A PAPERBACK EDITION OF A book seems the perfect place to give a little more detail about things that happened outside the frame of the story as I told it in the book. So here, in various snatches, is a coda of sorts.
First, there is—and will always be—the question of Glenn Gould’s love life. Was he straight? Gay? Bisexual? This was a subject that has inspired more than its share of speculation. But when it came to committing such speculation to print, Gould’s biographers remained respectfully discreet. They knew of love affairs (all with women) but referred to them in veiled terms. And although nearly every one of them knew about the lengthy and tortured affair Gould had with Cornelia Foss, none mentioned her by name.
For my part, I wasn’t even certain that I would write about his love life at all; in a book about a piano, the topic seemed tangential at best. But then a few well-respected Gould experts— including a couple of the biographers who had refrained from naming Foss in their books—suggested I get in touch with her. After all, they said, forty years had passed; she was now in her seventies. What did I have to lose? One of them sent me an address and encouraged me to write to her.
I sent a letter, and within a week, she responded with a phone call. Only a few minutes into the conversation, I could see why Gould had gravitated to her. She was forthright, energetic—and obviously brilliant. Many writers had approached her over the years, she said, including one woman who insisted that Gould must have been homosexual. “I said to this woman, ‘I’m here to tell you he was not.’ ” But nothing she said could dissuade the writer. Cornelia politely declined any further interviews with her. She made it clear that she was willing to speak to me now only because so much time had passed.
AS SHE TOLD me more, I began to realize that Cornelia’s affair with Gould, which lasted throughout the 1960s, was another reflection of his. For years after the affair ended, Gould continued to call her, finding it nearly impossible to accept her decision to leave him. It was in the context of that obsessive persistence that I wrote the section about the affair.
Although Cornelia had spoken with me freely, with the open understanding that I was writing a book, I wanted to make certain she was comfortable with what I was doing. A journalist entrusted with someone’s story is holding something extremely delicate; your subject is giving you a portion of his or her life to shape as you see fit in the retelling. Although I suspected that Cornelia trusted me, I printed out the pages I had written about the affair and took them to New York.
Cornelia greeted me at the door and poured some tea, and we seated ourselves in the living room. Lukas, now very elderly and suffering from Parkinson’s, walked a bit unsteadily into the room, smiled, said hello, and went out for a walk. I handed Cornelia her pages and sat, nervously drinking my tea, while she read with pencil in hand. As she turned one of the pages, she looked up at me and said very quietly, “This is very well writ- ten.” She made a few small corrections, returned the pages, and saw me to the door. I was relieved, of course, and grateful.
Appropriately, though, the most difficult and sensitive reporting of the book centered not on romance but on who had worked on a particular piano. The instrument in question was the Yamaha Gould bought for the re-recording of the Goldberg Variations in 1981, after he had decided that CD 318 was no longer up to the job. As I was looking into how Gould came to choose the Yamaha, I stumbled on an unexpectedly delicate situation—a story of rivalry and professional injustice I would never have foreseen. When Gould played the Yamaha for the first time, at a dealership in New York, he immediately loved its light, even touch. Obviously, he was curious who had regulated the piano in this way that seemed to anticipate his very particular needs. But the technician, a Japanese man named Mitsuo Azuma, was never mentioned. Instead, an independent Yamaha technician named Dan Mansolino was assigned to work on the piano during the recording sessions (the reason, as I wrote in the book, was likely that the owner of the Yamaha dealership didn’t want to give up one of her best staff technicians to the all-consuming Glenn Gould), and for years afterward, it was Mansolino whose name became associated with Gould’s last piano. I, too, assumed, it was Mansolino who had first regulated the Yamaha, and a recording of an interview that Mansolino had done with a Japanese Gould expert named Junichi Miyazawa confirmed the story.
It wasn’t until a year later, when interviewing someone who had been present when Gould played the Yamaha for the first time, that I heard Azuma mentioned for the first time. Azuma, I was told, was the true genius behind that piano. And when he didn’t get credit for his work, he had been crushed; he returned to Japan a broken man. It was likely that Gould himself never knew of Mitsuo Azuma. The poignancy of this hit me hard. In reporting the book, I had come to understand how hard piano technicians worked and how underappreciated their efforts tended to be.
