A Biography Of Glen Gould: Classical Music's Modern Genius

Perhaps the most influential musician of our time, Glen Gould was a unique and revolutionary pianist, composer, conductor, musical philosopher, and recording engineer. Often a tough pill to swallow, this genius demonstrated eccentric and controversial ways that evolved the performance, production, and sounds of music into what it is today.

The Early Years

Born on September 23, 1932 in Toronto, Canada to a fur dealer and violinist father, Gould demonstrated greatness early. His mother, Emma Grieg Gould, a piano, organ, and voice teacher and cousin to composer Edvard Grieg, noticed that at 3 Glen read sheet music. He also possessed perfect pitch. She immediately began teaching Glen piano and encouraged his creativeness. Three years later, he wrote and performed his first composition.

In 1940, Emma realized he needed more knowledge and started Gould in theory with Leo Smith at the Royal Conservatory of Music. Two years later, Fredrick Sylvester, conductor of Toronto’s Mendelssohn’s Choir, began instructing Glen in organ. Glen became an eager piano student to his mentor and friend Alberto Guerro in 1943.

Sensitive to the cold, Glen constantly wore a tweed jacket and gloves even in Sarasota, Florida where police once arrested him for vagrancy. He frequented “Fran’s Restaurant” eating the same meal of scrambled eggs at the same table almost every night between 2 & 3AM. He continued even though he believed someone was watching and trying to poison him. Glen despised concerts and displays of appreciation from the public. He called it “evil” and wrote a paper entitled “GPAADAK,” which stood for “Gould’s Plan for the Abolition of Applause and Demonstrations of All Kinds.” Glen delighted in reincarnation, life after death, numerology, and contrapuntal poetry.

He spent a lot of time examining society’s popular figures and ideologies regularly speaking against rock and jazz. According to Glen, the Beatles were a disgrace and modern music was ill-fated. He felt the Baroque method of counterpoint, where each voice plays separately, was exemplary to the modern day method of homophony, where all voices moved as one.

His Musical Performances

Critics labeled Gould a prodigy after his first public performance in 1945 and his first solo recital in 1947. Influenced by Leopold Stokowski, Arthur Schnabel, and the recordings of Bach by Rosalyn Tureck, Glen showed unequalled creativity and technical ability. He played certain Romantic and Classical pieces, but Baroque period music was his favorite with an emphasis on Bach.

The piano prodigy demanded consistency. He always used the same chair his father made after Glen suffered a back injury at 10. Glen was pain-free when sitting lower than the keyboard of his beloved Steinway CD318, but it birthed a new technique. Along with his piano teacher, he invented “finger tapping,” which meant pulling down rather than pushing the keys. His fingers moved autonomously of his arm. The notes produced along with alterations to his piano, were concise at extremely fast tempos and matched perfectly with Bach’s compositions and Gould’s style.

Gould saw performances as a communication of his thoughts and opinions, and it absorbed him so much that it was physically apparent. Glen would subconsciously circle clockwise, rock on his chair, conduct an imaginary orchestra, and take imaginary notes from the air while performing and recording. He rarely practiced by playing preferring to read sheet music.

Humming, singing, grunts, and moans accompanied his sweet melodies because his mother told him to sing everything he played. These habits increased as his frustrations grew. Gould often felt the piano was unable to meet his standards especially after the frame cracked after a group of movers dropped it. These noises became so loud and frequent that sound engineers used to gauge how good they were by how well they could edit out the sounds.

Glen liked to share the music of composers rarely heard in North America. These included works by Schoenburg, Hindemith, Strauss, Bizet, and Sibelius. Orlando Gibbons, however, was his favorite.

Other soloists disliked Gould as an accompanist. He was the nightmare of most conductors. They found Gould played over them and improvised to the point they couldn't follow. He also had extreme tempo and dynamic changes and would cancel at the last minute with little explanation. Glen strongly disagreed with common music interpretation and refused to conform. Hemassacred violinist Morry Kerman on October 1954in Toronto (the night after Hurricane Hazel. Bernstein, the New York Philharmonic conductor told his audience that he was not responsible for the quality of the night’s performance with Gould.

Gould's debut orchestral performance was with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra in 1945 and he opened in the USA at the Phillips Gallery in Washington D.C. in 1955. Glen played in the 1953 maiden Stratford Festival, and in 1957, was the first North American musician to perform in the Soviet Union after WWII. He performed for two weeks in Leningrad and Moscow as well as with the Berlin Philharmonic at the Vienna Festival. Glen wrote 12 pieces as well as cadenzas for Beethoven’s “Piano Concerto No. 1,” and variations on a wide variety of works. His most famous piece is his “String Quartet Opus 1.”

Television and Radio Career

His Christmas Eve performance in 1950 at CBC changed his life and career. Gould wandered into the mixing studio and altered the recording. He was in awe making the piece sound exactly the way he dreamed lowering the upper registers and increasing the volume of the lower voices.

Gould gave up live concerts in 1954. He recorded all of Mozart’s works, five Beethoven piano concertos and most of Bach’s compositions. “The Art of Fugue” would be the only organ recording. Later, Gould made recordings as a conductor with “Seigfried Idyll” by Wagner as his last.

The most famous was the 1955 New York City recording of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations.” Audiences love it so much CBS Masterworks re-released it in 1982. In total, it earned several Grammy’s, Juno’s and the “Grand Prix du Disques” award from the L'Académie Charles Cros.

He debuted on television with Lehundi Menuhin in 1965, but the radio’s airwaves continued to beckon. He liked that he could work by himself late at night giving him full control over the final product. He would change the balance and use bits and pieces of different takes to reach his artistic goals. His radio programs focused on various musical ideas and techniques including the Moog Synthesizer, the ins and outs of recording, broadcasting concepts, as well as theories of improvisation and spontaneous music.

Gould liked hearing many voices at the same time (contrapuntal). One of his famous contrapuntal radio programs was “Solitude Trilogy.” It includes “The Quiet in the Land” that focused on Manitoba’s Mennonites, “The Idea of the North,” which looked at the culture, people, and land of Canada’s North, and “The Latecomers,” which examined Newfoundland’s people and culture.

Glen Gould was well-known for his written words as well. Along with many papers dissecting common music philosophies, he created “liner notes” and interviews in which he would write both the questions and the answers. These would appear between and after recording sessions. Glen created alter egos such as “Theodore Slutz” and “Karl Klopweisser” in order to analyze his own work.

Glen passed away on October 4, 1982 after suffering a stroke. He was buried in Toronto’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery. His chair remains as a quiet reminder of the genius sitting in a glass case at the National Library of Canada.

The musical genius was always conscious of his anxieties, idiosyncrasies, and differences. However, he forced classical music to open its boundaries. The entire world received a unique glimpse into the mind of a genius through every word and note. These gifts were as revolutionary as the man himself. The only regret Glen Gould ever voiced was not finishing his radio work on Wagner and Bach, which he had been translating into spoken word.