Gould at the wheel in April 1974. A famously bad driver, he once remarked, “It’s true that I’ve driven through a number of red lights on occasion, but on the other hand I’ve stopped at a lot of green ones but never gotten credit for it.” Photograph by Don Hunstein, courtesy of Sony BMG Music Entertainment.
AFTER THE ACCIDENT, GOULD started referring to the piano as “the late and very much lamented CD 318.” Well into 1972, nearly a year after it had been dropped, Gould was telling friends and fellow musicians that CD 318 was, in all probability, damaged beyond repair, and he began toying with the idea of a replacement.
He knew that he couldn’t fruitfully confine his search to the small stable of concert grands at Eaton’s. At the same time, he had little desire to travel to the Steinway Basement in New York to play the pianos there. Over the years, especially after he stopped performing, he had grown more reclusive, and was increasingly traumatized by change. He had spent his entire life in the city where he was born, lived in his parents’ house until he was nearly thirty, and for years used the same stockbroker, accountant, lawyer, and agent. He had sat on the same chair for nearly twenty years and played on the same piano for ten. The idea of switching to an entirely new piano was hard enough. But to spend hours on the road, to and from New York, in the course of such a switch seemed too much to ask.
Arguing that he would need an extended period in which to try out the most promising candidates, Gould wrote to Steinway & Sons and audaciously requested that the firm ship pianos to Toronto, preferably two at a time. Meanwhile he began thinking aloud about the possibility of cannibalizing CD 318 for its best bits. “I am most anxious to know whether any parts are salvageable and could be used in conjunction with another instrument,” he wrote to Steinway’s David Rubin. “It may be possible,” he conjectured, “to salvage the ac- tion of this instrument but, if so, it would be installed within the chassis of another piano.” But regardless of what happened with CD 318, he wanted Steinway to begin sending him their best pianos, in the hope that he would find an instrument that, he noted with some understatement, “comes closest to meeting my requirements.”
Gould’s elaborate fantasies notwithstanding, executives at Steinway & Sons were not inclined to start sending pianos up to Toronto, and turned down his request. Suddenly Gould grew sentimental about CD 318. All talk of giving up on the piano, or eviscerating it, vanished. He decided to ship CD 318 to New York to have technicians at Steinway work on it.
No one was particularly surprised. Gould forged his longest-lasting attachments with inanimate objects: his rattletrap of a chair, his cars (he even named them), his fingerless gloves. Over the years, he had made sincere proclamations of his affection for CD 318 and would play on no other instrument. Now, at the hands of movers who were at best inattentive, at worst incompetent, the entire investment in 318 had come to a premature and abrupt end. It was a haunting and eerie reminder of what had happened fourteen years earlier to CD 174, another favorite piano that had been dropped on its way back from Cleveland, a city that was beginning to seem cursed.
Any objective outsider would have told Gould that the piano could be restored, but that it would never be returned to its original condition. And it most certainly would not be the piano he and Edquist had spent so many years turning into exactly the instrument he wanted, with the fluid action and regulation customized to his idiosyncratic needs. He knew this, of course. But he was unwilling, in the end, to turn his back on 318. When he called Muriel Mussen to ask her to arrange for the piano’s trip to New York, he made a bleak joke about tossing a coin to decide which mover she should call.
WHILE WAITING FOR CD 318 to return from New York, Gould decided to capitalize on the piano’s absence and spend some time making a recording on the harpsichord. For years he had been interested in taping Handel’s suites for harpsichord. He had originally planned to play them on 318, on which he had recorded so many other works, especially Bach, that had been written for the harpsichord. But with 318 out of commission, he decided to distract himself by playing and recording on an actual harpsichord. After all, he had managed to have 318 tweaked to the point where it nearly was a harpsichord, and a great deal of his playing simulated the sound of the piano’s predecessor. Gould was intrigued by the harpsichord not only because it was the instrument Bach composed on but because it produced the sound Bach would have heard, clean and free of harmonic resonance. And it was precisely this clean, pure sound that Gould found appealing when playing Bach—and which he had tried to approach with CD 318 when, holding down the soft pedal, he used just two strings for each note. One of Gould’s main complaints with authentic eighteenth-century harpsichords was the width of the keys, which are narrower than those of a traditional piano. This tended to throw off the amazing speed of his fingers. For that reason, there was only one kind of harpsichord in the world he could play: a Wittmayer. Made in Germany in the middle of the twentieth century, the Wittmayer harpsichord is five and a half feet in length, making it as big as a baby grand piano. Many harpsichord purists turned up their noses at Wittmayers, Gould knew, for precisely the reason he was so fond of them: Not only was the Wittmayer larger than most harpsichords, but the keyboard width is as close to a piano’s as one could get. So he used a Wittmayer to record the first four Handel suites. Gould enjoyed himself immensely during the recording, but Edquist less so. A harpsichord is far more fragile than a piano and will go out of tune whenever the slightest breeze grazes it. Still worse, Gould had a tendency to hit the harpsichord’s keys with the same force he used on a piano. As Edquist put it, Gould was “overzealous” in his attack. Not only was this unnecessary on a harpsichord (because the strings are plucked, you won’t get a louder sound no matter how hard you hit the key), but it threw the keys out of position. Edquist spent hours on his knees in front of the instrument trying to undo the damage. “I just about cried like a baby,” he said. “It’s the closest I ever came to quitting.”
When the recording came out, critics scratched their heads, wondering why the great Glenn Gould was suddenly recording on a harpsichord. Only a few people knew there was no deeper meaning to draw: that he was biding his time, waiting for his beloved instrument to return from New York.
