Glenn Guld Biography Personal

So called Glenna Gulda. They tried to imitate him - in a low landing, in an almost complete rejection of the pedal, which Guld considered vulgarity, in his special articulation of Bach music. His art was not laid out into terms and did not suffer epigonism. The closest to the answer was probably the most devoted fan of the musician, or, as he called himself, is the Gospelist of Guld's religion - French director Bruno Monsenzhon.

He compared the relationship between Glenn Guld and the work performed by him with the relationship of the artist and model: having studied nature, the pianist began to create his canvas, and the music only “posed” him. Guld was born in Toronto, his mother was the grandmother of Edward Grieg, whom fate brought into distant Canada. Under her leadership, Glenn began to make music, he mastered notes before the letters.

At ten years, he already visited the organ and piano classes of the conservatory, in thirteen debuted as an organist, two years later he first performed with a solo piano program. In the year, Guld made his debut in the United States, and in the year Goldberg Coming for the first time recorded-his life will end with a re-record of this composition after twenty-six years. In the year, the pianist comes on tour in the USSR.

For Guld, who hated air travel and with painful suspiciousness treated his health, wrapping himself in a coat, scarves and gloves, carrying a suitcase of drugs with him, such a long trip was a real feat. However, he will remember the time spent here. The success awaiting the pianist in Russia will be the first true triumph. And fame, contrary to common opinion, was important to Gulda, without it, the plan over time to abandon public speaking would be impossible.

The tour began with a curiosity, repeatedly described in memoir literature. Since autumn, first-class musical groups visited-the Boston Symphony and London Philharmonic Orchestras, the Leipzig Gevandhaus Orchestra, not to mention Western musicians with a lower rank. In any case, the first branch of the first concert of Guld in the Moscow Conservatory was held at the half -empty hall.

In the interval, the students rushed to the automatomes, calling all their acquaintances demanding to immediately throw everything and flee to the concert. After the intermission, not only all places were occupied in the hall, people stood in the aisles, joining the sacrament, which Guld, as usual, created on the stage. Surprisingly, although rumors about the phenomenal pianist could not help but reach Leningrad, for some reason, the local public did not believe.

The story repeated in details: on May 14, the large hall of the Philharmonic was also half empty in the first compartment and clogged to capacity in the second. In the second section of the program, the "prelude" of the sheet are declared. But they literally beg from the pianist’s hall yet. And the Slovak leaves the scene, and Guld gives actually the third compartment, already solo.

The audience continues to applaud, they will even start turning off the light and turn to the scenes of the piano .... Canadian newspapers informing readers about the success of the musician in the first transatlantic tour, report: "Guld won Leningrad." GLENN GOULD. Glenn Guld. May G. Shostakovich, Soviet programs Glenna Gulda reflect his views on music: Bach, Beethoven, the sonatas of Berg and Hindemit, in the small hall the pianist also plays Intermezzo Brahms-a rare exception to romantic composers, which he sometimes did.

He never played neither Chopin nor a sheet - the most popular composers in a concert piano repertoire. To create his own world, Gulda was enough two poles - old music, first of all, of course, Bach, and modern - especially Guld loved the Novovenians. Guld tried to perform with concerts-lectures on modern music, almost unknown at that time of the Soviet audience in the Moscow and Leningrad Conservatory at meetings arranged as part of the tour with students and teachers.

In Moscow, the lecture was a great success - the indignation of just a few professors, the audience listened to avant -garde works with great attention. Leningrad, according to the memoirs of the witnesses of that meeting, turned out to be more conservative: the students, politely listening to a little Schenberg, desperately asked Bach to play, and Guld surrendered to persuasion.

In Leningrad, Glenn Guld will have time to take a walk along the embankments and visit the Hermitage, although by his own admission, "a tourist from it was unimportant." But most importantly, he will have time to find many true apologists of Guld's religion here. Some will write to him in Canada for many years, the rest - look forward to the release of each next record and hope for a new visit to the musician.

In an interview with the year, Guld himself admits that he would really like to return to the USSR and talks about preliminary agreements on repeated tour. However, in the same interview, the musician will make another confession: “By the age of sixty, I would like to fulfill my long -standing dream, which I have been bearing from the age of sixteen: I would like to open my own hall and give concerts in it.Listeners will be forbidden to react: neither applause, nor calls to BIS, nor whistles - nothing.

” Concert life burdens Gulda. He himself does not like to go to concerts, assuring that he could not at all enjoy music among strangers. He does not like to play, counting on a large audience. He compares the concert hall with the isna of Corrida, where the thought is always present: who will come out the winner - the performer or the public? In m, at the age of 32, not having time to visit Moscow and Leningrad once again, Guld completely stops the concert practice.

To this step, a shocking audience and colleagues, he went intentionally. Guld believed that "the purpose of art is creation, step by step, throughout the artist’s life, atmosphere of enthusiasm and serenity." It was hardly such an atmosphere that could arise with a full hall of random witnesses of a mystical act. Guld excludes the audience from his life as an unnecessary element.

And yet in this phrase there was some cunning.

Guld's interlocutors are needed, but like any genius, he considered himself the right to choose the format of communication and dictate his rules, despite anyone's opinion. The musician settled in the hotel where he arranged a studio, went out for walks only at night, still wrapping in a warmer in any weather, really reducing unnecessary contacts to a minimum. But at the same time, he recorded and mounted many radio programs himself, wrote articles on different topics, told television about his favorite records, among which he would suddenly be recorded by Barbara Streisand, called his friends at night, singing a “new hearing” of musical fragments.

The camera of the director Bruno Monsenjon, who fixes Gulda for a long time, shows a person with an endless sense of humor, thirsty to tell the world about himself and his world. For this, the musician was released eighteen years after voluntary recluse. Close people knew that Guld planned once, at 50 years old, to stop and this communication with the audience, to completely “move away from the world” and no longer approach the piano: the music sounded inside him, it was no longer necessary to play it.

He wanted to make a few more records, including the new version of Goldberg Coming. The pianist worked on it in the last year, constantly moving from the hotel to Toronto to the New York Studio Columbia and vice versa. The plate came out a few days before the unexpected death of Guld. He was 50 years old. Guld predicted that in connection with the era of recording, the concert format would completely become obsolete, and by the year the concert halls would be closed, and the music lovers would listen to music at home, at rest and silence.

Fortunately, this prediction did not come true, concert halls are still full, including at concerts of eminent pianists. But the records of Glenn Gulda remain out of competition, still being the subject of disputes, imitation and worship.