After I first met Glenn Gould over half a century in the past, he was 28 and artist in residence on the 1960 Vancouver Pageant.

He was already a world-famous pianist, fabulously handsome within the James Dean mould and blessed, so it appeared, with a heat, outgoing persona. And he was media-savvy, but totally dedicated to music.

A pair of fly-on-the-wall movies about Glenn, On the Document and Off the Document (each from 1959), had lately been proven on the BBC and made an enormous impression, as did a Bernstein present known as The Artistic Performer, by which Gould performed the Bach Piano Concerto in D minor; Stravinsky was the opposite visitor and it was spellbinding.

In Vancouver, the place I used to be moonlighting as a visitor critic for CBC, I struck up a working relationship with Glenn which mixed pleasant banter with a proselytising zeal regarding musical training: I recall a riveting night of Schoenberg that includes the Ode to Napoleon, the Hanging Gardens music cycle, and the Suite for Piano.

Later within the Nineteen Sixties once I produced and hosted Conversations with Glenn Gould, one of many 4 programmes was dedicated to Schoenberg, the others being on his beloved Bach, on why he most well-liked Petula Clark to Mozart, and on what he described because the ‘predictable unpredictability’ of Richard Strauss. His pronouncement on BBC One which the live performance corridor was completed set heads shaking and tongues wagging: it was even mentioned in Parliament.

Glenn’s idiosyncrasies made him a publicist’s dream. He took his personal folding chair wherever he went – constructed for him by his father Bert. It was scarcely a foot off the bottom and left him along with his nostril degree with the keyboard. He crouched over the notes like a leopard ready to pounce and when a hand wasn’t enjoying he would deploy it to conduct himself.

Typically he groaned or moaned; extra usually he sang as he performed, which was an irritation for a lot of and a nightmare for recording engineers who needed nothing however the notes. I discovered it endearing – it was as if he’d found an aria for which the keyboard served as an accompaniment.

Away from the piano the quirkiness continued: he wore two pullovers on the warmest of days, a protracted overcoat, gloves, a muffler and a flat cap. Leonard Bernstein, with whom Gould gave many concert events within the Nineteen Fifties, instructed me how his spouse requested whether or not the headgear had some form of non secular significance since Gould appeared so reluctant to take away it – even indoors. After we had been first launched I reached ahead to shake his hand. He snatched it away amid gasps from onlookers: did I not know that Mr Gould had lately threatened a lawsuit towards a Steinway technician who had greeted him with a pleasant slap on the shoulder?

He was decided to not put his fingers in danger: he’d had circulation issues since childhood and he wasn’t the one pianist who’s spent half an hour earlier than a live performance along with his fingers and forearms soaking in scorching water. Gould’s hypochondria was as a lot of a legend as his precise enjoying; I keep in mind him in Vancouver exhibiting off his medication field, which I’d assumed was a paperwork case for his music however as a substitute contained cabinets of multi-coloured bottles and phials, a pill-popper’s paradise.

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When and the place was GlennGould born?

In his house city, Toronto, the place he was born on 25 September 1932, Gould had been performing publicly because the age of 12, debuting with orchestra two years later in Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4. He additionally gave recitals on the organ and briefly performed for a church congregation however was sacked for shedding his place through the hymns.

When did he develop into well-known?

He was 23 when he burst on to the worldwide scene with what turned his signature recording, the Goldberg Variations. Critics hailed him as a celebrity: right here was a pianist to fulfill Bach’s problem, a pianist who had every thing – a singing tone, incredible finger dexterity allowing the lightest of staccatos and ultra-fast tempos, an distinctive vary of dynamic depth, an mental grasp which ensured a separate life to every half in Bach’s contrapuntal webs and above all a ahead drive, a rhythmic spring within the step that was totally exhilarating.

Through the years Gould was to convey his very good approach to bear on all the good Bach keyboard works, the partitas, the suites, the ‘48’ and even the very summary Artwork of Fugue.

So spectacular was the Goldbergs recording, so influential in musical circles, that quickly he was receiving invites from as far afield as Tel Aviv, Moscow and the Salzburg Pageant. When Karajan invited him to play Bach with the Berlin Philharmonic, the veteran critic HH Stuckenschmidt rated his enjoying as the most effective since Busoni: ‘a marvel, an incomparable delight… his technical means borders on the fabulous; such a mix of fluency in each fingers of dynamic versatility, and of vary in colouring’.