In the meantime Gould continued to negotiate with Steinway & Sons over his proposal that trial pianos be shipped to Toronto. But it wasn’t a particularly good time for him—or anyone else, for that matter—to ask for special dispensations from the company. Steinway & Sons had never recovered completely from the financial distress brought on by the Depression, then by the manufacturing restrictions during the war, then by a steady decline in piano sales around the country. Henry Z., for his part, had watched his father, Theodore, grow increasingly depressed by what had happened to the company forty years earlier and, ever the pragmatist, in 1972 he decided to sell the company to CBS. Suddenly Steinway & Sons became a very small subsidiary of a very large corporation. The change in ownership brought with it still more cost cutting.
The ripple effects were felt everywhere, including in Toronto. After encountering a great deal of resistance from his contacts at Steinway, Gould all but gave up on the idea of getting them to send him pianos and found a Model D the CBC had on loan from Steinway that spent much of its time at Eaton’s. Gould pronounced the piano “usable,” but not much more.
Finally, more than a year after the piano’s accident, Steinway & Sons phoned Muriel Mussen to say that CD 318 was repaired and ready to return to Toronto. When the piano arrived back at Eaton’s, Edquist went straight over to examine it. He could tell that the case had been refurbished, the lid replaced, and everything else put back in its proper place and orientation. The keybed had been repaired, the key slip replaced. And he could tell there was a brand-new cast-iron plate inside.
That was the extent of the good news. Edquist noticed right away that only a few of the broken action parts had been replaced; the rest had merely been realigned, as if the Steinway workers were trying to save money on parts. He also noticed, after a quick tuning, that the tone was uneven and problematic in the treble. The higher notes were “all zingy and buzzy and didn’t sound right.” The treble, he discovered, had lost quite a bit of its timbre, depth, and singing quality.
The probable cause of the buzzing, Edquist decided, was the new plate. Every grand piano’s action is custom-built around a cast-iron plate that has been uniquely fashioned for that particular piano. And each plate is a slightly different size. The difference is in millimeters, but those millimeters are crucial. The tiniest of differences in a plate’s dimension and position are critical to how everything else fits together. Whenever an action is assembled, minute adjustments must be made to the mechanism’s leverage and geometry as they relate to the plate. Edquist knew how important the plate is. Install a new plate in an old piano and you are inviting trouble: Issues with tone and touch are likely to arise, requiring modifications to the action. In 318’s case, the few modifications that had been made to the action after the new plate was installed were insufficient at best.
Edquist called Franz Mohr in New York, whose response was curt: “There’s nothing I can do about it.” So even before Gould had a chance to sit down at the piano, Edquist wove some felt into the small section of the strings between the tuning pins and the metal bar known as the capo d’astro (this was a common technique, but one 318 had never needed) to try to cut down on the buzzing. It sounded better, but the unique timbre he had come to associate with CD 318 was now largely attenuated.
When Gould sat down to the newly repaired piano, like a wine expert sniffing a cork, he could tell right away that something was off. Indeed, one of the first things Gould noticed was the “horrendous buzzing.” But what his ears were hearing was quickly eclipsed by what his hands were feeling. The action, he realized, had taken a noticeable turn for the worse, with none of the responsiveness he had come to take for granted. Gould knew that even after a thorough repair, CD 318 would not be the piano it had been in 1969 and 1970—two especially productive years in the recording studio—but he had hoped for an approximation. This was no approximation. The piano was, for his purposes, an alien.
Rather than send it back, the two men decided to keep working on it in Toronto. Edquist did what he could—voicing and revoicing, readjusting the blow distance on the hammers. But Gould grew increasingly frustrated. The piano’s action had lost something essential, he decided, although he was unable to figure out exactly what it was. After a few weeks of what felt increasingly like pointless tinkering, Gould came up with a radical idea: an action transplant. Could Edquist perhaps remove the action from another Model D at Eaton’s, which was seldom played, and install it in CD 318? This, Gould reasoned, would give Edquist a relatively clean slate of an action to work with while preserving the fundamental magic of the rest of CD 318. Edquist was immediately skeptical. The action of a piano slides out easily enough, and technicians routinely remove an action to work on it. But actions are not interchangeable. Every action is made to fit with the piano it resides in. “Glenn, it won’t work,” he complained. But Gould insisted, leaving Edquist with little choice but to make his point by demonstrating the difficulty of such an operation. “I knew I wasn’t going to get out of there without trying it,” he recalled. “When he wanted something, Glenn was one to push the needle in a millimeter at a time.” So, with Gould pacing behind him, humming Bach, the tuner removed the actions from both pianos. He then put the other piano’s action into 318, and indeed, as he predicted, he discovered that the hammers were so misaligned that they didn’t even hit the strings in the right place. He showed the result to Gould, who was finally convinced and abandoned the plan.
In 1973, a year after CBS bought Steinway & Sons, the company further curtailed its largesse to Steinway artists by ending the practice of renting pianos for indefinite periods to its elite artists. The company began requiring that all Steinway artists buy their instruments.
Instead of bidding the piano a final farewell, on February 14, 1973, perhaps as a Valentine’s Day gift to himself, Gould wrote a check to Steinway for $6,700 to purchase CD 318 outright. The invoice read, “1 Used, As Is, Steinway & Sons Model D Grand in Ebonized Case 317914.” “Needless to say,” Gould wrote to David Rubin at Steinway in a letter accompanying his check, “after all these years of exposure to the unique charms of CD 318, I am proud indeed to add it to my ‘rare’ instrument collection—and you may apply the adjective as you choose.” In a nervous footnote, he asked almost timidly if the piano would retain its CD 318 designation. The answer, of course, was that it would not, because it was no longer the property of Steinway. The number 318 would be assigned to another concert piano in Steinway’s stable.
