The meeting initiated 10-years of friendship which ended with Gould's death in 1982. Their collaboration produced seven films, a 23-episode television series and four books introducing the eccentric musical genius to the world.
To Monsaingeon, Gould's eccentricity was testimony to the extreme intensity of a genius. Talking at length and with
profound devotion and respect about his relationship with Gould, Monsaingeon revealed how his music transformed the lives of many, and how as a philosopher with total coherence between his thoughts and deeds, his energy and inspiration were omnipresent and expressed without a moment of rest.
An extreme example of Gould's almost religious austerity was his eating habits. "Glenn rarely ate food. He didn't like to eat when he was hungry and the word food was never mentioned in our conversations. I never saw him dine until five years after our first meeting. It was 5am in his hotel room, a space he lived in as a home and studio. Glenn suddenly said to me, `It's about time for me to eat.' He ordered scrambled egg on toast and ate it in a personal ritual," Monsaingeon said.
Having worked with a great number of idiosyncratic musicians, Monsaingeon himself is also an artist of unique sensibility who transforms what could be the unimaginative commentary of films about music and musicians into gateways for understanding some of the greatest minds of our time. In his works, one will find no arid compilation of archive footage and interviews that have often pushed the genre of films about classical music into rarely visited
cinematic ghetto.
In Glenn Gould Hereafter (2005), which took seven years to complete, Monsaingeon structured the film around the musical notion of polyphony by which disparate themes converge, forming a whole and pointing directly to the core of Gould's musical ethos.
Musical films are also an integral part of the artist's creative life in that they serve as a vital connection between his inner complexity and the wider world. "I'm not a composer, and filmmaking is the medium through which I can express myself in a creative way. It's a channel [through which] to transmit my own emotions into some kind of universal significance and enable my own experiences to be shared by the public," Monsaingeon said.
As a classical-music purist who says he has never heard of The Rolling Stones, Monsaingeon admitted he finds inspiration only in the classical and some folk music. "I would still like to be convinced that there is something original and creative about popular music," Monsaingeon said. But so far, the conviction has evaded him.
The proof of his insistence on musical immaculateness came later when as we headed out for a late lunch after the interview. In a cab, the artist politely asked the driver to turn down the radio and later at the restaurant, he did the same thing with the irritating background music. His eyes met our understanding smiles, and the amiable gentleman stuck out his tongue with an apologetic smile: "Ah, I just can't bear that music is reduced to such a crude state."
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