Background

Ethnicity: Glenn Gould had Scottish, English, and Norwegian ancestry.

Glenn Gould was born on September 25, 1932, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, to Russell Herbert Gould, a Toronto furrier, and Florence Greig Gould. His mother claimed to be a descendant of Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg. Both parents were amateur musicians, and the young Gould displayed his own musical abilities at an early age.

Education

Gould began to play the piano at the age of 3 and to compose at 5. By the age of 10, he could play Book I of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. And at 10, he began attending the Royal Conservatory of Music of Toronto, where he studied piano with Alberto Guerrero, organ with Frederick C. Silvester, and theory with Leo Smith. He attended the Williamson Road Public School until 1945, later advancing to Malvern Collegiate Institute, a public high school. He never completed his high school education, but in 1946 he was awarded the associate diploma of the conservatory with the highest honors.

Career

Gould's career as a concert performer had its beginnings in his student years. Gould’s formal debut was not as a pianist but as an organist, at Toronto’s Eaton Auditorium on December 12, 1945. On May 8, 1946, he gave his premiere performance as a pianist, playing the first movement of Beethoven’s fourth piano concerto with the Toronto Conservatory Symphony Orchestra at Toronto’s Massey Hall.

By 1952 he had given several performances with orchestras in Toronto, Hamilton, and Vancouver; had toured the western provinces, and had given network radio performances for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). That same year he stopped his lessons with Guerrero and partially withdrew from the public eye in order to examine music more carefully and to assess his musical possibilities.

On January 2, 1955, Gould made his United States debut at the Phillips Gallery in Washington, D.C.; a week later he appeared at New York City’s Town Hall. His programs at that time were characterized by a taste for intellectually rigorous music and a conspicuous absence of the 19th-century staples that dominate the repertory of most pianists.

The day after the New York recital Gould was offered a recording contract with Columbia Records - unprecedented considering he had mounted only a single performance in New York City. His first recording, of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, was released in 1956 and became a best-seller.

Gould made his formal conducting debut on CBC TV’s Chrysler Festival on 20 February 1957. In May of that year, he made his European debut as a pianist with a two-week concert tour of Moscow and Leningrad (making him the first Canadian musician, and the first North American pianist, to play in the Soviet Union after the Second World War), followed by performances with the Berlin Philharmonic under conductor Herbert von Karajan, and a recital at the Vienna Festival.

On 26 September 1957, Gould conducted the CBC Vancouver Orchestra in symphonies by Mozart and Schubert, broadcast nationally on CBC Radio. Another highlight of this period includes his recital at Carnegie Hall on 7 December 1957. He returned to Europe the following two summers.

In 1958, he appeared at the Salzburg Festival and, with the Hart House Orchestra under Boyd Neel, at the Brussels World's Fair. He also performed that year in Sweden, Germany, and Italy, made his Boston debut in the Peabody Mason Concerts, gave 11 performances in 18 days in Israel, and gave concerts and lectures at the Vancouver International Festival (1958, 1960-1961).

Although his reputation continued to grow in the 1960s, Gould became increasingly uncomfortable as a concert performer. Gould continued to play concerts for the next seven years, to perform on television, and to lecture both in Canada and the United States. He also began to contribute frequently to periodicals, including High Fidelity, Saturday Review, and Piano Quarterly.

Throughout these years, however, he became increasingly attracted to the recording medium, and in 1964, after an appearance in Chicago, chose to abandon the concert stage altogether in its favor. He offered several reasons for doing so: a dislike of applause and of "being demeaned like a vaudevillian;" a dislike of music suited for a large hall, especially the bravura concertos of Chopin, Liszt, Schumann, and Rachmaninoff; a reluctance to use those devices, such as rubato and exaggerated dynamics, necessary to project the music in a large hall; and what he called "the none-take-twoness of public performances."

Throughout the remainder of his life, Gould explored the prospects of recording. The editing process became a vital and integral part of his musical expression, and he felt that even the splicing of two distinct interpretations showed neither a lack of integrity nor necessarily interrupted the continuity of performance. Eventually, he produced his own recordings.

In 1970, he declined a nomination to the Order of Canada and moved his recording operations to Toronto from New York. He composed the music for the feature film Slaughterhouse-Five (1972) and won the only Grammy award in his lifetime for Best Classical Album Notes for his 1973 album Hindemith: Sonatas for Piano.

During this period, Gould also created four major documentaries on musicians: conductor Leopold Stokowski (1971); cellist Pablo Casals (1974); and composers Arnold Schoenberg (1974) and Richard Strauss (1979). Among the most important CBC TV productions of Gould’s later years were a documentary portrait in the series Telescope (1969), his technologically experimental special The Well-Tempered Listener (1970), his series Music in Our Time (1974-1977), and the documentary Glenn Gould's Toronto in the Cities series (1979).

