Glenn Gould

Canadian pianist

• Born: September 25, 1932
• Birthplace: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
• Died: October 4, 1982
• Place of death: Toronto, Ontario, Canada

A prodigiously gifted pianist and multimedia communicator, Gould popularized, and thus helped preserve, the works of neglected composers and the lesser-known works of celebrated ones. He also popularized aesthetic and philosophical theories that, while often controversial during his lifetime, have come to be seen as prophetic of the computer age.

Early Life

If ever someone seemed destined for superior musical achievement, that someone was Glenn Gould (goold). His mother, piano teacher Florence Grieg Gould, was a relative of the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg. She played while Gould was still in her womb in the expressed hope of giving birth to a musician. In the ten years following his arrival, she was his only teacher. By the time Gould began studying with the Chilean pianist and conductor Alberto Guerrero, he was already demonstrating the gifts and the eccentricities that would characterize him for the rest of his life.

Possessing a photographic memory, uncommon digital dexterity, and perfect pitch, Gould mastered a large body of compositions from the baroque, classical, and romantic repertoires of composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, Richard Strauss, and Sergei Prokofiev. Gould was a hypochondriac and was intuitively dismissive of convention. He took obsessive care of his hands (refusing even to play catch or shoot marbles with relatives and friends) and developed unorthodox performance mannerisms like humming and singing loudly while he played and conducting himself with his free hand. He also adopted odd postures while performing, which resulted from his preference for playing while seated not on a piano bench but on a family chair that his father modified (at his son’s urgings) until Gould was practically sitting on the floor. Gould would thereafter perform almost exclusively with this ever-modified chair, both on stage and in the studio.

Gould received early recognition, including a silver medal by the Toronto Conservatory (its highest award) at the age of seven. He also performed as a featured soloist with the Toronto Symphony Orchestras at age thirteen. Indeed, by the time that most young people his age were graduating from high school, he was already in such demand as a concert pianist that he never completed his formal education.

Life’s Work

Gould played what turned out to be one of his most important concerts at Town Hall in were chosen on January 11, 1955. In a program consisting of the works of Bach, Alban Berg, Orlando Gibbons, Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, and Anton von Webern, he so impressed Columbia Records’ David Oppenheim that Oppenheim signed him to a recording contract the next day. Although other record companies would release Gould concert recordings over the years, Gould never recorded for another company, eventually releasing more than fifty Columbia albums.

Gould recorded as his debut a spirited rendition of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, a series of thirty variations on a theme stated in a beginning and concluding aria that was, in 1955, among Bach’s least-performed compositions. Gould’s rendition proved an immediate best seller. Coupled with his photogenic looks and his eminently fascinating eccentricities, the album’s popularity expanded his renown beyond Canada and launched him on nine years of worldwide touring. The tour featured 250 concerts, including eight ecstatically received performances in Russia that were all the more remarkable for occurring during some of the chilliest days of the Cold War.

Although critical response was often positive, there developed an undercurrent of impatience with Gould’s odd onstage mannerisms: playing with his legs crossed, his wearing of fingerless gloves while playing, and his reading a magazine or drinking a glass of water during orchestral movements without piano. Furthermore, audiences disliked his occasionally audacious reinterpretations of beloved standards. One such interpretation in particular, his 1962 Carnegie Hall performance of the D minor concerto of Brahms with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, in which Gould insisted upon exaggeratedly slow tempo, became legendary and saddled him with a reputation for the outrageous.

In truth, the majority of Gould’s recordings and performances adhered to the spirit, if not always the letter, of the laws laid down by their composers. Such early controversies, however, as well as Gould’s hatred of the touring lifestyle, were to inspire an even greater controversy. In 1964, Gould made good on a threat that he had been making for years: to stop touring altogether. He was warned that, unless he changed his mind, sales of his recordings, which had been among the highest in the “serious” music market, would fade, along with the rest of his career. He countered that he could create higher quality music in the controlled atmosphere of the recording studio, where multiple takes could be edited together into an ideal whole. These fine recordings would not be possible, he said, in acoustically inhospitable concert halls populated with coughing patrons. He also maintained that a single recording, and not a concert, could be enjoyed by more people, endlessly.

