Glenn Herbert Gould (; né Gold; 25 September 19324 October 1982) was a Canadian pianist and broadcaster. Regarded as one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century, he was renowned as an interpreter of the keyboard works of Johann Sebastian Bach. His playing was distinguished by remarkable technical proficiency and a capacity to articulate the contrapuntal texture of Bach's music.
Gould rejected most of the Romantic piano literature—Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Rachmaninoff, and others—in favour of Bach and Beethoven mainly, along with some late-Romantic and modernist composers. Gould also recorded pre-Baroque composers such as Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, William Byrd, and Orlando Gibbons; Classical composers such as Haydn, Mozart, and Brahms; and 20th-century composers including Paul Hindemith, Arnold Schoenberg, Alexander Scriabin, and Richard Strauss. He championed Gibbons, whom he called his favorite composer.
Gould was also a writer and broadcaster, and dabbled in composition and conducting. He produced television programmes about classical music, in which he spoke, performed, and interacted with interviewers in a scripted manner. He made three musique concrète radio documentaries, the Solitude Trilogy, about isolated areas of Canada. He was a prolific contributor to music journals, in which he discussed music theory. Gould was known for his eccentricities, ranging from his unorthodox musical interpretations and mannerisms at the keyboard to aspects of his lifestyle and behaviour. He disliked public performance, and stopped giving concerts at age 31 to concentrate on studio recording and media. His recording of the Prelude and Fugue in C major (BWV 870) from The Well Tempered Clavier, Book 2 is on the Voyager Golden Record, a sample of the sights and sounds of Earth sent into space with the Voyager spacecraft. He is the subject of Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (1993) and Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould (2009).
Life
Early life Glenn Gould was born at home at 32 Southwood Drive in The Beaches, Toronto, on September 25, 1932, the only child of Russell Herbert Gold and Florence Emma Gold (née Greig, a distant relative of the Norwegian composer and pianist Edvard Grieg), Presbyterians of Scottish, English, German, and Norwegian ancestry. The family's surname was informally changed to Gould around 1939 to avoid being mistaken for Jewish, given the prevailing antisemitism of prewar Toronto. Gould had no Jewish ancestry, though he sometimes joked about it, saying, "When people ask me if I'm Jewish, I always tell them that I was Jewish during the war."
Gould's interest in music and his talent as a pianist were evident very early. Both parents were musical; his mother taught him the piano and encouraged his musical development from infancy. Hoping he would become a successful musician, she exposed him to music during her pregnancy. As a baby, he reportedly hummed instead of crying and wiggled his fingers as if playing a keyboard instrument. This led his doctor to predict he would be "either a physician or a pianist". He learned to read music before he could read words, and it was observed that he had perfect pitch at age three. When presented with a piano, the young Gould was reported to strike single notes and listen to their long decay, a practice his father Bert noted was different from typical children. Gould's interest in the piano was concomitant with an interest in composition. He played his pieces for family, friends, and sometimes large gatherings—including, in 1938, a performance at the Emmanuel Presbyterian Church (a few blocks from the Gould family home) of one of his compositions.
Gould first heard a live musical performance, by the pianist Josef Hofmann, at age six. This profoundly affected him. He later described the experience: It was Hofmann. It was, I think, his last performance in Toronto, and it was a staggering impression. The only thing I can really remember is that, when I was being brought home in a car, I was in that wonderful state of half-awakeness in which you hear all sorts of incredible sounds going through your mind. They were all sounds, but was playing them all, and suddenly I was Hofmann. I was enchanted.
At age 10, he began attending the Toronto Conservatory of Music in Toronto (known since 1947 as The Royal Conservatory of Music). He studied music theory with Leo Smith, organ with Frederick C. Silvester, and piano with Alberto Guerrero. Around the same time, he injured his back as a result of a fall from a boat ramp on the shore of Lake Simcoe. This incident is apocryphally related to the adjustable-height chair his father made shortly thereafter. Gould's mother would urge the young Gould to sit up straight at the keyboard. He used this chair for the rest of his life, taking it with him almost everywhere. The chair was designed so that Gould could sit very low and allowed him to pull down on the keys rather than striking them from above, a central technical idea of Guerrero's.
Gould developed a technique that enabled him to choose a very fast tempo while retaining the "separateness" and clarity of each note. His extremely low position at the instrument permitted him more control over the keyboard. Gould showed considerable technical skill in performing and recording a wide repertoire including virtuosic and romantic works, such as his own arrangement of Ravel's La valse and Liszt's transcriptions of Beethoven's Fifth and Sixth Symphonies. Gould worked from a young age with Guerrero on a technique known as finger-tapping: a method of training the fingers to act more independently from the arm.
Gould passed his final Conservatory examination in piano at age 12, achieving the highest marks of any candidate, and thus attaining professional standing as a pianist. One year later he passed the written theory exams, qualifying for an Associate of the Toronto Conservatory of Music (ATCM) diploma.
