Bruno Monsaingeon: Glenn, I think first we should give you the opportunity to verify some of your public comments. Did you really say all these unheard of things about Mozart that are attributed to you? Do you really despise his music? Do you think that he's a "mediocre" composer and that he "died too late rather than too soon"?

Glenn Gould: Well, for the daily news these quotations might suffice, Bruno, but they might here deserve a slightly more in-depth treatment. Everything that I "despise" in the Mozart repertoire dates from his later years - compositions like The Magic Flute, the g minor Symphony...

BM: ...Or any of his other masterpieces!

GG: If you like. Indeed there are some from the early 1780s or the late 1770s that I can tolerate quite well - things like Seraglio for example enter one ear and exit the other immediately, but as background music I find that quite acceptable.

BM: How very generous of you.

GG: Not at all. Let me even add that there is a lot of music from the early years to which I really feel compelled, so actually it would be more appropriate for me to speak about Mozart as a composer who developed towards mediocrity. In fact, it is superfluous to say that my remark "he died too late" is a loveless reaction to his early demise, it was merely in response to such speculations as "just imagine what he would have composed if he'd lived to seventy."

BM: Well, for all of us who love Mozart and who think of his late compositions as the most superb musical experiences, it is inevitable to formulate such speculations. Probably useless, but inevitable.

GG: But of course, I myself speculate in the same way about Pergolesi. But the following is certainly reasonable: Had Mozart lived to seventy, he would have died one year before Beethoven and two years before Schubert and in that case, I suspect that Mozart - if one imagines a curve representing the last three hundred Koechel numbers - would have ended as some kind of mixture between Weber and Spohr.

BM: That is pure nonsense and you know it.

GG: I don't know, I just think that that's the direction he would have taken. Certainly I can't detect anything in Mozart's musical personality that would have led him in the direction of a piece like The Great Fugue.

BM: You don't want to say he became a "mediocre" composer because he didn't develop in the direction of the "avant-garde" like Beethoven?

GG: Of course not. But if we agree about nothing else, we can agree that "Zeitgeist" and political inclinations don't have a place in music. I would have been rather satisfied if Mozart, about the time when he left Salzburg, would have frozen his style and simply composed three hundred more pieces with no detectable change in expression. I must say that it would be fun to consider in what way Mozart would have reacted to a piece like The Great Fugue, if he would have heard it. I bet in more or less the same way as Richard Strauss reacted to Opus 16 of Schoenberg.

BM: Well, indeed it might be fun, but concerning the point at hand, it wouldn't be so fruitful. Let's leave the speculations and turn to facts.

GG: Well then.

BM: Did you always eschew Mozart? After all, I'm sure you were forced to learn and perform some of his pieces over the course of your musical education.

GG: Well, of course I was forced to study some of them and, to be honest, on some occasions I rather enjoyed playing them for my own delight. They gave some kind of keyboard pleasure that ranked slightly higher than with Clementi and slightly lower than with Scarlatti. Always, though, when in the course of my studies it came time to compile a program I succeeded in substituting Mozart with some late Haydn or early Beethoven, so that I actually didn't play any piece of Mozart in public before my mid-twenties.

BM: But it must have been apparent to you as a child that your opinion about Mozart wasn't widely shared.

GG: At first not. I believe that until I was thirteen I succeeded in convincing myself that everyone else reacted to everything in exactly the same way as I. For example, I thought it would be obvious that everyone would share my delight in a cloudy sky, and it was something of a shock for me when I discovered that some people preferred sunshine. Even now I can't understand it. But that's an entirely different story...

BM: Were these two realizations somehow connected? Would you agree with the image of Mozart constructed in the nineteenth century, of him possessing a sunny disposition or a cheerful nature, or whatever?

GG: Oh yes. I agreed with that always and still do. I believe that the tendency in the nineteenth century to call Mozart the way he appeared to the outside comes much closer to the truth than the image of him using every outside mood as merely a mask to disguise another darker side. But I think you're right, there is some connection between these two ideas. The truth is that it always seemed to me that there was something fundamentally frivolous to playing Mozart - and of course, the cloudy sky or, if not provided, the drawn curtains were always a necessary circumstance for me to play it with the required concentration. And indeed I remember a quite traumatic event from my twelfth year, when Artur Schnabel, who was my idol, came to Toronto and programmed K 333.

