FOOTNOTES

*1 The producer, Niv Fichman, recalled that late one night around 1980 he and two friends–all young film students and rabid Gould fans–saw the pianist emerge from a Toronto hotel with a garbage bag and set off in his Lincoln Continental. The trio followed him for half an hour, until he stopped at a bus shelter, dropped his bag into a garbage can, and drove away. They could not resist retrieving the bag, which contained nothing but grapefruit peels and back issues of the Globe and Mail.
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*2 Name-change searches requested from Ontario’s Office of the Registrar General revealed that Bert formally changed his name only on December 5, 1979, so that he could legally marry his second wife under the surname Gould. The searches turned up no information on Gould or his father or grandfather from the period around the start of the Second World War, suggesting that the family’s change of name was informal and that Gould was still legally Glenn Herbert Gold when he died.
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*3 To make matters even more confusing, Gould’s first name is frequently misspelled as “Glen” in documents (including official ones) dating back to the beginning of his life, and Gould himself used both spellings interchangeably throughout his life. In fact, it is difficult to find a specimen of his signature in which a second n is clearly discernible. To his record producer Andrew Kazdin, Gould offered a lame explanation: he had discovered early on that if he started to write the second n he would be unable to stop and would end up writing three n’s.
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*4 The aggressive evangelism of nineteenth-century Methodism certainly influenced Gould’s grandfather (who was born in a Methodist parsonage, the son of a minister) and probably influenced Bert, too.
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*5 Bert Gould, too, had Scottish ancestors: his mother’s father, Andrew T. Horne (ca. 1830–1910), a storekeeper in the Uxbridge area, was born in Scotland.
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*6 No score survives, however. According to a contemporary report on the subject published in the Weekly Mail, “Miss Joan Dobe, of London, England, a theatre critic and writer, has asked for Glen’s [sic] composition for her own correlation of creative arts for children”–whatever that means.
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*7 Those already familiar with Gould’s adult proclivities will be amused to note that his worst marks–bare passes–were in counterpoint and form.
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*8 “One of the students Glenn talked about all the time was Malcolm Troup,” Ray Dudley, another Guerrero pupil, recalled. “You see, Troup was a kind of character in the class. He was about three years older than Glenn, and I think he had a tremendous influence on him. Troup was radical in everything he did–in the way he dressed, the way he spoke, even the way he wrote. He’d write long, involved essays on some esoteric subject and then read them to the class. Well, I think Glenn would just sit there, fascinated. And Troup usually came into class with holes in his socks or wearing clothes that were rather dirty-looking. He was always trying to create a sensation with his appearance.”
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*9 In January 1946, Hindemith made his only visit to Toronto and lectured at the conservatory. It is difficult to imagine that Gould missed such a momentous event, but there is no mention of it among his writings and interviews and unpublished papers. He was just thirteen at the time, and so still “a complete reactionary” perhaps he simply could not rouse enough enthusiasm to attend.
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*10 Many other pianists renowned for discrimination of nuance and disdain for virtuoso fireworks also sat unusually low, including two of Gould’s pianistic heroes, Artur Schnabel and Rosalyn Tureck.
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*11 As an adult, Gould turned to technology in an effort to enhance the physical system that Guerrero advocated. He often used an ultrasound-therapy unit on his shoulders and upper arms, with the avowed aim of “breaking down” or “thinning” the “hypertrophied” muscle tissue in those areas, and thus helping to maintain the back alone as the locus of support and power. Gould’s biographer Peter Ostwald, a psychiatrist specializing in the physical and mental problems of performing artists, dismissed his theories on ultrasound as “highly improbable, if not actually dangerous.”
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*12 Guerrero developed the method in Chile. As William Aide wrote, “Guerrero attended a travelling circus and saw a three-year-old Chinese boy do an astounding dance full of breath-taking intricacies. Guerrero went backstage to meet the child and asked his trainer for the secret. The teacher-trainer demonstrated how he placed his hands on the child and moved his limbs, while the child remained still and relaxed. Then the child was asked to repeat the movements by himself.” The child thus learned to make the movements in an instinctive and relaxed manner.
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*13 Gould deplored the “interminable ostinatos” in Schubert, yet admired “the unself-conscious use of ostinato” in Schoenberg–the sort of contradiction typical of his highly prejudiced aesthetic.
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*14 Gould and Evans were mutual admirers and friends. (Gould called Evans “the Scriabin of jazz.”) In the early sixties, the Canadian jazz musician and writer Gene Lees suggested that the two pianists review each other’s recordings in High Fidelity, and they agreed, though in the end Evans backed out. Lees introduced them (by telephone) around 1970, and they spoke often after that. According to Evans’s biographer, Peter Pettinger, Evans recorded Conversations with Myself, in 1963, on Gould’s own Steinway.
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*15 Though often called a champion of “Baroque music,” Gould played little from that period besides Bach–just some Scarlatti and Handel and the Couperin-Guerrero Passacaille. He admired some other Baroque composers, including Purcell and Rameau, but never performed their music.
