Glenn Gould: A Life in Pictures (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Glenn Gould: A Life in Pictures S. Timothy Maloney Glenn Gould: A Life in Pictures. By Tim Page. Richmond Hill, ON; Buffalo, NY: Firefly Books, 2007. [192 p. ISBN: 9781554072897. $29.95.] Illustrations, facsimiles. Billing itself as “the first photographic treatment of the life of one of the greatest and most fascinating musicians of all time,” this book was conceived to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of Glenn Gould’s birth, and was first published in hardback under the same title by Doubleday in Toronto in 2002. The current edition is a softcover reprint published in 2007, which presumably makes it a seventy-fifth anniversary tribute, though no changes were made to the original texts. A brief foreword by the 1999 laureate of the Glenn Gould Prize in Music and Communications, Yo-Yo Ma, extols Gould’s “ability to create breathtaking new sound worlds from his own deep understanding of the abstract,” and lauds the “legacy of his imagination.” A lengthier essay by the Pulitzer Prize-winning music critic, Tim [End Page 768] Page, provides a biographical sketch of Gould and attempts to interpret and place into a broader context the salient features of his career. For example, after asking, “Has anybody ever possessed ten fingers with ten such marvelously independent lives?” (p. 14), Page suggests that Gould “made some of the best recordings of his time and . . . a few of the worst” (p. 15). Interspersed as marginalia throughout Page’s introductory text and occasionally thereafter are images of some of the thousands of documents preserved among the Glenn Gould Papers at the Library and Archives Canada. Gould was a pack-rat who kept everything from shopping lists, broadcast scripts, and drafts of outgoing correspondence (sent and unsent), to blood-pressure logs, tour itineraries, baggage tags, and hotel and rental car keys. Included in this selection are a Mother’s Day card hand-made by the youthful Gould, a letter from Queen Elizabeth’s lady-in-waiting acknowledging the Queen’s interest in “the little Canadian boy who is such a clever musician,” images of the covers of his first keyboard tutor and various recordings he made, concert programs and publicity flyers and posters, his lifetime membership card to the National Anti-Vivisection Society (attesting to his great concern for animals: he eventually left half his estate to the Toronto Humane Society), and the mimeographed note he displayed in his dressing rooms and handed out to fans during his nine-year career as a touring artist discouraging them from trying to shake his hand. Among the over 200 black-and-white photos that make up this Life in Pictures are many previously unpublished images of Gould, ranging from family snapshots to candid and formal publicity photos by Don Hunstein, whose portraits graced the covers of the ninety-plus Gould LPs issued by Columbia Masterworks (now Sony Classical), by Harold Whyte and Herb Nott for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), and by other Canadian photographers, including Robert Ragsdale, Paul Rockett, Henri Rossier, Dan Weiner, and Gaby, who were engaged at various times by Gould’s own management or by a succession of concert societies, festivals, newspapers, and symphony orchestras. They are organized into four chronological sections entitled “Overture,” “Bursting Forth,” “New Horizons,” and “Envoi.” Acknowledgements, sources, and a listing of permissions follow a five-page chronology of the major points in Gould’s life and career that rounds out the volume. Missing from this collection are photos of Gould by Yousuf Karsh, presumably because his estate tightly controls all use of his photographs by third parties, and by Jock Carroll, whose own book, Glenn Gould: Some Portraits of the Artist as a Young Man (Toronto: Stoddart, 1995), sparked a lawsuit brought by the Estate of Glenn Gould, which claimed copyright infringement based on its assertion of complete control of all usage of the name and likeness of Gould. The Estate lost both the original trial and the appeal, and one senses that this Life in Pictures publication, a project officially underwritten by the Estate, may have been its attempt to head off additional photo books that might be contemplated by any of the above-named or other photographers. Notwithstanding the...