A Romance on Three Legs

 
They say that you can see a faint star better if you don't look right at it but slightly askance, and I've noticed the same is true about a lot of things—they sink into consciousness and stick in memory better when you don't look right at them. A few books that I've read also confirm this belief. For example, I doubt if I'll be reading a full-blown history of England any time soon, but I thoroughly enjoyed A History of England in Fifty Postage Stamps.  And although higher mathematics is an impenetrable subject, Karen Olsson makes it all sound very interesting in The Weil Conjectures, her joint biography of mathematician Andre Weil and his philosopher-sister Simone. And just the other day I finished a third book that I'd place in the same category, A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould's Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano.   

Gould, a piano wunderkind from Toronto, burst onto the scene in the mid-1950s at the age of 22 with a dazzling recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations. A true "crossover" hit, the album sold forty thousand copies and was later chosen the recording of the decade. (I'm listening to it now.) A charming if eccentric personality, Gould had many devotees who were otherwise uninterested in classical music. By the same token, many fans of classical music were unimpressed by his later recordings, especially those in which Gould strayed from the baroque repertoire. To them, Gould's interpretations were odd, his attack on the keys unduly harsh, his incessant humming distracting, and, more generally speaking, his celebrity all out of proportion to his musicianship.

Gould died in 1982, at the age of 50. Yet his "cult" endured, and in2002 a three-CD set of his two versions of the Goldberg Variations, recorded twenty years apart, along with a disc devoted to interviews, sold more than 60,000 copies, dwarfing the sales of any CD by Rubinstein, Horowitz or any other household name in the world of classical piano.

The public fascination with Gould's personality and music remains such that several popular documentaries have been made about him, including 32 Short Films about Glenn Gould (1993) and Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould (2019).

Author Katie Hafner fills in some of the detail regarding Gould's childhood and upbringing in suburban Toronto in the first chapter of this crisp and well-researched portrait, but she soon changes direction, taking us out to the plains of rural Saskatchewan in chapter two to meet a nearly blind farm boy named Verne Edquist. His family was so poor they sent him to a state-run school for the blind, where he learned to tune pianos. It took him a while, but eventually he got pretty good at it.

Young Verne Endquist

Chapter three jumps to the Astoria neighborhood of Queens, where Steinway and Sons in located. Hafner reviews the history of the company, underscoring the radical improvements in construction that help the firm rise to preeminence in the field, while also describing the changing role of the piano in twentieth century American life and how the Steinway marketing techniques influenced that development.

In the course of relating these two stories, Hafner presents us with a large amount of technical information about how pianos are made, how they actually produce the sounds they do, and how various techniques from chipping to bellying to tuning to voicing enhance the sounds that emerge from a Steinway grand piano.

"Any technician knows that a bad voicing job can ruin a set of hammers, but there is also great pride to be had in voicing— because it is in the voicing that a piano maker can have a real in­fluence on the instrument. Voicing gave employees who loved music a chance to indulge their passion, allowing them to im­pose a little of their own musicality on a piano. The sound of a piano can vary dramatically, depending on what the voicer has done. A piano voiced in a mellow tone for the music room of a typical home, for instance, can be swallowed up in a concert hall. And what one person might perceive as mellow, another might hear as weak. This subjectivity—this unquantifiable sense that guides the essential voicing process—is part of what makes each piano distinct, while at the same time it is what creates the characteristic 'Steinway sound.'" 

Gould's "touch" was different from that of most other pianists, and for that reason, he had a difficult time finding a piano that suited his needs. In particular, he was obsessed by the need to have a light, clean, "action." By the time we meet up with the piano of Gould's dreams, Steinway CD318, Hafner has introduced us to Gould, Edquist, Steinway, and the mechanics of a piano; in short, she's given us all the information we need to appreciate the event.

"Striking a key on the piano, however, Edquist, like Gould, knew that there was something about CD 318 that set it apart even from other Steinways. Usually Edquist set his ear for nu­ances in pitch, resonance, and overall quality of tone. It was a dis­passionate approach, but efficient. While Edquist encountered fine Steinways every week, the first few chords he played on 318 got his attention. He was well accustomed to the different quali­ties of fine instruments, but in 318 the tone and the featherlight, fast-repeating action stood out. This was a piano with a soul."

The piano was old. It had been sitting in a backroom of Eaton's department store in Toronto since before the war, and was due to be shipped back to New York and sold. Edquist recognized that CD 318 was a rare creature, but he also knew that it needed a lot of work.

"It had been nearly two years since the piano had gone to New York for a thorough going-over, and now Edquist settled in for a full tuning and regulation. First he gave the piano a quick rough tuning; then he lifted off the key slip, the long, narrow wooden strip in front of the keys. Next he removed the two screws from beneath the treble and bass cheek blocks, the two rectangular blocks at either end of the keyboard. This enabled him to lift the tailboard from the piano, exposing the action mechanism inside. Then he slid the entire sixty-pound action out and onto his lap.

Wearing strong magnifiers pressed against his glasses, he took a small sandpaper file and reshaped each of the eighty-eight hammers, which had been lined with grooves after more than fif­teen years of hitting the strings. Then he adjusted and aligned hundreds of individual action parts. In order to approach those parts from a series of different angles, he moved the action from place to place—onto his lap, then onto a workbench, then back onto his lap. And to test the action as he went, he often slid it back into the piano, then removed it again to make more refine­ments, including voicing and fitting hammers to individual strings so that all three strings of each note would be set in mo­tion at precisely the same time."

Gould played CD 318 on most of his famous recordings, and he also had it shipped from coast to coast during his attenuated career as a concert performer. But that's not to say his issues with pianos were over, by any means. CD 318 needed constant attention. In one humorous episode Gould and an associate drive from Toronto to New York with the piano's action sitting in the back seat, fearful that the customs agents will suspect they're up to no good.

By the time Gould took up the project of redoing the Goldberg Variations, twenty years after the original recording that had brought him worldwide fame, CD 318 was a thing of the past, and Gould was so dissatisfied with the pianos Steinway & Sons had to offer him that he performed it on a  Yamaha.

But I don't want to give away too much. The book reads like a good mystery, which means we follow evident digressions and seemingly incidental events with relish, anchored by the hope of finally identifying the murderer—er, I mean, the hope of finally finding a suitable piano for Gould. Hafner devotes a few pages to Gould's long-running but doomed relationship with the painter Cornelia Foss, during which she exposes a few of his less attractive quirks—his paranoid streak, for example, and his ten-Valium-per-day medical regimen. But these pages also humanize the artist in a way that discussions of keyboard action and performance repertoire do not.

For the most part, her portrait maintains a healthy balance between Gould's unusual personality and his often brilliant musicality. Readers who have never heard a note he played will be taken in by his story, and also, I suspect, by the technical details of the wider industry of musical performance upon which he relied.

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I have been a fan of Gould's work since my undergrad years, drawn by the precision and intensity of his playing and the unusual voices he was able to bring out from the midst of the polyphonic compositions he preferred.  But I must admit that the only recordings of his that I still listen to are the two versions of the Goldberg Variations, his Well-Tempered Clavier sets, the Bach violin duets he recorded with Jamie Laredo, the late-Brahms intermezzi, and the collection of short pieces by Gibbons, Tallis, and other early keyboard masters. Gould approached the chestnuts of the romantic era with an irreverent attitude that sometimes hinted of distain, and he sacrificed a great deal in feeling and rubato in his attempt to unearth new dimensions of expression in Mozart or Beethoven by means of his inimitable attack. 

The notion that he might even consider tackling the loping and dilatory sonatas and fantasies Schubert boggles the mind.