Gould and Liberace, or the Fate of Nineteenth-Century Performance Culture

ABSTRACT Two of the most famous pianists of the 1950s, Glenn Gould and Liberace occupied opposing esthetic and cultural positions. Liberace’s style of performance and self-presentation was by and large consistent with his late nineteenth-century pianistic models; however, emerging television esthetics, among other factors, made this style increasingly incomprehensible, except as an extreme brand of musical kitsch or camp (the mode for which he became notorious). Meanwhile, Gould’s studied neutrality, which energetically deployed the period’s new media forms to cultivate a radical denial of the performing mechanism and the performing body, interpellated a generation of listeners who were not addressed by a musical rhetorician as much as they were invited to eavesdrop on, and to make their own, a self-possessed sound object. The story of Gould and Liberace thus not only sheds light on the new austerity of 1950s performance practice, but has something important to teach us about the ideological fate of nineteenth-century performance cultures since the late twentieth century.