"A Romance on Three Legs": An eccentric pianist and his grand affair

"A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould's Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano"

by Katie Hafner

Bloomsbury, 259 pp., $24.99

In 1955, a recording of J.S. Bach's "Goldberg Variations" by 23-year-old Canadian pianist Glenn Gould set the world on its ear. It would become the most popular classical solo-instrumental album ever, selling an astonishing 1.8 million copies.

To be sure, Columbia Records' promotional efforts shrewdly played upon Gould's eccentricities: the artist's trademark winter clothes (for the June session), myriad pills, bottled spring water and, always, his battered "pygmy chair," that low-set, cushionless old seat upon which Gould interpreted some of the greatest piano music in the Western canon.

But Gould was for real. His technique combined dazzling speed and a level of voice articulation that Bach's keyboard music demands but doesn't always receive. Add to those elements an austere though entirely human musicality, and Gould converted people who never thought they liked classical music, let alone Bach.

Central to Gould's music-making was his choice of pianos, the most renowned being a 1942 Steinway D concert grand, known as CD 318, whose full and translucent sound, along with its effortless action, won over Gould.

From the wealth of information already known about Gould, New York Times writer Katie Hafner teases out this "romance" between the artist and his instrument. Hafner, who writes on technology and society, seems an odd fit for her subject, but she tells a good story of Gould and CD 318, and of the blind technician, Verne Edquist, who helped keep that partnership a productive one.

There was Gould's unconventional youth, which wasn't incompatible with a life of supreme music-making. There was Edquist's boyhood of privation in rural Saskatchewan, and his remarkable path to Gould's recording sessions. And there was CD 318, which traveled from the Steinway factory to Toronto's Eaton's department store to performance venues across the continent.

The irony of this romance is that Gould's signature recordings, the 1955 "Goldberg Variations" and the bookend 1981 rerecording of the "Variations" at the end of Gould's life, were not performed on the artist's beloved CD 318 but rather on another Steinway D and a Yamaha grand, respectively — fine instruments but probably not the equal of the CD 318 in Gould's mind.

Among several lessons from Hafner's book, I was reminded of this one: that the quest for perfection is a worthy one. But in the absence of perfection, greatness is still to be found.