BM: Well, that must have been a revelation for you.

GG: I wouldn't know, I wasn't present. Despite the pressure of my teacher I refused to go. The whole episode involved tears and furious fits. I just couldn't understand how Schnabel could disappoint me so severely.

BM: Was there any pianist that would have impressed you with his Mozart playing?

GG: At least not to the same degree Schnabel impressed me with his Beethoven - but it might have to do with the emotional limitations of the Mozart repertoire.

BM: Or with your imagination of the emotional limitations.

GG: Agreed. Nevertheless, I remember with great pleasure some Casadesus recordings from that time (I still have some in my collection) - the beautiful 78 complete concert recordings - wasn't it with the orchestra of the Paris Conservatory?

BM: I believe so.

GG: I also liked, and it might surprise you, Eileen Joyce.

BM: I'm not familiar with her playing at all.

GG: Well, she played Mozart with real dedication - even I could realize that. Actually, just a couple of weeks ago, I heard a very old recording of hers of the K 576 on the radio, for the first time in probably twenty years, and again I remembered what an extraordinary pianist she was.

BM: How was it with conductors?

GG: Well, none of the Mozart stylists of the time - for example Walter, or also Beecham - interested me in a way the Beethoven specialists did, somebody like, for example, Weingartner. On the other hand, the greatest Mozart conductor that I've ever heard was already than active but not so well known on this side of the Atlantic.

BM: And who would that be?

GG: Josef Krips.

BM: Really?

GG: Indeed. And he,. by the way, was a student of Weingartner.

BM: That is true.

GG: Until the fifties, I didn't know Krips at all, neither personally nor as a conductor, when the time came, however, I discovered that he possessed an unusual capacity to capture structures that on paper appeared to me impossible to handle and rather boring as well - for example symphonies of Bruckner - and that he transformed them into absolutely fascinating events. His Mozart was simply charming and I don't think that his recordings with the Concertgebouw-Orchester will ever age. In my opinion he as the most underrated conductor of his generation. Of course there were quite a few capable baton swingers who had a similar precision - Szell and Reinecke and so forth, but Krips was capable of something more.

BM: I do agree. But would you be able to name that "something more?"

GG: I'm not sure. First of all, Krips was, and in the best of senses, a very simple man. I'm aware that some of my colleagues would insist upon calling him naive, but this would be as imprecise as it would be heartless. He had some kind of blind faith in what he was about to do, and when he would speak with someone about music, no matter on the subject of Mozart or Mahler, his conversation was always based on such profound knowledge of the score that he seemed almost intimidating. And yet the words he actually used to describe his insights were remarkably uncomplicated. The combination of his profound insights with his almost childlike innocence produced a remarkable effect. It was as if you would listen to a theologian who also was a believer - that doesn't necessarily go hand in hand - and as if it was declared in some dark corner of a doctrine that at least for the moment any disbelief would be impossible.

BM: Was it the same when you performed with Krips?

GG: Absolutely. In no way was he a dictator. One could always take the freedom to make one's own suggestions. Actually, I remember that I once succeeded in convincing him that some dynamic indications in the slow movement of the B flat Major Concerto of Beethoven didn't make sense, and he, in response, asked the members of the orchestra to change their scores. But, nevertheless, when you took your seat and began a performance with him, something happened that I could only describe as a quasi-hypnotic moment. He used to look at you in a way that somehow made you aware that there was an inevitable process beginning, a process in which you could only work together and in which you couldn't have any other desire than to work together, and that everything would develop and blossom at the time when it should. Then he gave the upbeat, and it happened exactly like that, it was pure magic.

BM: But then it must have been an extraordinary experience for you to play Mozart with him.

GG: I never played Mozart with him.

BM: Why not?

GG: I was afraid. That simple. I knew that my anti-Mozart arguments would never convince Krips - you can't convince a Viennese that Mozart is a mediocre composer - but on the other hand I also knew that I would never have been able to share his love for Mozart and it appeared to me that any form of collaboration in which his love would have been compromised by my personal inclinations would have become some kind of blasphemy. Not a blasphemy upon Mozart, I wasn't concerned about him, but upon his love that enabled Krips to do such miraculous things with music. He would never have understood that my resistance to play Mozart with him was rooted in my admiration for him. At one point, he suddenly insisted on singing the K 491, there was no piano in the room, that is from the first to the last note. You have to know that he had memorized the entire Austrian/German repertoire, and without the aid of any score, used to do things like that all the time. So I sang the bassoon or cello, and Krips sang and gesticulated for all the others in our imaginary orchestra. In that hour, it was teatime, I have never been so close to loving Mozart before or afterwards.

