A Romance on Three Legs

 
They say that you can see a faint star better if you don't look right at it but slightly askance, and I've noticed the same is true about a lot of things—they sink into consciousness and stick in memory better when you don't look right at them. A few books that I've read also confirm this belief. For example, I doubt if I'll be reading a full-blown history of England any time soon, but I thoroughly enjoyed A History of England in Fifty Postage Stamps.  And although higher mathematics is an impenetrable subject, Karen Olsson makes it all sound very interesting in The Weil Conjectures, her joint biography of mathematician Andre Weil and his philosopher-sister Simone. And just the other day I finished a third book that I'd place in the same category, A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould's Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano.   

Gould, a piano wunderkind from Toronto, burst onto the scene in the mid-1950s at the age of 22 with a dazzling recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations. A true "crossover" hit, the album sold forty thousand copies and was later chosen the recording of the decade. (I'm listening to it now.) A charming if eccentric personality, Gould had many devotees who were otherwise uninterested in classical music. By the same token, many fans of classical music were unimpressed by his later recordings, especially those in which Gould strayed from the baroque repertoire. To them, Gould's interpretations were odd, his attack on the keys unduly harsh, his incessant humming distracting, and, more generally speaking, his celebrity all out of proportion to his musicianship.

Gould died in 1982, at the age of 50. Yet his "cult" endured, and in2002 a three-CD set of his two versions of the Goldberg Variations, recorded twenty years apart, along with a disc devoted to interviews, sold more than 60,000 copies, dwarfing the sales of any CD by Rubinstein, Horowitz or any other household name in the world of classical piano.

The public fascination with Gould's personality and music remains such that several popular documentaries have been made about him, including 32 Short Films about Glenn Gould (1993) and Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould (2019).

Author Katie Hafner fills in some of the detail regarding Gould's childhood and upbringing in suburban Toronto in the first chapter of this crisp and well-researched portrait, but she soon changes direction, taking us out to the plains of rural Saskatchewan in chapter two to meet a nearly blind farm boy named Verne Edquist. His family was so poor they sent him to a state-run school for the blind, where he learned to tune pianos. It took him a while, but eventually he got pretty good at it.

Young Verne Endquist

Chapter three jumps to the Astoria neighborhood of Queens, where Steinway and Sons in located. Hafner reviews the history of the company, underscoring the radical improvements in construction that help the firm rise to preeminence in the field, while also describing the changing role of the piano in twentieth century American life and how the Steinway marketing techniques influenced that development.

In the course of relating these two stories, Hafner presents us with a large amount of technical information about how pianos are made, how they actually produce the sounds they do, and how various techniques from chipping to bellying to tuning to voicing enhance the sounds that emerge from a Steinway grand piano.

"Any technician knows that a bad voicing job can ruin a set of hammers, but there is also great pride to be had in voicing— because it is in the voicing that a piano maker can have a real in­fluence on the instrument. Voicing gave employees who loved music a chance to indulge their passion, allowing them to im­pose a little of their own musicality on a piano. The sound of a piano can vary dramatically, depending on what the voicer has done. A piano voiced in a mellow tone for the music room of a typical home, for instance, can be swallowed up in a concert hall. And what one person might perceive as mellow, another might hear as weak. This subjectivity—this unquantifiable sense that guides the essential voicing process—is part of what makes each piano distinct, while at the same time it is what creates the characteristic 'Steinway sound.'" 

Gould's "touch" was different from that of most other pianists, and for that reason, he had a difficult time finding a piano that suited his needs. In particular, he was obsessed by the need to have a light, clean, "action." By the time we meet up with the piano of Gould's dreams, Steinway CD318, Hafner has introduced us to Gould, Edquist, Steinway, and the mechanics of a piano; in short, she's given us all the information we need to appreciate the event.

"Striking a key on the piano, however, Edquist, like Gould, knew that there was something about CD 318 that set it apart even from other Steinways. Usually Edquist set his ear for nu­ances in pitch, resonance, and overall quality of tone. It was a dis­passionate approach, but efficient. While Edquist encountered fine Steinways every week, the first few chords he played on 318 got his attention. He was well accustomed to the different quali­ties of fine instruments, but in 318 the tone and the featherlight, fast-repeating action stood out. This was a piano with a soul."

