Sixteen-year-old Glenn and his English
setter Nick at the keyboard. This
photograph accompanied a profile that ran
in the Evening Telegram in February
1949. Photographer unknown, courtesy
of the Library and Archives Canada and
the Glenn Gould Estate.
GLENN GOULD WAS BORN in 1932 to a solidly middleclass family in a leafy, peaceful neighborhood on the eastern edge of Toronto.
Glenn’s father, Bert, was a furrier who had played the violin in his youth; Glenn’s mother, Florence, was a pianist and music teacher. Both were singers. The two-story brick house where Glenn would live more than half his life was unostentatious, but the family was affluent enough to buy cars and radios and to afford live-in housekeepers and a nanny, and the Goulds’ relative prosperity kept them largely shielded from the Depression.
The Goulds—Methodists on one side, Presbyterians on the other—were quietly pious people. Both Bert and Florence had come out of traditions that stressed morality and the authority of the Bible, valued reason over passion, and considered idleness a sin. They were devout churchgoers, and throughout his childhood Glenn accompanied his parents to Sunday services.
A life of music was preordained for Glenn. Florence was convinced of her son’s musical genius even when he was an infant. “She was very determined he was going to be a musician,” Glenn’s cousin Jessie Greig recalled years later. As a small child, Glenn was verbally expressive and spoke full sentences before he was a year old. But music was the realm where he was to find true expression. When Glenn was three, his mother noticed that he could correctly name a note being sung on a record, a sign of perfect pitch, the psychoacoustical ability that enables a person to recognize the pitch of every note, to know how a C sounds the way most people recognize the color blue. Fascinated by her son’s acuity, Florence invented a game in which she would sit at the piano and Glenn would remain in a distant room in the house. Florence would play a chord on the piano and Glenn would call out the full name. He could do this not just with simple triads, but also with complicated chords involving more than the usual number of tones. His father once noted that when something happened that would normally cause a child to cry—if he fell down, for example—young Glenn would hum instead.
He was inordinately sensitive as a small child. Not only did he have a tactile hypersensitivity both in touching and being touched, but he disliked bright colors. His favorite colors, he often said, were “battleship gray and midnight blue.” Throughout his life, he could not think clearly in a room painted in primary colors. When his parents took him to see Walt Disney’s Fantasia, the “awful riot of color” gave him a headache and left him feeling nauseated.
Glenn was also a very aural child. His senses of sight and taste and smell were not well developed, but musical sound could move him deeply. Unlike most small children, Glenn did not need to bang on a piano’s keys in order to be interested in what he was hearing. As soon as he was old enough to be held on his grandmother’s knee at the piano, he would press the keys one by one with what were already long, tapered fingers, holding a key down until the sound had faded completely, fascinated by its diminishment.
At three, before he could read words, Glenn could read music. A childhood nanny recalled that this extraordinary ability led Florence to suggest that her son might be the reincarnation of one of the great composers. Gould himself once said he had never been pushed to learn music or to play the piano, but took to it as if he had fallen into a swimming pool and become an avid swimmer as a result. And his agile hands were an asset he guarded instinctively, even as a small child. If someone threw, or even rolled, a ball at him, he pulled his hands away or turned his back. “It was as if he knew he had to protect those fingers for some reason,” his father said years later.
By the time Glenn was four, his fascination with the piano had evolved into formal lessons with Florence, thus further cementing an already strong bond between mother and son, and it was in those lessons that Glenn’s gift became even more apparent. To reinforce her son’s innate musical talent, Florence, who was also a voice instructor, taught Glenn to sing along to everything he played, planting the seeds for what would become a lifelong habit. Florence was an exacting teacher. “He was never allowed to play a wrong note,” recalled Glenn’s cousin Jessie. “If he did, she stopped immediately right there and then.”
