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Glenn Gould

25 September 1932
Toronto
Pianist

I am going to play the incidental music to William Shakespeare’s The Twelfth Night. Well, I actually wrote this as an overture to the play. It is in the form of a suite in four movements for the piano. The suite is widely changeable in its ideas and moods of the different sections of the work, as in the play when we find different styles of writing in the different scenes, and so I think you'll find a great contrast in the movements. The first movement I call Nocturne, the second Whimsical Nonsense, the third Elizabethan Gaiety, and the fourth Regal Atmosphere. Here is the incidental music to The Twelfth Night.

I think there is a necessity, when doing a recording, to do it differently, to actually cover new ground, and I think if you can't find with conviction, new ground, one perhaps ought to leave that particular work until you found such a cause for it, or until you're convinced perhaps the median way is the right way. There is, there is nothing against doing something in quite an orthodox way, but I think it's important, especially in making recordings, that one contributes actually a totally new view. One in fact creates a new work, one turns performance into composition; I think this is the key to it.

Shakespeare had the art of words. In a marvelous way he understood our faults, our strengths, how we struggle to live. Shakespeare used the word for dramatic reasons, but he also used the word for poetic reasons. He selected language which sounds to me like music. The words and the rhythms of the words are just like music to my ears.

Glenn used to get very intense over certain things, and in the days in which he was giving concerts, I felt he needed a complete break. I loved Shakespeare, and he loved Shakespeare too, so I said: Why don’t we read Shakespeare together? Well, he thought this was an absolutely wonderful idea. His favorite play was Richard II, and you can guess who played Richard. He always felt that I made a great John of Gaunt. — Wally Maclean