I'm a big Gould fan, but I understand what you mean. Gould's ubiquity is often such that I tend to want to hear other pianists in the same works for a while, keeping more distance from what they are playing.

I never had a problem with Gould, at least not a practical one. Pianists are plentiful. If I didn't like a performance of his, there were usually myriad alternatives. Many other artists have been of far less use to me. Hearing Gould instead of the composer could be pleasantly entertaining, there being room for both. On rare occasions, he genuinely spoiled be, causing me to marvel at other artists' failure to "get the memo."

Great video, I’ve always found myself swinging between extreme reactions with GG, so your video has given affirmation. Thanks

I used to take Gould’s recordings in good faith but these days I realize he was a critic and these recordings are arguments. He wanted to be a composer but was stuck and so he made a commentary on western classical music, on the piano. It allows me to appreciate his enormous talent without angst. His skill in voicing allowed him to build a climax on a very long arc with such momentum even if the incline is very low as well as create maximum clarity in contrapuntal lines that I’ve never heard another pianist make. That said, I mostly love his recordings of Bach. In his live recordings he tends to play more conventionally with more pedal and looser phrasing, if that’s your thing. His recordings of concertos where he had to accommodate fifty other musicians tend to be less eccentric as well. And his recording of the Brahms concerto was slow - I’ve heard other pianists play it almost as slow - but he reduced the dynamic contrasts to make it sound more baroque, as he said. Anyway, love it or leave it.

You can replace most excellent recordings of Bach with other equally wonderful recordings.

You can’t replace the Gould recordings (good or bad) with anyone else.

The world is considerably better for having the option to enjoy them.

I agree... this is a very fair and even-handed look at this flawed genius.

Gould is interesting for me because I see a bit of myself in him. I have autism and when I heard about all of his methods I immediately recognised it and also that I do these to a lesser degree. When I was younger I used to make faces while I was performing because my face felt weird and I needed to move it (which I still do a bit out of habit today), I always have to make up stories about the audience because the idea of performing to people not there to enjoy the music makes me play worse and one time when I was 14 I had to use a viola that wasn't mine and I had a breakdown in the rehearsal because it didn't feel right. Now whilst I'm more able to function in society that Gould was it's interesting to hear someone with my condition succeed in the world like this (even if I'm not the biggest fan of his music).

Amazing video mate, well done. I used to be a Gould fan, but for a few years now, i’ve been less impressed

Artists are judged by the quality of their recordings and based on that we can safely say that Gould made innovative, ground breaking recordings that changed how we hear Bach and opened a lot of new doors for interpretation. He also helped popularise Classical music and his bold vision served as a blueprint for many pianists. However, again based on that same measure of judgement Gould is known & respected mainly for his Bach recordings. If you remove his Bach from his body of work, only a small amount of relevant recordings remain

The best performers reveal the composer through themselves, they do not reveal themselves instead of the composer. Gould did just that. He was blatant enough to say he recomposes, verbatim. But, make no mistake, Gould is not 0.5% more important than Bach, Beethoven or Mozart. He would be nothing without their music

The main issue with most artists, politicians etc is the cult of personality trap. And with Gould, as you can see from your comment section, the cult is alive and kicking. A huge percentage of his fans adore him because he was who he was, which for me personally is irrelevant when it comes to his artist merit, unless the person is an outright criminal.
I can put up with eccentricities and idiosyncratic behaviours so long as they serve the music, not sabotage it. And Gould did serve the music but also did copious amounts of sabotaging. My criterion is simple: Does most of the music sound good? His Bach does, because it's different, unique and well ahead of his time. For me most part, the rest does not, with few notable exceptions of course, his transcription of Ravel's La Valse being a favourite

Your video makes a devastatingly good points mate. You don't often hear people talk about Gould's intellectual arrogance upon both the composers whose music he played. Or the scorn towards the very audiences that made him famous and rich. You don't hear people say that if he was more disciplined and less indulged in his youth, he could have achieved a far greater potential, which is most definitely your best argument. And you never hear about the ''brand over composer marketing'' that his career was built upon, with his name being bigger than the composers on the LPs (seriously c'mon)

I wrote above that I do not care about eccentricities as long as the music is good. Having said that, it's hard to overlook Gould's ultimate betrayal, refusing to visit his own dying mother because of his germophobia and letting her die alone

I believe good art exists independently from the artist. As such, it can be enjoyed without the impediments that artists' messy personal lives bring. But guess what. Morals and ethics do not, that's why i don't subscribe in anybody's cult, least Gould's

That was a fascinating take. I really like the way you don't sugar-coat your own distaste. But besides all the crazy psychological stuff (which tempts two obvious labels of course) was Gould actually a frustrated composer? I mean why didn't he branch out in that direction since this seemed to be his unconscious wish.