The piano became the place where Glenn preferred to spend his time. Far from having to force their child to practice, the Goulds had the opposite problem. When they needed to discipline him, they shut the piano down and locked the fallboard, a measure his father described as “far worse than any corporal punishment.”
Even before his teens, Glenn had decided on a career as a concert pianist. In 1938, his parents took him to the Toronto Symphony. The concert, especially the full sound of the entire orchestra, made a deep impression on the young man, who later told an interviewer that he remembered being brought home afterward in the car. “I was falling asleep—and I was in that wonderful state of half awakeness in which you hear all sorts of incredible sounds going through your mind, and they were all orchestral sounds. But I was playing them all.”
Elizabeth Fox, a friend and frequent visitor to the Gould household, once compared the threesome—Bert, Florence, and their very unusual son—to the family in E. B. White’s Stuart Little, in which a human couple’s child is a mouse, a sweet little guy who also happens to be freakishly different. “When you were at the Goulds’ house, you’d think, these people have produced something that is not of them,” she said. “He’s dressed . . . like a human being, and he plays the piano, but they were constantly in awe.”
Unlike many parents of talented children, Florence and Bert had no desire to push Glenn onto the concert stage, preferring to let him develop at his own pace. When he was five he was allowed to play the piano in public for the first time, at a Sundayafternoon church service, where he accompanied his parents as they sang “Revive Us Again,” a nineteenth-century hymn. And he performed sporadically thereafter. But for years, and well into Glenn’s teens, the Goulds kept their son out of the public sphere, which they intuitively sensed would put a strain on his mental or physical health—or both. And while competitions were the typical route to success and recognition for most young pianists, as he grew older Glenn steered clear of them. Throughout his life Gould would vehemently oppose any sort of musical activity that smacked of competition, claiming that such contests left their participants “victims of a spiritual lobotomy.” Still, and not surprisingly, at the few competitions his parents did enter him in, which consisted of three Kiwanis Music Festivals in the mid-1940s, he always walked away with several prizes.
For Glenn’s education, his parents started out by engaging a private tutor. But by the time he was eight years old and ready for grade two, they enrolled him at Williamson Road Public School, which bordered the back of the Goulds’ property. He passed his grade with such ease he was permitted to skip ahead to grade four. In general, his father recalled, Glenn was a happy, “normal, healthy, fun-loving boy” with a sunny disposition. Robert Fulford, who lived next door, described Glenn as a “lovable” small child. “He was very funny,” Fulford said. “He didn’t take himself very seriously. He took music very seriously, but not himself.” Fulford remembered that when they walked home from school, Glenn sometimes conducted an invisible orchestra, both arms flailing as he hummed the different parts.
But as adolescence set in, Glenn became increasingly lost in a world of music. And the traits that defined him as an adult— hypochondria, obsessive and reclusive tendencies—gradually manifested themselves. He had few friends. It didn’t help that he detested group activities, especially sports, and his separateness made him the object of frequent teasing. He once told an interviewer that he wasn’t beaten up every day; he was beaten up every other day.
If Glenn related to anything outside of music, it was animals. When he bicycled through the countryside near his parents’ lakeside vacation cottage outside of Toronto, he sang to the cows. His pets included rabbits, turtles, a fully functioning skunk, goldfish named Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, and Haydn, and a parakeet named Mozart. There was also a series of beloved dogs: a big Newfoundland named Buddy, an English setter named Sir Nickolson of Garelocheed—or Nick for short—and, later, Banquo, a collie. One of Glenn’s childhood dreams was to someday create a preserve for old, injured, and stray animals on Manitoulin Island, north of Toronto, where he wanted to live out his old age by himself, surrounded by animals.
At an early age, Gould established a strong identification with a puritan sensibility. Throughout his adult life he would often say that it was he who was the Last Puritan rather than Oliver Alden, the titular hero of George Santayana’s novel, a book he admired greatly. Oliver was a serious, duty-bound young man; his searching, restless mind arrived at many understandings, yet he was unable to live the life of the mind as free play, to take delight in where those understandings might lead him.
