Glenn Gould

Glenn Herbert Gould was born on September 25, 1932, in Toronto, Ontario, the only child of Russell Herbert Gold, a furrier, and Florence Emma Gold, a musician who traced a distant family connection to the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg. The family altered its surname to Gould during Glenn's childhood. The household in the Beach neighbourhood of east Toronto was musical from the start: Florence, who had wanted a musical child, began teaching her son at the piano as soon as he could sit at the keyboard, and by his own later account he could read music before he could read words ^[1].

The boy's gifts were unmistakable early. He had absolute pitch, a prodigious memory, and an unusual physical relationship with the instrument, sitting very low and drawing sound from the keys with flat, close fingers rather than the raised hand position most teachers demanded. At age ten he entered the Toronto Conservatory of Music (later the Royal Conservatory of Music), where he studied piano with the Chilean-born pedagogue Alberto Guerrero, organ with Frederick Silvester, and theory with Leo Smith ^[2]. Guerrero remained his only significant piano teacher, and elements of Gould's celebrated finger technique, including the tapping exercises he practised, derive from Guerrero's method, though Gould later minimized the debt.

Gould passed the Conservatory's associate examination in piano in 1946 at age thirteen, achieving the highest marks then recorded, and made his concerto debut that year playing the first movement of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra ^[1]. His formal schooling at Malvern Collegiate Institute ran alongside his musical training, but he left without completing it, and by his mid teens music had become his whole occupation.

Through his late teens Gould built a Canadian reputation with recitals in Toronto and broadcasts for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, an institution that would matter to him all his life. He gave his first CBC radio recital in 1950, and the experience of playing for a microphone rather than a hall planted an idea he never let go: that the broadcast and the recording, not the concert, might be the natural home of music making ^[3].

His American debut came in January 1955, with recitals in Washington, D.C., and at Town Hall in New York. The programs were deliberately unconventional, mixing late Beethoven, Berg, Webern, and the music of Orlando Gibbons with Bach. The day after the New York recital, Columbia Masterworks signed the twenty-two-year-old to a recording contract ^[2]. His first project for the label was audacious: Bach's Goldberg Variations, a work then considered esoteric and rarely recorded on the piano. Released in 1956, the album became a startling commercial success for a classical debut and made Gould famous almost overnight ^[4].

The fame came with a public persona journalists found irresistible. Gould performed on a battered folding chair his father had modified, sat fourteen inches off the floor, hummed audibly while he played, wore overcoat and gloves in warm weather, soaked his hands in hot water before concerts, and conducted himself with his free hand. In 1957 he became one of the first North American musicians to tour the Soviet Union after the Second World War, playing to overflowing halls in Moscow and Leningrad, and international engagements followed across Europe, Israel, and the United States ^[1].

Any account of Glenn Gould achievements begins with Bach. Across a quarter century with Columbia (later CBS Masterworks) he recorded most of Bach's major keyboard works: the two books of The Well-Tempered Clavier, the partitas, the English and French suites, the toccatas, the two and three part inventions, and the concertos. His Bach was fast or slow by turns but always contrapuntally lucid, each voice articulated with a clarity that owed something to his detached, non-legato touch and his sparing use of the sustaining pedal ^[4]. Critics disagreed sharply about the results, particularly in Mozart and Beethoven, where his tempos and phrasing could be willfully strange, but few disputed the distinctiveness of the playing.

The most consequential act of his career was a renunciation. On April 10, 1964, Gould played a recital in Los Angeles and never appeared in public concert again. He was thirty-one. He argued the case for his withdrawal in essays and interviews: concerts, he said, encouraged theatrical exaggeration and note-perfect caution, while the recording studio allowed a performer to construct an ideal interpretation through multiple takes and editing ^[3]. His 1966 essay "The Prospects of Recording," published in High Fidelity magazine, predicted that technology would dissolve the boundary between performer and listener, an argument that has been cited ever since in discussions of recorded sound ^[5].

Gould's creative work extended well beyond the piano. For CBC radio he invented what he called contrapuntal radio, layering interviewed voices like lines in a fugue. The best known result, The Idea of North (1967), the first panel of his Solitude Trilogy, wove the voices of five Canadians into a meditation on isolation and the Canadian North ^[6]. He composed a string quartet, opus 1, in his early twenties, wrote the cabaret piece So You Want to Write a Fugue?, transcribed orchestral works by Wagner for piano, and produced a steady stream of essays, liner notes, satirical sketches, and television programs. In 1981 he returned to the Goldberg Variations for a second studio recording, slower and more inward than the 1955 version, released shortly before his death ^[4]. His recordings won multiple Grammy Awards, including, posthumously, Album of the Year honours in the classical field for the 1981 Goldbergs ^[2].

