Glenn Gould (1932–1982) was a Canadian pianist, born and brought up in Toronto. He entered the Toronto Conservatory at ten, studied piano with Alberto Guerrero, and passed his final piano examination at twelve with the highest marks.

In January 1955 he made his American debut in Washington and New York, and that June he recorded Bach’s Goldberg Variations for Columbia. Released the following January, the record made his name. In 1957 he played in Moscow and Leningrad, the first North American pianist to visit the Soviet Union since the war.

On 10 April 1964, at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles, he gave his last public concert. For the eighteen years that remained he worked for the microphone and the camera: recordings of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and Schoenberg, and CBC radio documentaries built like fugues, the Solitude Trilogy. He sat at a low folding chair his father had made and, for most of his recordings, at a Steinway known as CD 318. His essays were gathered after his death in The Glenn Gould Reader.

In 1981 he recorded the Goldberg Variations again, slower, as one long arc. He died in Toronto on 4 October 1982, at fifty.

This is a demo site, a tribute built to show what a musician’s page on TJP can hold. Its dates are the demo’s own.

Projects

The Goldberg Variations
Recorded twice, in June 1955 and in April and May 1981: the first quick and bright, the second slow and drawn as one long arc.
The studio, from 1964
After his last recital he worked only for the microphone and the camera, for Columbia and for CBC radio and television.
The Solitude Trilogy
Three radio documentaries for the CBC, The Idea of North, The Latecomers and The Quiet in the Land, with voices layered like the lines of a fugue.
The chair and the piano
The folding chair his father made, fourteen inches off the floor, and the Steinway CD 318 he found at Eaton Auditorium in 1960. Pictured: a replica of the chair, Paris, 2007.