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Glenn Gould: The Ecstasy and Tragedy of Genius
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 781
EAN: 9780393318470
ISBN: 0393318478
Label: W. W. Norton & Company
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 368
Publication Date: September 15, 1998
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Studio: W. W. Norton & Company
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Editorial Review:
Peter Ostwald, who died shortly after completing this sensitive analysis of the legendary Canadian pianist Glenn Gould (1932-82), is one of those rare biographers equally qualified to assess his subject's artistry and psychology. Founder of the Health Program for Performing Artists, the psychiatrist-author was also Gould's friend for 20 years. Lucid prose captures Gould's formidable, unconventional virtuosity and unmasks a deeply troubled man who was uncomfortable with audiences, fearful of human contact, and able to maintain relationships only when he was in complete control. The eccentricities and the genius, as Ostwald persuasively demonstrates, were inextricably intertwined.
The Canadian pianist Glenn Gould was a child prodigy and a musical genius whose 1955 recording of Bach's "Goldberg Variations" catapulted him to world fame. He was also plagued by lifelong depression, was terrified of playing before live audiences, and consumed prescription drugs by the handful. He died at fifty of a massive stroke. In this acclaimed biography, the late psychiatrist Peter Ostwald-himself an accomplished violinist and longtime personal friend of Gould's-raises many questions about Gould and his music. Was his genius sponsored by eccentricity or vice versa? Do those with genius sacrifice themselves for a higher ideal while remaining personally unfulfilled? Ostwald lays bare the energy and contradiction behind Gould's brilliance.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Gould's head gets a much-needed shrink
In this book, the author, Peter Ostwald, sometimes enjoyed playing classical music as an amateur musician but, perhaps more importantly, he was also a psychiatrist. Ostwald completed this work just before he died of cancer. He shared a casual relationship (he considered it a friendship) with Gould over a window of several years and his (Ostwald's) angle on the book is sort of a psychoanalytical one.
I carried this book on my reading list for a couple of years and when the price dropped ... Read More
Rating: - A solid start, but loses momentum
With a book titled "The Ecstasy and Tragedy of Genius" written by a psychologist/friend of the subject, I was expecting to learn a great deal about the psychology behind Glenn Gould's eccentricities, drug addictions and unusual career decisions. Instead, in the introduction to the book, the author discloses that he never treated Glenn professionally, and so he relies on testimony from others to delve into the subject.
The author spends a great deal of time on Glenn's early years. There ... Read More
Rating:  - THE ubiquitous comment about GG --- "eccentric" --- but what of the why of it!
My difficulty with books on Glenn Gould is that there always seems to be two extremes so to speak: he was, to put it in colloquial parlance, either a "flake" ==or== that virtually everything he did was "understandable and even pardonable from the point of view of a genius." Question is, where is the middle-ground assessment of the man although it seems to be that every write-up on Gould from squib to article to hefty tome duly contains the word "eccentric" and essentially as a given from the get-go! ... Read More
Rating: - With friends like these...!
As a person who suffers from hypochondria, I read this book mostly out of interest in the struggles of a world-class hypochondriac. But I found it more interesting for the glimpses it provides into the much stranger minds and motivations of psychiatrists such as Peter Ostwald and Joseph Stephens.
The book does drip bitterness, in places deteriorating into a disorganized hodgepodge of personal gripes against Gould. But Ostwald goes beyond the typical and easily spotted hatchet job: He ... Read More
Rating:  - An excellent, interesting life review and interpretation
Ostwald has done an excellent job of ferreting out the details of an unusual life and making it readable, regardless of the readers experience in music and/or medicine. The book can be read cover to cover, or the reader can easily jump around without losing too much from not reading previous chapters.
I have heard it said that Ostwald is somehow "jealous" of Gould and that his book is a restitution for Gould's scorning of the Psychiatrist-author. On the contrary, I don't think that Ostwald ... Read More
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