A view of CD 318 and its cast-iron plate. The
piano is now at the Library and Archives
Canada in Ottawa. Photograph by Ian
Austen, courtesy of Ian Austen.
BY EARLY 1984, eighteen months after Gould’s death, CD 318 had taken up residence under the main stairwell at the National Library of Canada in Ottawa, where it would remain for the next decade. The pygmy chair took its place next to the elevators on the fourth floor, in a Plexiglas display case. Gould’s other pianos were scattered around Canada. The smaller Steinway that he had kept at his apartment was completely rebuilt and refurbished before ending up at Rideau Hall, the governor general’s house in Ottawa. The Yamaha that Gould used for the final Goldberg recording eventually went to Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto, where it is played regularly to this day. Another Yamaha he bought near the end of his life ended up at a church in Edmonton. The venerable Chickering came to rest on display at the CBC’s Glenn Gould Studio in Toronto.
The director of the National Library’s music division, Helmut Kallmann, was determined to learn everything he could about the library’s new treasure, and so a few months after CD 318 arrived he traveled to Toronto to visit Verne Edquist. The tuner told him the whole story of the piano’s life, including the devastating accident at the Eaton’s loading dock and the many subsequent attempts to restore the action to its original—and, having forsaken that goal, to just playable—condition. Kallmann asked him to come to Ottawa to tune and regulate the old piano, and Edquist happily agreed. He packed his tools and a small suitcase and took the train to Ottawa.
As part of its agreement to sell the piano to the National Library, the Gould estate had imposed several conditions about its use, the most important being that beyond basic tuning there was to be no modifying of the instrument. But “because of its specially adapted action and mechanism,” the estate stipulated, CD 318 was “to be kept in active and playing order, to be available to researchers and scholars studying the technique of Glenn Gould.”
Kallmann appreciated the value of the piano both as a teaching instrument as well as for the virtues that Gould had so prized. In a letter to the estate shortly after CD 318 arrived, he noted that “For ordinary mortals who prefer a light action and an instrument suited for contrapuntal music, the instrument is still a joy to play and listen to.” He had no intention of treating the instrument as a museum piece, but rather as a working recital piano, so in accordance with the wishes of the estate as well as his own desire to honor the remarkable piano, he informed his staff that “if a pianist does not like its particular adjustments, we won’t change a thing.”
WHEN EDQUIST ARRIVED at the library, he found that CD 318, now referred to by the library staff as “the Gould Piano,” seemed in good condition, not much worse off than when he had last worked on it a few years earlier. While working on the piano, he found it an odd and eerie experience to be in the presence of the piano without Gould there to play and kibitz about the state of its tuning, or to hatch some new and highly improbable idea for how to optimize its sound or its action.
After Gould had finally declared CD 318 unplayable and had purchased the two Yamahas, Edquist gradually began to focus his professional efforts elsewhere, taking on a variety of private clients. Gould had been known to cut off friendships and professional relationships, sometimes abruptly, when they no longer served a need of some kind. But in this case there had been no definitive parting of the ways. Gould’s switch to Yamaha simply meant he didn’t need Edquist as much, and they gradually drifted out of each other’s orbits. Edquist understood this, yet still he was deeply dismayed that no one had phoned him after Gould’s sudden death, and that he had heard the news the way that it had come to so many millions of strangers—on the radio, followed by strains of the aria from the Goldberg Variations.
THE OFFICIAL INAUGURATION of CD 318 in its new home took place on October 14, 1986, in a recital that featured Angela Hewitt, a young Canadian who had recently won a Bach competition held in Gould’s memory. Hewitt was a rising star who had started playing Bach at the age of four and conquered the Goldberg Variations at sixteen. By 2005 she would finish an elevenyear project to record all the major keyboard works of Bach, which won her a huge following. Critics over the years would hail her as “the preeminent Bach pianist of our time” and “nothing less than the pianist who will define Bach performance on the piano for years to come.”
Hewitt had grown up listening to Gould’s records, and had seen him regularly on Canadian television. She remembers telling her parents when she was a small child that he seemed to her “a kook,” with his nose practically on the keyboard, playing at tempos that even at a young age she knew were bizarre. “He was clearly recognizable as a serious presence in Canadian musical life, but not, perhaps, one to be closely imitated,” she observed. More importantly, “he set this wonderful standard of Bach playing and brought it to such a large audience that I admire him for that.” For the library debut of CD 318, Hewitt was deferential in her choice of music: She played Bach—one of the French Suites—and a Weber sonata. And for her encore, of course, she played the aria from the Goldberg Variations.
Recitals on CD 318 have continued through the years. Eventually it was moved to the library auditorium and a harpsichord took its place under the stairwell. It even made the local news when, in the middle of a performance, one key suddenly stopped working. Some musicians were even permitted to record on CD 318, including a classically trained pianist named Ian Hepburn who had made his career in rock ’n’ roll. The famous hiccup was still very much a presence when Hepburn played 318, and it still bedeviled the sound engineers. A string of jazz pianists played the piano, and as soon as they touched the keys, they sensed Gould’s aura. Said one: “I sat down to play Monk and out came Bach.”