The piano was old. It had been sitting in a backroom of Eaton's department store in Toronto since before the war, and was due to be shipped back to New York and sold. Edquist recognized that CD 318 was a rare creature, but he also knew that it needed a lot of work.

"It had been nearly two years since the piano had gone to New York for a thorough going-over, and now Edquist settled in for a full tuning and regulation. First he gave the piano a quick rough tuning; then he lifted off the key slip, the long, narrow wooden strip in front of the keys. Next he removed the two screws from beneath the treble and bass cheek blocks, the two rectangular blocks at either end of the keyboard. This enabled him to lift the tailboard from the piano, exposing the action mechanism inside. Then he slid the entire sixty-pound action out and onto his lap.

Wearing strong magnifiers pressed against his glasses, he took a small sandpaper file and reshaped each of the eighty-eight hammers, which had been lined with grooves after more than fif­teen years of hitting the strings. Then he adjusted and aligned hundreds of individual action parts. In order to approach those parts from a series of different angles, he moved the action from place to place—onto his lap, then onto a workbench, then back onto his lap. And to test the action as he went, he often slid it back into the piano, then removed it again to make more refine­ments, including voicing and fitting hammers to individual strings so that all three strings of each note would be set in mo­tion at precisely the same time."

Gould played CD 318 on most of his famous recordings, and he also had it shipped from coast to coast during his attenuated career as a concert performer. But that's not to say his issues with pianos were over, by any means. CD 318 needed constant attention. In one humorous episode Gould and an associate drive from Toronto to New York with the piano's action sitting in the back seat, fearful that the customs agents will suspect they're up to no good.

By the time Gould took up the project of redoing the Goldberg Variations, twenty years after the original recording that had brought him worldwide fame, CD 318 was a thing of the past, and Gould was so dissatisfied with the pianos Steinway & Sons had to offer him that he performed it on a  Yamaha.

But I don't want to give away too much. The book reads like a good mystery, which means we follow evident digressions and seemingly incidental events with relish, anchored by the hope of finally identifying the murderer—er, I mean, the hope of finally finding a suitable piano for Gould. Hafner devotes a few pages to Gould's long-running but doomed relationship with the painter Cornelia Foss, during which she exposes a few of his less attractive quirks—his paranoid streak, for example, and his ten-Valium-per-day medical regimen. But these pages also humanize the artist in a way that discussions of keyboard action and performance repertoire do not.

For the most part, her portrait maintains a healthy balance between Gould's unusual personality and his often brilliant musicality. Readers who have never heard a note he played will be taken in by his story, and also, I suspect, by the technical details of the wider industry of musical performance upon which he relied.

______________________

I have been a fan of Gould's work since my undergrad years, drawn by the precision and intensity of his playing and the unusual voices he was able to bring out from the midst of the polyphonic compositions he preferred.  But I must admit that the only recordings of his that I still listen to are the two versions of the Goldberg Variations, his Well-Tempered Clavier sets, the Bach violin duets he recorded with Jamie Laredo, the late-Brahms intermezzi, and the collection of short pieces by Gibbons, Tallis, and other early keyboard masters. Gould approached the chestnuts of the romantic era with an irreverent attitude that sometimes hinted of distain, and he sacrificed a great deal in feeling and rubato in his attempt to unearth new dimensions of expression in Mozart or Beethoven by means of his inimitable attack. 

The notion that he might even consider tackling the loping and dilatory sonatas and fantasies Schubert boggles the mind.

   

Welcome to Samarkand

On the coldest day of the year, one's thoughts turn, naturally enough, to Samarkand, where the temperature is a balmy 55 degrees. But maybe it's not all that natural. By coincidence, I was fully absorbed not so long ago in a book titled In Search of Zarathustra: the first prophet and the ideas that changed the world.