Gould spent the rest of his career handily winning the argument. In addition to making more recordings, the sales of which did not suffer, he embarked on a career in radio and television that, despite its beginning with the pedagogic tone common to presentations of serious music, eventually led him to create what has come to be known as Glenn Gould’s Solitude Trilogy. The trilogy was a series of pioneering, hour-long “contrapuntal radio” documentaries consisting of various speakers discussing such topics as life in the Canadian North (The Idea of North), in Newfoundland (The Latecomers), and in a Manitoban Mennonite community (The Quiet in the Land). The result of hundreds of hours of meticulous late-night editing, a process for which the nocturnally habituated Gould was temperamentally well suited, these documentaries satisfied his mostly unrealized dream of composing, and they became almost as large a part of his legacy as his musical recordings.

In the mid-1970’s, Gould was beset by mysterious(some have guessed psychosomatic) illnesses that greatly hindered his playing. (In 1978 he recorded nothing at all.) He recovered, however, and, by decade’s end, he could number the recording of more than sixty major works among his accomplishments in the 1970’s.

An ironic result of his hypochondria was a heavy regimen of prescription drugs. His prolonged use of the drugs, coupled with his exhausting work ethic, may have contributed to the fatal stroke he suffered on October 4, 1982. Coming as it did just months after the release of his re-recording of the same Bach variations with which he had made his debut twenty-seven years earlier (and days after his fiftieth birthday, a milestone that Gould had predicted would mark his abandoning of the piano altogether), his death was seen by many as an eerily appropriate, if tragic, coda.

Significance

In some ways Gould has been as “alive” in death as he was in life. Posthumous sales of his recordings, which Columbia (now Sony) has re-released in an ever-increasing series of handsomely packaged editions, have made him the best-selling solo classical musician of all time. His life and thought have been the subject of books and an experimental film (Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, a 1993 biopic directed by François Girard, structured as a kind of visual analogue to the Goldberg Variations). He has also been the subject of documentaries, the most notable of which, Glenn Gould Hereafter (2006), was directed by Gould’s friend and collaborator Bruno Monsaingeon and emphasizes the profound effect that Gould continues to have on people’s lives.

In 2006, on what would have been Gould’s seventy-fourth birthday, Zenph Studios used his 1955 recording of the Goldberg Variations to unveil a radical new technology in which a computer meticulously encodes the details of a piano performance and sends the information to a computerized piano. The Yamaha Disklavier Pro piano accurately “re-performed” the piece. Sony Classical released a recording of the Zenph re-performance on May 29, 2007, accompanied by the endorsement of Gould’s estate and several of his closest friends and colleagues.

Bibliography

Angilette, Elizabeth. Philosopher at the Keyboard: Glenn Gould. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001. A fascinating attempt to construct a coherent philosophy of both art and life from Gould’s many writings and recorded statements.

Bazzana, Kevin. Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Because of its length (560 pages) and its author’s access to people and documents heretofore inaccessible, this is the most authoritative Gould biography. It thoroughly and fairly balances an examination of Gould’s life (its controversial aspects included) and his music.

Cott, Jonathan. Conversations with Glenn Gould. New ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Of value both for the incisiveness of Cott’s questions (and Gould’s answers) and for the fact that, unlike many of Gould’s other “interviews,” Cott’s were not “ghost scripted” by Gould in advance. Includes photos and detailed listings of Gould’s recordings and radio and television projects.

Friedrich, Otto. Glenn Gould: A Life and Variations. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. The first full-scale Gould biography, which, although in some ways now surpassed, remains useful for its detailed, interview-enriched narrative and its detailed listings of Gould’s concert and media performances.

McGreevy, John, ed. Variations: Glenn Gould by Himself and His Friends. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1983. A handsome and skillfully edited combination of career-spanning photographs and essays, combining the best of Gould (“Glenn Gould Interviews Glenn Gould About Glenn Gould,” “Stokowski in Six Scenes,” “Toronto”) and reminiscences written by Gould’s closest friends (Leonard Bernstein, Yehudi Menuhin, Bruno Monsaingeon) shortly after his death.

Payzant, Geoffrey. Glenn Gould, Music and Mind. Toronto, Ont.: Key Porter, 2005. The latest edition of Payzant’s Gould-approved exploration of the aesthetic and philosophical ramifications of his abandonment of the concert stage and his use of “creative cheating” to construct the best performances possible in the recording studio.