Glenn Gould made Bach speak in crystalline counterpoint
Canadian pianist Glenn Gould (1932–1982) became a twentieth-century legend for Bach playing of startling clarity and control. He largely refused Chopin-to-Rachmaninoff Romantic staples, favoring Bach, Beethoven, selected moderns and even Byrd, Sweelinck and Gibbons.
Glenn Gold, as he was born, grew up in Toronto's Beaches district, the only child of Presbyterian parents; the family quietly switched to Gould around 1939. His mother, a distant relative of Edvard Grieg, played music to him before he was born and taught him piano, and family lore says he hummed as a baby instead of crying. Hearing Josef Hofmann live at six left him imagining himself as the great pianist on the drive home. He first played in public at five, before about 2,000 people at a church service in Uxbridge, Ontario.
At ten he entered the Toronto Conservatory, studying piano with Alberto Guerrero, and at twelve passed its final piano exam with the top marks of any candidate. Guerrero taught him to learn pieces by reading rather than at the keyboard, and Gould later claimed he rarely practised, though evidence suggests he sometimes drilled hard. He sat unusually low at the instrument, which gave him extra control, and had his recording piano adjusted for a shallower, quicker action.
His American debut, at the Phillips Collection in Washington on 2 January 1955, drew a Washington Post critic to predict no finer recital that year. The same year his recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations made him famous worldwide. In 1957 he became the first North American to play in the Soviet Union since the Second World War, programming Schoenberg and Berg, whose serial music had been suppressed there, and he played Beethoven with Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic.
He distrusted what he called hedonistic showmanship in performance, and he told interviewers the piano was simply the best vehicle for his ideas rather than an instrument he loved. Away from the concert hall he made scripted television programmes and wrote prolifically for music journals.
Source: Glenn Gould
