In 1981 Gould rerecorded the Goldberg Variations, and the album was released the following year, a few weeks before his death in October 1982. Photograph by Don Hunstein, courtesy of Sony BMG Music Entertainment.
CD 318’S CROWNING INDIGNITY came in 1980, quite literally in the middle of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. Gould and Monsaingeon were making one of their final films together—the second in a series called Glenn Gould Plays Bach, in which Gould played the Fugue in E Major from Book II. Halfway into the piece, Gould simply stopped playing. The action was not the problem. It was the sound. Where the piano had once been rich and supple in tone, it was now feeble and weak, barely projecting. Gradually he and Monsaingeon came to accept that he couldn’t finish the piece on the venerable 318. So in the middle of the recording they substituted a different piano, while maintaining the illusion in the film that he was playing on a single instrument.
A few months later, Gould summoned Edquist to Eaton Auditorium, which was still in a shambles after the flood and renovations. Gould was there to record a Bach prelude and fugue. To Edquist’s immense surprise, Gould had taken seriously his offhand remark about trying a Japanese import. There, in the old recording space, sat Gould before a nine-foot Yamaha.
Edquist wasn’t impressed, to say the least. For one thing, the piano was noisy. When Gould released the sustaining pedal slowly, the dampers would zip into the strings, creating an annoying buzz. Edquist spent hours needling the dampers in an effort to mitigate the noise. And he fine-tuned it for what seemed like hours. But in the end he found the entire exercise of working on the Yamaha frustrating and pointless, and found himself pining for the original 318, as stable an instrument as he had ever known.
Gould was by now finally ready to accept the fact that the intense, exclusive intimacy of a life with one piano—the piano— had finally ended. But he had no patience left for the long, frustrating spells of substitute pianos while 318 was being worked on in New York. He called his friend Robert Silverman to help him find another piano—not a temporary substitute, but a permanent replacement. Gould had recently made a major decision to rerecord the Goldberg Variations, more than twentyfive years after his first recording had made him an overnight sensation.
There were various reasons for his decision, beginning with technology. The 1955 version existed only in mono sound, and the development of stereo, digital, and Dolby all fascinated Gould. Over the years he had experimented in studios, both at Eaton and in New York, with these newly developed audio technologies, and now he wanted to rerecord the piece that had launched his career with the benefit of everything the state-ofthe-art studio had to offer.
And there were musical reasons as well: Gould had something new to say about the piece. He wanted to record a cohesive interpretation that could act as a corrective to what he considered the scattered performance of twenty-five years earlier, which he now found buoyant but altogether too romantic, too “pianistic” in the worst sense of the word. For a long time he had been saying he planned to wrap up his performing career at around the time he turned fifty. Taking on the piece that launched his fame clearly represented a meaningful ending. Another consideration may have been a lingering insecurity about his technique after the protracted episode with his hands. What better way to reassure himself—and show the world—than, on the eve of turning fifty, to nail the piece that made him famous at age twenty-two?
But first he needed a piano on which to accomplish this feat.
Thus began a series of phone calls to New York. Though fully aware of the long and now-famous rift between Gould and Steinway, Silverman’s first call was to the Steinway headquarters on Fifty-seventh Street, inquiring what they might have available. Bruce Stevens, the president, called back with three possibilities: two Model D concert grands in Manhattan, and one in the showroom in Long Island City.
Silverman hung up the phone and called Baldwin, knowing full well that at this point the situation was turning sensitive. Signing on as a Steinway artist was tantamount to taking a loyalty oath. Even casually playing an instrument of a different make was considered a breach of trust that could threaten a pianist’s standing as a Steinway artist. But actively seeking another make of piano for purposes of performing or recording while under contract to Steinway was considered a breach of contract as well as a major betrayal. So when Silverman called Jack Romann, the artistic manager of Baldwin, he asked for discretion. He explained to Romann that Glenn Gould was looking for a new piano and asked if there was a Baldwin he could look at, or perhaps a Bechstein. (Baldwin was representing Bechstein in the U.S. at the time.) To snatch a major musician like Gould away from Steinway would have been a huge coup for Baldwin, whose concert grands, once considered on a par with Steinway and Bösendorfer, had been all but forgotten by 1980. But while competitive, Romann was also honest, and he was sufficiently familiar with what he euphemistically referred to as “Gould’s technical requirements” to know what to say. He told Silverman that he did not have a single decent piano for Mr. Gould to try.
