Leaving the stage, 1964

On 10 April 1964 Gould played at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles: Beethoven’s Sonata No. 30, Op. 109, a selection from Bach’s Art of Fugue, and Hindemith’s Sonata No. 3. It was the last concert he gave in public. He was thirty-one.

The reasons

He gave many, and over the years they hardened into an argument. In a 1966 essay in High Fidelity, The Prospects of Recording, he predicted that the public concert as we know it would no longer exist a century on, its functions taken over by electronic media.

The studio

From then on he worked for the microphone and the camera: Bach and Beethoven, Brahms and Schoenberg, and for the CBC the radio documentaries of the Solitude Trilogy. He edited his own tapes and treated the studio as an instrument.

The photograph above: the bronze of Gould on a bench in front of the CBC building in Toronto, photographed by mtsrs (CC BY 2.0).