GLENN GOULD

Virtuoso, recluse, germaphobe, Glenn Gould is a style icon, copied everywhere, equalled nowhere.

At eight years old, he entered the conservatory, graduating six years later with the best mark.
Young, frail, he wears vests, revealing billowing white sleeves.
Poplin grows paler, flannel darker: the young prodigy leaves all his clothes drenched in sweat. The trousers heave, the jackets float. He cultivates his asceticism, keeps one button open, and never straightens his hair.

He plays Beethoven in concert, Bach in four days. On the cover, thirty Glenn Goulds in a white shirt: thoughtful, precise, baroque.

His impresario takes him to the Soviet Union: Gould takes Bach, white tie, and dons a scarf he does not remove for the next two hundred and fifty-three concerts. Then in 1964, at the age of thirty-one, he retires.

He lives in a hotel room, doesn’t telephone until midnight, turns caustic, is called a mystic.

In the studio, the pianist-turned-arranger devotes himself to the study of counterpoint. The intellectual Edward Saïd defines it as follows: ‘In counterpoint, a melody is always being repeated by another voice: the result is music that is horizontal rather than vertical. Any series of notes is then capable of an infinite set of transformations, the voices constantly continuing to resonate against each other as well as with each other'.

His hypochondria makes him accumulate layers: a Chesterfield, then two. A beret, then a winter hat. The trousers’ hems become sedate, the jackets thicker: herringbone, twill. One whim: mittens so as not to compromise his touch.

In 1981, he decides to re-record the Goldberg Variations. His 1955 playing seemed to him ‘unrecognisable: for me, this piece today has an intensity without any false glamour. Not a pianistic or instrumental intensity, a spiritual intensity'. It is his last album: Glenn Gould dies on October 4th 1982. On the cover of this new version, he is wearing navy trousers, a navy shirt and a navy jacket. Always with one button open, he is alone.