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*16 “He took a great, great deal from me,” said Tureck in a 1985 interview. “Playing his records I hear myself playing, because I was the only one in the world who did these embellishments.” Fulford recalled hearing Gould, around age twenty, demonstrating why his interpretation of a Bach partita was superior to that in a recording “by one of the greatest Bach interpreters of the age.” Was it Tureck? A case, perhaps, of symbolically killing the mother?
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*17 Glenn Plaskin interviewed Gould as research for his biography Horowitz (1983). The interview, conducted by telephone and never intended to be published, turned out to be more about Gould than about Horowitz, and in the end Plaskin did not quote Gould in his book.
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*18 “On that famous occasion,” Gould wrote in a 1959 letter, “I was a guest lecturer on a series at the University here and was asked to prepare a 50-minute talk. Somehow or other”–the thirty musical examples, perhaps?–“it extended into one hour and 35 minutes and the Assistant Principal of the Royal Conservatory finally strode on stage and informed me that I was infringing on the time of the annual Christmas party and even if I hadn’t got around to discussing the inversions in the last movement, would I please shut up and go home!” Sylvia Hunter, a former Guerrero pupil, recalls, “I don’t think anybody in the room had a clue what he was talking about.”
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*19 “I began to study the Goldberg Variations much earlier than when I recorded it–it was perhaps in 1950,” Gould said, in a 1959 interview. “This was a work which I learned entirely on my own. I never really had a lesson with anyone on it and in fact it was one of the first works that I did learn entirely without my teacher. It was a work which I made up my mind about relatively [early], much more so and much more decidedly than was the case with most works in my repertoire at that time. And therefore I think that it’s a work that I probably have changed less about in the last few years than most others.”
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*20 The Festival Trio later appeared at least once on CBC radio, on June 15, 1954, in a performance of Schubert’s Piano Trio in B-flat Major for CBC Concert Hall (no recording survives).
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*21 On July 18, according to CBC records, Gould joined the violinist Alexander Schneider and the cellist Zara Nelsova in the Festival Theatre performing chamber music by Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. The performance was broadcast (presumably live) on CBC television in Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal, in the series Summer Festival (and on the radio, too?); no visual record survives, though recordings of Beethoven’s “Ghost” Trio and Allegretto in B-flat Major, WoO 39, do survive, and they do not sound as though they had been made in the presence of an audience.
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*22 Gould had first met–or at least sighted–Keith MacMillan when he was seven and saw the Toronto Symphony for the first time. In a reminiscence from the mid-seventies, he wrote: “I was sitting with my parents directly back of two young Upper Canada College types a few years older than myself whom my mother pronounced to be Sir Ernest’s sons. I have no idea what her sources were but mother had a habit of gathering information like that especially when it could be turned to a propaganda purpose. They were, of course, immaculately turned out (that was the propaganda purpose, since in those days I was hardly the style-leader of my social set), mother pronounced them the very model of decorum to which I should aspire, and I hated them on sight.”
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*23 On October 19, 1955, Gould appeared in a CBC radio tribute to the recently deceased Mann, giving a full-throttle performance of Beethoven’s Op. 111 sonata, which is discussed in Dr. Faustus. In the early sixties, he talked about making a radio documentary on Mann.
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*24 Such four-note motifs have been commonplace in contrapuntal music since the Renaissance, and when (as here) they are cast in a minor key the resulting melodic shapes tend to give the music a “pathetic” cast, as in fugal works ranging from the chorus “And with his stripes” in Handel’s Messiah to “Cool” from West Side Story. A “pathetic” four-note motif is common to Beethoven’s late Opp. 131 and 132 quartets and Große Fuge, Op. 133, the latter introduced to Gould by Morry Kernerman around the early fifties. Gould never mentioned late Beethoven among the influences on his quartet, yet his permutations of his motif often yield striking resemblances to, especially, the slow introduction of Op. 132 and the Große Fuge.
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*25 “I can play the whole thing on the piano,” Gould once said, “except that, in a few spots, I need another piano player to handle the cello part. It’s so exhausting, though, that I have to go to bed for two days after I do it.” He can be heard playing an excerpt from his quartet in the 1959 CBC radio interview At Home with Glenn Gould.
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*26 Gould referred to the String Quartet as his “Opus 1,” and it was so designated on the cover of the Columbia LP, though not in the published score or on the CBC recording.
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*27 In 2001, Landowska’s former pupil, assistant, and companion Denise Restout, director of the Landowska Center in Lakeville, Connecticut, wrote to me, “Landowska heard Glen Gould a couple of times and found him to be very gifted for music, but she certainly did not appreciate his excentricities [sic].”
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*28 Gould did greatly admire Szell as a musician, ranking him above Bernstein, Ormandy, Karajan, and even Toscanini, but he apparently did not admire Szell’s acerbic, domineering manner. He admired the Cleveland Orchestra, which also recorded for Columbia, but the first time he considered recording with the orchestra was in 1971, the year after Szell’s death. He was never sympathetic to the martinet breed of conductor. He deplored the prima donna behaviour of Toscanini, and refused to perform with the Chicago Symphony under the forbidding Fritz Reiner.
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*29 The following day, Gould and the same quartet recorded the piece for the CBC’s International Service, even though Gould would years later refer to the Brahms as “not a work that I’m all that fond of” and “a very difficult piece to bring off.”
