第34页 Performance as an Extreme Occasion

p20

It is not that Toscanini highlights only the melody (as Adorno charged) but that each of the measures of the score is realized with a taut inevitability suggesting the expressivity of pure forward movement that seems to be making only provisional or convenient use of music, rather than communicating the orchestral equivalent of shaped phrasings that derive from the human voice.

What Toscanini seems to me to be doing here is trying to force into prominence, or perhaps enforce, the utterly contrary quality of the performance occasion, its total discontinuity with the ordinary, regular, or normative processes of everyday life.  No wonder that Adorno preferred a Furtw\"angler for whom the performance of, say, the Bruckner or Schubert Ninth symphonies was felt to derive from his private, intuitive interpretation brought out and displayed, as if by the sheerest coincidence, on a public concert platform.  In the drier, more unyielding acoustical and expressive contours of a Toscanini performance the concert stage is the public occasion, and \emph{only that}; it stands before us stripped of any vestiges of home, individual subject, family, tradition, or national style.  And because it is really very difficult to prove that from a logical point of view Toscanini is wrong, or that concerts under late capitalism are really ``music-making'' or ``communities of interpretation'' or shared ``subjectivity,'' and that traditions of performance established in nineteenth-century Berlin and Vienna are being violated, there has been in general an unwillingness to grant that the unrelaxed emotional pressure projected on his audiences by his performance stems immediately from what is extreme in the occasion itself.  Out of touch with a reflective composing tradition that was never really his, having lost contact with the vagaries and permissiveness of amateurish musical practice, specialized into the ascetic discipline of a concert repertory based entirely on masterpieces from the past, Toscanini's conducting, I believe, rarefied and concentrated the whole business several steps further, and made it for a time \emph{the} dominant musical paradigm.  That the paradigm was endorsed and subsidized by a corporate patron is a precise index of business acumen, and of course of the way in which the culture industry operates.


p25

It was as if Gould's virtuosity finally derived its fluency from the piece and not from a residue of technical athleticism built up independently over the years.  Pollini has some of the same quality as Gould in this respect, but it is the wonderfully intelligent exercise of his fingers in polyphonic music that separates Gould from every other pianist.  Only a great Bach organist communicates in something like the same way, except that as a concert pianist Gould had an awareness of the essentially theatrical frame that calls attention to what keeps him on the distinct side of the divide between audience and performer.


p26

Gould was neither intellectually disciplined nor a fully cultivated man, and his learning, for all the exuberance with which he deployed it, often reveals the trying awkwardness of the naive village philosopher.  The paradox is that his writings are nevertheless essential as the verbal counterpoint he provided for himself as a performer.  Thus quite deliberately Gould extended the limited theatrical space provided by performance as an extreme occasion to one whose scope includes speech, time as duration, an interlude from daily life that is not controlled by mere consecutiveness.  Thus for Gould performance was an inclusive phenomenon but it was still kept within the bounds and the inaccessibility imposed by his studied eccentricity.


p33

Most important in all this, however, was Gould's talent for doing one thing brilliantly (playing the piano well, for example) and suggesting that he was doing something else too.  Hence his predilection for contrapuntal or variational forms or, on a slightly different level, his habit of playing the piano \emph{and} conducting \emph{and} singing, or his way of being able to quote both musically and intellectually more or less any thing at any time.  In a sense then Gould was gradually moving toward a kind of nontheatrical and anti-aesthetic Gesamtkunstwerk, a description that sounds antiformal and contradictory at the same time.  I am not sure how aware he was of this, and how conscious he was of Rimbaud's deracinement du sens, but it strikes me as apt since the idea seems to me to approach the unsettling and yet attractively intelligent qualities in Gould's unusual enterprise, which was at once to make the performance more---because packed, bustling, overflowing---of an occasion, and more extreme, more odd, more unlike the lived reality of humankind, and still more unlike other concerts.  By its radical force Gould's career in fine has supplied us with a largely but not completely new concept of what performance is all about, which like most things in musical elaboration---because it is still ideologically and commercially linked to the past and to present society---is neither a total disruption nor a total transformation of customary practice.

The distensions and peculiarities in what Gould did may in time come to seem totally innocuous, tamed or incorporated by the ongoing culture business, of which classical musical performance is only one component.  An index of this diminishment to Gould's real activity is that he is known today almost exclusively either as a curiosity or as a very gifted pianist, just as Toscanini is known entirely as a great conductor about whose interpretations one may have opinions, but the social and aesthetic meanings of whose career are now generally screened from attention or study.