Florence Gould was passionately devoted to and extremely protective of her sensitive, gifted son. In the winter, she kept him excessively bundled against the elements—even when it wasn’t cold outside. And year-round she warned him against the perils of germs. Her hypercaution laid the foundation for her son’s lifelong fear of illness. For his entire life, Gould wrapped himself in woolen scarves, mittens—which he often wore over fingerless gloves—caps, and heavy winter coats, even on the hottest summer days. As he grew older, Gould developed an extensive repertoire of eccentric habits aimed at keeping sickness at bay: He avoided shaking people’s hands and insisted on keeping room temperatures at eighty degrees, no matter the season, even if it meant using every available space heater.
As an adult, Gould liked to claim he was largely a self-taught musician. But there was in fact a teacher who made deep and lasting impressions on him. At the age of ten, when he had mastered the first book of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and was enveloping himself still more cocoonlike in music, his parents enrolled him at the Toronto Conservatory of Music. His mother, aware that his talents had outgrown her, began to seek a teacher more suited to her son’s rapidly advancing level.
In 1942, after consulting several people, including Sir Ernest MacMillan, the conservatory’s principal, Florence found Alberto Guerrero, who was to be Glenn’s only teacher after her. Guerrero, fifty-eight years old when he began teaching Glenn, had enjoyed a childhood even more privileged and focused on music than his new student’s. Guerrero was born and raised in Chile. In contrast to the later claims of his most famous pupil, Guerrero was in fact a self-educated pianist, with no time spent in formal study. It is rare for someone who attained such a high degree of professional standing to be genuinely self-taught, but this was indeed the case with Guerrero: He learned en famille. His father was a prominent industrialist; his mother was a pianist, and she and Alberto’s older brother gave him lessons. By the time he was in his early twenties, he had established himself as a brilliant solo pianist, performing throughout Chile. In 1916 he made his New York debut, and two years later he accepted a teaching job in Toronto at the Hambourg Conservatory, a private music school that had opened a few years earlier. In 1922 he switched to the Toronto Conservatory, where he stayed for the rest of his life.
When young Glenn Gould began studying with Guerrero, it was clear to the teacher that his new pupil was already independent-minded as a musician. Guerrero once said, “The whole secret of teaching Glenn is to let him discover things for himself.” Still, Glenn was open to suggestion. Although later in life Gould seldom cited Guerrero (or anyone else, for that matter) as an influence on his playing, signs of Guerrero’s nine years of guidance were everywhere. Guerrero shaped Gould’s technique and his musical taste, particularly his affinity for early music, especially Bach, whose music Guerrero played in concert far more than other pianists did. Guerrero’s love of such music made a lasting impression on his young student, as did his admiration for the atonal works of Arnold Schoenberg.
Guerrero instilled some early habits in Glenn, including a variety of unusual limbering and strengthening exercises. Lessons often began with arm massage. To build strength and dexterity, Guerrero had his students practice squeezing a rubber ball. He also had them rotate the wrist or elbow while keeping the hand loose and play scales as smoothly as possible with just one finger.
Then there was the “tapping” exercise, whose goal was to improve ease and evenness of touch and enhance the clarity and separation of individual notes. As John Beckwith, the author of a biography of Guerrero, has explained it, the tapping consisted of placing the five fingers of one hand on the keys and tapping each of those fingers with the nonplaying hand. The idea was to record in the brain what it was like to play with a minimum of muscle movement, as the fingers alone did the work. This exercise was followed by slow, staccato practice before the piece was brought up to tempo. Glenn became an enthusiastic adopter of the tapping exercise. Wrote Beckwith, “It accounts for the clarity of individual notes in Gould’s fast runs, one of his most indelible personal trademarks as a player.”