As he approached age 50, Gould was planning to phase out his career as a recording pianist while fulfilling ambitious plans to make recordings as a conductor. He made his first and only official recording as a conductor (Wagner's Siegfried-Idyll) in the summer of 1982. He also arranged music for the feature film The Wars (1983).

Gould planned to stop recording altogether around 1985, and devote himself to writing and composing. However, on 27 September 1982, a few days after his 50th birthday, and approximately a week after the release of a best-selling second recording of the Goldberg Variations, he suffered a massive stroke and died on 4 October 1982.

Achievements

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  One encounters a wide range of opinions about Glenn Gould. Despite his relatively short concert career and 20-year truancy from the concert hall, and despite the absence from his repertoire of such mainstream piano composers as Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt, Debussy, Bartók, and Stravinsky, he is widely considered one of the greatest (and certainly the most original and idiosyncratic) pianists of the 20th century, particularly in the music of Bach and of Gould's favorite 20th-century composers, such as Schoenberg and Berg. Gould also counted among his admirer's many great performers, conductors, and composers of his day.
  
  Decades after his death, Gould continues to entertain and fascinate, challenge and provoke, as both a personality and artist. The very uniqueness that continues to attract new fans may limit his influence since he was too idiosyncratic to breed literal imitators or lead a movement. It does however seem likely that he will remain a major presence in classical music. Certainly, he has proved to be one of the most important cultural figures Canada has produced.
  
  Among the numerous honors conferred upon him was a lifetime achievement award from the Recording Academy, presented posthumously in 2013. He was also inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame in Toronto in 1998 and designated a National Historic Person in 2012. In 1983, Gould was posthumously inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame.
  
  There is a Glenn Gould Memorial Scholarship Fund at the University of Toronto and a Glenn Gould Professional School at the Royal Conservatory of Music. For a time there was an annual Glenn Gould Lecture in New York, and there have been college-level courses devoted to him in Canada and the United States.
  
  There is also a Glenn Gould Park in Toronto and a Glenn Gould Crescent in Uxbridge, and the City of Toronto has declared the house in which he grew up (32 Southwood Drive) to be a historic site.

Works

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• music

  • Glenn Gould Conducts & Plays Wagner 1990
  • Richard Strauss: Piano Sonata, Op. 5; 5 Piano Pieces, Opl 3 1984
  • Beethoven Sonatas: No. 12 Op. 26 / No. 13 Op. 27, No. 1 1983
  • Johannes Brahms - Glenn Gould: Brahms: Ballades, Op.10, Rhapsodies, Op.79 1983
  • Glenn Gould: A State of Wonder - The Complete Goldberg Variations 1955 & 1981 1982
  • Haydn: The Six Last Sonatas 1982
  • Silver Jubilee Album 1981
  • Beethoven: Piano Sonatas Nos. 1-3, Op. 2 & No. 15, Op. 28 "Pastorale" 1980
  • Bach: Prelude, Fughettas & Fugues 1980
  • Glenn Gould - Bach Toccatas Vol. 2 1980
  • Glenn Gould - Bach Toccatas Vol. 1 1979
  • Das Marienleben for Soprano & Piano 1978
  • Glenn Gould Plays Sibelius 1977
  • Hindemith: Complete Sonatas for Brass and Piano 1976
  • Beethoven: Bagatellen Op 33 & 126 1975
  • Bach The French Suites, Vol 2, Nos 5 and 6 Overture in the French style 1974
  • Glenn Gould Plays His Own Transcriptions of Wagner Orchestral Showpieces 1973
  • Bach: The French Suites: Vol. 1 1973
  • Glenn Gould's First Recordings Of Grieg And Bizet 1973
  • Music From Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five 1972
  • A Consort of Musicke Bye William Byrde and Orlando Gibbons 1971
  • Glenn Gould In Conversation With John McClure 1968
  • Brahms:10 Intermezzi 1961

Religion

Gould was not a member of any organized religion.

Politics

Gould was the first North American pianist to perform behind the Iron Curtain, and his visit was a spectacular success artistically and politically. Privately endorsed, but not officially sponsored by the Canadian government, the tour was organized by Gould's manager, Walter Homburger.

Views

Outside popular music, possibly no artist to date has expanded the technological possibilities of recorded music or explored it's aesthetic and even ethical implications, more than Gould. He believed that his performances were not just readings of pieces of music, but documents that reflected his entire world view. He thought (as had creators in the Romantic era) that artists had a "moral mission," and that art had enormous potential for the betterment of human life.

Gould became a leading exponent among classical performers of a true philosophy of recording, which he passionately defended in articles and broadcasts, and practiced in dozens of albums for Columbia/CBS, developing hands-on expertise in recording techniques.

A studio performer, he felt, need not be concerned with projecting musical effects into an auditorium for the purpose of catching and holding the attention of an audience; rather, he could subject the music to a minute inspection of detail at every structural level. Moreover, he could allow the technology itself - placement of microphones, splicing, overdubbing, reverb, etc. - to influence the interpretation and could defer many final interpretive decisions to the post-production process.