BM: But what if you decided to explain to somebody like Krips why you don't like Mozart. How would you handle that?

GG: That is, without any attempt towards diplomacy?

BM: Yes, without any respect for age, experience, excellence, or anything else.

GG: You see, that is exactly the problem. Somebody like Krips represents - at least for me - so to speak the net result of two centuries of Mozart admiration and it is quite complicated to present such a person the fact that for all these years he has believed in the wrong god. I wouldn't know where to start.

BM: Well, why don't you try.

GG: Very well. I believe it would develop into some kind of confession, resulting in the admittance that in relation to music I have something like a one hundred year blind spot. You could define it with, on the one hand, The Art of the Fugue, and on the other, Tristan. Anything in between, in the best case gives me incentive towards admiration, but not towards love.

BM: Anything?

GG: Well, not really anything. There are some exceptions. Some Haydn compositions and some pieces by Bach's sons, the rather idyllic side of Beethoven - things like the first movement of Opus 101, or the entire Opus 28 and of course I would make an exception for something like The Great Fugue that of course is not idyllic, but appears to me to be one of the wonders in music. And then there is Mendelssohn - at least if he isn't composing for the piano. I think I've told you once that I'm the only person known to me that would prefer to hear the Paulus over the Missa Solemnis.

BM: And I think I've told you that I'm speechless.

GG: I believe it went like that. But, overall most of the music between late Bach and mid-Wagner would in the best case produce a dilute emotional effect within me.

BM: But that is a rather large field.

GG: Quite true.

BM: For example all the early Romantics come to mind.

GG: With the exception of Mendelssohn.

BM: With the exception of Mendelssohn, but also Schubert, Chopin, and Schumann.

GG: That is right.

BM: And then the so called Rococo or Classic style.

GG: But with the mentioned exceptions.

BM: Well you mentioned Haydn and Beethoven, but I assumed you meant only a few pieces. As a violinist I would like to ask you how you react to the Beethoven Violin Concerto.

GG: I'm afraid rather negatively. To be honest, you choose a piece that drives me absolutely crazy. But the whole middle period, which I call the "Me Explosion" of Beethoven - Appassionata, the Violin Concerto, the Fifth Symphony, etc. - this whole oeuvre being so satisfied with itself, so full of repetitive patterns following the premise "Damn you if you push me towards the next progression," bores me to tears. It appears to me to be one of the little miracles of life that these pieces produce such an amazing effect.

BM: And always did.

GG: Exactly, and so it is probably one of the little miracles of history. At this point, concerning Beethoven and his middle period, I'm afraid we're losing our focus on Mozart.

BM: Well not really, because I believe that with the examples at hand - regarding Mendelssohn or Beethoven or whomever - one could understand your hesitations concerning Mozart a little better.

GG: Well, that I like. I actually got into that remark about my blind spot trying to explain that my reservations concerning Mozart are a part of a larger scheme, that they are just one dislike among many.

BM: But isn't there some common denominator between all your dislikes?

GG: That is absolutely right, there is. I would like to add though that, contrary to what you might believe, as a premise for my musical pleasure, I don't necessarily need some kind of unending fugue - although a neverending fugue indeed could be something very pleasant.

BM: But at least it seems that you need a very strong feeling for independence of voices that is regardless to what kind of structure they are following, be it just a complex composition or a fugue. And that is why, in my opinion, you can't stand (or I would prefer to say, you don't understand) a piece like the Violin Concerto of Beethoven, in contrast to music like Opus 28, which you admire, because as you said earlier it possesses a very continuous quartet-like structure.