Guerrero instructed his students to study the score away from the piano, and Glenn became especially adept at this. By his late teens he was spending at least half his practice time away from the instrument, poring over musical scores. In years to come, people were astounded to learn that a musician could do so much work in his head, spending relatively little time at the piano, and yet play with such remarkable precision.
Guerrero also encouraged Glenn to think of the piano not just as a percussion instrument, but to hear and experience the ways that it embraced aspects of other instruments: strings, woodwinds, lutes, and harpsichords. Although Glenn didn’t use the pedal much in general, he found that, with Guerrero’s words in mind, using it on occasion helped get him closer to an orchestral sonority. In an interview he gave much later in his life, he said, “Always in the back of my mind, certainly in my postadolescent period, anyway, there has been a substitute sonority such as orchestra or string quartet, to which I have tried to relate whatever I am doing, rather than approaching the music as keyboard music per se.” Gould did this, he said, because he believed that for the great majority of important composers, the piano was a substitute system. “It’s been there to allow the performance of music that would otherwise be realized by a string quartet, a concerto grosso ensemble, by a full symphony, whatever.”
In 1946, at age fourteen, Gould received his diploma from the conservatory and continued to study with Guerrero. That year marked his first performance with the Toronto Symphony, where he played Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto. Reviewers gushed. “How awesome are the ways of genius in a child,” wrote the critic for the Toronto Evening Telegram. “For Glenn Gould is a genius.” The critic for the national paper, the Toronto Globe and Mail, marveled at the effect of Glenn’s speedy hands. “His is not a heavy tone,” she wrote, “but delicacy of phrasing and timing give it clear carrying power.”
Glenn remarked years later that the performance was “the one most exciting moment in my entire life.” Yet he could recall few specifics about his playing. He did, however, remember the dog hair that Nick had left on his trouser legs when he greeted him before the concert. In trying to pick off the hairs during a couple of lengthy orchestral passages, Glenn got so distracted that he almost lost his place in the finale. “I learned the first valuable lesson of my association with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra,” he later said. “Either pay attention or keep shorthaired dogs.”
From an early age, Gould adopted an unusual and intimately physical relationship with his instrument. Sometimes he lowered his face so close to the keyboard that it looked as if he was playing the piano with his nose. And it often seemed that he was hugging the instrument. He developed a playing style that was largely focused on the tips of his long, nimble fingers, and he liked to sit low—several inches below the place where most pianists sit—with his elbows dangling below the keyboard or flapping out to the sides, often with his wrists well below finger level. It was an odd approach; Gould appeared to be reaching for the keys from below. Guerrero also sat low, as did two other pianists Gould had grown to admire, Rosalyn Tureck and Artur Schnabel. But Gould did so to exaggerated effect. He believed this position allowed him a sense of intimate connection with the keys and more control over the finer nuances of tone, phrasing, dynamics, and the contrapuntal complexities in much early music.
Indeed it was well suited to his particular repertoire. Had he wanted to play a great deal of, say, Chopin and Liszt, such a position would have been untenable, because sitting as he did limited his ability to hit the keys from above with maximum strength. It made it more difficult to bring down the requisite force for a true fortissimo or to really attack the far ends of the keyboard, as is often required in climactic passages in nineteenth-century music. And Gould acknowledged this limitation. “It’s difficult for me to get a really big sound, as in some of Liszt’s fortissimos,” he once said. Yet Gould’s “rather hunchbacked” technique gave him “finger clarity, better definition and feeling” for the composers he preferred, especially Bach, whose music required far less horizontal and vertical movement.