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*30 A memorandum of conversation on the subject from the Department of State, dated February 13, 1957, is now in the National Archives in Washington. One might assume that a high-profile tour of Russia in 1957, at the height of the Cold War, would have caught the attention of law-enforcement agencies in Canada and the U.S.; after all, the Security Service of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police kept files on hundreds of thousands of Canadians at this time. I made official requests for information about Gould to the National Archives of Canada, the RCMP, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS, the descendent of the RCMP’s Security Service), and the U.S. Department of Justice, but none was found. It is possible that files on Gould did once exist but were thrown out over the years (as many files were), but for now I can only conclude that the Russian tour did not make Gould a target of investigation by either the RCMP or the FBI.
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*31 Recordings survive of these two performances and were released in Russia during Gould’s lifetime on the Melodiya label. He had not consented to their release, and when he heard them, near the end of his life, he was surprised: he did not know that the concert had been recorded. He described the performances as “full of beans” and almost worthy of release, despite the glaring wrong entry by the orchestra near the end of the finale of the Bach concerto.
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*32 While preparing his 2002 television documentary Glenn Gould: The Russian Journey, Yosif Feyginberg discovered a cassette of recordings from this event in the possession of the pianist and professor Vladimir Tropp, and both men agreed to share the find with me. It is an incomplete dub including only recordings of works by Sweelinck, Webern, and Krenek. The whole lecture-recital was recorded, but over the years the original tapes were lost or stolen, and today only the empty, labelled box for the tapes survives in the conservatory’s archive.
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*33 Until the 1960s, Columbia Records did not operate in Europe, so Gould’s recordings were distributed and promoted there by the Philips label, which also lent support to his European concert tours.
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*34 Gould once received a letter from Busoni’s son, who wrote that of all modern performers it was Gould who most reminded him of his father.
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*35 Stephen Leacock was once amused to be introduced, at a dinner in Orillia, as “one of the foremost humorists of East Simcoe,” and as late as 1940 he had trouble cashing a cheque at a local bank because the teller did not recognize him, despite his decades of international fame.
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*36 That was his second bout of what he called “Emperoritis” in as many months. Were these perhaps convenient cancellations? After all, he never liked the piece much. In a letter to Peter Yazbeck shortly after playing the concerto in Victoria in December 1955, he wrote that he felt, “on closer inspection, less and less happy with the work itself. Neither the 2nd nor 3rd [movements] are well-devised (in my opinion). The 3rd movt. is a particularly pedantic and uninspired creation…. p.s. Please do not show the above critique of Beethoven to anyone who doesn’t already know me. They might get the idea that I’m stark raving mad. And they might be right!!”
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*37 The BBC apparently did not keep the original tapes, and the National Sound Archive of the British Library did not record the broadcasts off the air. Unless these recitals were recorded by a private collector, we must assume they are lost.
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*38 Gould can be heard playing the Chickering only in the NFB’s Glenn Gould: Off the Record and in some of his own private recordings.
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*39 Gould and Schonberg had met only once, through the publicity department of Columbia Records, for what Schonberg described as a very awkward lunch that deteriorated when Gould scoffed derisively at Schonberg’s interest in obscure Romantic piano fare. Gould had never been fond of Schonberg’s critical style or musical tastes. After the Brahms review, he took to parodying Schonberg as “Homer Sibelius,” music critic of “the New York Square,” and he liked to circulate the old canard that Schonberg’s career as a music critic was preceded by a tenure on the sports desk. In a letter to Diana Menuhin in 1966, he wrote that “anything Homer Sibelius can know about on Monday, I can know about on Sunday!”
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*40 The two never performed together again. Gould cancelled an appearance with the New York Philharmonic in 1963, due to illness, and was replaced at the last minute by the sixteen-year-old André Watts, whose career was launched by that concert. But Gould’s concert career was effectively over by this time, anyway, and this is no evidence of a permanent falling-out with Bernstein, as some have claimed. Two months after the Brahms performances, Gould was talking to Columbia about recording Strauss’s Burleske with Bernstein, to be coupled perhaps with the Bourgeois gentilhomme Suite or the Tanzsuite after Couperin, in celebration of the Strauss centenary in 1964 (the project did not materialize). Eventually the two stopped seeing each other, but that reflects only a general thinning of Gould’s circle of contacts after his retirement from concert life.
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*41 A 1959 letter from Applebaum to Walter Homburger reveals that Gould had suggested playing a concert in 1960 “in duet with Van Cliburn,” but it did not materialize. Later, he gave Cliburn a standing invitation to give a concert at Stratford–“the zanier the better.”
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*42 Two examples, from Bach: a flubbed bass entrance (bar 25) in the Fugue in C Minor from Book One of The Well-Tempered Clavier; and a dropped note (melody, bar 178) in the finale of the Italian Concerto–one of his most brilliant recordings.