Gould then asked Rubin for a formal reassurance that, now that the piano was in private hands, service on it would continue. He ended his letter in the most politic tone he could muster. “I want to thank you once again, and this time rather more officially than in the past, for your kindness and consideration this past year during which, for all intents and purposes, CD 318 was saved from the scrap-heap. I realize that the work of Franz and, undoubtedly, many other technicians at the factory as well, played a major role in the miraculous rebirth of the instrument, but I also realize that had it not been for your willingness to guide the project through the various experiments to which it was subjected, the final result would not have been the happy one which now makes it possible for us to record on this instrument once again.”
He chose his words carefully, not wanting to jeopardize his relationship with Steinway now that he knew he would be relying on the company for future service. And he had no intention of letting on that he was in fact extremely frustrated by what had happened to CD 318. In buying the piano, Gould must have felt he had little choice. If Steinway had taken it back, who knows what might have happened. He was convinced that Steinway, famously unsentimental about its instruments, would not have spent the money to repair it a second time. He told Lorne Tulk he was afraid they would have simply destroyed it, “and he couldn’t bear the thought of that,” Tulk said.
Still, Tulk tried to talk Gould out of buying the piano, even resorting to an analogy to animals, a comparison he knew Gould could appreciate. “I said, ‘It’s like a horse or a dog that’s served you very well, and it’s time to put it out to pasture.’ ” Gould certainly understood, and perhaps even accepted Tulk’s argument, but, as with the episode of the action transplant, he had trouble believing the piano couldn’t be fixed. And, he reasoned to Tulk, there was nothing further he could do unless the piano belonged to him. “He bought it so he would have control over it,” said Tulk years later, “so he could give it a dignified retirement.” When Edquist heard Gould had bought 318, he was very surprised, as well as disappointed that Gould hadn’t bothered to ask his opinion: “I would have advised him not to do it.” At the same time, Edquist understood something fundamental about Gould: He was uniquely accustomed to having things go his way. He had grown up believing all traffic lights were green, even when they were red. And by purchasing 318, in spite of the botched repair attempts, he must have still held on to a shard of hope that the piano could be fixed.
WHAT TULK AND others didn’t know was that Gould was gradually losing control over another sacred part of his life. For more than a decade he had been in a serious, discreet romance with Cornelia Foss, the wife of the composer and conductor Lukas Foss.
Gould might have referred to himself as the Last Puritan, but that was probably more true about his approach to playing the piano than his sexuality. Gould grew up in a household where sex was not discussed, and throughout his life he maintained a discretion much like that of his parents, perhaps even more extreme. But he was hardly asexual. He had a tendency to develop adolescent crushes, and throughout his life he revered certain women from a distance. Once, when he was in his early twenties, he had a fairly lengthy relationship with a woman whose letters to him were addressed from “Faun” to “Spaniel.” In fact, it was from “Faun” that he had taken over the rental of the Chickering before he purchased it.
But the most serious and long-lasting romantic relationship of his life—it started when Gould was in his late twenties and continued into his forties—was with Cornelia. It was also perhaps the most emotionally turbulent of Gould’s relationships, and triggered periods of absolute obsession for him. Gould and Cornelia had met in 1959 by way of Gould’s playing. At the time, Lukas was teaching music at the University of California at Los Angeles, and one evening he and Cornelia were on their way to a dinner party when a recording of the Goldberg Variations came on the radio. Cornelia was at the wheel, and Lukas insisted she pull over and stop the car in order to listen without distraction. Lukas was entranced. Cornelia, who was not a musician, was appreciative but not nearly as moved as her husband was. She sat patiently while Lukas listened, spellbound, to the entire thirty-eight minutes and twenty-six seconds of the recording, which the radio station played without interruption. When it was over, Lukas signaled Cornelia not to stir. “I have to hear who this was.” The announcer came on and identified the performer as Glenn Gould. Oddly, in spite of the fame the recording had brought Gould, it was the first time that Foss had heard him.
But Foss, it turned out, was a musician whom Gould admired, and three years later, when playing in Los Angeles, Gould invited the Fosses to the concert and the reception afterward. It was at the party that Gould first met Cornelia, a wellregarded painter whose quick wit and breadth of knowledge matched his own. The Fosses became close friends with Gould, who took to calling them regularly. When Lukas became conductor of the Buffalo Symphony in 1963, Gould often drove down from Toronto to visit. As the friendship progressed, the conversations—and Gould’s attention—began to shift focus. When the three of them were together, Gould started out talking mostly to Lukas, then to the two of them, and before long he was talking mostly to Cornelia. In the vibrant Cornelia he had found his intellectual equal. One of Gould’s gifts was his fugal mind: Not only was his ability to play counterpoint unmatched, but he could actually think on three or four levels at once. Having grown up around highly intelligent people, Cornelia was not the least bit intimidated. There were few subjects in which she was not conversant. In fact, Cornelia’s worldliness contrasted sharply with Gould’s relatively provincial upbringing. She had been born in Berlin, and when she was an infant her parents moved to Rome. When Cornelia was still a young girl, they fled Nazi Europe for the United States, where her father, Otto Brendel, a prominent archaeologist and art historian, taught first in Saint Louis and Indiana, then for many years at Columbia University. English was her third language.