When he was fifteen, he began to give concerts as a fullfledged professional pianist and became the frequent subject of profiles in Canadian newspapers and magazines. But he was in no rush to expand his performing schedule or to increase his fame, and for several years he confined his appearances to Canada. Finally, in early 1955, at the age of twenty-two, he went to the United States, where he made his debut in Washington, D.C., playing an unconventional assortment of music including Webern’s Variations, Orlando Gibbons’s Lord of Salisbury Pavan, and the Bach Partita in G Major. A week later he repeated the same program at Town Hall in New York, before an audience that included some prominent pianists who had been hearing about the delicate and gangly pianist with the unorthodox style and wanted to see Glenn Gould for themselves. Gary Graffman and Eugene Istomin, both rising stars, were astonished to hear what Graffman described later as a fully developed original. “He had a hand in his pocket as he walked out,” said Graffman. “And as soon as he started to play, I just listened to the music and was absolutely floored.”
The critics, too, were taken with the performance. “This young pianist is clearly a dedicated, sensitive poet of the keyboard,” wrote the critic for the New York Herald-Tribune. And John Briggs, a reviewer for the Times, said Gould “left no doubt of his powers as a technician.” Although the review was short, it captured an essential reason for Gould’s ability to mesmerize an audience: “The most rewarding aspect of Mr. Gould’s playing . . . is that technique as such is in the background. The impression that is uppermost is not one of virtuosity but of expressiveness. One is able to hear the music.”
After the concert, Graffman and a few other young pianists were introduced to him at a party in his honor. Graffman noticed that Gould drank only milk and excused himself several times to wash his hands.
As it happened, David Oppenheim, the director of Columbia Records’ Masterworks division, was in the audience that night. Oppenheim had gone to the recital because he had heard from a friend that the young Gould might be another Dinu Lipatti, the Romanian pianist who was known for his perfect finger control and purity of sound. Lipatti had died of cancer a few years earlier, at age thirty-three, leaving behind a legion of grief-stricken admirers. At Town Hall Oppenheim was not disappointed. He was so taken with the sheer originality of Gould’s playing that he immediately offered him an exclusive contract. When he asked Gould what he wanted to play for his first recording, Gould replied that he wanted to perform Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Surprised, Oppenheim suggested Gould consider a different work of Bach’s—perhaps the Inventions. There were many reasons for Oppenheim’s objection. The Goldberg Variations was notoriously challenging; it was a work more often associated with the harpsichord than the piano; it had been recorded on piano by only two musicians, and one, Rosalyn Tureck, was the established authority. But Gould stood his ground and Columbia gave in.
A few months later, Gould arrived at the recording studio in an abandoned church on East Thirtieth Street in Manhattan. He brought his pygmy chair, a folding bridge chair his father had modified for him in 1953 by sawing four inches off each leg. Gould preferred this chair to any piano bench because it enabled him to sit a perfect fourteen inches off the floor—six inches lower than the height of a standard piano bench. Gould’s father fashioned the chair so that it had individually adjustable legs, which enabled Gould to achieve the precise height he wanted on each. The chair had what Gould once referred to as “exactly the right contour.” It also had the give Gould wanted in all directions: left, right, forward, backward. It swayed—and creaked—along with him as he moved while playing. The chair was an object that he remained attached to all his life, and he took it with him everywhere. When he traveled for concerts, with or without his own piano, the chair came too, packed in its own travel crate. Another fixture Gould brought with him to the recording sessions was a supply of bottled Poland Spring water, which he believed was the only water fit to drink. He brought pills for headaches, tension, and circulation. And although it was June, of course he arrived in coat, cap, gloves, and muffler. And with those habitual appurtenances he settled into a weeklong recording session of the fabled Goldbergs.
Bach wrote the Goldberg Variations around 1740, some ten years before his death. It is one of the composer’s great encyclopedia works—a multifaceted summation of his style. Gould once told an interviewer that while the work was “never high on my hit parade as an integrated experience,” it contained some sublime moments for him. Variation 15 in G minor, for instance, one of the canons, was a slow variation that he said moved him “in an extraordinary way” and demonstrated the very best of Bach. And although he had less admiration for the more virtuosic, finger-twisting variations like 5, 14, and 23, those pieces showed off Gould’s impeccable technique.
