Glenn Gould Hereafter (review)

When Glenn Gould died in 1982 at the age of fifty, he clearly had reached a new level of mastery in his career. His pianism— always brilliant but sometimes marred by perverse musical decisions—demonstrated a virtuosic clarity and interpretive richness that he had not achieved previously. And he was planning to turn much of his attention to conducting. A painfully slow, mysterious reading of Wagner's Siegfried Idyll in its original instrumentation is one of the few recorded documents he left in this area (Sony SK 46279, 1990, CD). Given Gould's considerable talents, imagination, and pioneering approach to various electronic media as a conduit for novel forms of artistic expression, I can think of few twentieth-century musicians whose untimely death deprived humanity of so much.

Perhaps for this reason, Gould maintains a powerful presence with music-lovers today: his records continue to sell, of course; more important, perhaps, many available film or video documentaries chronicle his life and work. In his own lifetime, Gould was photographed or filmed frequently, and so there is considerable archival material to draw from. Bruno Monsaingeon's new film, Glenn Gould Hereafter, benefits from this wealth of material as well as from the director's long-standing friendship and professional collaborations with his subject. The film follows, in the main, a loose chronological organization that presents Gould's life, music-making, and fundamental ideas on the intersection of aesthetics, technology, and ethics through audio from his performances and recordings, still photographs and film from his career, his own voice (captured in countless interviews), and excerpts from his uncompleted autobiography and other print sources read by the Scottish actor Rory Bremner.

Monsaingeon's choices and treatment of this material are uniformly excellent. Some of the best video excerpts include Gould singing Mahler's "St. Anthony of Padua's Fish-Sermon" to the elephants in the Toronto Zoo (from the 1979 film Glenn Gould's Toronto), and an arresting video performance of the unfinished fugue from J. S. Bach's Art of the Fugue (one of his final collaborations with Monsaingeon). One particularly striking sequence shows Gould conducting the countertenor Russell Oberlin and a small string orchestra in a 1962 performance of the opening aria from Bach's Cantata 54, Widerstehe doch der Sünde; the clip is extraordinary because the cameras focus first on Gould and even continue to do so once Oberlin begins to sing. Such moments affirm the degree to which Gould's image mesmerized audiences from a very early date. Still other film sequences, such as the one showing Gould in a staged cab ride to a Columbia Records studio (complete with dialogue in which he asks the cabbie to close the windows), demonstrate how he adroitly used film to carefully craft and control his unusual artistic persona.

But Monsaingeon does more than select interesting archival video that is complete in itself. The narrative is supplemented by new footage that frames and articulates the earlier material. Some of these shots are extraordinary for their perceptive, even magical, combination of video with musical cues chosen from Gould's performances and recordings. In the opening sequence, for instance, a shot of the full moon begins slowly to pass to the left and eventually out of frame. The audio consists of Prokofiev's Vision Fugitive, op. 22, no. 2 over which is added a recording of Gould's voice converting various measurements of hours, days, months, and years into their equivalent in seconds. And the shot of the moon is intercut with film of Gould performing the Prokofiev with an expression of ecstatic abandon. The sequence unites old and new material in a fresh and innovative way and also introduces the viewer to one of Gould's fixations—time—without devolving into pedantry. Another beautifully composed shot of Toronto's skyline at sunset is accompanied by the opening of a 1951 recording of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto—the same work that Gould performed in his debut at the age of fourteen. Gould recollects...