(The most amazing, misunderstood classical album of all time)
He decided to revisit his 1955 masterpiece in 1981 and commit it to record and film. The bloody nerve of Gould thinking he could top what had remained his best-known work.
This time around he slowed down many passages so you could savour every note previously lost in the blur of the analog original. Very cheeky. And he pounded the keys with an authority which drove the purists nuts, having the audacity to sing along, too!
What was the hell was this new Goldberg Variations about? It was about The Immense Intensity this time around–all the nuances, not just the simple focus and purity of the original. When Gould played it again, it was like an orchestra of instruments–a wonderful illusion that–to bring down the imagined house one final time.
It was, in a phrase–the music of the soul–in all its naked splendor. And Gould nailed it with thunder in the faster sections, yet with an alternate deep tenderness in the slower pieces he had not been capable of a quarter of a century before.
I think of the second version as his retake to reveal all the beauty, sensitivity, and great passion he had missed the first time around. Humming along, he was likewise lost in the grandness that he heard, generated, and captured sublimely–a grandness to some extent that transcended the greatness of Bach’s own original.
In short, he had turned the aria and variations composition inside out and plumbed its depths–the soul behind the music as well as his own soul, totally free and freed, for all to share and feel in this tremendous masterwork.
No, the limited naysayers and purists were completely out to lunch in their nitpicking and complaints. What they missed is one of the most remarkable cases of reinvention ever created in the annals of classical music. Gould’s 1981 variations–‘warts’ and all.