I don’t know the first thing about piano, but The canny madness of a remarkable man and his musical talent amused me:
Vladimir Horowitz once observed that there were three kinds of pianists — Jewish pianists, homosexual pianists and bad pianists. Over the years Glenn Gould (1932-1982) has sometimes been thought to belong in all three categories. His father, a prosperous Canadian furrier, changed the family name from Gold to Gould; many admirers have assumed that the reclusive musician — hypersensitive, fussy, and in his youth almost effeminately pretty — must have been a closeted gay; and at one time or another nearly all his recordings have been derided as perverse in tempo, willfully disdainful of the composer’s intentions, and marred or ruined by Gould’s quite noticeable humming. To this day, that Bible of classical music, the Penguin Guide, seldom bestows more than two stars on Glenn Gould CDs and nearly always points out that his renditions of, say, Beethoven’s late sonatas will appeal only to committed fans. One can tell that the Penguin critics privately regard such fans as essentially insane cultists.In fact, as musicologist Kevin Bazzana shows in this authoritative, beautifully composed biography, Gould was English-Irish and not at all Jewish, enjoyed several heterosexual love affairs (one quite serious, with a married woman), and was judged by Sviatoslav Richter — arguably the greatest all-round pianist of the latter half of the 20th century — as nothing less than a genius of the keyboard.