GG: That is quite true. And, Bruno, I believe I know where that comes from. Since my childhood I have been aware that the music that moves me most stems from chorales and hymns. And they don't have to be complex chromatic chorales in twelve tone organization, like "Es ist genug" or something similar, they could also be very common methodical pieces from the nineteenth century, for example, "Abide with Me". Indeed I always said the most fascinating beautiful little piece in all of music is a hymn by Orlando Gibbons, by the name "Thus Angels Sang." I couldn't count the times I've let these bars wander through my mind, or how often I've played them on the piano, or how often I've listened to the Deller Consort sing them - hundreds, probably thousands of times. Overall I believe that a certain kind of pure, leading, principal voice, more than counterpoint in the academic sense, is much more the key to my musical pleasures

BM: Well, I would say that is an indication of some phenomenon of your personal musical tastes. But it also indicates that these principles of yours never allow you to accept or understand the decorative element of Mozart's music, or that in any music of any kind.

GG: Well Bruno, I don't presume that I don't understand Mozart, but certainly one of the things that I can't accept is that the melodic element could ever be separated from its harmonic surroundings. And I believe that one has the tendency to do so if there's a specifically melodic talent, be it with Bellini or Mozart or whoever. Do you remember, for example, these bars from the second movement of the Concerto K. 482?

My reservations here are not only caused by my general distaste for sequences, but rather by the fact that Mozart in the moment when he led this sequence harmonically over the dominant of the second scale degree, and also over the E flat in the melody - or one should probably say, in the de facto melody since the second voices are taken by the first violins in that moment - succeeded in endangering the entire harmonic balance of the movement, with the result that for me the interval from the simple E flat to the simple D is the sounding equivalent of the scratching of one's fingernails across a chalkboard, it makes me cringe.

BM: In your opinion, what should he have done?

GG: Well, if I could, I would remove the entire sequence so that you would never get tangled up in this mess.

BM: And if you would accept the sequence as necessary?

GG: In that case, the only solution that comes to mind is the following: One would have to take the C Major tritone and let it resonate with the arbitrary c minor, in that way aiding the simple D with the dominant of the mediant, so that at least the functions of this sequence would be harmonically clear. Something like this:

...Or, if you prefer, a Mendelssohn or Hummel kind of variant, with a canon sort of accompaniment:

In this way, of course, you introduce a new kind of rhythmic element that changes the character of the sequence but at least you no longer suffer the fingernails on the chalkboard.

BM: But you merely take the elements of the composition as they are and make them explicit.

GG: Well, you see, Bruno, I'm absolutely in favor of multiplicity, you must believe me. But only if it works within its own structure, if the overall harmonic climate in which the piece progresses is equipped in a way that it delivers a very clear psychological explanation of all these factors. And I don't believe that is the case here at all. On the other hand, I've already told you that I don't like the Symphony No. 40, although one of my favorite moments in all of Mozart's music comes exactly from there - this extraordinary sequence of unaccompanied falling sixths, immediately after the double bar in the finale.

Well that is a really unbelievable inspiration. It is as if Mozart tried here to greet the spirit of Anton Webern from afar. It is like an oasis in a desert of cliches.

BM: Please do not confuse my silence with agreement.

GG: I certainly wouldn't. The important thing is in this particular case I don't have a problem because this part works in its structural environment, whether he could make that happen in anything else than an unaccompanied sequence is another issue. Anyway, I just brought it up because I don't believe that you can ever handle a melody, whether accompanied or not, outside of the harmonic structure of the situation. I just do not believe that it is possible.

BM: Well actually when I spoke about the decorative element I meant an entirely different aspect of figuration, I was thinking about the bel canto aspects of the Mozart style, the scales, trills, and arpeggios that you generally dislike, regardless of harmonic context.

GG: Indeed I believe that Mozart's attitude towards ornaments was very "legere," it evokes in me a suspicion of some kind of faking, a suspicion that any other fancihood would have sufficed as long as both hands are fairly employed. Something like that happens very seldom to Haydn, and Beethoven - with the exception of his middle period - is almost always able to convince one that his ornaments fulfill an organic function, he actually differs so reluctantly between his thematic and ornamental materials that his themes sound in the end occasionally like the ornaments of others.

BM: But wouldn't it be fair to say that your inclinations away from Mozart have as least as much to do with questions of form as with the problems of melodic figuration of harmonic progression? What I mean is that I sometimes have the impression that you like to use Schoenberg's principle of the developing variation on all music, no matter if it fits or not?