Indeed, Gould’s choice of the Goldbergs for his debut record was a shrewd one. Until the time of late Beethoven, the Goldberg Variations was the largest single keyboard work ever written, and through the years the work had acquired a reputation for being unplayable on the piano. But in Gould’s agile hands the music became eye-opening, fresh, and brazen. Even those purists who tossed heresy charges at anyone who attempted to play Bach on anything but a harpsichord—who insisted that playing Bach on the piano violated the composer’s specific sonoristic intentions—were dumbstruck by what Gould did with Bach on the piano. As David Dubal, a well-known pianist and writer, put it, “Bach on the piano had become a nightmare of boring academic pattern making, full of plushly pedaled un-Baroque sonorities.” Gould, in one recording, would change all that.
Gould’s approach was part of a general rethinking of how the piano could be used in the service of Bach. By the time Gould came on the scene, a clear, lean style of playing Baroque music, and Bach in particular, was a rising trend, especially among younger pianists. Gould’s playing was a particularly dynamic example of this trend and seemed ideally suited to the composer. When Gould played Bach, the music became sparse, abstract, and mysterious. Dubal wrote: “It was a process that went far beyond quibbling about the correct instrument. Indeed, the timbre of the piano under Gould’s hands became new and unexpected.”
Aside from his sheer technical ability, Gould was giving musical expression to radical beliefs. He argued that the harpsichord purists were suffering from “musicological overkill” and that Bach was comparatively indifferent on the question of which instrument a piece of music was best suited to. When it came to Bach, he argued that in certain circumstances “the piano can get you a lot closer to Bach’s conceptual notions than the harpsichord ever can.”
Technically, of course, Gould was a breed apart, mostly because of the speed with which his fingers flew. When he was fourteen, his class publication, the 9-D Bugle, had dubbed him “the ten hottest fingers in Malvern,” Gould’s high school. Guerrero had taught him to leave his arms and hands relaxed and let his fingers do as much of the work as possible. And indeed they did. A friend once recalled visiting him at home and watching him sight-read the last movement of Grieg’s Piano Concerto at breakneck speed—“like Horowitz, only better,” the friend said.
His tactile ability was amazing, yet throughout his career Gould seldom pondered the source of the incredible speed, precision, and dexterity of his hands. He preferred to believe that he was possessed of a mysterious gift that he had no need to understand. When discussing his technique, he offered this Zenlike explanation: At all times, he maintained a mental image of every key on the piano, a tentacular awareness of where each note was and how it would feel to reach for it and strike it. Thereafter, the physical act itself was simple. It was a strategy not unlike the one coaches urge on athletes as they master a sport through a form of visualization. In Gould’s case, his skill was aided by an uncanny capacity for memorization. He could read a score through once, then play it flawlessly. And once he had played a piece, years could pass and he could sit down and play it again without hitting a single wrong note.
When performing in public, Gould’s choice of programs was always unorthodox. The reigning classical pianists of the day—Vladimir Horowitz, Van Cliburn, Myra Hess, Claudio Arrau—played a more established repertoire founded on the nineteenth-century Romantics. But Gould had no interest in playing such crowd-pleasers. He didn’t care about bravura or big, expansive musical gestures.
Gould played pieces by the composers he felt the closest musical kinship with: Bach, Gibbons, Schoenberg, Berg. And the concertgoing public embraced those choices. Not only was he a critical success, but he was a box-office success as well; his concerts were often sold out months in advance. This wasn’t merely amazing on its own. What was more extraordinary was that he managed to play to sold-out houses with such an unusual repertoire. The norm among superstars was something very different. At most, a concert pianist would play Bach as a concert opener. Gould offered Bach as the main course. And he filled concert halls with audiences drawn to the quiet intimacy of his music, which perhaps reminded his listeners of the old teacher’s adage: To get people’s attention, rather than raise your voice, speak quietly.
