Word: goulding
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Though senior writer Otto Friedrich has written ten other books, he is best known as the author of an acclaimed biography of a brilliant pianist, Glenn Gould: A Life and Variations (Random House). When he is not buried in his own writing, Friedrich sometimes dons the mantle of literary agent. Impressed by the reporting that Denise Worrell, then TIME's show-business correspondent, had done on celebrities from Michael Jackson to George Lucas, he offered to spend his lunch hours showing Worrell's work to publishers. A flattered if skeptical Worrell said, "Great!" then forgot about...
Among the few modern concert performers whom even the tone-deaf have heard of, none is more intriguing than the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould -- not only because of his electrifying reinventions of Bach's Goldberg Variations, among other pieces, but also because of the strikingly eccentric artistic creation that was his life. Who could forget the singular genius who shuffled about on summer days swathed in mufflers and overcoats (because of his hypochondria), and in concerts sat himself down on a pygmy chair and proceeded to sigh, groan, sing and wave his hands about as he played? Who could resist...
There is, of course, plenty of strangeness here: Gould rehearsing a children's choir while crouched in a pew, nothing visible but his hand; Gould serenading the elephants at the Toronto zoo by singing them Mahler at dawn. Yet at play within him was something deeper than mere oddity. Able to read music before he could read words, Gould found he could learn scores most easily while listening simultaneously to TV shows or the roar of a vacuum cleaner. Always, his remarkable gifts were shadowed by a perversity that drove him to torture the works he disliked (notably, most...
...Gould's performances, writes Friedrich, had "a strange power unlike anything in the work of any other pianist . . . a power that made many people feel that their lives had somehow been changed, deepened, enriched." Still, Friedrich respects Gould's talents too much to canonize, or psychoanalyze, him. Instead, he sends the reader back to the recordings. And there, as one listens, one senses that in some deep but precise sense, Gould and his piano were truly one. For the man himself was a highly sensitive instrument, tuned to a fine pitch, capable of many moods, and played upon at times...
...York Central Railroad), was a whiskey-swilling, street-fighting parvenu who bullied his wife and children, cheated the public and gave away pittances from the $100 million he amassed. Auchincloss notes, a bit sorrowfully, that Vanderbilt and his colleagues in stiff-collar crime like Jay Gould would not find themselves out of place on Drexel Burnham Lambert's Wall Street. Still, the author can find it in his heart to suggest that the commodore's coarseness may have been caused by social insecurity...