Mastery

Glenn Gould launched a brilliant career
as a pianist at age 24 when he recorded
Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Shortly before
he died at age 50 he recorded them again.
He told an interviewer that he recognized
his style in the earlier recording—wild
runs and trills, bright surfacings—yet
its heart seemed unfamiliar. The material
was the same—he’d always loved the Master’s
genius for exploding many ideas at once—
but his own way of riding that music had
deepened so much that the earlier talent
sounded strange, like the sound of
someone walking outside a dark, wet window.

On the later recording you can hear
Gould humming along as he played.
He hated the habit he’d formed over the years,
and it made hard work for the engineers:
Yet he knew he always played better
dancing along with his voice. Imagine painting
while you dreamed, or making love on
a horse galloping through a wild night’s storm.
There is a mastery which finds the heart
of the heart and learns how to stay there.
None of that was apparent to the younger man.
It took decades for Gould to find the
deeper hooves of mastery. I think of him
walking outside that house trying to go home.
Of one day finding a door, not in what he knew,
nor in the brilliance of his hands, but by
abandoning himself to the piano’s keys,
riding them into the heart’s wilderness.