The author, Paul Kriwaczek, takes us with him on a journey of exploration across Europe and the Middle East to Central Asia, visiting a long list of mostly obscure ruins stretching from Hadrian's Wall to Samarkand and beyond, while refreshing our memory regarding not only Zoroastrianism but also Manichaeism, Mithraism, the Cathars, and the Parsees. Kriwaczek wears his erudition lightly and makes no attempt to convert us to one belief or another. He isn't much interested in belief at all, in fact, but rather in the cultural impact of a religion dating back, by some estimations, ten thousand years, doing his best to gather together the reins of a chariot that has long been run off the road in the mountains of Iran or a desert byway along the Silk Route, far from the bustling superhighways of the three Mosaic religions.

Prior to reading the book, I had the impression that Zoroastrianism was a dead or dying religion—the first monotheistic religion, perhaps, but also one that somehow worshipped fire. I took the Three Wise men to be Zoroastrians, and had a sneaking hunch that Nietzsche, almost at random, was inspired by its beliefs and traditions when he wrote Also Sprach Zarathustra.   

I read that thick book as an adolescent, and was overawed by its "profundity." I might not feel the same today, though some scholars do. I also bought an LP of Richard Strauss's tone poem of the same name, which figured so prominently in the then-popular film 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Kriwaczek describes reading the book at the same age, and to similar effect. And he spends some time discussing Strauss's piece, too. But he takes the story much farther, explaining why Nietzsche chose that religious figure as a mouthpiece.

The story begins back in 1718, when a British civil servant stationed on the west coast of India brought home a rare copy of the Zoroastrian sacred book called the Vendidad. No one could read it, but he donated it to the Bodleian Library in Oxford. A few decades later, a young French linguist and adventurer named Abraham Hyacynthe Anquetil du Perron caught sight of a few pages, and determined on the spot to dedicate his life to translating it. He travelled to India to study the languages, where he had a series of adventures on the order of Indiana Jones, but without the fame or glamour; the British and the French were at war, which didn't help. At one point du Perron found it necessary to walk the length of the Indian coast from French Bengal to Surat. It took him two years.

He eventually got a hold of the Book of Zoroaster and a Pahlavi-Farsi dictionary. After overcoming additional obstacles, including a duel during which he suffered six or seven serious saber injuries, du Perron made his way back to France, where, in 1771, his three-volume translation of the Avesta, the Zoroastrian bible, were finally published. The scholars hated them, of course—an amateur, he had done what they didn't do—and the texts weren't widely accepted as authentic until 1820. An eminent British philologist wrote a widely-discussed paper on du Perron's ground-breaking work in 1857. Other translations were in the works. Zoroastrianism was suddenly a hot topic. At precisely that time, Frederick Nietzsche was entering his second-year of philological studies at the University of Bonn.

Kriwaczek spends a few pages describing how the dualistic beliefs of the Zoroastrians inspired Nietzsche's formulation of the genealogy of morals and the will to power, which Kriwaczek describes as an urge to "leave behind the animal-natured 'blond-beast' and strive for the 'super-human.'" As it happened, no one cared about Nietzsche's theories at the time. The first two volumes of Zarathustra sold fifty or sixty copies each, and when his publisher backed away from the final volume, Nietzsche was forced to print forty copies at his own expense.

A latter-day Sarmatian

In successive chapters, Kriwaczek takes up the case of the Cathars of Southwestern France, and then the Bogimils of the Balkan lands, both of whom embraced the Great Dualistic Heresy of Manichaeism. He visits the enormous rock at Montsegur and ponders the fate of those final victims of the Albigensian crusade, later rides the train east out of Vienna and through the Balkans to reach the flat grassy regions north of the Black Sea where the Sarmatians, an Iranian people, once ruled on horseback. Many of the cultural traits we now regard as gothic or medieval originated with them.

Kriwaczek dilates at some length on the life and career of Mani himself, who was not, strictly speaking, a Zoroastrian, but drew from that far more ancient faith a more pessimistic view of the eternal battle between darkness and light.