Thanks a lot for this fascinating video. You must have put a lot of work in it. I think you make a great case for your issues with him. Even if he wasn't the greatest musician to live we can all agree that he  manages to keep us entertained even after his death.

Gould is indeed doing his own thing. He's not trying to be historically faithful or 'correct' like so many others. No doubt he would have been another long forgotten player had he been encouraged to conform, and I think we would have been denied some wonderful recordings. While some of his idiosyncrasies are indeed jarring, I find him in general far more honest and therefore tolerable than many other classical performers who try to be unique with some manufactured gimmick or other.

I am actually somewhat refreshed to see a well-written take on Gould which doesn't consist of incessant affirmation of  his every eccentricity, especially the muttering and humming. Seeing all the comments on the 1981 recording about how they wish it was less suppressed by the audio engineers, and also the comment section on almost every video he is in, I tried to convince myself that it added to the music. But ultimately, I find myself unable to enjoy musical performances which lack the reverence to allow the composers to speak through them.

Having as much time and support around each of us would become a genius😊

It the humming that bothers me.  I look for it, and think I hear it, even when it's not there.  I liked the word you used, "muttering."

Hehe. This was good, thanks. Will keep in mind if I read more about him

I rank his WTC up there, along with the first Goldberg and the Partitas. It is my preferred version, my reference version. I know a lot of people don't like it, but there is a clarity and precision that I don't find in other players, not as consistently at least. Nobody brings the individual voices out so clearly as Gould. He also got the tempos more right than most. The C# major fugue in book 1, for example. None of which is to put down other great performers of Bach at all, we are lucky to have so many over the decades.

I do wish he had subdued his voice more, that can get annoying. There is a re-performance recording of his first Goldberg that removes the voice, and it works very well (Zenph, 2007, available on Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ah392lnFHxM).

But he will always be controversial, and maybe, underneath it all, that is his main legacy – making us think more about the role of performance in music.

I think today he'd be called neuroatypical, but you can be neuroatypical and just plain neurotic at the same time. The thing about "recomposing" seems to me to be a matter of degree. I imagine taking sheet music and turning it into actual sound is an act of interpretation, just like translating a novel into a different language is an act of interpretation. There is a certain amount of creativity in both processes; you can try to imagine what the original intent was, but sometimes you have to make do with a best guess, and different people are going to guess differently. But if you have a German translation of "Great Expectations" and it includes space aliens then the translator has gone too far.

Gould believed that Mozart was a bad composer, and his recorded Mozart performances are his attempt to get the listener to agree with his assessment.

I somewhat agree and somewhat disagree. You talk about wanting to hear the composer instead of the performer, but that is impossible most of the time. Many parts of the music can't be written down in sheet music and so you can't hear the composer completely by just playing the notes, instead you get a shell of the music without the spirit. I think the original spirit of the music died with the composer, so the performer has to replace it with his/her own. This can be informed by how we think people generally played in the past, but a true spirit is something individual. I think the 1981 recording is better than the 1955, it feels like Gould had a more definitive idea about what he wanted from the music. For example he added a grace note in the third movement, or how loud he plays variation 26 as a counter to variation 25.

Another point is that none of Bach's music was written for a piano, a piano can not really reproduce the sound of a harpsichord, but it can play with much more dynamic range and it can play much faster without sounding muddy unlike a harpsichord. I think the drastic difference between the instruments requires or at least benefits from a strong interpretation from the performer's side, because you can't play the "real original" music on a piano anyway. For example think of how Liszt made arrangements for violin music from Paganini, or Bach-Busoni arrangements.

Modern performers I think are often too preoccupied with just playing the notes as clean as possible instead of trying to play music. Compare for example modern very clean interpretations of Mozart to the in my opinion more interesting interpretation of Rachmaninoff who used much more rubato.

But I do think Gould plays very vertically, which doesn't really work in most music, but in Bach I think it works pretty well since the music is complex enough that the clarity of Gould's style can make the structure of the music come through more which can compensate for how dull he might play the lines individually.

I sit down at the piano everyday with the goal of making him roll over yet another few degrees in his grave, and I do so with great love and the knowledge that I’ll never be as good as him.