In 1964 an affair began, and Cornelia and Gould met wherever they could: in New York, Buffalo, and Toronto. As the relationship grew more serious, Gould insisted that Cornelia move to Toronto and marry him. “He really didn’t want this to be just an affair,” she recalled many years later. After years of indecision, in 1968 Cornelia finally made up her mind to leave Lukas and move to Toronto. She put her son and daughter, ages ten and six, into the family station wagon along with the cat, and prepared to make a new life with Gould in Toronto. But Lukas, she recalled, wasn’t so convinced of her resolve. While Cornelia sat in the car he stood in the driveway, smiling. “I said, ‘Why are you smiling? I’m leaving you, for heaven’s sake. I’m going to go off and marry Glenn,’ ” she recalled. “And he said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, you’re not going to marry Glenn. Have a good time. I’ll see you next weekend.’ ”
Cornelia and Gould had decided more or less to live together but keep separate places. Cornelia enrolled her children in school in Toronto and rented a house a few blocks away from Gould’s apartment, and they fell into something of a domestic routine. The couple even attended dinner parties given by Gould’s friends in the Toronto musical scene. For the most part, however, Gould kept this new turn in his life relatively quiet. Still, those who worked closely with him could not help but notice that something was different. Andrew Kazdin, for one, noted a newly domesticated tone to Gould’s voice when he brought up Cornelia. “From time to time Glenn would bring her name up in conversations in a very matter-of-fact way, much the same as one would mention a marriage partner,” Kazdin later wrote. Lorne Tulk described Cornelia as a “very, very lovely” woman. “Her mind was going all the time and his mind was going all the time, so the two of them got on very well,” Tulk said. Gould seemed genuinely relaxed. And happy.
But there was a twist that Cornelia hadn’t counted on. Within a few weeks of arriving in Toronto, Cornelia knew that her husband had been right: Marriage to Glenn Gould was out of the question. “I realized Glenn was an incredibly wonderful human being, the funniest, most wonderful person,” she said. “But flawed. Something was seriously wrong.” Not only did she now witness his myriad quirks on a daily basis, but she saw firsthand his growing dependence on prescription medication, mostly tranquilizers. Gould was not a person she could marry, and this fact became clear to her even before she had fully moved into her house. Yet it would take four and a half years to “disentangle” herself, as she later described it.
In those years, Cornelia lived something of a double life: Every Friday afternoon when school was out, she put the children in the station wagon, drove back to Buffalo, and spent the weekend with Lukas.
By 1973, the relationship between Gould and Cornelia was unraveling. Gould grew increasingly paranoid and insecure about her continued affection for him. He insisted on knowing her whereabouts at all times. If she had an appointment, he drove her there and waited in the car for one, two, three hours—however long it lasted. In a way she found it touching. “He was passionate about everything he did,” she would say years later. But his obsessive devotion to her was now giving way to paranoia. And it revealed a side of him that few people saw at close range.
Cornelia attributed some of Gould’s paranoid behavior to the large amounts of medication he was taking, a regimen that by the early 1970s included ten Valiums a day. Eventually the relationship had become stifling for her, and she began to plan her exit from Toronto and a return to Lukas, who was now living in New York City. She and Lukas decided that he should drive to Toronto to get the children, by then aged ten and fourteen, and take them first, without telling Glenn. Cornelia knew that as soon as Gould discovered that the children were gone he would be beside himself, because he would understand what it meant: that she, too, was leaving. Indeed, when he found out that Lukas had come for the children, he was furious. She stated plainly that she would be leaving soon. And she did.
Gould had always avoided braiding his public and private lives, and for weeks leading up to the separation, and even afterward, those he worked with had no notion that anything was amiss. “It was not well defined exactly when her name began to fade from his conversations,” wrote Kazdin. “I just sort of sat up one day and realized that he had ceased speaking of her. She was never mentioned again.” But when Cornelia left, privately Gould was devastated. He called her in New York and insisted on staying on the phone for hours at a time. When she told him he needed to get some exercise and fresh air, perhaps take a walk around the block, he agreed, but insisted that she stay on the phone while he went out. When he put the phone down, she picked up a book and read until he returned. This telephonic struggle went on for more than a year, at which point Gould announced that he planned to visit Cornelia in New York. His goal was to persuade her to return to Toronto. By now it was summertime and she was renting a small cottage on Long Island. Gould arrived and checked into a nearby motel, and they took a walk on the beach in the June heat. Years later Cornelia could still remember others on the beach in their bathing suits, staring at the figure next to her in his heavy coat and gloves. She told him she could not return to Toronto, and said good-bye to him at the motel. They made a date to talk on the phone in a week’s time. Then Cornelia did the unthinkable: She forgot to call. When she remembered, and when he finally took her call, he told her he now knew she no longer loved him. Still, they talked, and made a date for her to call again. But again she forgot. And that was the end. They never spoke again.
CORNELIA WAS AN obsession Gould couldn’t shake. Rather than read her neglect as a sign of evident rejection and adjust accordingly, Gould continued to fixate. Discovered among his private papers after his death was a handwritten page dating to 1976, chronicling frequent attempts to reach someone, presumably Cornelia, made over a period of several days. The page paints a portrait of near-desperate attempts to speak with Cornelia. She was apparently being shielded by other family members, including Lukas and her daughter. The entry ended after the third day of unreturned phone calls: “Called at 11:35. L. said he would ‘try to get you to call.’ ” After that, Gould evidently abandoned his efforts to reach her. Not long after, still obsessing, he filled another four pages with a list of “pros” and “cons,” reviewing the state of the relationship. He was careful not to specify that he was referring to his broken relationship with Cornelia and kept the tone distant and clinical. Reasons to “retain” the relationship included: “because I feel, at this moment, that the daily or stand-by contact with one individual is essential” and “because I cannot easily surrender the tokens of permanence—safety, security, shelter—from my overview of life.” Why he “would like to be without it” included: “because it involves an unmanageable breakdown in communications, a constant frustration which leads to the avoidance of all that discussion which once made it meaningful” and “because I feel that the long, long history of quarrels and relationship disruptions is bound to be continued indefinitely and that that continuance will be detrimental to my health—physical as well as emotional.” Gould then composed a third lengthy section under the heading WHAT WOULD I ADVISE IN THE ROLE OF 3RD-PARTY OBSERVER. Included in that column was “immediate discontinuance,” and “that I, as observed party, would adjust given time to a new set of proportions in my life and, eventually, would wonder what ever made it seem like an addicting habit.”