Gould organized his life around privacy, control, and the telephone. He never married and had no children, though a long relationship in the 1960s with the painter Cornelia Foss, who moved to Toronto with her two children for several years before returning to her husband, the composer Lukas Foss, became publicly known only decades later ^[7]. He lived alone in a Toronto apartment on St. Clair Avenue West, kept nocturnal hours, and conducted many of his friendships through marathon late-night phone calls.

His eccentricities were inseparable from genuine anxieties about health. Gould was hypochondriacal, dosed himself with an expanding roster of prescribed medications, dreaded drafts and cold, and avoided shaking hands for fear of injury. A 1959 incident at Steinway's New York offices, in which an employee clapped him on the shoulder, led Gould to claim lasting injury and to pursue legal action against the firm ^[1]. He loved animals, the music of Orlando Gibbons and Richard Strauss, the landscape of northern Ontario, and long solitary drives; he disliked applause, competition in music, and what he saw as the blood sport atmosphere of the concert hall ^[3].

For all the mythology, colleagues who worked with him in studios described a disciplined, courteous, and exhaustively prepared professional. He arrived knowing exactly what he wanted, supervised his own edits, and treated the technical staff as collaborators rather than servants ^[4].

After leaving the stage, Gould rebuilt his working life entirely around media. From the mid 1960s through the 1970s he recorded prolifically in New York and later in Toronto's Eaton Auditorium, completed his Bach cycle, and ranged into Byrd and Gibbons, Schoenberg, Hindemith, Sibelius, and Scriabin. His television work for the CBC included conversation programs and performance films, and he collaborated with the French filmmaker Bruno Monsaingeon on a series of documentaries and filmed performances that preserved his mature playing on camera ^[6].

The radio documentaries continued alongside the records. The Latecomers (1969), about Newfoundland outport communities, and The Quiet in the Land (1977), about Mennonites in Manitoba, completed the Solitude Trilogy ^[6]. He wrote criticism and satire under his own name and under invented personae, and in his final years he began edging toward conducting, leading a chamber ensemble in a recording of Wagner's Siegfried Idyll in 1982.

Days after the release of the new Goldberg Variations and shortly after his fiftieth birthday, Gould suffered a severe stroke on September 27, 1982. He was taken to Toronto General Hospital, where his condition worsened, and he died on October 4, 1982 ^[2]. He was buried in Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto beside his parents; his gravestone carries the opening bars of the Goldberg aria. Much of his estate went, at his direction, to the Salvation Army and the Toronto Humane Society ^[1].

Anyone asking who was Glenn Gould confronts a figure whose influence runs in several directions at once. As a Bach interpreter he changed expectations: the analytic clarity of his playing helped move Bach's keyboard music from the specialist's shelf to the centre of the piano repertoire, and both Goldberg recordings remain among the best selling classical piano albums ever issued ^[4]. As a theorist of recording he anticipated arguments about editing, remote collaboration, and listener participation that became commonplace only with digital audio ^[5].

His afterlife in Canadian culture is unusually visible. The Glenn Gould Foundation, established in Toronto in 1983, awards the international Glenn Gould Prize for contributions to music and communication; laureates have included Yehudi Menuhin, Oscar Peterson, and Leonard Cohen ^[8]. The CBC's Toronto broadcast centre houses the Glenn Gould Studio, a bronze statue of Gould on his folding chair sits outside the building, and his papers, including the famous chair itself, are preserved at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa ^[6]. In 1977 his 1955 recording of a Bach prelude and fugue was included on the Voyager Golden Record launched into interstellar space ^[2].

Biographies, films, and scholarly studies keep the arguments alive, from Otto Friedrich's authorized 1989 life to Kevin Bazzana's Wondrous Strange (2003) and François Girard's film Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (1993) ^[1]. Every Glenn Gould biography wrestles with the same tension the man embodied: a performer of rare communicative power who mistrusted performance itself, and who bet his career on the idea that a musician could reach listeners more honestly through tape than from a stage. Four decades after his death, the bet looks prescient.