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*43 In his liner notes Gould refers to K. 491 as “not a very successful concerto,” and in 1974 he told an interviewer that it was “the only Mozart concerto that I’ve recorded because it’s the only one that I sort of halfway like.” In 1959 he had spoken of wanting to do an album of Mozart concertos with a chamber orchestra and without a conductor, as Serkin and Bernstein and others had done–a “relaxed and informal” approach–and at one point, to John Roberts, he hinted that he might even record all of Mozart’s concertos. He had studied the “Coronation,” K. 537, and other of the concertos under Guerrero. During his concert days he and Homburger announced on several occasions that he was willing to program the G-major and A-major concertos, K. 453 and 488, respectively. In 1970 he talked about performing the C-major concerto, K. 503, on television. But in the end, he never performed or recorded any Mozart concerto but K. 491.
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*44 Of this first movement Gould once said to John Beckwith, “It’s such a bad piece; I want to get on to the finale.”
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*45 One particularly promising theme program, alas, never got made. In the late fifties a CBC producer had the bright idea of bringing Gould together with Toronto’s other world-class pianist, Oscar Peterson. Both men jumped at the idea, and plans were formulated for a ninety-minute show involving classical music and jazz, with each pianist performing solo, in a small ensemble, and with full orchestra, and swapping ideas in conversation. A taping date of April 26, 1960, was set, but because of persistent scheduling problems with both Gould and Peterson, the show never materialized. Every few years–as late as May 1982–the CBC approached Gould with new plans for a televised Gould-Peterson summit, either a talk-and-play show or a joint interview, but while he remained interested he never committed. Peterson told Timothy Maloney that Gould did not show up at an appointed meeting for the original 1960 show, and offered no explanation; Peterson was miffed, and was less disposed to working with Gould after that. Curiously, though the two pianists lived in the same city, and admired each other, they never met.
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*46 Gould’s first sketches for So You Want to Write a Fugue? date from 1958. That year, in the Globe Magazine, it was noted, “This summer he worked feverishly on a 90-minute program for the CBC called History of the Fugue from the Sixteenth Century to the Present Day. The program is being recorded slowly, [and] will probably be broadcast some time next year…. The windup piece on the program is something tantalizingly called ‘So you want to write a fugue?’ Gould grins about it, [and] says it will probably sound a little jazzy.” Why his work on the program was interrupted is a mystery.
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*47 Stravinsky’s note is lost, but Gould’s two-line reply, dated May 9, 1961, survives in the Stravinsky Archive at the Paul Sacher Foundation, in Basel, Switzerland.
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*48 In a letter from late 1965, he claimed that this monograph was “really just a preparatory sketch for a longer work which I have been commissioned to write next year.” But he never wrote that book.
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*49 Gould refused many offers over the years to have his name brought forward for the country’s highest honour, the Order of Canada. He was put off by the competitive implications of the “stratification”–the various levels–of the Order.
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*50 In an insurance document from 1962, Gould calculated the total value of his possessions–pianos, furniture, paintings, recording and medical equipment–at 19,800, somewhat more than a hundred thousand dollars today.
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*51 The Inventions finally released were all recorded in two sessions in March 1964, most of them on the first take. Gould noted in 1966 that he had previously attempted integral recordings of the Inventions in 1955 and 1963, “and on both occasions had rejected the results out of hand.”
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†52 This was the first Gould album to be released in stereo format only. His albums were released in mono sound only up to summer 1958, then in both formats until 1967.
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*53 This was the first Gould album to bear the new label designation “CBS Masterworks” rather than “Columbia Masterworks.”
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*54 John Roberts was in Gould’s apartment when a package arrived containing a score of the concerto, which Gould claimed never to have studied. He needed to tell Columbia once and for all whether he would record it, and so decided to sight-read it on the spot. A few years later Roberts wrote about what followed: “He sails through the first movement, including the cadenza, without a wrong note or the faintest blemish. The last movement is sight-read at breakneck speed, again flawlessly. It sounds like Horowitz, only better. At the conclusion Gould says, ‘Somehow, I feel this is not for me,’ and shuts the score.” Later, obviously, he changed his mind, at least temporarily.
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*55 He had two practice pianos in his apartment: his old Chickering baby grand, and a Steinway Model B grand built in 1932. According to a comment published in 1979, he received the Steinway on loan in January 1960, and he claimed that “I last had it tuned in January 1963, and through all types of meteorological vicissitudes, it has stayed perfectly in tune.” Nonsense, says his Toronto piano tuner, Verne Edquist: the instrument was half a tone flat. The National Library of Canada in Ottawa maintains CD 318. The two Yamaha grand pianos he bought in his last years are now housed at Roy Thomson Hall, in Toronto, and at The King’s University College, in Edmonton. The two pianos he kept in his apartment, the Steinway grand and the Chickering baby grand, are, respectively, in Rideau Hall (the Governor General’s residence in Ottawa) and in the lobby outside Glenn Gould Studio. All have been serviced and restored to varying degrees over the years, and none can reliably be said to retain the precise, very idiosyncratic standards of touch and tone that Gould cherished.
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*56 Northrop Frye noted that the idea of the frontier–“the unknown, the unrealized, the humanly undigested”–is built into the Canadian character: “The sense of probing into the distance, of fixing the eyes on the skyline, is something that the Canadian sensibility has inherited from the voyageurs.” Indeed, he wrote, “There would be nothing distinctive in Canadian culture at all if there were not some feeling for the immense searching distance, with the lines of communication extended to the absolute limit, which is a primary geographical fact about Canada and has no real counterpart elsewhere.”
