I did not have breakfast with Beethoven this morning. But one of the wonderful things about both Beethoven and I being humans is that having learned to read it, and having heard many others who have as well, I simply need to open a score of Op. 110, and therein lies a world of human emotion that we share.
What I find most relevant in art is that Beethoven and the other great artists were able to capture their experience in such a way that others could relate to these experiences and make our own the understanding that the artists' uncanny sensibility has reached, crafted or discovered in connection with these experiences.
We in the 21st century can clearly relate to the affirmance of hope that only a rock would miss after listening to Beethoven's 9th symphony. Beethoven, in a world in many ways different from ours, but in fundamental ways the same, captured not necessarily a zeitgeist, but a geist of human.
You ask how do I know I understand Beethoven and Gould doesn't. You miss my point. It is easier if you think of it with a metaphor.
Say you and I have a beach ball with six colored stripes. Comes Glenn Gould and says, in his genius, that what we have in our hands is a plastic air container, and highlights that this container has the purpose of serving as a suffocation device, or an umbrella, or a sun-dial clock.
C'mon. You have to be too clever to say that a beach ball is not a beach ball.
Granted, Gould is not wrong or bad for identifying that this object of perception can be understood in the ways he described; but it is obvious that he has missed, perversely, the function and beauty of the ball: to play with it at the beach.
Metaphors have the short-coming of over-simplification. The beauty of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier and Beethoven's 32 sonatas is more complicated, rich, and ambiguous than a beach ball.
Is it possible that secretly Bach meant to create a multi-color, somewhat oddly shaped raft that became spheric if fully inflated? Only a fool would think so.
Forget about Beethoven, where Gould's excentricities are so implausibly far from the plain bones of the music to be simply laughable. Let's talk Bach for a second:
Bach wrote a bunch of cantatas, several oratorios, and a truckload of instrumental music. In the vocal music, quite campy, he often illustrates the words with music that sounds kind of what is being described by the words. In more significant places, Bach gives us a powerful, visceral, illustration (or even more, a transfusion: the experience of listening transfigures your existence so you feel these cosmic, profound, experiences as your own) of the aspects of human experience he has captured in his music. A choir screams "Barrabas" and the experience of choosing to kill Jesus, the pain of our own absurdity, the terror, and desolation, of the violence that humans inflict on each other will always now be part of you, even if you are fortunate enough to never have witnessed genocide, lynching, or injustice.
But I put on a Gould CD, and what I hear is self-indulgence, neurosis, obsession. I am at a loss for the emotion that (thanks to Bach having been the superb artist he was) is quite apparent from the music itself.
I think you misunderstand me about my appreciation of Gould's trascendence. It is quite obvious to me. In fact, I think it is the only thing that makes listening to Gould worthwhile. His perfomance are, without doubt, works of art in their own accord. It happens to be art that does not appeal to me because the frequency to which I feel Gould tuned to, neurotic, jittery, bizarre, selfish, has little to offer me. It is art, but art that has little value for me.
I am more interested in humor, love, communion, hope even in the most horrid grief. Hence that I am listening to more Bach, Mozart and Beethoven these days. If I am in the mood for neurotic art, chances are I'll pick some Prokofiev instead. He was a genius too, you know, and of a much richer caliber than Gould.
It is funny you mention Argerich and Horowitz, two artist whom as they matured shed much of their self-centeredness and became much much much more focused on the composer's gifts, rather than in their need to project some other message that does violence to the work of art they are choosing to interpret for us. For example, Argerich's Schumann of recent is of a genuine quality that surpases incommensurably her ghastly early recordings of, say, Kresleriana.
You suggest we cannot discern Beethoven's true intentions, and to that I say I fear you have been corrupted by the type of relativism that bothers me in Gould's playing, for Beethoven was very good at making his understanding of what is important in each of us accessible to anyone who listens.
Borges once mused about a library in which all possible books (within certain parameters) were housed. He entertained himself with the thought that infinite permutations were posible by assigning different to the words. In a book the characters "once" would mean "11," and in another "one time," or yet in another it would be a person playing left wing in a soccer team, or "twice." If "book" really means murder, and the other words also vary their meaning, a rose is a rose is a rose might well be a phone number, the secret name of God, or directions to the bathroom in a restaurant. Is it true that when you say no you really mean yes? Answer no, and I will not know whether you mean no as conventionally understood, or no under the bizarre parameters of the question.
If you want to spend your time focusing on the fact that we are incaple of "knowing" that Beethoven meant chair when he wrote chair, you should go ahead. Freedom is one of the virtues of being human. But if you are tired, and you need a chair, musing that it could really be a beach ball is a waste of an opportunity.
Topic: Who is the best Beethoven Sonata Interpreter?