before the composer's death, according to contemporary sources, but it is unlikely that Bach had any real supervision in that preparation of the printed edition, due to his illness at the time.

The first printed edition also includes an unrelated work as a kind of "encore", the chorale prelude Vor deinen Thron tret Ich hiermit (Herewith I come before Thy Throne), BWV 668a, which Bach is said to have dictated on his deathbed.

A 1742 fair copy manuscript contains Contrapuncti I–III, V–IX, and XI–XIII, plus the octave and augmented canons and an earlier version of Contrapunctus X.

Instrumentation

Manuscript copies of the Art of Fugue, as well as the first printed edition, use open scoring, where each voice is written on its own staff. This has led to the assumption that the Art of Fugue was an intellectual exercise, meant to be studied and not heard. However, musicologists today, such as Gustav Leonhardt, agree that the Art of Fugue was probably intended to be played on a keyboard instrument. Leonhardt's arguments included the following:

The unfinished fugue

Contrapunctus XIV breaks off abruptly in the middle of the third section at bar 239. The autograph carries a note in the handwriting of Bach's son Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach saying "Über dieser Fuge, wo der Name B A C H im Contrasubject angebracht worden, ist der Verfasser gestorben." ("At the point where the composer introduces the name BACH [for which the English notation would be B-A-C-B] in the countersubject to this fugue, the composer died.") However, modern scholarship disputes this version, in particular because the musical notes are indisputably in Bach's own hand, written in a time before his deteriorating vision led to erratic handwriting, probably 1748–1749.

Many scholars, including Gustav Nottebohm (1881), Wolff and Davitt Moroney, have argued that the piece was intended to be a quadruple fugue, with the opening theme of Contrapunctus I to be introduced as the fourth subject. The title Fuga a 3 soggetti, in Italian rather than Latin, was not given by the composer but by CPE Bach, and Bach's Obituary actually makes mention of "a draft for a fugue that was to contain four themes in four voices". The combination of all four themes would bring the entire work to a fitting climax. Wolff also suspected that Bach may have finished the fugue on a lost page, called "fragment X" by him, on which the composer attempted to work out the counterpoint between the four subjects.

A number of musicians and musicologists have conjectured completions of Contrapunctus XIV, notably music theoretician Hugo Riemann, musicologists Donald Tovey and Zoltán Göncz, organists Helmut Walcha, David Goode and Lionel Rogg, and Davitt Moroney. Ferruccio Busoni's Fantasia Contrappuntistica is based on Contrapunctus XIV, but is more a work by Busoni than by Bach.

In 2007, New Zealand organist and conductor Indra Hughes completed a doctoral thesis about the unfinished ending of Contrapunctus XIV, proposing that the work was left unfinished not because Bach died, but as a deliberate choice by Bach to encourage independent efforts at a completion.

Douglas Hofstadter's book Gödel, Escher, Bach discussed the unfinished fugue and Bach's supposed death during composition as an illustration of the Church-Turing Thesis, specifically the notion that logical systems can be made to "destroy themselves" by proving contradictions in their own rules.

A book titled "Bach: Essays on His Life and Music" includes an article about the unfinished fugue, stating that Bach never intended to write the rest of the fugue on the last sheet of music paper used for the fugue because of the unalignment of the bottom staves. It also says that because of the above-mentioned reason, Bach wrote the rest of the fugue on another sheet of music paper, called "fragment x" that would have completed, or almost completed, the fugue. However, even if there is a fragment x, it has been lost.

The permutation matrix

In 1991 a theory was published by Zoltán Göncz answering the question of how Bach planned the appearance of the fourth subject, the main subject of the cycle:

In the course of the exposition of the first three subjects (first subject: mm. 1–21, second subject: mm. 114–141, third subject: mm. 193–207), Bach applied a serial sequence of voice entries decided in advance, by which he determined the space and time parameters of the subject entries. The superimposition of the three exposition matrices foreshadows, and develops as a negative, the sequence of the voice entries of the fourth subject. The copying of the four subjects onto each other displays a characteristic construction of Bach's oeuvre occurring mainly in the vocal fugues: that of the permutation fugue.

However paradoxical, it follows from the logic of composing a quadruple fugue that the combinations joining all four subjects (i.e. those combinations which appear last when performing the work) were already completed in the very first stage of composition, because the possibility of overlapping the four subjects (1 + 2 + 3 + 4) is the sine qua non of writing a quadruple fugue. The process of composition does not proceed in a linear way from the beginning, but with all four parts in view.

One of the striking features of Contrapunctus XIV is that in this movement Bach applied the stretto of whole expositions, layering the first two expositions atop each other prior to introducing the third subject. In the exposition of the first three subjects he "programmed" the later permutation stretti, then applied the expositions as "programs", "algorithms". The permutation matrix, apart from originating authentically with Bach, can be proved to have been ready at the time of the genesis of the work (that is, earlier than the surviving section).