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*57 Gould knew McLuhan and Le Moyne personally. In the later sixties McLuhan lived not far from him, and (as his son Eric recalled) Gould was an occasional visitor to McLuhan’s study. The two corresponded and spoke often on the phone, and Gould interviewed McLuhan twice for CBC radio projects. Gould thought him “a dear and wonderful man,” despite his penchant for monologue and reluctance to give straight answers to questions, in which respects he out-Goulded Gould. McLuhan admired Gould’s media work, and wrote, in Counterblast (1969), “Bless Glenn Gould for throwing the concert audience into the junkyard.” Le Moyne met Gould in 1968, in which year both received the Canada Council’s Molson Prize, and Gould interviewed him for a 1969 radio program about the Moog synthesizer.
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†58 Robert E. Babe, in Canadian Communication Thought: Ten Foundational Writers, made the fascinating observation that virtually all of the writers he studied–Innis, McLuhan, Frye, Grant, and others–were greatly influenced by their mothers, read voraciously as children, had intense religious training as children and retained profound religious sensibilities as adults, did not have a prototypically “masculine” view of the world, were “outsiders” by disposition, and were concerned with the moral implications of technology. Sound familiar?
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*59 Andrew Kazdin noticed that Gould accepted minor flaws like small, unwanted shifts of tempo if they originated in his performance, but not if they were the result of imperfect splicing.
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*60 Except for some comments about the opening bars, in his 1974 Rolling Stone interview–the recording was to have commenced with a striking rapid “zoom” from a “long shot” to a “close-up”–Gould left no mixing instructions for the Fifth Sonata. When Andrew Kazdin edited it for a posthumous CD in 1986, he declined to attempt a speculative acoustic orchestration of his own, and so the recording is available to the public only in a conventional, unvarying audio perspective.
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*61 Forty years later, digital technology has made Gould’s prophecies eminently feasible. There have been CDs, including classical CDs, in which the disposition of the contents is left open–for instance, a recording of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto offering fifteen alternate cadenzas for the first movement–and the typical DVD resembles in many ways a Gouldian “kit.” In the movie business, to the horror of the studios, the “director’s cut” now has competition from the “viewer’s cut”: computer aficionados have lately been circulating their own edited versions of certain movies online. The “fan edit” has also become popular among some pop-music fans, though classical-music types, typically, have been slower to catch on to such things.
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*62 After retiring from concert life Gould rarely gave conventional interviews. Usually he either wrote out both questions and answers, sometimes on the basis of a preliminary impromptu conversation, or granted an unscripted interview on the condition that he could edit it for publication.
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*63 He also received several offers to supervise new editions of Bach’s keyboard works, but he turned them down.
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*64 To judge from the testimony of his friends, I doubt that Gould was drawing on personal experience when he wrote that “unembarrassed silence” was “the true mark of friendship.”
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*65 A month before, he had told a reporter that the sonata was finished, yet in a 1962 interview he said he had “a work sitting around that began as a wood-wind quintet, then altered itself and became a clarinet sonata. It has taken three different forms in the past four years. It is 95 per cent completed.”
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*66 None of his sketches is labelled “clarinet sonata,” but there are internal clues to their identity–mainly the abbreviation “cl” in various spots. (The accompaniment is unmistakably for piano.)
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†67 He was apparently also struck by the first letter, one line of which–“Monica, what is our life compared to the many million years of the starry sky!”–he set to music in several sketches.
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*68 It may be that some compositions were more complete in his head than on paper. John Roberts recalls hearing him play music from A Letter for Stalingrad for as long as thirty or forty minutes–perhaps he was improvising on ideas he had only roughly sketched, or had worked out more music in his head than on paper.
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*69 The closest thing to a symphony I have discovered is a curious “Sonata” in E-flat major from around 1964, scored for flute, oboe, bassoon, two horns, two trumpets, and strings. Gould did nothing more than rudimentary sketching for first and second themes, in a harmonic idiom so resolutely diatonic that the prepubescent Mozart would have found it conservative.
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†70 The break is strikingly obvious in his surviving sketches–unless one assumes that boxfuls of compositional manuscripts from after 1964 once existed but have since vanished, which, since Gould was a packrat, is unlikely.
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*71 Gould wrote to a correspondent in the late sixties that he had wanted to release albums, too, that included spoken commentary, but Columbia Records had rejected the idea.
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†72 Also, his technical standards were a little lower in one-time broadcasts. There were poor splices in some of his radio performances that he would never have countenanced in one of his albums.
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**73 The program in which the sonata was broadcast included a ten-minute capsule-history of recent musical trends, which, according to Lorne Tulk, was extracted from a much longer documentary on music in the sixties that Gould made for the CBC and edited into various forms, but that ultimately never aired. To my knowledge, the full-length version does not survive.
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*74 After Duo Gould badly wanted to make records with Menuhin, who was under contract to emi, and was bitterly disappointed when he and Menuhin could not convince either emi or Columbia to make the necessary contractual concessions. The two taped another conversation, on the subject of recording, in June 1978, for Menuhin’s television series The Music of Man. Menuhin again declined to read from Gould’s carefully prepared script, and in the finished program the encounter seems strained.