The Mithric mystery religion, so popular with Roman soldiers, inspires a trip, not to Rome, but to Hadrian's Wall, on the Scottish border. That faith, which succumbed relatively quickly to the arrival of Christianity, has not left much of a residue, beyond a vast assortment of statues now in museums depicting Mithra riding a bull while stabbing it in the neck with a knife,  but Kriwaczek muses that it may have made at least one lasting contribution to civilization—the handshake.

Things get more exotic, and even more interesting, as Kriwaczek turns to the eastern Mediterranean and begins to explore the intersections of Zoroastrianism with the incursions of Alexander the Great and the much earlier interpenetration of Iranian and Jewish cultures during the Babylonian Captivity. Alexander's wanton destruction of the library at Persepolis takes on a far more grotesque appearance seen from the Iranian point of view. And Kriwaczek's visit to the tomb of the Prophet Daniel in Susa makes for a fascinating interlude. 

Daniel's tomb in Susa

He devotes sixteen pages to unraveling who Daniel actually was, corrects the many historical inaccuracies to be found in the Biblical text that bears his name, and asks himself the question why such a tomb had not been destroyed by the Muslims centuries earlier. His conclusion, somewhat simplified, is that in the figure of Daniel were united, for the first time, the apocryphal traditions of Mesopotamian Jews and Iranian Zoroastrians.

Centuries later, According to Kriwaczek, the rabbis of the Talmud made an effort to expunge both Christian and Zoroastrian beliefs from their sacred canon in the belief that they were cleansing and purifying their faith. He writes:

"Zarathustra's two supreme powers [the good and evil forces] were an affront to Israel's One God. Yet to sit here in Susa, so close to the Persian tomb of a Jewish prophet, is to be forcibly reminded that the relationship between the two ancient nations had been so close for so long that many other Persian themes had successfully infiltrated Jewish thinking without being spotted. Without any sanction in the Torah, Jews had come to believe in heaven, angels and a life after death. And those teachings had come not from their own prophets but by the grace of [Zarathustra's highest spirit] Ahura Mazda."

It's interesting to note that Karen Armstrong, in her magisterial 400-page best-seller The History of God, mentions Zarathustra only three times. Well, it's a different kind of book, written within a shorter time-frame and with a different end in mind. Kriwaczek has given us a travel book, full of arcane facts but also of dust and ruins, mountain passes and indecipherable inscriptions, military conquest and sacred devotion, curiosity and humor. 

The fire in the temple in Yadz
has been burning for 1500 years.

The author doesn't claim to be a Zoroastrian. He is only interested to share with us, step by step, what he's learned about a fascinating chapter in Indo-European history. When, near the end of the book, he and a local driver arrive at 6 a.m. at the tomb of Cyrus the Great, thirty-five miles north of Shiraz, he spends many pages filling us in on the significance of this ruler—pages that made me consider getting my copy of Herodotus down off the shelf again—but he also takes time to inform us that the elderly man who emerged from a nearby caravan to unlock the gate for them was wearing flannel pajamas decorated with yellow daisies.    

___________

Zoroastrianism is still an active religion, practiced mostly by the Parsees of India, though the entire group could gather comfortably in a stadium to watch an Ohio State football game. After all these years, scholars have not been able to decide whether the faith should be classified as monotheistic, dualistic, or pantheistic. In any case, Zoroastrian purification rituals are closely bound up with both water and fire. It's that second element, fire, that interests me at the moment. I'm tempted to pull a chair up to the fire today and try to make my way through Georges Dumezil's Mitra-Varuna.    

Hunt Hill Getaway

 Frances Andrews, the daughter of a North Dakota farm boy who became a wealthy grain trader and philanthropist, may have developed her love of the outdoors at the family compound on Isle Royale, where she and her younger brother hiked, fished, and foraged for mushrooms and other wild edibles. In Minnesota she is perhaps best known today as the long-time personal friend of Ernest Oberholtzer, with whom she shared a variety of environmental concerns.

When Frances's brother and mother died, her father, Arthur, bought a  large chunk of woods and farmland in northwest Wisconsin as a memorial, naming it Hunt Hill. The family built two cottages on the hilltop, and Frances spent a good deal of time there working to restore the acreage to a healthier and more natural state. A few years after her father's death in 1951, Frances deeded the estate to the National Audubon Society, along with a generous endowment, the idea being that it would be operated as a research facility and a "nature camp" for Minnesota and Wisconsin residents.