Not everyone was thrilled with the newcomer. Rosalyn Tureck was mightily put out by Gould’s achievement. As a teenager Tureck had memorized the Goldberg Variations in five weeks, then performed them at Juilliard. The day after her performance, Juilliard’s president met Tureck in the corridor and said, still awestruck, “I understood that they weren’t possible.” “Oh, really?” she replied. Tureck became famous for her pronouncements about the Goldberg Variations. “It is an infinite work of art,” she once said. “After the opening aria, the thirty variations traverse the whole experience of man. And the return to the beginning aria at the end is one of the most sublime moments in all art.”
She once colorfully described an episode that occurred shortly before she turned seventeen. She lost consciousness, and when she came to, she found herself possessed of a revelation, “an insight into Bach’s structure, his musical psychology, his sense of form,” and she knew that she had to create an entirely new technique for playing the piano as a result.
It was Tureck who received credit for prying loose from people’s minds the conviction that Bach could be played only on a harpsichord. Yet with the advent of Glenn Gould, Tureck’s Bach became yesterday’s news. Gould’s precise articulation combined with the superhuman speed of his fingers made Bach’s set of variations take flight. In its attack and phrasing Gould’s playing resembled Tureck’s, but his tone was more seductive and his approach, especially in terms of rhythm, was more dynamic. His Bach grabbed the public in a way that hers never did. With one recording, Glenn Gould proved that he could play the piano like nobody else in the world. The record caused a sensation among listeners and critics alike, who pronounced him a genius, perhaps the greatest pianist of his generation.
Gould’s recording of the Goldberg Variations became the best-selling classical recording of 1956. By 1960, it had sold forty thousand copies, which was, Joseph Roddy noted that year in the New Yorker, “just about as astonishing in the record business as a big run on a new edition of the Enneads of Plotinus would be in the book trade.” Gould outsold the soundtrack for The Pajama Game, one of Columbia’s big hits. It even outsold Louis Armstrong. It would eventually become the best-selling classical soloinstrumental album of all time, with sales topping 1.8 million copies. Stardom came to Gould instantaneously. “We know of no pianist like him at any age,” wrote Paul Hume in the Washington Post. Record-industry publications named Gould’s Goldberg Variations the record of the year, then of the decade. Early the following year, at Leonard Bernstein’s invitation, Gould played Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto with the New York Philharmonic, and in quick succession recorded Bach Partitas, book two of The Well-Tempered Clavier, Beethoven, Brahms, and Haydn. Gould was well on his way to becoming one of the great pianists of the twentieth century.
There was much about Gould’s personal appeal that was ineffable. Journalists who interviewed him were invariably impressed by his sharp wit, often at his own expense, his politeness, his charm, and his lack of pretension. And although he wore a tuxedo when performing with orchestras, beginning with the Town Hall recital in 1955, he became the first major pianist to give recitals in a suit, usually unpressed and baggy. His playing exerted an unusual power over his audiences. After seeing Gould perform, or after listening to his records or hearing him on the radio, people swore that they could hear the player’s soul and sense its vulnerability. They reported feeling as if their lives had somehow changed. Some who listened to him play Bach said he played it like a prayer; some believed he had a direct link to God.
There was no disregarding Gould’s many physical quirks while performing. From the start, audiences were exposed to what Gould preferred to call his “side effects”: singing, arm flailing, swaying, and foot stomping. Most conspicuous was his habit of singing aloud as an accompaniment to his own playing. Following a concert in Detroit, the local critic wrote that Gould’s humming sounded like “a large blackfly had escaped in the auditorium,” recalled Ted Sambell, a technician who for years worked on pianos at the Stratford Festival, where Gould often played in the summer, and had traveled to Detroit to do the tuning for the concert. At times the humming was so pronounced that it seemed a duet was being played between piano and pianist.