When Franz Mohr heard that Gould was looking for a piano on which to record the Goldberg Variations again, he of course knew precisely which instrument would be ideal: Horowitz’s main studio piano, known as CD 186, which was locked up in a corner of the Steinway Basement. Mohr knew the instrument had the uniformly light touch that Gould adored, and Mohr himself had attended to CD 186 constantly and lovingly for more than a decade. Mohr knew Gould’s pianistic needs well enough to know that this was the best piano in town for the task, and for a brief moment he considered asking Horowitz if he might lend the piano to Gould for the recording. But in the end he didn’t dare approach the mercurial Horowitz, who had never been warmly inclined toward his Canadian rival, about letting Gould borrow the instrument. So Mohr let the matter drop rather than create problems for himself.
Unwittingly, Mohr had created a big problem for Steinway. A few weeks later, Silverman called Gould with some news. He had spoken with someone at the Ostrovsky Piano and Organ Company, the Yamaha dealer in New York, and the store had pianos for him to try. Gould asked Ray Roberts to contact Ostrovsky to set up a visit, and after a few calls Roberts was connected to Raphael Mostel, the only salesman in the shop that day who also happened to be a musician. The first thing Roberts asked was whether the store had any nine-foot grands. Mostel responded that there were two, and asked his own question: Who was the prospective buyer? Roberts explained that this was an especially delicate topic, because the pianist in question, one of international renown, had been under contract to Steinway for nearly twenty-five years, and if Steinway were to learn that this pianist was even thinking of a different brand, the consequences could be bitterly unpleasant. Therefore, if the pianist were to come into the store to try the pianos, it would have to be after hours, and the store would have to take measures to ensure that no one could see anything from the outside. To Mostel, the insistence on such secretiveness was understandable but also a little extreme. “There was a very cloak-and-dagger tone to the conversation,” he said, “almost as if there were true peril involved.”
Mostel agreed to the excessive precautions, but insisted that if he were to go to all this trouble, he would need to know who the pianist was. Roberts relented and told him it was none other than Glenn Gould. Like everyone in the music business and even the public at large, Mostel knew that Gould had become increasingly reclusive over the years, cultivating an aura of Howard Hughes–like secrecy. He was heard only on his recordings and seen in public only occasionally on Canadian television. Of course Mostel instantly agreed to the conditions. “I said, ‘Whatever he needs, as long as I can be in the room when he plays.’ ” After all, it had been nearly two decades since Gould had given up the concert stage. They arranged for Gould to come into Ostrovsky’s after six o’clock, when the store closed.
Gould had not been to New York since the ill-fated trip with the action a year earlier. This time, without the added worry of having CD 318’s action on the backseat, the trip across the border went much more smoothly, and Gould and Roberts proceeded directly to the Drake Hotel. First, to appease both Silverman and Steinway, Gould went to the Steinway Basement to try the two pianos that Bruce Stevens had recommended.
He hated them.
He even went to Long Island City to try a piano there. First he loved it, and for an incredible twenty-four hours it seemed as if the problem had been solved and all would be well between the demanding pianist and his long-suffering sponsor. “He called and said he had found it, and that he would go back in the morning and try it again,” Silverman said. But by the next day, the infatuation had evaporated. When he called Silverman the next morning, this time from Long Island City, he said, simply, “It’s not the piano.”
Later that day, Gould and Roberts went to Ostrovsky’s piano showroom, which was located, along with half a dozen other piano dealers, on the block between Broadway and Seventh Avenue on West Fifty-sixth Street, just a few hundred feet from Carnegie Hall.