Reading Gould’s clinical pros-and-cons discussion is striking for various reasons, not the least of which being that it contradicts the popular notion of Gould as a hermit. Hermits, of course, aren’t known for their need for “daily contact” with another person. But more remarkable is the fact that although Cornelia had essentially ended the relationship three years earlier, Gould continued to believe that he was in control of steering its future course.
It was the same impulse—or fantasy—that guided his belief that he could salvage his piano. And now he had all the more reason to resurrect the instrument. Some years earlier Gould had begun a collaboration with Bruno Monsaingeon, a French violinist and filmmaker. Their work together yielded two series of films celebrating the genius that was Glenn Gould. One was called Music and Terminology (Chemins de la Musique). The other was a series of three films titled Glenn Gould Plays Bach. The projects spanned several years, and for most of those years 318 was the piano he used. It appeared in the films with its right side banged and dented, but its sound was still rich and splendid.
When the filming began in 1974, Monsaingeon found CD 318 to be a perfectly fine instrument. He remembers that for the tremendous range of repertoire Gould was playing in the first set of films—Bach, Scriabin, Schoenberg, Gibbons, Wagner, and the Berg sonata—the piano was “magnificent,” producing not only a full-blooded sound but a Baroque one as well. “It was a piano with that kind of range,” he said.
As he did during the recording sessions, during the filming Edquist stood by most of the time, and whenever the slightest problem arose, Gould would stop and call him over to regulate the piano. Then, Monsaingeon recalled, Edquist, “that modest, peaceful man, would step up and start working on it.” Tulk was in the films too, displaying his mastery of tape splicing and mixing during a mock recording session—made specifically for the film—in Eaton Auditorium. Evident, too, was Gould’s love of being in the studio, in close contact with the dials, switches, and levers, all in the name of perfecting a performance with technology. More than once he seized control of the mixing board to get just the level he wanted on each track, to the patient amusement of Tulk and everyone else.
Yet Gould continued to brood about the state CD 318 was in. He noted that the tempos in his first recordings on the restored piano, and now in the films, were slower than he would have liked. The action he so loved was suddenly holding him back. Perhaps thinking that Edquist wasn’t doing all he could for the piano, in a fit of infidelity Gould asked Steinway to have Franz Mohr fly up and work on the piano. Now, however, all repairs would be done at Gould’s expense, since he, not Steinway, owned the piano. Mohr arrived and did some adjusting to the capstan screws, raising the level of the hammers. (Edquist grumbled afterward that these were all things he could have done, thus saving Mohr a trip and Gould some money.) Mohr left Toronto shaking his head. Although he was accustomed to pianos in various states of disrepair, this one was a mess. It was just plain old and simply worn out. Although Mohr had spent many years indulging pianists in their loyalty to—even obsession with—their instruments, in the end he was a believer in the Steinway credo that the company was in the business of selling and promoting new pianos, not endlessly restoring the old instruments with their brittle wood and fading sound.
But Gould wasn’t giving up.
In early 1976, he decided to send the piano to Steinway for a second attempt at repair. This time he circumvented the usual bureaucracy and called Mohr directly. Mohr had spent enough time working on CD 318 to know exactly what the piano needed: the careful and precise measurement of each key’s weight in order to restore its evenness of touch. Mohr was expert at this. When he had rebuilt Horowitz’s piano he did so painstakingly, key by key. To ensure precision, Mohr had created a chart of all the parts, listing the gram weight of each key. As he rebuilt the piano, he duplicated the weight and action as precisely as possible. This was what needed to happen with CD 318.
But Mohr was too busy to oversee the work directly. Horowitz was in one of his productive periods, and Mohr’s near-slavish devotion to the artist, who was now seventy-six, left him little time to attend to the eccentric Canadian. The best he could do was give precise instructions to Joe Bisceglie, the longtime employee who now presided over the factory. Mohr gave Gould his word that he would do his very best to convey exactly what the pianist wanted: an action with keys weighted uniformly down to the milligram to give the keyboard a light, even, hair-trigger touch.
Mohr also spoke with Bill Hupfer, the man whom Gould had accused years earlier of delivering the crippling blow to his shoulder. Mohr told Hupfer about Gould’s requirements, especially the need for a light, even touch. “I told Bill he didn’t want a romantic Steinway,” Mohr recalled. But Hupfer, not surprisingly, wasn’t about to drop everything to oversee the rebuilding of Glenn Gould’s quirky and by now very elderly piano. The conversation made it clear to Mohr that no one in the upper echelons of the company planned to give the piano special attention.
A few weeks after the piano arrived back in Astoria, technicians at the factory came up with an official recommendation for what should be done to the piano, which the company now referred to as “formerly CD 318”: install new backchecks with stiffer wire, reregulate or replace repetition springs, and reweigh the action “to obtain a uniform down-weight.” This last item, it was noted, was critical. The outlook was promising.