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*75 The program was based on an article Gould had published that fall in High Fidelity. The magazine had insisted on “Petula Clark” in the title, but Gould’s preference was “‘Pet’ Clark,” which he duly restored in the radio version.
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*76 A television adaptation of The Idea of North, a co-production of the CBC and NET, produced and directed by Judith Pearlman, had its premiere on August 5, 1970. The program, for which the radio version, with some editing, serves as the soundtrack, includes images of the locations that originally inspired Gould, for which purpose Pearlman and her crew took the “Muskeg Express” to Churchill in November 1969. Two actors appear–one plays Wally Maclean, the other a new, non-speaking character, a young man taking his first train trip north–and the other four characters appear as themselves. Gould appears briefly, on a boxcar in Toronto’s railway yards, to deliver his introduction. He supported the production in a variety of ways and loved the results, and Pearlman credited him as “associate producer” out of gratitude. But he was not really involved with the shooting or post-production, even though, in speaking to the press, he sometimes abetted the misconception that the program was a joint effort or even his own show.
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*77 Between the prologue and the start of the train trip, Gould interpolated his own two-minute introduction. It was his only misstep in The Idea of North. The autobiographical comments, the introduction of the characters, and the tone of Gould’s overwritten prose–“that incredible tapestry of tundra and taiga,” and so on–are jarring in this context.
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†78 One whole, partly edited sequence–it dealt with “the media in relation to northern experience, in relation to sensory deprivation”–was ultimately cut because the program was running long. To my knowledge no tape or transcript of this sequence survives.
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*79 Even in his more conventional radio programs Gould tended to eschew foreground-background distinctions where someone speaks against a musical backdrop: voice and music tend to be equally loud, forcing the ear to listen contrapuntally. He deplored the venerable tradition of turning down the music track in the background as soon as someone begins to speak.
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*80 Gould was impressed by one of Anhalt’s own works in this vein, Cento (1967), and interviewed Anhalt about the piece on CBC radio, in 1969.
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*81 In order to bring the documentary to a national audience, CBC Learning Systems released it as an LP in 1971. The Idea of North was also released the same year.
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*82 Aspects of the Booker project lingered in his mind. In September 1971 he proposed to Helen Whitney, of NBC News, a television program that would “look at the Thoreauvian way of life as evidenced in present-day America,” a “south-of-the-border adaptation of my theme…the relationship of isolation and solitude to one’s productive capacity.” The program, which was never made, might have looked at “the revolt against certain aspects of materialism” in the youth culture of the sixties.
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*83 I leave it to my readers to decide whether Payzant was also correct when he added, “A book on his life and times would be brief and boring.”
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*84 Most of Gould’s clothing was donated to charity after his death, though some representative samples were kept, and are now stored at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, Quebec. In 1996, the Bata Shoe Museum, in Toronto, announced the acquisition of a pair of shoes and a pair of galoshes belonging to Gould.
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*85 Among the dreams he discussed with others were some whose meaning was ambiguous (being without form and looking down on the earth from above), some that caused him anxiety (standing in at the last minute for an indisposed baritone in an operatic duet with Maria Callas only to make a terrible musical error; grabbing on to something just as he is about to plummet over Niagara Falls; looking out his bedroom window at the cottage and seeing only an expanse of barren rock), and some that put him in a heroic light (guiding a damaged airplane to a safe landing). “I’m very much the anti-hero in real life,” he once said, “but I compensate like mad in my dreams.”
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*86 One of his few material indulgences was an oil painting by the Chinese artist Zao Wou-Ki, which he valued, in 1962, at 4,200.
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†87 He considered Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1964 film version of the novel “quite possibly the greatest film ever made,” saw it dozens of times, and claimed to have studied it frame by frame.
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*88 To this day there are rumours that he had homosexual encounters as a young man, and while I do not dismiss them as necessarily absurd on their face, I know of no evidence to support them.
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*89 I called her to talk about it, but she hung up on me.
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*90 “He shacked up with a broad for about a year,” his accountant, Patrick J. Sullivan, told Peter Ostwald. “I know, because I saw the expenses.” I, however, have seen no evidence that the two lived together for any period of time.
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*91 In some of his notepads from the late seventies, he reported symptoms like “chills,”“on occ[asion], absolutely uncontrollable shivering,” and “freezing sensations–shivers–top of nose,” which he associated with rises in his blood pressure.
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*92 Gould claimed that his fingers were so sensitive that they were stiffened by air conditioning and swimming, which, he said, “ruins my hands for days afterwards.”
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*93 Schneider, who said that he had never before encountered a pianist who knew the violin repertoire by heart, also objected because Gould did not play with a score in front of him, and so Gould, as Nelsova recalled, “brought it with him into the concert hall and sat on it.” When he performed Brahms’s F-minor piano quintet with the Montreal String Quartet in 1957, the quartet also asked him to use a score, for appearance’s sake, so he put a score on the piano and turned a page from time to time, without regard for where he actually was in the music.
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*94 Some time in the late fifties, Gould made a sixteen-bar sketch for (apparently) a vocal duet based on one of Binks’s hilariously awful poems, “The Farmer and the Farmer’s Wife.”