Boris Ostrovsky, a prominent piano technician, had been selling pianos in the U.S. for years and was the exclusive Yamaha dealer in the greater New York area during the 1960s and 1970s, when the Japanese piano manufacturer was establishing a solid presence in North America. It was the same period that Steinway found itself struggling against a recurring threat from a handful of Steinway artists who were frequently, and vocally, expressing their disappointment in Steinway’s pianos—and threatening to abandon Steinway for Yamaha. Unlike Steinway, Yamaha had avoided establishing an artist policy, but the company went out of its way to cultivate pianists whose affections for Steinway were waning. If Yamaha did manage to lure one away from Steinway, it assigned a full-time technician to the musician to service and tune his instrument.
Boris Ostrovsky made a point of keeping two or three wellmaintained concert grands in his showroom. When he died in the 1970s, his wife, Debbi, took over the business. Debbi Ostrovsky was not a pianist or a piano technician; nor, before her husband’s death, was she much of a businesswoman. And she certainly wasn’t enthusiastic about keeping the store open late and covering the windows so that Glenn Gould could come in and play her pianos in absolute privacy. But at Mostel’s urging she relented. There were two nine-foot concert grands in the store at the time, one brand-new one that had just arrived and another that had been broken in: a five-year-old piano that the store’s head technician once referred to as “Mitsuo’s baby.” The piano had undergone careful regulating by Ostrovsky’s most skilled technician, a Japanese tuner named Mitsuo Azuma, who had spent hundreds of hours working obsessively on the instrument in his spare time.
The demand for discretion and privacy presented a particular challenge to the showroom, which had been built out of three connecting carriage houses that shared a huge expanse of floor-to-ceiling windows with no curtains, shades, or any other means of covering the sea of glass that fronted onto Fiftysixth Street. Azuma’s piano was not just in the front of the third store; it was squarely in the window. So Mostel arrived at work the day of the Gould appointment with a suitcase filled with sheets he had brought from home and, that evening after the store closed, he taped them across the windows of the first and third showrooms.
The only store employees who were present when Gould and Roberts arrived were Mostel, Ostrovsky, and her secretary. After a generous exchange of pleasantries, Mostel showed Gould both pianos and suggested that he would probably prefer the older piano to the new one. From a standing position, Gould struck a few notes on the newer piano and immediately lost interest. He then walked over to the piano in the window, hit a few notes, sat down, and began playing. First he played a few things to try out the different registers, then he launched into Bach. He nodded to Roberts, who immediately—and to everyone else present, mysteriously—left the room. Gould appeared delighted. “This is the best-regulated piano I’ve ever played,” he told Debbi Ostrovsky. After a few minutes Roberts reappeared with the old pygmy chair, whose seat now consisted of nothing more than a wooden crossbar upon which Gould perched.
Even before announcing that he planned to buy the piano, Gould asked Ostrovsky about the technician who had worked on it. This question put her in a bind, because even before it was apparent that Mitsuo Azuma had done the impossible—taking a standard Yamaha concert grand and turning it into an amazing instrument that would suit the needs of the great Glenn Gould—she had known that he was a uniquely talented technician. But she wasn’t about to lose a staff technician to Glenn Gould. So instead of answering the question, she dithered and assured Gould that she would find him an excellent technician.
After ten minutes or so the two women left the room, leaving Mostel alone with the pianist. Gould kept playing. Mostel’s reward for his efforts was what amounted to a private concert from one of the finest musicians in the world. The fact that the live performance was from someone who had long since forsworn playing in public made it all the more thrilling. “The whole experience of seeing him play was peculiar. His nose was at the keyboard, and he was completely lost in the playing,” Mostel recalled. “When one hand stopped playing it was conducting the other. He was arguing with himself, physically. It seemed to be a committee of people playing the piano.”
For Gould, it was as if he had discovered CD 318 all over again—not in terms of its sound, but in the all-important action, which was more to his liking than any he had found in years. It is very possible that Gould, who for his entire career had been playing on the best Steinway had to offer, had never played a Yamaha piano. In fact, he responded in a way that had become familiar to the Yamaha salespeople, who were increasingly witnessing the shocked reaction of many professional pianists upon discovering the evenness of the Yamaha action. Unlike Steinway’s, Yamaha’s manufacturing process was automated, and while Steinway’s parts may have been handmade, in the 1970s the quality had plummeted. Yamaha, through its more automated process, emphasized consistency, especially when it came to the plates and the weight of the keys.
