More documentary blogging

We went on a record store binge this weekend, and my husband came away -- among other things -- with this documentary about Glenn Gould, which he made me promise to watch with him. My husband plays piano and worships Bach, so the Glenn Gould fanaticism sort of comes with the territory. He has managed to make me into a Glenn Gould fan as well (it's not hard), but I wasn't sure I was far enough advanced actually to enjoy a documentary about Gould -- especially one which included performances, not only of Bach and Gibbons, but also of Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg. Well, I still love the performances of Bach, and I still don't understand the atonal composers, and I found Gould to be -- in his performances and in his interviews -- absolutely riveting. Of course, I had seen Thirty Two Short Films about Glenn Gould, and I knew a little about Gould's famed "eccentricities," but I'm not a member of the Cult of the Tortured Genius - -which, I think, tends to romanticize mental illness and trivialize true genius. What I loved about the interviews with Gould in this documentary was the gilmpse they provided of a brilliant, funny, engaging, slightly self-deprecating man who had thought deeply about the music he loved, and whose genius arose, not from the obsessive-compulsive ketchup-eating depths, but from the same source as those qualities which made him such a spellbinding talker. Glenn Gould: The Alchemist is not about a nut who happened to be a genius, nor even about a genius who happened to be a nut. It's about a man who happened to be a genius, and whose "nuttiness" is almost entirely beside the point.