Glenn Gould plays his own transcriptions of Wagner!

“You know I’ve always sat down at night and played Wagner for myself, because I’m a total Wagnerite- hopelessly addicted to the later things especially- and I thought it would be fun to make my own transcriptions“- Glenn Gould Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Prelude from Act 1 0:00 - 9:35 Dawn and Siegfried’s Rhine Journey (Götterdämmerung) 9:43 - 22:52 Siegfried-Idyll 22:56 - 46:08 Gould’s transcriptions help bring to the fore the contrapuntal aspect of Wagner’s orchestral scores, and the inimitable clarity of his playing does more than justice to this intention. Gould managed the final section of the Meistersinger Prelude by overdubbing a second piano, an example of what he termed “creative lying“, playing four-hands with himself.