Yamaha’s aesthetic approach to its instruments was also different. It rejected the American bravura piano in favor of a more graceful instrument. When Gould played a Yamaha with these basic characteristics that had, in addition, been lovingly regulated and maintained by one of Yamaha’s very best technicians, he fell for it immediately and decided to buy it on the spot.
When Edquist heard that Gould had bought a Yamaha and planned to record the Goldberg Variations on it, he was dumbfounded. Throughout his career as a technician he had chronically disapproved of the mass-produced Yamaha brand. He didn’t feel betrayed, exactly; he knew as well as Gould that old 318 was beyond salvation. But couldn’t Gould at least have settled on a Steinway?
It wasn’t long before executives at Steinway & Sons got wind of Gould’s defection. Someone from Steinway must have spotted the Yamaha after it had been moved from Ostrovsky’s to the Thirtieth Street recording studio at CBS Records. Just before the recording was to begin, Gould got a call from an alarmed David Rubin at Steinway, inquiring about Gould’s piano affiliation. Oh yes, Gould told him, he was using a Yamaha. He had even bought one. But he still considered himself a Steinway artist. There was nothing he would like more than to find a good Steinway, he assured Rubin, and went out of his way to remind him of the unsuccessful trips he had made to New York in search of a piano that was suitable for his recording needs. He told Rubin that the Yamaha had a magnificent action, similar to Steinway CD 318 when it was newer and in better health. But, playing both sides, he told Rubin that the Yamaha was only a “temporary stopgap” until he could find a Steinway that he was happy with.
Gould never did hear about Mitsuo Azuma, the technician who regulated the Yamaha to the glorious state in which he had discovered it behind the sheets on Fifty-sixth Street. Now that it was time for Debbi Ostrovsky to supply Gould with a technician, she sent him a man named Daniel Mansolino, a highly respected technician who had been working at Ostrovsky’s on a freelance basis on and off for several years. In contrast to the humble Edquist, Mansolino was a man with an outsized personality who thought highly of his own abilities as a technician. And indeed, he was very talented.
Now, with the Yamaha in CD 318’s former role, it was Mansolino, not Edquist, whom Gould engaged to minister to the piano when he recorded the Goldbergs at the Thirtieth Street recording studio in April of 1981. In addition to the CBS producer and his technicians, Bruno Monsaingeon was also present with a film crew. The revisiting of the Goldbergs was to be another in the Glenn Gould Plays Bach series. Once Gould arrived at the studio, there was always a good deal of banter before the actual work started, with Gould conducting a contrapuntal social hour, carrying on several animated conversations simultaneously. Then eventually he would say, “Well, I can’t put off the moment of truth any longer. Time to soak.” And he would disappear for the ritual soaking of his hands.
During the recording sessions, Mansolino and Gould worked together closely. By and large, Gould was very pleased with Mansolino’s work. He paid him the ultimate compliment when, after playing a particularly difficult passage, he stopped and said into the microphone that was piped into the control booth: “Dan, I know you didn’t get a chance to touch up the tuning for that one. And I don’t think I can do it any better than that. But if you can’t live with the tuning, I’ll do it again.” Sometimes it seemed as if Gould wanted to please Mansolino more than Mansolino wanted to please Gould.
Gould’s perfect ear was often quicker than Mansolino’s, just as it had been with Edquist’s, pinpointing the instant a note started to work its way out of tune. “Dan, the E in the treble staff: Is that in tune? And the one an octave lower. It’s flat. Am I right?”
And so it went. But as the recording session wore on, Gould’s love for the Yamaha began to fade. It just didn’t have the range of the glorious CD 318. Monsaingeon’s film provides a marvelous running commentary on the Yamaha’s shortcomings. Variation 5, with its famous intricacy and devilishly fast tempo, lasted just a little over half a minute, but it was one “where the Yamaha is, frankly, not quite up to it,” Gould complained. Variation 14 was similarly problematic. “The problem in this piano is the trilling,” he said. “It doesn’t do it very well, especially in the center octave, and there’s only so much that one can do to distract from that fact.” Or this, during a particularly nettlesome passage: “This is a very, very difficult one to do on this piano. It’s just not something you can make clear in a machine-gun-like way, as you can on 318.”