The discovery of the permutation matrix was one of the most essential requirements for achieving a reconstruction of Contrapunctus XIV which might approach the original form planned by Bach. (Göncz, Z.: Reconstruction of the Final Contrapunctus of The Art of Fugue, in: International Journal of Musicology Vol. 5, pp. 25–93. 1997 ISBN 3-631-49809-8; Vol. 6, pp. 103–119. 1998 ISBN 3-631-33413-3)

A Pythagorean enigma

The theory is advanced by the cellist Hans-Eberhard Dentler (a pupil of Pierre Fournier's, and Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science) that the Art of the Fugue was written to display Pythagorean philosophical principles. The arguments revolve upon Bach's friendship with Johann Matthias Gesner, whom he had known in Weimar and who in 1730 moved to the Thomasschule at Leipzig (where Bach was Cantor) as rector. There Gesner taught Greek philosophy with an emphasis on Pythagorean thought.

Among Gesner's students was Lorenz Christoph Mizler, who became a pupil and friend of Bach's. Bach was one of four distinguished dedicatees of Mizler's 1734 doctoral dissertation on Music as part of a Philosophical Education. Mizler founded the Korrespondierenden Sozietät der Musikalischen Wissenschaften (Corresponding Society of Musical Sciences) in 1738, which Bach joined in June 1747, and of which Handel and Telemann were also members. The society was concerned with the union of music, philosophy, mathematics and science in Pythagorean theory, and required each member to contribute a practical work in demonstration of this approach, for which Bach produced his Canonic Variations on "Vom Himmel hoch da komm' ich her" for organ, BWV 769, and the Canon triplex a 6 voci. The Society's work commenced with the publication of a Bibliography (in its Musikalische Bibliotek) referencing works of Marcus Meibom, John Wallis, Leibniz, Kepler and Robert Fludd.

The points of this analysis are that the work constitutes an enigma in the classical sense of a puzzle contained within its structure. This subsists in the numerical and philosophical relations of Unity (one key signature throughout and the thematic synthesis); Tetraktys (the relation of 1, 2, 3 and 4 as arranged to form the perfect triangle), the mirror or speculum principle, Contrapunctus as derived from Aristotelian terminology referring to balancing opposites, the Music of the Spheres is possibly reflected in Fugues 1-7, and in the term Fugue, meaning 'flight', which refers both to the flight of the musical phrases and the flight of the soul to God.

Against the theory is Bach's apparent indifference to the Society in its early years, and his hesitancy in joining it. The Society had in fact attempted to establish principles for the writing of cantatas which were not in line with his own approach. Since any musical structure was susceptible to Mizler's Pythagorean analysis, the case for any specific precedent influence on The Art of Fugue remains conjectural.

It has also been argued that the hidden theme in Edward Elgar's Enigma Variations may derive from The Art of Fugue.

Films about the Art of Fugue

The documentary film Desert Fugue is a 90 minute documentary about the history of the Art of Fugue and its suitability for performance on the organ. The film features interviews with scholar Christoph Wolff, George Ritchie (organist) and organ builders Ralph Richards and Bruce Fowkes.

Notable recordings

See http://www.jsbach.org/1080.html and http://www.bach-cantatas.com/NVD/BWV1080.htm#Rec for more complete lists.

Harpsichord:

Gustav Leonhardt (1969)

Davitt Moroney (1985) Glenn Gould (1962) incomplete

Ensemble Wolfgang von Karajan (1963), on three chamber organs

Lionel Rogg (1970) André Isoir (1999) Some movements performed as a duet with Pierre Farago, on the Grenzing organ of Saint-Cyprien in Périgord, France

Wolfgang Rübsam (1992)

Marie-Claire Alain (1993)

Louis Thiry (1993) on the Silbermann organ of Saint Thomas Church (Strasbourg).

Kevin Bowyer (2001) on the Marcussen organ of Saint Hans Church, Odense, Denmark

George Ritchie (organist) (2010) on the Richards, Fowkes & Co organ of Pinnacle Presbyterian Church in Scottsdale, Arizona. This recording includes as a bonus track an alternative take of the final unfinished fugue with the completion by Helmut Walcha.

Piano:

Richard Buhlig and Wesley Kuhnle (1934)

Glenn Gould incomplete

Juilliard String Quartet (1989)

Keller Quartet (1997)

Delmé Quartet (2000), arranged by composer Robert Simpson, including versions of Contrapuntus XIV unfinished and completed following Tovey's version.

