NONFICTION
Gould made his name as the perfectionist pianist
By Mary Kunz Goldman
NEWS BOOK REVIEWER
Updated: 06/29/08 7:41 AM
It’s endlessly entertaining, the madness of Glenn Gould. No matter how often you read about the eccentric pianist, the stories never grow old.
The people behind “A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould’s Quest for the Perfect Piano” must know this, because on the back cover, before even mentioning a piano, they immediately remind us of a few of the dandies: Gould wore a hat and gloves on the hottest days, he refused to shake hands for fear of germs, he traveled around with that beat-up chair.
Surely Gould vies with Oscar Levant for the title of World’s Weirdest Pianist.
Gould can even take credit for the weird title of this book. He was obsessed with pianos and their physical workings, and “a romance on three legs” was what he called his beloved grand piano, Steinway CD 318.
We live in the golden age of piano reporting. No other era in history, I am sure, has seen so much literature about how pianos, particularly Steinways, are made. I have waded through so much of it that I could probably build a Steinway myself in my basement if I had to. So as I read this book, I found myself skimming over big blocks of technical text.
Many parts of the book, though, I actively enjoyed. The hoops Steinway and Sons had to jump through to placate the weird Gould were nothing short of incredible.
One memo he sent Steinway read: “If last night was a success it was only because I conjured myself into a semi-trance by continuously murmuring — I’m playing the Chickering, I’m playing the Chickering, I’m playing the Chickering.” (In case there are any piano novices left on earth, Chickering is a rival piano maker.)
There was the fateful day William Hupfer, then Steinway’s chief technician, made a terrible mistake. You couldn’t shake Gould’s hand, because he hated germs. So Hupfer patted him on the shoulder.
“Don’t do that,” Gould said. “I don’t like to be touched.”
It’s painful enough to imagine Hupfer’s embarrassment. But things got worse. Gould canceled concerts, then a whole tour. He complained, Hafner writes, that the cancellations “were doubly unfortunate due to the fact that the injury was sustained in your hallowed offices and from the hands of one of your employees.”
Everyone was afraid to put his foot down and tell Gould the problem was in his head. Gould began wearing a cast, then a sling and a cervical collar. After a misleading lull, he slapped Steinway and Hupfer with a massive lawsuit.
Frightened, Henry Z. Steinway went to negotiate with Gould in the pianist’s stifling hot hotel room. To his astonishment, Gould said he’d drop the suit if Steinway paid his doctor bills, which amounted to less than $1,000. Hafner explains: “What mattered to Gould was that Steinway & Sons simply acknowledge that he had in fact been injured — and that they make him whole on the fees he had been forced to pay as a result of Hupfer’s pat.”
But... but had Hupfer hurt him? You have to sympathize with the poor technician. “I never hit that
man,” Hupfer told an interviewer years later. “But I certainly would like to take a good punch at him now for being such a lowdown rat.”
That’s the sort of story this book is good for, though my enjoyment was eventually tempered by the feeling that Gould was catered to a bit too much. He was like an overgrown kid, it seemed. Once in a while, he needed to be swatted — on purpose, not by accident.
You have to wait until late in the book to find my favorite story.
That’s the part about Gould’s affair with Cornelia Foss, the wife of conductor Lukas, who was then music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. This story broke only a few months ago, and this book has to be one of the first to include it.
An unforgettable drama took place in the Foss’ Buffalo driveway.
After years of indecision, in 1968 Cornelia finally made up her mind to leave Lukas and move to Toronto. She put her son and daughter, ages 10 and 6, into the family station wagon along with the cat, and prepared to make a new life with Gould in Toronto. But Lukas, she recalled, wasn’t so convinced of her resolve. While Cornelia sat in the car he stood in the driveway, smiling. “I said, ‘Why are you smiling? I’m leaving you, for heaven’s sake. I’m going to go off and marry Glenn,’ ” she recalled. “And he said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, you’re not going to marry Glenn. Have a good time. I’ll see you next weekend.”
Why couldn’t the whole book have been about Gould’s relationship with Cornelia Foss?
How about a sequel?
A Romance on Three Legs:
Glenn Gould’s Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano By Katie Hafner
Bloomsbury 249 pages, $24.99
Mary Kunz Goldman is the News’ Classical Music Critic. mkunz@buffnews.com