Gould sometimes said that he hummed in order to compensate for the shortcomings of an unfamiliar or inferior piano. But he had another explanation for it: It represented wishful thinking, the perfect, ideal phrasing he had in his head that he could never quite achieve in real life. It was probably a little bit of both: The humming expressed his ideal vision of the music he was playing, and it probably became more prominent in situations when an inadequate instrument subverted the realization of that vision.
Fans noticed. A woman once sent a letter to Columbia Records from the Midwest to say she had just bought a recording of Bach’s French suites. “Now, you’re not going to believe this,” she wrote, “but someone is singing in the background as Mr. Gould is playing!” During one of the first recording sessions of the Goldbergs, in fact, Gould’s humming was so loud that someone joked that he might consider wearing a gas mask. Playing along, Gould actually picked up a gas mask at a war-surplus store and, as a gag, wore it at the start of his next session.
Beyond the vocal accompaniment, Gould stomped, swayed in time to the music, and conducted himself whenever he had a free hand. He sat sidesaddle much of the time, with one knee almost on the floor. He insisted on using the wobbly little fold-up chair so he wouldn’t be too far above the keys. As if the effect of the chair weren’t enough, he also spent considerable time having small, custom-built wooden blocks, about 1.25 inches high, placed under each piano leg to uniformly raise the height of the entire instrument.
Gould was by no means the only high-level pianist with a tic or two. Rudolf Serkin rocked and squirmed when he played, and whacked the pedal with his foot. The Russian pianist Vladimir de Pachmann mugged and chattered and pantomimed his way through concerts. Self-accompaniment was not so unusual, either. Toscanini once sang his way through a recorded broadcast of La Bohème, Pablo Casals hummed and grunted through the Bach suites for unaccompanied cello, and the jazz pianist Keith Jarrett became famous for his audible moans during concerts. All things considered, Gould was not so very different from the others—just louder.
There was a touch of Beatlemania to some of the adoration of the handsome young pianist. Scores of young women wrote fan letters with pointed questions. Was he single? Interested? Might he agree to a meeting? One woman went so far as to show up at Columbia Records in New York, hoping for a chance meeting. Another wrote to him regularly for years, pouring her heart out in each letter.
The features that distinguished Gould’s idiosyncratic piano playing made him extremely particular about his pianos. He demanded something very different from what a generic, standardissue piano provided. Instead of volume he required nuance; rather than sustaining power, he needed incisiveness.
He was seldom happy with one piano for very long. When Gould was a child, his father bought new instruments—first uprights, then a series of grands—at regular intervals. And as Gould grew older, he took over the search for playable instruments. One happy discovery he made was a piano that became an ideal against which he measured the various concert pianos he would encounter for the rest of his life. It was a small grand made in 1895 by the Boston-based firm Chickering. Gould had discovered the Chickering in 1954, when it was in the possession of a friend who was renting it. It was a well-decorated instrument, with stout, carved legs, an ornamented lyre above the pedals, and a richly carved music desk. Based on looks alone, the Chickering would have fit very nicely in a well-appointed parlor. But Gould had no interest in the piano’s appearance. He loved its touch.
Gould liked the piano so much, in fact, that he took over the rental and finally bought it outright in 1957. He did most of his practicing for the U.S. debut on the Chickering, its tactile immediacy a perfect fit with his musical tastes. But although the Chickering was his ideal instrument, he knew it was a piano he could never perform concerts on. Not only was it too small to project the kind of sound needed in a concert hall (by and large, concert pianists never perform on anything but a nine-foot concert grand), but the piano produced a distinct banjolike twang.
Still, the Chickering clarified for him the features he wanted as he continued to seek a concert grand. For a time it seemed he had found the perfect instrument: CD 174, a piano with a featherlight action that felt just right under his fingers. He had chanced upon it at Steinway one day in 1955, when both the piano and the pianist happened to be in the same place at the same time. Gould loved CD 174 so much he used it to record the Goldberg Variations. But he didn’t have the piano for very long, and it would be several years before he would find another concert grand that felt just right under his hyperdiscerning touch.