In that short series of recording sessions, it was as if the years with Edquist during CD 318’s heavy tweaking period in the 1960s were condensed into three days with Mansolino. In fact, less time was spent recording and filming than bringing in Mansolino, who continually readjusted the action whenever there was an off note. “He would call in the technician and they would spend hours with the mechanics out of the piano with the technician working on it and Glenn just watching,” Monsaingeon recalled.
Gould was constantly remarking on the Yamaha’s problems, trying his best to articulate the issues that he wanted Mansolino to fix. “The low E is still a little loud,” he would complain. Or: “I don’t want to get you into uncharted waters, but at the moment there is a strong sense of the vertical and what I want is a horizontal experience.” What he wanted was something “as smooth and as nonexistent as possible.” It was an odd request, but understandable in light of what Gould had done on 318 with, say, Orlando Gibbons’s music, where the piano’s light action had allowed his fingers to skate along the surface of the keys.
After Gould finished a take, it wasn’t unusual for him to bend his head as if in prayer, put his hands between his knees, and lean back in the chair. “Thank you, Glenn, I think that’s just glorious,” came the producer’s voice over the speaker. And Gould would answer, “Considering what I’m having to deal with here, I don’t think I can do any better.” Finally Gould came up with a way to convey in more tangible terms what he wanted Mansolino to do: “Think harpsichord,” he told the technician. “I want a harpsichord. Virtually.”
Lorne Tulk, Gould’s longtime sound engineer, guessed that Gould was feeling guilty for playing a Yamaha, later observing that “he still felt a loyalty to Steinway, even though he had provoked them in numerous ways in the past.” After a while during the recording sessions, Gould resorted to calling the Yamaha “this thing.”
Clearly he was missing what he had once been able to do on CD 318. “I can’t get it on this piano,” he said during one of the rapid-fire variations. “I want it as a machine-gun effect and get it at home routinely, but I can’t do it here.” Then, as if determined not to mope, he suddenly brightened up. “But we’ll try it again!”
The Goldberg sessions continued, and by the time Gould reached Variation 30, for reasons no one could quite understand, the piano began inching its way back into favor: “It’s not as good as it had been. It’s lost that incredible smoothness. But it’s better.” In fact, the music Gould created in those recording sessions was remarkable, even thrilling. When the new Goldberg Variations were released in September 1982, the critic Tim Page, a longtime friend and admirer of Gould’s who had found the first recording filled with originality, intelligence, and fire, liked the second one even more. He found it more thoughtful—more meditative—and observed that as the pianist advanced into his forties, Gould was “no longer just an arrogant, albeit sweettempered, genius. He became a sweet-tempered, melancholy genius.”
Other critics, for the most part, agreed. They found the later recording intellectually far more commanding than the earlier one, though not free of some classic showing off on Gould’s part: Most of the virtuosic variations still raced at imponderably fast tempos. At the same time, the second time around Gould was more calculated with his phrasing and ornamentation. The pianist David Dubal described the new recording as “a Goldberg infused with humanity.” It was as if Gould’s spirit as a man and his breadth as a musician had grown and changed since the first time he recorded these pieces. The aria, in particular, had what Dubal called a “terrible, withdrawn pain that is unforgettable.” Through the ensuing years, the work would be given even more prominence among the pianist’s oeuvre—heard as “autumnal” and as Gould’s final “testament.” For within a week of the album’s release, Gould was dead.
BY THE SUMMER of 1982 Gould’s health had begun to deteriorate in earnest. His eyes were perpetually bloodshot, and he always looked tired and haggard. On his lined legal pads, he noted his medical symptoms: palpitations, heat in arm, freezing sensations, “indigestive-style pains in chest.” Part of the malaise was surely his hyperactive hypochondriac’s imagination. He had once written that he had discovered some odd blue spots on his abdomen, precisely “in the area where the hiatus hernia is often knotted up.” As it turned out, they were ink stains from the very ballpoint pen with which he was writing the note. But this time the problems were real.