Emerson Quartet (2003)

Vittorio Ghielmi and "Il Suonar Parlante" viols quartet (2009) with Lorenzo Ghielmi on a Silbermann piano and harpsichord

Orchestra : Hermann Scherchen with Orchestre de la RTSI (1965)

Karl Ristenpart with Chamber Orchestra of the Saar (1965)

Neville Marriner with Academy of St. Martin in the Fields (1974)

Jordi Savall with Hesperion XX (1986)

Erich Bergel with Cluj Philharmonic Orchestra (1991)

Karl Münchinger and Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra (1965)

Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra (2002)

Rinaldo Alessandrini and Concerto Italiano (1998)

Other:

Milan Munclinger with Ars Rediviva (1959, 1966, 1979)

Fine Arts String Quartet and New York Woodwind Quintet (1962)

Yuji Takahashi (incomplete) electronic version (1975)

Musica Antiqua Köln (director Reinhard Goebel) for string quartet/harpsichord and various such instrumental combinations (1984)

Berliner Saxophon Quartett for saxophone (1990)

József Eötvös for two eight-string guitars (2002)

Amsterdam Loeki Stardust Quartet for recorder quartet (1998)

Phantasm (director: Laurence Dreyfus) for viola da gamba four-part consort (1998)

Fretwork for Consort of Viols (2002)

Aurelia Saxophone Quartet for saxophone quartet (2005)

The Canadian Brass for brass quintet

The Version of Jacques Chailley instrumentation of Pascal Vigneron for wind quartet, brass quartet and organ (2005)

An electronic version, Laibachkunstderfuge, by Neue Slowenische Kunst industrial band Laibach (2008).

Media

See also

List of compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach

Bach compositions printed during the composer's lifetime

Unfinished symphony

The Art of Fugue discography

Notes and references

External links

Full discography of The Art of Fugue

Johann Sebastian Bach / L'art de la fugue / The Art of the Fugue - Jordi Savall, Hesperion XX - Alia Vox 9818

Piano Society: JS Bach - A biography and various free recordings in MP3 format, including art of fugue

Web-essay on The Art of Fugue

Introduction to The Art of Fugue

Die Kunst der Fuge (scores and MIDI files) on the Mutopia Project website

The Art of Fugue as MIDI files

The Art of Fugue: Part 1/2, Part 2/2 as MP3 from OnClassical record label

Image of the ending of the final fugue at external site

Contrapunctus XIV (the reconstructed quadruple fugue) – Carus-Verlag

Malina, János: The Ultimate Fugue, The Hungarian Quarterly, Winter 2007

Contrapunctus XIV (reconstruction): Part 1/2, Part 2/2 (YouTube Video)

Contrapunctus II as interactive hypermedia at the BinAural Collaborative Hypertext

Synthesized realization and analysis of the Art of Fugue by Jeffrey Hall

Hughes, Indra (2006) Accident or Design? New Theories on the unfinished Contrapunctus 14 in JS Bach's The Art of Fugue BWV 1080 The University of Auckland PhD Thesis

“Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Art of Fugue” an article on Bach's Art of Fugue by Uri Golomb, published in Goldberg Early Music Magazine

Ars Rediviva: Sound Recordings Library, The Art of Fugue, Contrapunctus VIII

http://www.fuguestatefilms.co.uk/aof description of documentary film Desert Fugue

Category:Fugues Category:Compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach Category:Musical compositions completed by others

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

Zoltán Kocsis (born May 30, 1952) is a Hungarian pianist, conductor, and composer.

Born in Budapest, he started his musical studies at the age of five and continued them at the Béla Bartók Conservatory in 1963, studying piano and composition. In 1968 he was admitted to the Franz Liszt Academy of Music, where he was a pupil of Pál Kadosa and Ferenc Rados.

In 1970, he gave his first important debuts both at home and abroad. During the following 25 years he toured practically all over the world. He performed together with the world's most famous orchestras, such as the Berliner Philharmoniker, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Dresden Staatskapelle, the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the Philharmonia of London, the Wiener Philharmoniker etc. American critic Harold Schonberg praised Kocsis' extraordinary technique and fine piano tone. Kocsis has recorded the complete solo and with orchestra piano work of Béla Bartók. In 1990, his recording of Debussy's "" won "The Gramophone" Instrumental Award for that year.

In recent years, Kocsis has taken the role of conductor, especially with the Budapest Festival Orchestra and the Hungarian National Philharmonic, where he is the current musical director.

References

External links

Zoltán Kocsis biography

TV and Video Productions with Zoltán Kocsis

Category:1952 births Category:Living people Category:Hungarian classical pianists Category:Hungarian conductors (music) Category:Hungarian composers Category:Alumni of the Franz Liszt Academy of Music