2004 short list:
Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould
by Kevin Bazzana
McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould
When Mikhail Baryshnikov defected to Toronto in 1974, he admitted he knew only three things about Canada: It had great hockey teams, abundant wheat fields, and Glenn Gould.
In Wondrous Strange, Kevin Bazzana vividly recaptures the life of Glenn Gould. He sheds new light on such topics as Gould's family history, his secretive sexual life, his hypochondria and mental health, and dispelshealth, and dispels the myth of Gould as a self-taught and emotionally damaged recluse who “burst out of nowhere” onto the international music scene. Bazzana places Gould's distinctive traits – his eccentric interpretations, his garish onstage demeanour, his resistance to convention – against the backdrop of his religious, middle-class Toronto childhood, and offers a fresh appreciation of Gould's high-profile but illness-plagued concert tours, his adventurous work for Canadian music festivals and the CBC, and his musical and legal problems with Steinway & Sons.
Bazzana also explains Gould's astonishing decision to abandon concert life in favour of innovative work in recording and electronic media, explores the challenges of Gould's last years — mysterious hand problems, family troubles, new creative outlets like film scoring and conducting — and considers the extraordinary.
Kevin Bazzana
Kevin Bazzana holds a doctorate in music history and literature from the University of California at Berkeley and is a freelance writer, editor, and lecturer. Wondrous Strange has been, or will shortly be, published in Canada, France, the United States, Great Britain, Italy and Japan. His previous book, Glenn Gould: The Performer in the Work, a study of Gould as pianist and interpreter, was published in 1997. He lives in Brentwood Bay, British Columbia.
Excerpt from Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould
From childhood Gould dreaded germs, and his mother's concerns about the Canadian National Exhibition apparently resurfaced in his mind after he signed a lucrative contract to play at the Hollywood Bowl in August 1957. According to Peter Yazbeck, Gould had not realized that the Bowl was an outdoor amphitheatre, and when Yazbeck told him he panicked and cancelled the concert. He feared germs in tap water, in groups of people, in hospitals – even when greatly concerned about a sick friend he could not bring himself to visit a hospital and would instead keep in contact by phone. He had cans of Lysol disinfectant spray around his apartment and packed disinfectants whenever he travelled. He avoided the company of anyone who seemed the slightest bit ill; he would not even enter a room or car or elevator a sick person had recently occupied. June Faulkner, a theatre--company manager who worked on the television program Glenn Gould's Toronto in 1978, recalled seeing him roll around on the floor with her hacking, wheezing dog. “But I gave a tiny sneeze and he was out the front door like a shot and bolted into his car, which had a telephone. He sat there in front of my house and we conducted our business by telephone.”
Gould knew he was a hypochondriac, and often seemed to treat the matter lightly with friends, doctors, and the press. And he knew it was part of a very profitable public persona. In 1958, a reporter saw him stop in the middle of a recording session, groan, and announce, “I think I have appendicitis.” It turned out to be a minor cramp – he had been sitting too long – and he joined everyone else in laughing about it. “I am sure you look forward to the interesting symptoms that I shall dig up for you in the future,” he once wrote to Dr. Herman. The French filmmaker Bruno Monsaingeon recalled that, during their first filming session in 1974, Gould “very, very gently” bumped his head on a microphone, collapsed in a chair, and cried out, “My God, a concussion!” He listed the symptoms that were bound to follow over the next few hours, then finally admitted, “Well, I know, I know, once I let my imagination go, I'm lost.” On June 12, 1980, he noted in his diary “some odd spots . . . on my abdomen – right of the navel, and in the area where the hiatus hernia is often knotted up – and, indeed, has been so for the last couple of days.” At the end of that entry there is a p.s.: “Have taken bath; spots have disappeared.” They were marks from a pen.
From Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould by Kevin Bazzana. Published by McClelland & Stewart Ltd. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