Why did he cease performing public concert events?

In London he did a Beethoven concerto collection with Joseph Krips and the LSO. He visited Stockholm and Vienna and appeared each season with the New York Philharmonic underneath Leonard Bernstein; they obtained on famously till 1962, when there was a really public disagreement over the stately tempo Gould had chosen for the opening motion of Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1.

An embarrassingly facetious New York Instances overview by Harold Schonberg prompt that Gould perhaps didn’t have the approach to play the Concerto any sooner. The furore stiffened Gould’s long-held resolve to give up the platform. Because it occurs, I used to be the primary to listen to about it: he wrote to me in London a couple of days later with the information that ‘when the subsequent season is over I shall give no extra public concert events’.

He had been saying one thing related since he was 18, he added, ‘however this time I actually imply it’. He hated the circus side, the debilitating journey and the routine. I instructed him on the time it was such a disappointment that he didn’t merely in the reduction of fairly than banning ‘stay’ appearances altogether. However he caught to his weapons and by no means gave one other live performance.

The Brahms was the most important orchestral work he did. His concerto repertoire was exceedingly small: Bach, together with the Brandenburg No. 5, the Mozart C minor and the 5 Beethoven concertos; he additionally gave performances of the Schoenberg Concerto and Strauss’s Burleske. (He adored Strauss and made an astonishing solo transcription of Elektra.)

His recital programmes had been far more adventurous: he introduced himself to American audiences (Washington, 2 January 1955) with a Pavane by Orlando Gibbons, adopted by a Fantasia by Sweelinck; works by Berg and Webern shared the remainder of the night with Bach and Beethoven (Op. 109). He usually performed Bizet, Grieg (a distant relation of his mom), Hindemith, Korngold, Krenek, Sibelius and Scriabin. However not a word of Schumann or Liszt, nor of Chopin as soon as he’d left faculty.

When did he cease enjoying publicly?

Gould stopped enjoying publicly in 1964 however he went on making information till his loss of life 18 years later: recording was central to his existence. His New York-based firm CBS (subsequently owned by Sony) knew from the beginning that they’d a best-selling artist on their books and gave him carte blanche over repertoire.

Glenn was the antithesis of the pre-war one-take strategy to recording. He leapt on the probability to provide himself a number of selections for the modifying course of. He would file the identical passage again and again, not due to errors however to discover totally different touches and tone colors, and totally different tempos various from stately to jaunty.

His recordings at all times did good enterprise: {the catalogue} is catholic in style and runs to 80 CDs. Some are maddeningly perverse, both too quick or too gradual – the theme of the primary motion of Mozart’s Piano Sonata in A, for instance, is excruciatingly ponderous. However as a physique of labor, his legacy is deeply spectacular.

Finally, to save lots of him from wearisome journey to New York, CBS helped Gould create a studio within the basement of a division retailer in Toronto the place he would work lengthy nights after the consumers had gone house. He was well-known for his finicky modifying which could contain taking a single word from one ‘take’, chopping to a different for the subsequent two semiquavers then on to a 3rd for the phrase-end, all inside the similar bar.

But regardless of how infuriating his methodology, his devoted recording colleagues went together with him as a result of they revered his musical authority – and his business pull. He had a whim of iron, went the gossip, however he was at all times charming and courteous, at the same time as he saved his editors up into the small hours; one wag noticed that there are such a lot of tape-joins in his closing assemblies that for Glenn Gould selection was clearly the splice of life. How he would have loved the digital age!

Gould and I exchanged letters discussing potential TV initiatives with the BBC nicely into the Nineteen Seventies, however ultimately I discovered I couldn’t cope along with his interminable transatlantic cellphone calls in the course of the night time.

In any case he was already marvellously cared for by the Canadian media; a lot of the time that he saved by not enjoying in public was diverted to the manufacturing of tv ‘specials’ for CBC comparable to The Nicely-Tempered Listener and The Anatomy of Fugue, and to radio documentaries of which the best-known is The Thought of North. I don’t suppose he ever ventured additional north than a prepare might take him however Gould was obsessive about the Canadian hinterland – the roof of the world – and his 1967 radio characteristic, the primary a part of his Solitude Trilogy, was lauded on the time for its creativity.