In the early 1990s, CD 318 landed a film role and was sent to Toronto for the shooting of Thirty-two Short Films About Glenn Gould, an idiosyncratic homage to the pianist. The instrument appears throughout the film, and one segment, three and a half minutes long, is devoted to 318 itself. A celebration of the interior topography of the piano, the segment abandons the customary focus on a pianist’s hands to reveal the intricacy of the mechanism, the actual beauty of 318 under its lid. In one sensuous sequence, as Gould is heard playing his harpsichordistic rendition of the Bach Prelude and Fugue in C Minor from book one of the Well-Tempered Clavier, the camera seems to inhabit the interior of 318. Gliding gracefully over the golden plate, it pans across the furrowed landscape of the strings, then shifts to a close-up of the hammers doing their rhythmic dance.
Edquist was brought in for the making of the film, both as an interviewee and to tend to the piano while it was being used. When the filmmakers asked if they might remove the plate brace to get the camera still closer, the ever-protective tuner declined. Years later he observed that it was during the shooting of that film that the reality of Gould’s absence finally sank in. And although he was a fundamentally practical man, not inclined to believe in the supernatural, throughout the making of the film Edquist got a strong, unmistakable sense of Gould’s spirit around the piano.
One of the film’s final scenes showed the 1977 launch of the Voyager I spacecraft, which carried with it a golden record assembled by a NASA committee chaired by the astronomer Carl Sagan. The record included 115 images, greetings in fifty-five languages, and the sounds of surf, thunder, whale song, children singing, a human kiss, and a mother greeting her newborn. This bottle that had been launched “into the cosmic ocean,” as Sagan described it, also included musical selections from different cultures and eras that epitomized human achievement. One of these was the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, played by Glenn Gould on his favorite piano. It was the Prelude and Fugue in C, which Gould had recorded in the 1960s at Eaton Auditorium on CD 318 when the piano was at its very best. “When I heard that,” Edquist said, “it was like a dream. There’s Bach writing the music, Glenn is playing the music, and it’s my tuning that’s giving it voice. And it’s going somewhere in outer space.”
Well into the piano’s new life, a Hungarian-born pianist named Mary Kenedi was invited to give a recital at the library. She chose a lively program of Liszt, Kodály, and Bartók. Gould had not been a particular fan of any of these men: He once called Bartók one of the most overestimated of modern composers, and he was equally dismissive of Liszt, who represented all that he hated about piano virtuosity, showmanship, and Dionysian hedonism. Of Kodály he made no acknowledgment whatsoever.
Kenedi, however, was completely devoted to the works of Hungarian composers, and she had chosen an all-Hungarian program for this recital, which was being held in honor of the Hungarian ambassador to Canada, who had personally asked her to perform. The pianist had selected her pieces with care. She had fallen in love with the Liszt piece Les Jeux d’Eau à la Villa d’Este while studying in Budapest, and it presented a series of technical challenges that Kenedi had long since mastered. She had been a friend to Béla Bartók, who often played Kodály’s Transylvanian Lament in his recitals, so she included that selection in the program along with several other Kodály pieces. But Bartók was her true love, and so she chose his music to end the program: a handful of early pieces, as well as some of the famous works from Fifteen Hungarian Peasant Songs. These pieces, which Bartók had based on folk songs and which were infused with national flavor, color, and expression, would enable Kenedi to unleash her own romantic and fiery temperament.
Kenedi was particularly honored to be there. She had once played on one of Horowitz’s favorite pianos, and had been thrilled to touch Bartók’s own Bösendorfer. Now here she was, in one of Canada’s most august institutions, playing Glenn Gould’s beloved Steinway.
She had rehearsed on 318 the afternoon before the concert and immediately appreciated the piano’s tonal richness, which allowed her to paint colors, especially in the Bartók. But she was put off by the action. The keys moved much too easily. “The scary experience was that I like to play on a piano that has resistance, and it didn’t have any.” The faster she played, the harder she found it. Keys were flying as if on their own. Afterward, Kenedi asked the tuner who was standing by if he could help. He replied that he wasn’t allowed to do anything more than tune the piano, and most certainly he could not tamper with the action.
Undaunted, Kenedi began her performance that evening with the Liszt, the most sedate piece on the hour-long program. Then she worked her way up through the Kodály. Kenedi was a vigorous pianist, and before long her zeal for the music had begun to assert itself. By the time she reached Bartók’s rousing Folk Dances, she noticed that something odd was happening: The piano was beginning to inch away from her.
Apparently someone had forgotten to set the wheels to keep the piano in place. As the piano crept toward the edge of the stage, Kenedi began to fear that it might end up in the laps of the people in the front row. The first thing she did was try to restrain her playing. But the piano kept moving. Then she tried to actually pull the piano back toward her, but she couldn’t without lifting her hands from the keyboard. Even between pieces she could gain no purchase under the keys. And it would have been unseemly, to say the least, to have gotten down on her knees and clutched at the legs. So she resorted to her only remaining option: She slid her chair closer to the keyboard, inching it forward as the piano edged away from the forceful playing. The piano, apparently in full retreat from Kenedi’s un-Gouldian repertoire, was moving in a general westerly direction, toward Toronto. By now the pianist was not only distracted by the moving piano, but she was trying to read the audience to see if anyone else had noticed. Luckily it seemed that no one had, and she kept playing.
By the end of the concert, Kenedi, the bench, and the piano had traveled at least a foot from their original spot on the stage. The applause was loud, appreciative, and sustained. As Kenedi rose from her seat she bowed, then smiled and shot CD 318 a sidelong glance. “Where?” she asked the piano silently. “Where were you trying to go?”