Last summer some friends who have a cabin in the woods a few miles up the road brought up Hunt Hill in conversation. I'd never heard of it. A few months later, trying to cook up some adventures to fill the winter months, I googled it and was surprised to discover the Hunt Hill cabins were available for rent and not terribly expensive. I booked the smaller of the two, a log cabin built in 1930, for a couple of nights in early February, and started to develop an itinerary and a recreational plan.

The camp is situated a half-hour southeast of Spooner, which we've driven through a hundred times. But we always arrive from the west or (rarely) the southwest. The countryside to the southeast was terra incognita. So, as the date of our excursion approached, I concocted a route that entailed heading east from Stillwater to New Richmond and continuing across Dunn County on Highway 64 across a lovely ridge of nameless wooded hills  to Bloomer, where we'd turn north to explore the Chippewa Moraine Wildlife Area and maybe do some skiing at Hickory Ridge before continuing north on Highway 53 to the camp.

But this morning the sky was full of that fine-grained snowy-icy stuff that could spell trouble on a windswept rural road, and we opted for a more familiar, but also safer, route east along Highway 8. It's not a pretty highway, but we'd never had occasion to take it past Turtle Lake, so there were new things to see. I was intrigued by the silica factory in Barron, and we drove through Rice Lake several times just to get the feel of it. Nice park along the lake, lumber mill on the south edge of town, used bookstore on Main Street.

We were still an hour early—check-in was at two—when we turned off Highway 53 at Sarona and began to weave our way east down county roads toward the camp. The last half-mile of township road hadn't been plowed, and we surfed our little Toyota through half a foot of fresh snow to the entrance of Hunt Hill. The driveway was clear, but we met the snowplow halfway in. He backed down a spur going toward the main camp to get out of the way and I took a run at the final hill leading to the cabins, still unplowed. Didn't make it. I backed down and let the man finish the job.

The camp director, Nikki Janisin, pulled in a few seconds after we arrived.

"I'm glad you made it in," she said. "I left a message about the roads. I didn't know what kind of vehicle you had."

"I don't have a cell phone," I said. "But no problem. Is it OK to park here?"

"The other cabin isn't winterized. You've got the place to yourselves" she said. "You're from Minneapolis, right? Well, these cabins were owned by the Andrews family. Wealthy grain traders from Minneapolis. They were important players in preserving the Boundary Waters, too. This was their family retreat."

The buildings are modest. The woods are thick and quiet all around. "Someone might come and fix the yard light this afternoon," Nikki said. A ladder was leaning against the pole. "If something goes wrong, or you need anything, just give me a call."

The cabin is warm enough (it has a furnace), big enough (it has an ample living room, a cozy bedroom, a primitive kitchen, and a microscopic bathroom), rustic enough (wrought-iron fixtures, a huge stone fireplace, resident mice) and it's certainly remote enough. 

There are lamps everywhere—an important feature for readers, especially in winter—though most of the bulbs are feeble. The large picture window looks off down the hill through a maple forest to a distant, snow-covered lake. And the property boasts twelve miles of trails that cross fields, woods, and bogs.

It didn't take us long to settle in, and we had soon turned our chairs away from the fireplace toward the window looking off down the hill through the trees. Now we're watching darkness obscure the woods and sky, which now has some hopeful variations in color, unlike the drab gray we were driving through this morning. Tomorrow will be colder, but perhaps sunnier. We're going to nibble our way through dinner—crackers, pears, herring, cheese, salami—and then read a few fairy tales out loud. We've brought the French, the Irish, the Arabic, and the Japanese volumes from the Pantheon set.

Frosty Backwoods Cabins, with Syrup

A saying was once current in therapy circles: lean into the pain.

As we enter into the coldest stretch of the year, I'd like to recommend a delightful film called Le Goût d'un Pays, which has been offered as part of the Great Northern Festival. The title has been translated as The Essence of a Country. I'm no French-Canadian expert, but to me the title sounds more like "The Flavor of the Land." .