To my thoughts its modern collage of overlapping voices and noises, which Gould mentioned had been organised on musical rules, turns into extra irritating than enlightening because the 60-minute transmission unfolds. Goodness is aware of what number of man hours had been utilized in its making.

No one might ever accuse Gould of idleness, nonetheless. Within the Nineteen Seventies he labored on a historical past of world music narrated by Yehudi Menuhin, with whom he’d earlier made a stimulating programme of Bach, Schoenberg and Beethoven by which additionally they debated the relative deserves of stay versus recorded performances. He had a weekly radio programme for CBC, The Artwork of Glenn Gould, and a long-running collection dedicated to music of our time.

Within the mid-Nineteen Seventies he discovered a brand new champion within the French violinist and film-maker Bruno Monsaingeon; they made many movies collectively. My interview approach for the BBC had been to problem the extra outrageous of Gould’s iconoclastic assertions, however Monsaingeon focused on extracting the essence of Gould, plying him with softball questions written by Gould himself. The enjoying is superlative.

When did Glen Gould die?

Having dropped out of Gould’s telephonic circle, I used to be all of the extra shocked when in October 1982, only a few days after his fiftieth birthday, his loss of life was introduced in Toronto.

I learnt that he’d been ill for a while. His cousin Jessie mentioned he went downhill with tragic pace. ‘His hair had thinned, he was stooped… he had been boyish-looking and now he was an outdated man.’ The notes he wrote to himself on a jotting pad in his closing years give a unprecedented image of the numerous illnesses from which he thought he suffered; he lists a number of prescribed drugs used to deal with these sicknesses – greater than 20 differing types, starting from the predictable valium to such names as allopurinol and hydrochlorothiazide.

Apparently he was seeing 4 totally different docs and enjoying them off towards one another with a reckless disregard for potential unwanted effects. (I’m reminded of the unhappy destiny of Michael Jackson.) Nearly completely paralysed by two strokes in two days, Gould sank right into a coma and was positioned on life-support techniques ‘however inside a couple of days’, reported the obituary within the Canadian Churchman, ‘his household made the agonising determination to withdraw these techniques’.

Did Glen Gould ever marry?

Gould had at all times lived on his personal. His condo was a multitude, each little bit of house on ground or furnishings piled excessive with books and scores and LPs. Exterior his work he had no social life. In his will he left every thing to the Salvation Military and the Toronto Humane Society. He was a real solitary who drove the streets at night time in his black Buick, dwelling frugally and going nowhere.

The movie research, Genius Inside – The Inside Life, digs deep, revealing that the painter Cornelia Foss, spouse of the composer Lukas Foss, whom Gould enormously admired, left her husband for Gould, taking her two young children to Toronto and dwelling close by for 4 years.

She says they talked of marriage: ‘He was a particularly heterosexual man. Our relationship was, amongst different issues, fairly sexual.’ However Gould by no means equipped affirmation: he turned a superb uncle to her children however finally she went again to her husband.

As I see it, his self-reliance was phenomenal. His piano instructor Alberto Guerrero instilled a superb approach. His mom gave him an unshakeable perception in his personal concepts.

You would argue this was a drawback, since he wasted a great deal of time on trying to conduct and compose, musical actions for which he clearly had little aptitude (all that survives is a string quartet and a choral frolic entitled So that you wish to write a fugue?).

His ‘contrapuntal’ radio programmes had no broad attraction, nor had been his occasional makes an attempt at humour profitable, although his polemical writing remains to be nicely price studying (Tim Web page edited the wonderful Glenn Gould Reader in 1990). His visionary prediction that music-lovers would assume management over how they listened to music, selecting, say, Klemperer’s exposition, Bruno Walter’s improvement and Karajan’s coda proved hopelessly, comically large of the mark.

It’s unhappy that there was no one in his life to influence him to place away the medication field and the tape deck so as to spend extra time doing what he did so splendidly: play the piano. However years after his loss of life his reminiscence is undimmed, his achievement nonetheless superb and nonetheless distinctive.

We named Gould one of many biggest pianists of all time