For Gould, the recording had fundamentally altered the traditional relationship of composer, performer, and listener. He justified his interpretive experiments in part by arguing that there was no point in making yet another recording of, for example, the Emperor Concerto, without offering significant departures from conventional readings already available.

Gould produced original, deeply personal, sometimes shocking musical interpretations, often employing extreme tempos, odd dynamics, and even odder phrasing. He had a lifelong, controversial penchant for flouting conventional ideas about the piano and musical interpretation, perhaps exemplified by his fondness for detached articulation (playing without connecting the melody notes).

His wide but highly selective repertoire ranged from Tudor-era virginalists (performed on a kind of harpsichord) to living Canadians and revolved mainly around Bach and Schoenberg, but was conspicuously light on early Romantic music.

He championed esoteric and intellectually challenging modern musical idioms and advocated obscure works by composers like Georges Bizet, Edvard Grieg, Richard Strauss, and Jean Sibelius. He also had a fondness (rare in his day) for playing orchestral and operatic music in transcription. In particular, he offered a dynamic and influential example of the mid-20th-century "high-modernist" approach to the performance of Bach.

Gould’s piano style - lean, refined, rhythmically dynamic, structurally explicit, insistently contrapuntal - was more modernistic than Romantic, though it could still be lyrical and deeply expressive in its own way. As an interpreter, however, he was the ultimate Romantic, often tinkering with the performance markings (occasionally even the notes). He sought fresh perspectives on works through extreme tempos, quirky phrasing and ornamentation, and other interpretive experiments. For these, he was both praised for originality and condemned for eccentricity.

Quotations: "I tend to follow a very nocturnal sort of existence mainly because I don't much care for sunlight. Bright colors of any kind depress me, in fact. And my moods are more or less inversely related to the clarity of the sky, on any given day. A matter of fact, my private motto has always been that behind every silver lining there is a cloud."

"I find myself more genuinely drawn to the essence of Beethoven in Schnabel than I ever have been by anybody."

"I detest audiences. Not in their individual components but en masse... I think they are a force of evil."

"Isolation is the one sure way to human happiness."

"To me, the ideal artist-to-audience relationship is a one-to-zero relationship. The artist should be granted anonymity."

Personality

Glenn Gould is known for his sometimes eccentric performances, wearing gloves, scarf, and overcoat in summer weather; soaking his hands in hot water before playing. He would sit on a piano stool no higher than 12 inches from the floor, with his face barely inches from the keyboard of his instrument. And in his recordings, one can often hear him vocalizing the music that he is playing.

Gould refused to play Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Debussy, and much of the other core piano repertoire, deriding their masterpieces as empty theatrical gestures. He especially disliked Mozart and named the obscure 17th-century English composer Orlando Gibbons as his all-time favorite.

After he left the concert arena, he lived reclusively, speaking with people by telephone, but restricting personal contacts. He did not cut himself off from music - he listened to other artists' recordings - but he cut himself off from the pressures and fashions of the musical world. In some ways, his entire life was an experiment in esthetic isolation.

Quotes from others about the person

• "Glenn brought an extraordinary awareness and imagination - he had a very plastic mind - and he was capable of growing, of changing too. Bach offers a very rich field for differentiation of approaches because he was so unspecific about what he did, in terms of performance. But every time one plays a piece, it’s an opportunity not so much to go where the composer didn’t but to come closer to what one conceives of as being the experience of the composer or the intention of the composer." - Leon Fleisher

Interests

• Electronic technologies, film

• Writers

  The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, The Three-Cornered World by Natsume Soseki

• Artists

  Julian Schnabel

• Music & Bands

  Orlando Gibbons, Ludwig van Beethoven

Connections

Gould lived a private life and never got married, which made people question his sexuality. In 2007, it was reported that in 1956 he met Cornelia Foss, an art instructor, who left her husband and became Gould's lover for several years.

Father:

Russell Herbert Gould

Mother:

Florence Greig Gould

alleged girlfriend:

Cornelia Foss

References

• Glenn Gould Official Site
• Conversations with Glenn Gould One of the most idiosyncratic and charismatic musicians of the twentieth century, pianist Glenn Gould slouched at the piano from a sawed-down wooden stool, interpreting Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart at hastened tempos with pristine clarity.
  1993
• Glenn Gould: A Musical Force Glenn Gould was a prodigy who loathed the word, a brilliant pianist who disliked performing, and a public figure who craved solitude. With his recording of the Goldberg Variations by J.S. Bach, Gould became an international celebrity. Gould's unusual interpretations, quirky stage mannerisms, and teasingly contrarian pronouncements fascinated and annoyed audiences and critics.
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• Remembering Glenn Gould: Twenty Interviews With People Who Knew Him In Remembering Glenn Gould, Eatock brings together a diverse group of people who knew and worked with Gould: musicians, broadcasters, professional associates, writers, and personal friends. Seeking to capture their memories of Gould as directly as possible, Eatock presents them in their own words, in Q&A interviews.
  2012