DURING THE PIANO’S absence, Gould tried several of the newer instruments at Eaton’s. Throughout the 1960s, when 318 was in good working order, Gould had been largely unaffected by the fact that during those years the quality of Steinway pianos was suffering badly. Every once in a while the factory would get it right, but usually the pianos being produced were just plain inferior to the company’s prewar instruments. Steinway was putting excessive amounts of lead in its keys, which made it easier to depress a key, but the extra mass created a kind of inertia or sluggishness in the action, which most pianists disliked. In 1963, in an effort to overcome problems it was having with its actions, Steinway started replacing all the cloth bushings with Teflon. It was a disaster, because although the Teflon did not alter in size as a result of changes in humidity, the wood surrounding it did. This made for actions that were too tight in the humid summer months and too loose in the winter. The result was an inconsistent level of friction in the action’s parts, as well as an annoying clicking noise that pianists could hear.
More and more frequently, concert grands were showing signs of bad craftsmanship. During one recital, the Brazilian pianist Ney Salgado was in the middle of Ravel’s difficult Alborado del Gracioso when several keys simply stopped working. Another artist, Byron Janis, was playing Rachmaninoff ’s Piano Concerto in G Minor when one of the ebony keys flew right off the piano. Suddenly a tiny jagged piece of wood jabbed his finger where the B-flat had been a second before.
This period was especially hard on touring pianists. By the early 1970s, costs had risen to the point where few musicians could afford to tour with their own personal pianos. It could cost up to a thousand dollars to ship a piano from New York to Chicago. Veteran concert performer Gary Graffman came up with his own extreme solution. Before going on tour he consulted his Truth Box, a card file indexed by city and state, with his personal appraisal of the pianos available in each place. If the card indicated the piano was a dud, Graffman complained bitterly to Steinway until a suitable instrument was provided. When Ruth Laredo encountered a lousy piano or a restless audience, it could intensify her nervousness. Less frequently, when she found a piano in a strange city that was fine, her playing wasn’t merely more relaxed: She found herself inspired. Laredo learned to be philosophical about bad pianos, which enhanced her appreciation of good ones. “Actually, I think all the bad instruments improved my playing,” she once said.
Some pianists were more amenable than others to playing on alien instruments. For Arthur Rubinstein, “Every piano is a different adventure.” And there was the Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter, who believed one simply had to have faith in the piano and trust in the tuner who had worked on it. For this reason, Richter never tried a piano before going onstage, preferring in- stead to take each piano he encountered as a sign of destiny. Monsaingeon, who made a lengthy film about Richter, recalled the pianist saying, “You’ve just got to believe, like a disciple of Christ believing Christ could walk on water, and if you don’t believe it, he will drown.”
Although Gould no longer had to contend with the vagaries of catch-as-catch-can pianos, the ripple effects of Steinway’s decline in quality were evident to him as well. Someone recorded one of Gould’s several forays to Eaton’s, where he did brief ad hoc performances while trying out several of their newer instruments and offered a running critique of the modern Steinway. On CD 131, “otherwise known as the Mussen special” (presumably because it was a piano Muriel Mussen had foisted on a great many visiting performers), he played a little Bach and some Strauss and pronounced the piano’s action “very sluggish,” even “heavy and cumbersome.” And, warming to his material: “But it’s also very even, so it’s evenly sluggish.” The piano, he went on to complain, lost its tuning very quickly. “It has even gone out of tune the two minutes I’ve been playing on it.”
Gould may have been trying different pianos at Eaton’s and elsewhere in Toronto, but in the meantime the work down in Astoria was going according to plan—but not Gould’s plan. “To my dismay,” Mohr wrote years later in his memoir, “when I went to the factory and put my fingers on the piano, I knew that Gould would not be pleased.” The action was much too heavy. The technicians had made it into the type of big romantic instrument that many pianists liked but that Gould abhorred. Mohr knew he could revoice the former CD 318. But he also knew that the sound was not what would upset Gould. It was the touch. And that was something that simply could not be restored.
This time, rather than have the piano shipped home, Gould went to New York to try it out. As Mohr tells the story, Gould arrived, put his hands on the rebuilt 318, and nearly broke into tears. “ ‘This is not my piano,’ he moaned. ‘What has happened to this piano? I cannot play it; I cannot use it.’ ” In his memoir Mohr observed that “the poor man was completely lost.” It was five years since the piano had been dropped, and the repeated attempts at repair had all been in vain. Gould returned home in a somber mood.
Once again the instrument was shipped back to Toronto. The soul, if not the body, that was CD 318 had been left somewhere on the factory floor in Astoria. Or was it beneath the loading dock, where it landed after having been dropped? Whatever, wherever, one thing was clear: The magic that might have eluded others but that Glenn Gould revered was gone forever.
Oddly, for all his anguish Gould continued to record on CD 318. He decided that although the escalating problems made performing difficult for him as a pianist, they were subtle enough not to be heard in the final taping. And it wasn’t that he found the piano unplayable; he just found it increasingly difficult to get what he wanted from it. He recorded Bach’s English Suites and a number of Mozart sonatas, and he continued filming with Bruno Monsaingeon. Yet by the late 1970s, the topic of the instrument’s diminished quality began to come up during the filming sessions, and the filmmaker also noticed. “It had deteriorated very drastically,” he said. “I quite agreed that there was something dead in the sound of the piano. It had become an uneven piano, a non-pianistic piano.”
Then Gould started canceling the filming sessions.
AT THE TIME, Gould was keeping a diary that chronicled a terrible problem he believed he was having with his hands. The journal reveals a man in the midst of a full-blown crisis, similar to the aftermath of the paralyzing blow Bill Hupfer had allegedly inflicted nearly two decades earlier. But this time Gould kept everything to himself.