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*95 Gould, by his own admission, would be a collie, and would be either F minor or B minor (he was not quite sure).
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*96 In one doodle from his school years, he stacked the words Gould, Guerrero, and Greig vertically, with all three words growing out of the same large capital G. I leave the psychoanalyzing of this morsel to others.
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*97 Roberts has said that he felt the end of this relationship was imminent in Gould’s last years, and some notes in Gould’s papers from mid-1977, including a draft of a letter of reference for Roberts, suggest that he might have been looking for a new assistant at that time; however, at the time of Gould’s death Roberts was still working for him.
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*98 Schwarzkopf approved the release of the Ophelia-Lieder, but she has never permitted the release of the four other Strauss songs she recorded with Gould in January 1966. Judging from the producer’s notes, the Ophelia songs were the only ones for which many takes and inserts were recorded.
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*99 In December 1975 he also completed a short documentary on Ernst Krenek for the BBC radio series Music Weekly, in which he read a text based on his recently published review of Krenek’s book Horizons Circled. He considered this documentary relatively accessible but it was still not what the BBC had expected: they found his counterpoint of text and music difficult to follow. Gould refused to allow it to be remixed, so it never aired.
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*100 In preparing to join in Webern’s Concerto, Op. 24, Gould studied and memorized the whole score–all nine parts, not just the piano part–and even wrote out his own piano reduction of it. But as the taping drew near he discovered that he had to do some extra practising in order to isolate the piano part–he had studied the score too well. Bruno Monsaingeon recalled hearing Gould play through the concerto twice, the first time in his reduction of the whole score, the second time playing only the piano part while singing the other parts as best he could. Both times he played from memory–testimony to the extraordinary, computer-like facility of his brain. Monsaingeon also heard Gould play a movement from a Mendelssohn string quartet by memory after hearing it once on the radio.
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*101 As his papers reveal, his German film projects might have included, in addition to his usual repertoire, several of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, Haydn’s D-major concerto, Beethoven’s “Les Adieux” Sonata, Fauré’s Ballade, Berg’s Chamber Concerto, and Hindemith’s Kammermusik No. 2.
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*102 The first part of the diary is ninety pages long, and begins with a twelve-page undated entry (from after mid-September 1977, according to internal evidence) followed by entries dated September 23, 1977, through January 30, 1978. This part is headed only with the initials “p. p.”–perhaps meaning “pressure point,” a term (unexplained) that Gould used in some later notepads to refer to some particular musculoskeletal problem. The second part of the diary is seventy-two pages long, includes entries dated January 30 through July 12, 1978, and is headed “B[OO]K II.”
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*103 Pianists can still take heart, though: Andrew Kazdin’s log for the Scriabin recording shows more than a dozen takes and inserts devoted to the sonata’s knuckle-busting closing pages. Among Gould’s private audio tapes in the National Library of Canada is an amusing one, from the early fifties, in which he breaks off practising in the middle of one of the most difficult bravura passages of Strauss’s Burleske, wearily sighs “Oh, my!” and shuffles away from the piano.
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*104 He actually resumed recording on April 23, on which date he recorded two of Strauss’s Op. 3 pieces (Nos. 1 and 3) at St. Lawrence Hall, in downtown Toronto.
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*105 After years of lobbying and court battles, Eaton Auditorium and its adjoining Round Room restaurant and other facilities were saved from demolition. The whole seventh floor of College Park (the former Eaton’s College Street store) was refurbished at great expense, renamed The Carlu, after the architect who originally designed it, and reopened to the public in May 2003.
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†106 In a 1980 interview, Gould said, “Now I am drafting an idea that I don’t really expect to get to work on for a year or so, but at that point I intend to do a radio equivalent of Tallis’s sixty-four-voice motet [laughs]–but I don’t want to say anything more about that, as it will probably jinx the whole project if I do!” Nothing related to such a project seems to survive among his papers.
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*107 In “Streisand as Schwarzkopf,” a perceptive review of the 1976 album Classical Barbra, Gould described Streisand’s voice as “one of the natural wonders of the age,” and later he called her “probably the greatest singing-actress since Maria Callas.” He ended his review by offering to work with her (she was a Columbia artist) on a second classical album, for which he suggested songs by Dowland and Musorgsky and Bach’s Cantata 54. “I will certainly talk to Barbra about your almost incredible offer,” wrote Claus Ogerman, the arranger, conductor, and producer for Classical Barbra, “so don’t be surprised if a telegram will someday order you to the coast whenever a second album is in the making.” But there is nothing more on the subject in Gould’s papers, and Streisand never has made a second classical album. According to several of Gould’s friends, he contacted Streisand’s representatives directly, without result.
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*108 He had already recorded the first two sonatas for this album, Nos. 60 and 61, on a Steinway, at the 30th Street studio in New York, in October 1980.
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*109 Likewise, Verne Edquist recalled that Gould could detect tuning problems before he could, and the CBS engineers who worked on his digital recordings in New York were amazed to discover that he could discriminate, by ear, between recordings made on Sony and Mitsubishi digital recording systems, even though the technical specifications of the two systems were identical.