Hoping to get the story straight, I tried to reach both Azuma and Mansolino, as well as the owner of the store that sold Gould the piano. I listened to the Mansolino interview again, this time seeking clues. A few things got my attention. Mansolino seemed to imply that at some point between the two recording sessions, the piano had been intentionally tampered with. And he clearly had no interest in assigning credit to his erstwhile colleague.
Azuma sent an e-mail from Yokohama, written in broken English. He was still stinging after twenty-five years, he said, and having once been burned when he tried to correct the record (leading to a year of “mental derangement”), he now directed his anger at me. Not only was I discourteous, but I belonged to a despised profession. He would not, under any circumstances, speak to a journalist, as he was “very afraid . . . that the nightmare might happen again.” I sent Mansolino a letter, but the Post Office returned it as undeliverable. Finally, I found his e-mail address, and sent him the same letter online. He wrote back, asking me to call him. “I urge you to listen to my account before you go to print . . . rather than print something that may not be true,” he wrote. I called him. I missed his return call. Then he didn’t call back. I sent him another e-mail. There was no answer.
In all my years of reporting, I had never encountered such passion, rancor, and bitterness. It became a question of how to frame the story, given the material I had. I spent weeks on those few pages, giving it all the sensitivity I could muster. I summoned what the Germans call Fingerspitzengefühl, a feeling at the tips of one’s fingers that yields a certain kind of sixth sense. I felt my way through it. I never heard from Mansolino again, and only hope he recognized the truth in what I wrote.
When the book came out, someone sent a copy to Azuma, though, and a month later, he sent me an e-mail with these lines: “I think you did the excellent work for the book . . . I wanted to say this to you. Thank you.” I felt I had performed one of the better deeds of my professional life.
MEANWHILE, OF COURSE, other Gould fans, many of whom consider themselves experts on the subject of their hero, surfaced quickly to point out omissions. Many people asked why I had failed to mention that Gould likely had Asperger’s Syndrome, a mild form of autism. Indeed, many of Gould’s habits and behaviors certainly fit the bill: he had a marked fear of physical contact and was prone to social awkwardness; he conducted long one-on-one monologues without much of an awareness of his audience; and he was given to ritualized behavior, like his obsessive hand washing. A discussion of the possibility that Gould had Asperger’s persisted through several early drafts of the book. But in the end, I decided that a posthumous diagnosis, made by people without medical training, was simply unfair. And when I told people my reason for taking it out, they were usually understanding.
The only omission that seems to bear correcting concerns CD 318’s afterlife, which was far richer than I had originally thought. In particular, in its post-Gould years the piano became a favorite of jazz musicians from around the world. It takes a bit of work to get one’s mind around the idea of CD 318 as a purveyor of jazz. In the first place, Gould wasn’t much of a jazz fan. He never attended a jazz concert, and was, by his own description, a total failure as a performer of jazz. He did admire Bill Evans, the legendary jazz pianist, who for a while in the 1960s was a recipient of Gould’s famous late-night phone calls. Peter Hum, a jazz critic in Ottawa, told me that Gould even loaned CD 318 to Evans to record his landmark Conversations with Myself. (On the album, Evans experimented with multitrack recording—hence the name—in so many places CD 318 can actually be heard in triplicate.)
In the three decades that the Ottawa International Jazz Festival has used the Library and Archives Canada as a venue, dozens of jazz pianists have played on CD 318. Harry Connick, Jr. was on that list, as were Brad Mehldau, Fred Hersch, Renee Rosnes, Hiromi Uehara, and John Stetch. And many of those who played CD 318 clearly appreciated the fact that it had been Gould’s treasured instrument. Hum told me that Ran Blake once got booked at the festival just so he could play CD 318, and he even arrived a day early to “commune with it.” He declared it one of the best pianos he’d ever played.
Katie Hafner
2009