GG: You know what Bruno, I hate to admit it but I think you're right. It's true. What it actually means is that I prefer inductive music to deductive music - music in which formal structure is identical with the development of a specific motivical idea and not music in which the materials are forced together by a predestined plan. One could invent some kind of salon public game in which you would divide all music into one of two categories. I would think that all the Bach Fugues would be inductive, for example.

BM: ...Whoa there, not all the Fugues.

GG: Yes, in general, all of them. The idea of the fugue is based in usually on an inductive formal aspect, at least in harmonic reference, in a way that sonata allegro form isn't.

BM: What would be the ultimate inductive piece?

GG: Oh, I don't know. The most appropriate answer to that is probably that it wasn't written yet. But if you would have to use what is already written, I would vote for The Great Fugue or something like Schoenberg's Erwartung.

BM: Let me ask you about a specific piece of Mozart that you recorded twice, the Sonata K 330. Since you consider sonata form the simplification of Baroque architecture, you would not perceive within it some kind of dramatic impulse. I know that you consider the choice of tempo to be something less than an important issue - that you demonstrated in the aforementioned recordings, the first of which you take at the slowest tempi I've ever heard, and then the second of which you take at by far the fastest.

GG: Must I defend myself?

BM: By all means.

GG: Well, first to 330. I think both versions reflect very simply the different pulse frequencies that I had during the recording sessions. I must say that today I prefer the slower tempi, a la Klemperer, so I prefer the early version. I can only argue on behalf of what you might call the theory of modulatory distance. Let me put it this way: If you encounter for the nine hundred and ninety ninth time a sonata in the key of C major which happens to have a second theme in G major, that's not per se a great event, especially if that theme has been arrived at via the customary harmonic routine - dominant of the dominant and all of that. And if it's not a great event (and I don't mean over the long haul of history only; I mean even from the presumed vantage point of the composer of Mozart's era - a composer who is likely to have been short on historical perspective but long on experience, to have heard, perhaps four hundred and forty four such thematic setups at court already and to have written two hundred and twenty two of them himself), then I really don't see why one would attempt to inflect it, to characterize it, as though it were. Now, if, on the other hand, it really does come through hell and high water to get where it's going, if some genuine, untoward event intervenes to keep the sonata allegro from its appointed rounds, then I'm all for the creation of a tempo shift appropriate to the magnitude of that event. For example, let's take the first movement of Op. 10 No. 2, where Beethoven introduces the recapitulatory material in the key of the submediant. That is a magical moment, and it deserves, in my view, a very special kind of temp adjustment - something that will allow the main theme to regroup, during the D major D minor sequence, and then gradually come back to life as the F major tonic returns. Now, nothing of that sort is indicated in the score, but that kind of harmonic drama is something that surely no one can ignore.

BM: Is this also the reason that you ignore Mozart's instruction to maintain the tempo intact at the end of the Rondo in K. 333?

GG: Absolutely. For me, that one page is worth the price of admission. It is a cadenza, no matter what Mozart says, and I simply can't imagine how he could possibly expect anyone to charge through the tonic minor and its submediant without going into low gear.

BM: But it's always the harmonic climate that seems to influence your thinking, never the aspect of thematic contrast itself.

GG: Well, as I said before, Bruno, the basic format of sonata style doesn't interest me all that much - the question of vigorous, masculine tonic themes and gentle, feminine dominant themes seems awfully cliche-ridden to me and, in any case, more an excuse for touch variation then for tempo changes. Besides, you know, it often works the other way around - aggressive, masculine second themes, and so forth. Since you mentioned K 333 a moment ago, think about the integration of line between the first and second themes of its first movement, which, as far as I can see, could be played in reverse order and still provide a perfectly satisfying contrast.

BM: But doesn't this suggest a certain rigidity in terms of tempo, after all, if you play the piano, especially as a soloist, you don't have to be bound by orchestral concepts of tempo.

GG: You don't have to be, but, in my view, and certainly in this repertoire, you ought to be. You know, I have a sort of motto to the effect that if you can't conduct it, it's wrong - "it" being any piece of piano repertoire penned before 1900 - and I'm not even sure that time limit is appropriate. One has to assume, of course, that the listener as a gift for subdivided beats, but I do find it upsetting, to put it mildly, to hear eighteenth or nineteenth century music played on the piano with the kind of motoric license that has nothing at all to do with rubato. I think it has to do with the fact that the piano can't just get up and deny its collaboration, the way members of an orchestra certainly would.