Although Gould’s hands were unusually well suited to the piano—his fingers were flexible, long, and strong—he was perennially anxious about them. He protected, coddled, and soaked them, dipped them in melted wax, and continually fretted over them. In the late 1970s he filled page after page of yellow-lined notepads with minute details of what he came to view as a serious and potentially crippling problem at the keyboard. It started with a “lack of coordination” that he first noticed in June 1977. What he had always taken for granted—the naturalness and ease of his piano technique—had been lost. He began a series of “practice experiments,” spending several hours at a time playing repertoire “constants” like Bach toccatas and Haydn sonatas, trying to remedy the problem. He analyzed in agonizing detail every aspect of his playing: not just his hands but his posture, and the position of his arms, elbows, wrists, neck, head, and chest. He shifted his body’s center of gravity; he experimented with the curvature of his spine.
The experience was unnerving. Gould had always maintained a simple faith in his musical gifts. He often refused, when asked, to expound on the mechanics of what he did because playing the piano had always come to him so naturally. “I don’t want to think too much about my playing or I’ll get like that centipede who was asked which foot he moved first and became paralyzed just thinking about it,” he said to an interviewer early in his career. But now the ease with which his hands moved seemed to have disappeared. His head and his hands had gone completely “out of sync,” he wrote.
It was a difficult time, to be sure. The end of the relationship with Cornelia had come just two years after the death of his mother, Florence, in 1975, which one friend called “probably the most traumatic event” of Gould’s life. And he was likely suffering a variety of side effects from the excessive amount of medication he was taking for his many ailments. He had developed hypertension, and although his regular doctor had told him not to give it a second thought, Gould consulted a second physician who prescribed an anti-hypertensive drug. Now checking and recording his blood pressure every hour—and sometimes every fifteen minutes—Gould added the hypertension medication to a regimen that included an antispasmodic for cramping in his stomach, anti-inflammatory medication for his shoulder discomfort, and a steady diet of tranquilizers. In addition to these miseries, Gould also had overly sensitive teeth and experienced pain when urinating.
Friends and acquaintances began to notice that he looked haggard. Soon after Gould started obsessing about his hands, Peter Ostwald, an old acquaintance, visited him in Toronto and was “shocked” by the deterioration in his appearance since he had last seen him a decade earlier. “His face and body had become bloated. He looked fat, flabby, and stooped,” Ostwald later wrote in a book about Gould. Ostwald, a psychiatrist, noted that the anti-hypertensive might have caused the weight gain, but observed that Gould’s “skin, which had always been on the pale side, had acquired an unnatural grayness.”
Gould’s obsession with his hands may have had something to do with his escalating battle with Steinway & Sons over CD 318. The damage—or what he perceived as damage—done at the Steinway factory had been a big blow, and he was deeply worried about what to do next. Although it’s not clear if Gould ever made the connection himself, it is entirely possible that at least part of the problem with his hands lay in the rebuilt action of 318, which had returned from its latest trip to New York with too much lead in the keys. For a pianist like Gould, who placed such strict demands on himself for speed and precision, playing on a sluggish, improperly balanced action could well have caused him to think there was something wrong with his own fingers.
Another cause of stress was the temporary loss of his favorite recording studio, which occurred when Eaton Auditorium was closed for renovations. For the entirety of 1978 Gould did no recording at all. Instead he spent a great deal of time writing detailed accounts of his hand condition, as well as other ailments. In May 1979, Gould and his team were informed by Eaton’s that the renovation of the auditorium had stalled, and although the place was a mess, if they thought they could make usable recordings there, they were welcome to try. As quickly as they had appeared, Gould’s hand symptoms suddenly vanished, and he was ready to resume recording.
In fact, as Kazdin later recalled, Eaton Auditorium looked as though a bomb had hit the place. Walls were missing. Doors were boarded up. There were no lights and no heat. Still worse, water tanks on the roof had burst and the whole auditorium had flooded. As a result, the flooring had been ripped up and in its place was a carpet of ceiling plaster that had fallen from the floor above. Thick layers of dust covered everything.
Nevertheless Gould decided to tough it out in the construction zone. Ray Roberts and his son spent days cleaning it up, and, in an effort to bring the room up to a temperature Gould could live with, they brought in large propane heaters and used portable desk and floor lamps for lighting. Fortunately, the freight elevator still functioned, so the piano could be moved in and out. When it was brought in, Edquist would work to get it in tune, but as soon as the temperature fluctuated more than a few degrees, it fell out of tune again.
When Gould got back to recording and filming, there was absolutely no sign of any deterioration in his playing. Not only had he overcome the whole hand crisis, but it was as if nothing had happened. Still, he was less and less happy with the piano that CD 318 had become. In recording sessions, Gould and Edquist and Roberts tried any number of gambits to make it sound better. They positioned it differently on the stage. They changed the location of the microphones, backing them away from the piano as if it were an aging actress in need of soft lighting. Finally, in the course of one frustrating recording session, Edquist said to Gould, by way of a joke, “Glenn, maybe you should try a Yamaha.” Although Edquist was not seriously urging Gould to abandon Steinway in favor of a mass-produced Japanese import, both men knew that, short of a miracle, 318 was not to be revived.
IN THE SUMMER of 1980, Gould decided to bet his hand on a miracle. He was scheduled to visit New York that June for a photo session with Don Hunstein, the well-known photographer of musical celebrities. (The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan album cover is one of his hallmark shots.)
Gould had Edquist take 318’s action out of the piano and persuaded Ray Roberts to drive with him down to New York to deliver the action to Steinway & Sons for yet another attempt at resuscitation. Roberts wedged the five-foot-long mechanism into the back of Longfellow, Gould’s large Lincoln Town Car, and they set off on the five-hundred-mile trip to New York City.