Gould had often, and famously, proclaimed that when he turned fifty he would stop playing the piano, or at least stop making piano recordings. He said he had run out of music, having recorded virtually all of the piano music that interested him. And he wasn’t particularly open to recording music that challenged his own prepossessions as a musician. He had never moved beyond the self-satisfied teenager who dismissed Mozart’s concertos. In his darker moments, Gould told friends that he did not think he would live much past fifty. This had been a persistent refrain while he was with Cornelia, who tried to reassure him that his fear was unfounded. Now, despite the fact that his mother had lived to be eighty-three, he worried that the hypertension that killed her would do the same to him. When he turned fifty on September 25, 1982, there were many published tributes, often tied to the release of the Goldberg Variations. Buoyed by the attention, Gould continued to stay busy. He had clearly not made a definitive decision about whether he would in fact stop making new piano recordings, because he was telling friends and colleagues of future plans for recordings he intended to make. He even spoke of moonlighting as a recording producer, having done so once as a favor for a friend in 1973. In the midst of the excitement around the release of the Goldberg Variations and his ideas for what to do next, he was temporarily distracted from the hypertension he had been so focused on; his only health-related complaint around his birthday was a cold, accompanied by sinus pressure that refused to go away.
Two days after his birthday, however, he awoke feeling strange. He had a terrible headache and his left leg was numb. He called Roberts, who came over right away and called the doctor, who, in view of Gould’s hypochondriacal tendencies, said he was not terribly worried. But Gould was frightened. He thought he had had a stroke. As the day wore on, he felt worse. His speech began to slur, and his entire left side became paralyzed. Roberts put in several more calls to the doctor, who, upon hearing of the new symptoms, began to take the matter seriously and told Roberts to call an ambulance. Instead, Roberts got Gould down to his car in a wheelchair and drove him to a hospital in downtown Toronto. They arrived shortly after eight P.M. Notes made in the emergency room at the time indicated muscular weakness over the left side of the body and drowsiness, but Gould had no difficulty speaking. The diagnosis in the emergency room was indeed stroke, and he was admitted to the neurology department for further observation. The next day he remained paralyzed on his left side, the headache worsened, and his vision began to deteriorate. He slept a great deal, but he was able to talk and watch television. Friends and family members began gathering at the hospital, and he was able to speak with his father and his favorite cousin, Jessie Greig. But by that night he was confused and disoriented. Moving in and out of consciousness, he became incoherent. He told a nurse he was in a recording studio. As Roberts later recalled, Gould started to ramble and lose control. “I can remember having to leave him. He was getting more and more upset,” he said many years later. “I had to leave. I just knew instinctively that I couldn’t be there. And I can still hear him calling me.” His father found him asleep most of the time, occasionally making conducting movements with his right arm.
By the next evening Gould was comatose and relying on a breathing tube. Once it was clear that he had suffered massive brain damage and was essentially brain-dead, his father made the decision to withdraw life-support systems. On the morning of October 4, Glenn Gould was pronounced dead. An autopsy performed later that day revealed two blood clots, one from sometime in the summer and another that was probably about ten days old, which had likely caused the sinus pressure that Gould had complained about on his birthday.
When Gould died, grief filled the classical airwaves as radio stations devoted extensive programming to his music. Newspapers immediately carried lengthy tributes to the pianist, and shock and sorrow over his premature death spread around the world. Many of his millions of fans took his death as a personal loss. “I write my plays to Glenn Gould,” remarked the playwright Tina Howe. “I cook the kids’ spaghetti dinners to Glenn Gould. I pay the bills to Glenn Gould.” And something about the sudden death of a relatively young man was difficult for many of his fans, most of whom had never seen him play in public, to accept.
Before the funeral, which was a small, private ceremony, Gould’s friends and colleagues paid their respects at a funeral home. The public memorial service was held a week later in Saint Paul’s Anglican, the largest church in Toronto. Three thousand people came from around the world. Gould had once remarked that he would have liked to attend his own memorial, to see who showed up. And indeed he was there, playing his own requiem. At the end of the service, the closing aria from the recent recording of the Goldberg Variations was piped into the cathedral. His grave is marked by a simple granite stone into which the outline of a piano is etched, along with his name, years of birth and death, and the first three measures of the same aria.