BOOKS: UNRAVELING GLENN GOULD

The Canadian pianist Glenn Gould was a musical genius whose keyboard mastery rivaled–surpassed, he believed–that of Vladimir Horowitz. Yet his extraordinary gifts were tempered, and finally undone, by psychological illness. At the time of his retirement from the concert stage in 1964, at age 31, he was almost as famous for his eccentricities as for his talent. He would sit hunched over the piano in a low rickety chair, his eyes and arms barely higher than the keyboard, occasionally draping one leg casually over the other. He audibly vocalized the music as he played, and often used a free hand to conduct it.

Peter F. Ostwald, who died just after completing his sensitive, penetrating biography Glenn Gould: The Ecstasy and Tragedy of Genius (Norton; 368 pages; $29.95), was ideally equipped to unravel this iridescent enigma. He was not only a psychiatrist who wrote probing, award-winning psychobiographies of composer Robert Schumann and dancer-choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky, but also a talented amateur violinist and Gould’s friend and occasional chamber-music collaborator for more than 20 years.

Gould burst into international prominence at age 24 with his 1955 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. (The recording has never gone out of print, and as with most of Gould’s large discography, it is available on Sony Classical.) His choice of a then largely unfamiliar Baroque composition hinted at Gould’s idiosyncratic temperament (most Romantic composers left him cold). He expressed his iconoclastic ideas not only in his musical choices and interpretations but also in essays and films and as the witty writer and host of numerous TV and radio broadcasts.

His playing was as spectacular as it was distinctive. He had great rhythmic vitality and an affinity for counterpoint. In playing Bach’s elaborate polyphonic music, Gould clearly articulated the simultaneous individual melodic lines, often at astonishing speeds. His performances revealed an active if sometimes perverse musical intelligence of which his fingers seemed to be omnipotent extensions.

His perfectionism was instilled by his mother, his first teacher and closest confidant. Seeking to nurture a great musician, she insisted that “wrong” notes had to be corrected immediately. She also strove zealously to protect her son’s health. Gould later interpreted missed notes, like illness, as character flaws. This helps explain his preference for “sterile” recording studios, where he could both correct errors and avoid germs. It also contributed, Ostwald contends, to Gould’s inability to sustain close relationships and to the severe performance anxieties and phobias that led to his early retirement.

Gould’s “willfulness was not matched by his [childlike] sense of reality,” writes Ostwald. Though his fertile imagination fed his originality as a pianist and essayist–and Gould could be a sparkling conversationalist–his eccentricities masked “deep feelings of anxiety and fragility.” Gould’s “way of persistently engaging in self-centered monologue tended to create distance,” Ostwald notes, “and it struck me that the envelope of heavy clothing he wore also was like a cocoon, sealing him from human contact.”

Ostwald sustains that fine balance between objectivity and intimacy throughout the book, as he explores Gould’s growing torment and his sad decline. Ostwald’s abiding concern for his often exasperating friend, whom he was never able to induce to seek therapy, makes this superb psychological study also a poignant personal memoir.

–By Elliot Ravetz