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Nov 29, 2009 · Christopher Foss's mother, said to be Glenn Gould's most important love interest, left his father for the famed pianist, but later returned. Their story is part of a new Gould documentary.
- Sarah Hampson
Glenn Herbert Gould[fn 1] (/ ɡuːld /; né Gold; [fn 2] 25 September 1932 – 4 October 1982) was a Canadian classical pianist. He was among the most famous and celebrated pianists of the 20th century, [1] renowned as an interpreter of the keyboard works of Johann Sebastian Bach. His playing was distinguished by remarkable technical ...
Artur Schnabel, Rosalyn Tureck and Leopold Stokowski were all early influences on the teenage Glenn Gould. By the early 1950s he was known across Canada through his many concert appearances as well as CBC Radio and Television broadcasts.
- Gramophone
With his groundbreaking Bach and idiosyncratic personality, Glenn Gould was one of the 20th century's most captivating performers. Humphrey Burton remembers.
- Early Years and Education
- Early Career, 1944–50
- Emerging Career, 1950–55
- Touring and Concert Career, 1956–64
- Broadcasting and Recording Career, 1964–82
- Retirement Plans and Death
- Beliefs About Recording
- Repertoire and Style
- Eccentricities and Lifestyle
- Gould The Writer
Glenn Gould was raised in the Beach neighbourhood of Toronto (the city has designated his childhood home a historic site), with long sojourns at his family’s cottage near Lake Simcoe. Both his parents sang. His father, a furrier, played the violin as a child, and his mother — whose grandfather was a cousin of the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg — p...
Gould exhibited tremendous talent and proficiency as a pianist, but his life was not that of a child prodigy. His public appearances with the TCM and the Kiwanis festivalsearned him his first serious attention as a pianist. He participated in his first radio broadcast (for CFRB, on 10 March 1945) with other Kiwanis Festival winners, and gave his fi...
Gould made his CBC Radio debut on 24 December 1950, playing Mozart's Sonata K. 281 and Paul Hindemith's Sonata No. 3 on a piano with a heavy, dark bass. While preparing the recording of the performance for broadcast, he experienced something of an epiphany. He found that by suppressing the bass and boosting the treble, he could make the piano sound...
For the next nine years, Gould toured annually throughout North America. Highlights included a performance at Massey Hall on 16 April 1956, at which he received an engraved watch from the City of Toronto. His only major composition, the long, one-movement String Quartet (written 1953–55), was first performed by the Montréal String Quarteton CBC's F...
While Gould's live concert career wound down, his radio and TV recitals and documentaries were becoming more innovative and sophisticated as he explored beyond the limits of the conventional broadcast recital. In the early 1960s, he began giving radio and TV recitals that were unified thematically or tied together with his own spoken commentary. He...
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 sto...
Outside popular music, possibly no artist to date has expanded the technological possibilities of recorded music, or explored its 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 th...
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 witho...
During his concert days, Gould noted that European critics wrote about his interpretations, while those in North America wrote more about his eccentricities. In his later years, a growing Gould legend was fed by reports of his personal eccentricities and lifestyle. He lived modestly and alone (he never married), guarded his private life jealously, ...
Gould published dozens of pieces of writing on a wide range of subjects (not all of them musical), including articles, program notes for concerts, liner notes for more than 20 of his albums, lectures, reviews, letters to the editor and humour. He received a Grammy Award in 1973 for the liner notes he wrote for his album Hindemith: Sonatas for Piano...
Oct 4, 2024 · Kevin Bazzana begins his biography of Gould with a prelude recounting what he calls the “cottage industry” that grew around the pianist posthumously and continues to this day, comprised of record re-releases, biographical books and other media, and pilgrimages to important places in his life.
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Sep 30, 2024 · Glenn Gould was a Canadian pianist known for his contrapuntal clarity and brilliant, if often unorthodox, performances. Gould studied piano from the age of 3, began composing at 5, and entered the Royal Conservatory of Music of Toronto at 10, earning its associate degree in 1946.