Gould was on edge about the trip well before it began. He started a lengthy diary entry on June 13, 1980 (“And it’s Friday, too!!”). Roberts had been suffering from a cold, so Gould insisted that he stay out of the car for at least thirty-six hours before they left.
Gould, who was a notoriously bad driver, insisted on taking the wheel. Roberts can’t have relished this situation, since Gould’s reputation was well earned—and one that the maestro acknowledged freely and with good humor. “I suppose it can be said that I’m an absent-minded driver,” he once said. “It’s true that I’ve driven through a number of red lights on occasion, but on the other hand I’ve stopped at a lot of green ones but never gotten credit for it.”
Gould’s fretting began the moment the two men started packing up the car. A lengthy discussion ensued about whether they should wrap the action in some kind of padding, but they decided against it, reasoning that any jouncing would just stimulate the natural movement of the hammers anyway. Besides, Gould worried, once they reached the border, anything shrouded might arouse the curiosity of the customs inspectors. In fact Edquist had made several initial inquiries with customs officials about the traveling piano action, in order to ease its passage across the border, and had composed a letter explaining why it needed to be transported to America. It was addressed “To Whom it May Concern”:
Only the manufacturer has the capability of rebuilding this mechanism to factory specifications. Due to the very critical nature of the artist’s usage of the piano, it is imperative that this work be undertaken by Steinway factory technicians where the piano was manufactured, using Steinway replacement parts. There is no Steinway repair shop in Canada having this expertise.
Stranger things have shown up at the Canadian-U.S. border, to be sure, but the sight of Glenn Gould in the summertime warmth, wrapped in his scarf, gloves, and heavy coat, could hardly have gone unnoticed. Add to that the guts of his piano splayed on the backseat of his enormous car, and the two travelers were certain to raise eyebrows.
The two men had left Toronto late in the evening, so by the time they reached the border just north of Buffalo at Niagara Falls, it was nearly three A.M. When the U.S. customs inspectors looked in the car, Roberts took charge. He got out of the car and showed them Edquist’s brief letter, stating that the cargo in question was the mechanism of Steinway Grand Piano #318, then invited the inspectors to take a closer look. He explained that it was a part of a piano that was going to the States for repair and then returning, and therefore not something on which they would need to collect a duty. He cocked his head in the direction of Gould, who was at the wheel. “Show-biz guy,” he said conspiratorially. They were waved through.
The two men left the action in the car and spent the night at a Holiday Inn in Batavia, New York, 350 miles from New York City. The following morning they continued on to another Holiday Inn just outside New York City, a hotel Gould patronized regularly. But Gould was unhappy about the air-conditioning there, so in a classic move for the exquisitely sensitive Gould, he drove into New York and took a room at the Drake Hotel on Fifth Avenue, another regular haunt. But, finding the mattresses too hard and the entire place reeking of fresh paint, Gould insisted on driving back to the Holiday Inn. The action made the trip as well, strapped all the while in the backseat of the car. The men were functioning on almost no sleep by this point, and the next day they drove back into New York (“I navigated in New York like an acerbic cabbie,” he wrote) and dropped the action off at Steinway.
Having done so, Gould and Roberts drove to the recording studio on Thirtieth Street, where Gould was to meet Hunstein for the shoot. While there, Gould spent a long time playing CD 41, a piano favored by Horowitz. He liked the piano’s full-bodied sound but found the action erratic. “Furthermore, it buzzes as indeed does 201 to a lesser extent,” he wrote, referring to one of Rachmaninoff ’s favorite pianos, which had a “terrific action,” but no real high notes and a dull, worn-out bass. “It’s as though some rare disease was sweeping the Steinway species or, alternately, that my hearing is suddenly aware of a level of sensitivity which was never bothersome before.” Gould explained to the ever-patient Mohr that he needed “the sound of the one and the action of the other.”
Later that day, he went to the Steinway Basement “to see what’s around.” His disappointment deepened. “All were miserable, undistinguished,” he lamented to his diary. Even CD 82, a new piano that Franz Mohr had assured him would not disappoint, buzzed terribly. The entire situation, he decided, was tragic and disgusting. He could not wait to leave. “For me,” he later wrote, “Manhattan is still one of the most depressing places on earth.”
Returning to the Holiday Inn that evening, the dejected Gould called his friend Robert Silverman, the publisher of the Piano Quarterly, who had good contacts at a number of piano manufacturers, and asked him about local dealers for Hamburg Steinways, which, most pianists now agreed, were superior to the models made in America, especially when it came to touch. Silverman told Gould he would talk to the Hamburg Steinway dealer, but urged him not to abandon the American Steinway just yet.
The next day Gould called Franz Mohr. “I told him of my severe disillusionment with 41 and with the pianos in the Basement,” he later wrote. “He said that, if I was bothered by buzzing in a new inst like 82, there was little point in changing hammers on 318 and (doing a 180 degree turn) that I should send the chassis to the Factory and have them determine whether anything could be loose inside.” Send the chassis to New York to see if something was loose? What were they going to do? Hold it upside down and shake it? Mohr clearly had other priorities, and Gould was losing patience with the senior concert specialist. “I have finally lost all confidence in Franz,” he wrote. “His inability to fathom the tonal and action mechanical inadequacy of 41 and of the other beasts in the Basement, his inability to hear (or to admit to hearing) the buzz syndrome, his inability to act succinctly on behalf of 318 are hardly encouraging.” Gould returned to Canada, in more doubt than ever before about the future of his long association with Steinway & Sons.