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Фермата

27 апреля 2023 21:52

That night I thought, "What am I going to talk to them about?"—when obviously the main subject of the evening was going to be our performance of a Brahms concerto and Glenn's interpretation of it. So I said to Glenn backstage, "You know, I have to talk to the people. How would it be if I warned them that it was going to be very slow, and prepare them for it? Because if they don't know, they really might leave. I'll just tell them that there is a disagreement about the tempi between us, but that because of the sportsmanship element in music I would like to go along with your tempo and try it." It wasn't to be a disclaimer; I was very much interested in the results—particularly the audience reaction to it. I wrote down a couple of notes on the back of an envelope and showed them to Glenn: "Is this okay?" And he said, "Oh, it's wonderful, what a great idea."

So I went out, read these few notes, and said, "This is gonna be different, folks. And it's going to be very special. This is the Glenn Gould Brahms concerto." Out he came, and indeed he played it exactly the way he had rehearsed it, and wonderfully too. The great miracle was that nobody left, because of course it had become such a thing to listen to. The house came down, although, if I remember correctly, it took well over an hour to play. It was very exciting. I never loved him more.

The result in the papers, especially the New York Times, was that I had betrayed my colleague. Little did they know—though I believe I did say so to the audience—that I had done this with Glenn's encouragement. They just assumed that I had sold him down the river by coming out first to disclaim his interpretation. It was, on the contrary, a way of educating the audience as part of Thursday night's procedure. All this was not only misunderstood, but repeated and repeated and multiplied exponentially by every other newspaper that wrote about it.

Then Harold Schonberg, the ex-chief critic of the Times who wrote the infamous review, wrote a Sunday piece in the form of a letter to "Dear Ossip"— Gabrilovitch, I assume. "Dear Ossip, you vill nyever guess vat last night in Carnyegie Hall hhappent!" sort of thing. The piece was based on this notion of betrayal. He has never let that notion die, and because it's so juicy it has undergone a kind of propagation all over the world. However, the "juicy" part is what did not happen. (For me, the juicy part is what did happen.) Of course, a defense is very weak, once a legend is born. It's rather like the Radical Chic Black Panther legend, which I can never seem to set straight. I have the feeling, even now, that trying to make this story about Glenn clear by telling the truth can't really erase the now legendary, but false, version.

Glenn laughed about it. He has that kind—had that kind of ... (I can’t get used to this idea of putting him in the past tense)—Glenn had strong elements of sportsmanship and teasing, 'the kind of daring which accounts for his freshness, the great sense of inquiry which made him suddenly understand Schoenberg and Liszt in the same category, or Purcell and Brahms, or Orlando Gibbons and Petula Clark. He would suddenly bring an unlikely pair of musicians together in some kind of startling comparative essay.

At some point, early on—I think when he was doing the Beethoven C Minor Concerto with me—Glenn and I were going to do some work at my apartment, so I invited him to dinner first. This was the first time Felicia, my wife, had actually met him. As you know, Glenn had a "cold complex." He had a fur hat on all the time, several pairs of gloves and I don't know how many mufflers, and coat upon coat. He arrived and began taking off all, or at least some of these things, and Felicia met and loved him instantly. "Oh," she said, "aren't you going to take off your hat?" He had a fur astrakhan cap on, and he said, "Well, I don't think so." At length, he did, and there was all this rotting, matted, sweaty hair that hadn't been shampooed in God knows how long. It was disappearing because it was so unhealthy.