著者

宮澤 淳一

出版者

帝京平成大学

雑誌

帝京平成大学紀要 (ISSN:13415182)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.7, no.2, pp.7-14, 1995-10-31

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David Young's Glenn (1992) is a play about the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould (1932-82). There are four characters in the play, which portray the eras of Gould's fifty-year life and his thoughts: Prodigy (6-22), Performer (22-31), Perfectionist (31-48), and Puritan (48-50). These characters act and symphonize their voices in the framework of J.S.Bach's The Goldberg Variations according to the voicing and structure of the music. The use of the framework (the aria, 30 variations and the aria da capo) is a successful device of transfering a musical form into a literary form which is independent of the time-space conventions of the theatre. The play also employs successfully the compositional technique named "contrapuntal radio," which overlaps parallel dialogue and makes coincidental conjunction between voices, because it makes the four Goulds disguise other theatrical Gould-like personae who enliven the inter- actions. For all the complicated plot, the play can be analized clearly if one realizes that the crucial hero is Puritan: the plot is the journey of Puritan who goes back through the whole of Gould's life. The recomposed figure of Glenn Gould in the play is a typical Canadian according to the model of Canadian identity in Margaret Atwood's Survival (1972). Glenn Gould was a man of escape who fled from the "South" to the "North" in order to survive himself, but happened to be a hero in the world as well as in Canada, and is by definition a Canadian anti-hero.