BM: How would all of what you just said refer to your recording of the A major sonatas of Mozart, which, in my opinion, is one of your most interesting Mozart recordings, but which has, doubtless, a lot of rather peculiar tempi?

GG: Indeed, I believe you refer to the excessive slowness of the Rondo Alla Turca.

BM: That of course is the least. I was much more thinking about the first movement, in which every variation is in a different tempo...

GG: ...But also each faster than the preceeding variation, if I remember correctly.

BM: ...And in which you, despite Mozart's indication of Adagio, perform the fifth variation Allegro.

GG: That is true, but pursuing my scheme, it being the penultimate variation, I still played it slower than the finale. I had the feeling, the way his compositions were constructed, that I could neglect any kind of sonata allegro conventions.

BM: Including the continuity of tempo?

GG: Exactly.

BM: What about all the sforzandi that you usually obliterate or at least underemphasize?

GG: Guilty as charged. I've always shied away from sforzandi. You see Bruno, I believe that they represent a theatrical element, something against which my puritan soul rebels. Let's take for example the thirty second ornaments in the second movement of the g minor Symphony. In a certain theatrical context they might appear justified. In other circumstances, they appear to me rather unmusical.

BM: I will now ignore any other complaints of yours about the g minor Symphony. I think it becomes clear that what you actually dislike in Mozart is Mozart himself, that you are perfectly satisfied with him as long as he is ready to appear as Haydn or one of the sons of Bach, that when he projects his own personality you become uncomfortable.

GG: It would be difficult to deny that.

BM: But the consequences are that you deny Mozart the dramatic entirely, and not only because you go ahead and remove all the sforzandi, but because you want him to possess all the qualities that the nineteenth century proscribed him, eternal youth, cheerfulness, grace, and so on.

GG: It's not that I would expect all that from him - I would simply be much happier if he would have been a somewhat more serious Gluck kind of figure, then I would just have to wait for the right cloudiness and I could play his music with real passion. Although I believe that all these characteristics were given to him by nature, I also believe that he had a very worldly inclination in his character and when he "grew up" he let it overtake him and his work declined correspondingly.

BM: Well, look here, I recently say Bergman's film of the Magic Flute, which I imagine is not one of your favorite works, and in spite of what I thought was a very bad soundtrack, I was simply moved all over again by the sound of the music itself, which may very well seem to be a sensual response - but I don't think so. I think it's something purely spiritual. But it would be awfully difficult to find an adjective for that feeling, and I certainly don't think that any of the stereotyped adjectives about Mozart could describe it.

GG: But you see, I think we can protest too much, Bruno. I think that when generations of listeners - laymen particularly, because their views usually have an intuitive edge over musicians - have found it appropriate to attribute terms like "lightness, ease frivolity, gallantry, spontaneity" to Mozart, it behooves us to at least think about the reasons for these attributions - which are not necessarily born of a lack of appreciation or of charity. I think that to a lot of people - and I include myself among them - the words imply not a criticism of what Mozart offers us, but a hint of what he doesn't offer. I always think of an extraordinary concept in an essay on Mozart by the theologian Jean La Moyne, who also happens to be a most perceptive musical layman, in his essay he tried to come to grips with just what it was that alienated him from Mozart. He discovered that in his youth he had mistrusted any art that had, as he puts it, "pretentions to self-sufficiency", but that later, having come to realize that genius is somehow related to an ability to understand the world, he nevertheless continued to require of every artist what he called "the polarization, the haste, and the progress" that he observed in the lives of the mystics.

BM: I presume he didn't come to terms with Mozart.

GG: No. As a matter of fact, he likened Mozart to Don Giovanni, who he claimed was really Cherubino returned from military service He said that - and I wrote this down for our conversation because I didn't want to misquote him - "despite his easy grace and virtuosity, Don Giovanni doesn't possess himself sufficiently to belong definitely to the absolute and to march unwaveringly towards the silence of being."

BM: Well I admire the poetry but that's as far as I can go.

GG: It's also as far as I can go, because, for me, that says it all about Mozart, or at least as much as can be said for now.