It's a documentary, and its ostensible subject is maple syruping. It follows a number of parties into the back country of Quebec, where they tap their trees, boil down the sap at their sugar shacks, and, while the reduction is taking place, drink Cognac and discuss trees, the thaw, the importance of remaining connected to the back country, and Quebecois separatism.

The operations vary, and so do these backwoods connoisseurs. One involves heavy machinery and  twenty or thirty men, ten thousand trees, lots of plastic tubing, and very little philosophizing, though the tone remains familial. The manager's friends show up two hours later than the hired hands, and the celebratory dinner at the end includes a local three-piece band.

Alongside that major undertaking is another driven by a single family: one man, his girlfriend, and three or four children of unclear pedigree. One segment focuses on a farmer and his wife, who have sold off all their farmland, and are left with only the wooded "back forty" where they tap their trees. We see the old man shedding a heart-felt tear as he contemplates all that he's lost.

What these enterprises share is a connection with the land, and with tradition. They all love their trees, their sap, the camaraderie that the harvest nurtures, and its connections with the past.

A few segments are devoted to a food-writer who discusses maple syrup, as if to remind us how important it is even for the urban masses to maintain their connections to the backcountry.  And there are also some scenes of a very experienced pie-maker putting her dough on the outside of the pie pan. And let's not forget the articulate young man at the café counter who perhaps couldn't tell a maple tree from an oak, but who has plenty of ideas about Quebec, its history, its identity, its future.

For myself, I do not love maple syrup. I like waffles, with syrup and butter and yogurt or sour cream on top. (A few strawberries or blueberries would be a rare but welcome luxury.) We have some genuine syrup from Lutsen in the fridge, also a big jug of a Canadian product we picked up at CostCo that will take us years to run through. It says "Organic Amber A" on the label. But waffles tend to make me sleepy. A few slices of bacon would help.

Nevertheless, I did enjoy listening to these people discuss how syruping enriches their lives, regardless of the enormous time and effort involved—seeing the spigots being inserted, listening to that ping in the bottom of the bucket, watching gallons of watery fluid being poured into huge steaming vats, and later, relishing the thick golden syrup as it's being poured into bottles or cans. I also loved seeing the steam coming out of the syrupers mouths as they philosophized about Quebec and Canada and syrup. 

The film is heavy with nostalgia. And doesn't the license plate of Quebec say "Je me souviens" (I remember)? Remember what?

I remember

That born under the lily (France)

 I grow under the rose (England). 

 By the end of the film, several groups of syrupers have brought out their guitars and started singing.

Alongside these other charms and virtues, the film also gives us ample opportunity to relish the maple forests and back-woods shacks of the protagonists and the joie de vivre they share with their friends. But "protagonists" is a silly word to describe these hard-working, festive, and loving characters. 

It was only later that I learned that several of the individuals portrayed are eminent Québécois. And that's the best way to see the film, I think. It's as if you were watching Pete Seeger, Wendell Berry, Thomas Merton, and Robert Bly pick huckleberries while they philosophize about America, but without knowing who they were.

So if you're planning to hunt out a link to the film, read the bios later.

_______________________________________

Gilles Vigneault is a poet, publisher, singer-songwriter, and Quebec nationalist. Two of his songs, "Mon pays" and "Gens du pays", are considered by many to be Quebec's unofficial anthems, and one of the lines from "Mon Pays" has become a proverb in Quebec: "Mon pays ce n'est pas un pays, c'est l'hiver." (My country is not a country, it is winter)

Fred Pellerin is a popular folksinger and storyteller.

Roméo Bouchard studied theology in the 1960s, left the priesthood in 1967 and shortly thereafter published "Two Angry Priests" in collaboration with confrere Charles Lambert. He later became a communications professor at the University of Montreal, managed an organic farm, and cofounded the Union paysanne.

Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, whom we see eating a crepe  at a cafe counter, is the co-spokesperson of the left-wing party Québec solidaire and was elected to the provincial legislative assembly in 2017.