Gould's childhood neighbour and lifelong best friend was Robert Fulford, who became a prominent journalist and essayist. In 1952, Fulford and Gould founded New Music Associates, which produced and promoted Gould's first three public performances, including Gould's debut performance of J. S. Bach's Goldberg Variations.
Piano Gould was a child prodigy and was described in adulthood as a musical phenomenon. He claimed to have almost never practised on the piano itself, preferring to study repertoire by reading, another technique he had learned from Guerrero. He may have spoken ironically about his practising though, as there is evidence that on occasion he did practise quite hard, sometimes using his own drills and techniques. He seemed able to practise mentally, once preparing for a recording of Brahms's piano works without playing them until a few weeks before the sessions. Gould could play a vast repertoire of piano music, as well as a wide range of orchestral and operatic transcriptions, from memory. He could "memorize at sight" and once challenged a friend to name any piece of music that he could not "instantly play from memory".
The piano, Gould said, "is not an instrument for which I have any great love as such ... [but] I have played it all my life, and it is the best vehicle I have to express my ideas." In the case of Bach, Gould noted, "[I] fixed the action in some of the instruments I play on—and the piano I use for all recordings is now so fixed—so that it is a shallower and more responsive action than the standard. It tends to have a mechanism which is rather like an automobile without power steering: you are in control and not it; it doesn't drive you, you drive it. This is the secret of doing Bach on the piano at all. You must have that immediacy of response, that control over fine definitions of things."
As a teenager, Gould was significantly influenced by Artur Schnabel, Rosalyn Tureck's recordings of Bach (which he called "upright, with a sense of repose and positiveness"), and the conductor Leopold Stokowski. He recalled, "It was playing of such uprightness, to put it into the moral sphere." Gould was known for his vivid imagination. Listeners regarded his interpretations as ranging from brilliantly creative to outright eccentric. His pianism had great clarity and erudition, particularly in contrapuntal passages, and extraordinary control. Gould believed the piano to be "a contrapuntal instrument" and his whole approach to music was centered in the Baroque. Much of the homophony that followed he felt belongs to a less serious and less spiritual period of art.
Gould had a pronounced aversion to what he termed "hedonistic" approaches to piano repertoire, performance, and music generally. For him, "hedonism" in this sense denoted a superficial theatricality, something to which he felt Mozart, for example, became increasingly susceptible later in his career. He associated this drift toward hedonism with the emergence of a cult of showmanship and gratuitous virtuosity on the concert platform in the 19th century and later. The institution of the public concert, he felt, degenerated into the "blood sport" with which he struggled, and which he ultimately rejected.
Performances and recordings On 5 June 1938, at age five, Gould played in public for the first time, joining his family on stage to play piano at a church service at the Business Men's Bible Class in Uxbridge, Ontario, in front of a congregation of about 2,000. In 1945, at 13, he made his first appearance with an orchestra in a performance of the first movement of Beethoven's 4th Piano Concerto with the Toronto Symphony. His first solo concert followed in 1947, and his first recital on radio was with the CBC in 1950. This was the beginning of Gould's long association with radio and recording. He founded the Festival Trio chamber group in 1953 and appeared at the inaugural Stratford Festival with cellist Isaac Mamott and violinist Albert Pratz.Glen Gould. The Canadian Encyclopedia. Section on "Emerging career".
Gould made his American debut on 2 January 1955, in Washington, D.C. at The Phillips Collection. The music critic Paul Hume wrote in The Washington Post: "January 2 is early for predictions, but it is unlikely that the year 1955 will bring us a finer piano recital than that played yesterday afternoon in the Phillips Gallery. We shall be lucky if it brings us others of equal beauty and significance." A performance at The Town Hall in New York City followed on 11 January. Gould's reputation quickly grew.
Also in 1955, Gould recorded Bach's Goldberg Variations. The recording built Gould's reputation both in North America and internationally and led to concert tours of Europe and the Soviet Union.
In 1957, he undertook a tour of the Soviet Union, becoming the first North American to play there since World War II. His concerts featured Bach, Beethoven, and the serial music of Schoenberg and Berg, which had been suppressed in the Soviet Union during the era of Socialist Realism.
Gould performed Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 3 with Herbert von Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in Berlin on 26 May, 1957. Gould debuted in Boston in 1958, playing for the Peabody Mason Concert Series. On 31 January 1960, Gould first appeared on American television on CBS's Ford Presents series, performing Bach's Keyboard Concerto No. 1 in D minor (BWV 1052) with Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic.Archived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine:
On 7 August 1960, Gould and cellist Leonard Rose performed Beethoven's Cello and Piano Sonata No. 3 Op. 69 at the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario, Canada. On the same program, Gould and Rose were joined by violinist Oscar Shumsky for a performance of Beethoven's Ghost Trio.
On 8 November 1960, Gould performed Beethoven's Emperor Concerto with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Josef Krips.