Glenn Gould: The Ecstasy and Tragedy of Genius

National Review, August 11, 1997 by Richard Brookhiser

Glenn Gould: The Ecstasy and Tragedy of Genius, by Peter F. Ostwald (Norton, 368 pp., $29.95)

Mr. Brookhiser is a senior editor at NR.

GLENN Gould, the eccentric Canadian pianist, died in 1982, but his cult lives on. When my wife and I went to a screening of a movie about him a few years ago, a man in the row ahead of us was showing off pictures he had taken of Gould's gravestone. The fan was also wearing gloves (Gould, terrified of catching cold, wore them when he wasn't playing, no matter what the weather). There aren't many movies about Rubinstein or Horowitz, and no one who went to one would go in costume.

In 1989, Otto Friedrich, a journalist with Time, published Glenn Gould: A Life and Variations, a solid biography. Peter Ostwald comes from a different angle: a violinist and a psychiatrist, he met Gould after a concert in 1957 and saw him off and on over the next twenty years. Ostwald played with him, collaborated with him, and got many midnight phone calls from him. He is careful not to call himself Gould's friend; Gould didn't have any friends.

Glenn Gould was born in Toronto in 1932, the only child of a furrier and a woman who had wanted to be an opera singer. When Florence Gould was pregnant, she sang, played the piano, and listened to records and the radio, in the hope that her fetus would acquire a taste for music. It must have worked. She started teaching Glenn to play when he was three. He became a prodigy, then a local celebrity. He burst into the wider world in 1956, with a recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations -- a recording which has never gone out of print, and which must be one of the best-selling classical recordings ever. In performance, writes Ostwald, "Gould became ecstatic, his expression one of rapture, his eyes closed or turned inward, and his hands caressing the keyboard as if he were making love." He pulled "his spectators into psychological orbits both close to him and far away, in some ethereal space."

His oddity was as pronounced as his talent. He put his pianos up on blocks and sat on a low stool (made for him by his father), so that his face was inches away from the keys. He sang as he played, often quite audibly. He thought audiences were out to get him, and he often canceled concerts, giving them up entirely after 1964 to play only in studios, where he could be safe. Clever and articulate, he loved to talk, but only in monologues, usually over the phone. "He shacked up with a broad for about a year, some conductor's wife," his accountant told Ostwald ungallantly. "I know, because I saw the expenses." But nothing ever came of this or his few other affairs. He believed he was prey to a host of ailments, mostly imaginary, and he consumed cabinets of pills, whose bad effects were not imaginary. Ostwald asked another psychiatrist friend of Gould's if he had ever suggested that Gould get his head examined. "Never in a million years. . . . It would have been the end of our friendship" (such as it was).

Dr. Ostwald does some examining at a distance. He is best on Gould's relationship with his mother, who was clearly a major source of his blessings and his frailties.

As soon as Glenn was able to sit up, his mother would take him to the piano. . . . She sang while playing [and] would encourage his tiny hands to reach out and grope those shiny black and white levers. . . . This may be the origin of Glenn's future posture when playing. His need to be very close to the piano would recall the warm feelings and earlier proximity of both mother and instrument.

But there was also something cold about Mrs. Gould. "She was very didactic and precise," one of her piano students recalled. "No faking, and it was ruler across your fingers if you made a mistake." Gould projected this side of his mother onto his supposedly hostile audiences, and perpetuated it in his own perfectionism.

If ecstasy and tragedy come from the same place, are they the same thing? Virtuosos often capitalize on their appearance or their behavior -- if Chopin had looked and acted like Jackie Mason, he would not have been Chopin -- and Gould's eccentricities certainly helped his reputation. His mannerisms, and some of his antics, seemed like lesser manifestations of the rapture that suffused his playing. Gould may also have stimulated in his admirers a touch of the unconscious sense of superiority that the crazy Australian David Helfgott provokes. Helfgott fans think they are admiring a triumph of the human spirit, but they are also admiring themselves: I can't play the piano, but at least I'm not a nut.

But was madness a necessary element of Gould's talent? Is it of any talent? Ostwald doesn't address the question. Surely the answer is no. Except perhaps for actors (who assume other identities) and dancers (who use their bodies as instruments), the level of craziness among creative people is no higher than among everyone else. Expressing a talent requires study and work, but it is no harder than many other jobs, and it is more interesting.