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*110 There was some sharing of expenses between Clasart and CBS, but the film and album are two legally separate entities. Though they document the same basic interpretation, the latter is not literally the soundtrack of the former. There are some differences between the two performances not only in editing standards but in musical detail–a phrase here, an ornament there.
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*111 The Haydn and Bach albums were released while Gould was still alive, and the post-production work on the two Beethoven sonatas was completed though that album was released only posthumously, but the posthumously released Brahms and Strauss albums were apparently not completed to his satisfaction when he died: his notepads show that he had plans to do further editing for these two albums in late September, October, and early November 1982. Moreover, his 1981 recording of Bach’s Italian Concerto, though edited and mixed in September 1981, apparently did not satisfy him, according to friends. His last surviving notepad indicates a plan to “check Italian” on what turned out to be the Saturday after his death.
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*112 According to John Roberts, Gould also considered, from time to time, recording Beethoven’s monumental Diabelli Variations, which he had never performed in concert.
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*113 These included rerecording the Two-and Three-Part Inventions, the G-major partita, and other Bach works, perhaps even the whole Well-Tempered Clavier; recording the complete Art of Fugue on the piano; completing his Bach-concerto cycle with No. 6 in F major; and rerecording concertos (Bach’s D-minor, Beethoven’s Second) that existed only in monaural sound. He considered recording Brahms’s C-major and F-minor sonatas; short pieces by Scriabin; the Six Impromptus, Op. 5, by Sibelius; the Suite “Den Luciferiske,” Op. 45, by Nielsen; and perhaps more music by Hindemith. And he considered chamber-music projects including Beethoven’s cello-and-piano works, with Leonard Rose; violin sonatas by Busoni, Grieg, and Strauss, with Jaime Laredo or Gidon Kremer; and songs by Strauss and Mahler.
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*114 The essay was commissioned by the New York Times Magazine, which published it in May 1978, and paid Gould 10,000, but he angered them by–naively?–allowing the Piano Quarterly to publish parts of the essay first. The magazine refused to publish anything by him after that.
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*115 One draft of the Stokowski article, in fact, bears the title “The Wands of Youth i: Remembering Stokowski.” Never one to resist a pun, whether good or lousy, Gould obviously stole this title from The Wand of Youth, the title Edward Elgar gave to two orchestral suites he composed in 1907 and 1908 based on themes he had jotted down in childhood.
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*116 His Bach recordings were used in the English director Mike Hodges’s science-fiction film The Terminal Man, released by Warner Brothers in 1974. He received a fee of 15,000 but was not involved with the production.
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*117 The two remained in touch, on good terms, and earnestly intent on working together. Samuel Carter says that Gould, at the time of his death, was still planning to record with Karajan (including the “Emperor” Concerto) in the future, and Elliette von Karajan, the conductor’s widow, told the Italian magazine L’Espresso, late in 2002, that her husband had been planning to travel to Toronto to record Bach concertos around the time Gould died.
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*118 In his 1997 book The Compleat Conductor, the American composer and conductor Gunther Schuller, deploring the phenomenon of the pianist turned conductor, singled out this recording as “probably the most inept, amateurish, wrong-headed rendition of a major classic ever put to vinyl.”
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†119 Those works included Bach’s Orchestral Suites, Brandenburg Concertos, D-minor clavier concerto, and Cantata 54; concerti grossi by Handel; three overtures by Gluck (including Alceste); six middle-and late-period symphonies by Haydn; Beethoven’s Second and Eighth symphonies, first three piano concertos, and Große Fuge, plus four overtures (Egmont, Fidelio, Coriolan, and either the third Leonore or King Stephen); Schubert’s Fifth Symphony; Mendelssohn’s “Scotch” and “Italian” and “Reformation” symphonies, plus four overtures (The Hebrides, Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, Die schöne Melusine, and Ruy Blas); Wagner’s Wesendonk-Lieder, plus three overtures (Faust, The Flying Dutchman, and Die Meistersinger); Brahms’s Third Symphony, Violin Concerto, Variations on a Theme of Haydn, Tragic Overture, Alto Rhapsody, and perhaps Song of Destiny; Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche, Don Juan, Metamorphosen, Oboe Concerto, and Four Last Songs, plus the Suite from Le bourgeois gentilhomme and perhaps one of the suites based on keyboard music by Couperin; Sibelius’s First, Fifth, and Seventh symphonies, plus Luonnotar, a tone poem with solo soprano; Schoenberg’s two chamber symphonies, his chamber-orchestra arrangement of the “Lied der Waldtaube” from Gurrelieder, Verklärte Nacht, and Pelleas und Melisande; Webern’s Passacaglia and Symphony; and Krenek’s Symphonic Elegy for strings on the death of Webern.
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*120 His last photos for CBS Masterworks were taken at the 30th Street studio, by Don Hunstein on June 18, 1980; some of them appeared on his last album covers. They already show a deterioration in Gould’s health, though according to his 1980 diary the photos were taken after he had been sleeping “miserably” for days. The last video images of Gould are in the April-May 1981 film of the Goldberg Variations.
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*121 In May 2003, just as this book was being completed, the NLC and the National Archives of Canada were merged into a new institution, the Library and Archives of Canada.
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