A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould's Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano Hardback - 2008

Excerpt

And then there was the piano, which the National Library had decided to purchase from Gould’s estate. An eight-foot-eleven-and-one-quarter-inch Steinway concert grand, it was known as CD 318 (C to signify its special status as having been put aside for the use of Steinway concert artists, and D denoting it as the largest of Steinway’s pianos). Like every Steinway piano, it bore its own serial number: 317194. Helmut Kallmann, the head of the library’s music division, oversaw the delivery of CD 318 and later described how all 1,325 pounds of it were unloaded by three expert burly movers and unceremoniously deposited in the ground-floor lobby of the library. They untied the straps, removed the pads, attached the legs, requested a signature, and left.

A musician himself, Kallmann was a devotee of Gould’s work. In the 1960s, he had occasionally crossed paths with Gould at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, where Kallmann supervised the music library. Gould showed up from time to time to pick up musical scores and often stopped to chat. The pianist’s eccentricities were always evident, as was his charm. Gould once endeared himself to Kallmann by asking, “What key do you think my personality is in?”

Like most Gould fans, Kallmann was familiar with the pianist’s legendary Chickering, a one-hundred-year-old small grand that Gould had famously adored. But when it came time to purchase one of Gould’s pianos for the National Library’s permanent collection, Kallmann and his colleagues in the music division knew it had to be CD 318, the piano that had seen Gould through nearly every recording of his career.

Steinway had made many beautiful instruments over the years–not just the classic ebonized concert grands, but also a number of art-case pianos. Among the best-known are an elaborate white-and-gilt decorative piano made for Cornelius Vanderbilt, with paintings of Apollo surrounded by cherubs, and a piano created for the White House, with legs formed of carved eagles. For the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, Steinway had built a tortoiseshell decoration surmounted by a candelabrum. For the oil magnate E. L. Doheny, the company designed a gilded piano in a Louis XV style with carved legs and elaborate moldings. Even Steinway’s standard-issue polished-ebony concert grands were stately and handsome, if also austere.

Not so this instrument.

The piano that arrived in the early afternoon at the loading bay behind the library, its black case scratched and dented, the lid slightly out of alignment and disfigured by visible gouges, looked every bit the orphan. The archivists in Ottawa knew that this tired-looking instrument had been Gould’s favorite concert grand. And they knew that there had once been an accident that had for a time rendered the piano all but unplayable. But that was all they knew.

One evening shortly after the piano’s arrival, after everyone else had left for the day and he was sure he was alone, Kallmann sat down at CD 318 and played on it a bit. He was first taken aback, and then impressed, by the instrument’s extreme responsiveness, its improbably light touch. No wonder Gould, whose musicianship was so closely tied to his dexterity, had been so attached to it. Kallmann suddenly felt as if he understood something crucial about the great pianist and the piano he had loved. During Gould’s lifetime, fans had speculated that the piano he used must have been altered in some extraordinary way, perhaps rigged with special equipment that would make it possible for Gould’s fingers to fly as fast as they did. But Kallmann closely examined the instrument and found nothing out of the ordinary, no piano equivalent of a warp drive. Using ordinary tuning and regulating tools, a piano technician had managed to give the piano its hair-trigger action. Kallmann marveled: That must have been some technician.

Kallmann took it upon himself to investigate CD 318’s provenance. One of the first telephone calls he placed was to the T. Eaton Company, the large Toronto department store whose piano department had been responsible for the instrument for nearly three decades before Gould had purchased it in 1973. Kallmann was directed to Muriel Mussen, who had recently retired from Eaton’s after more than thirty years working in the piano department, where she was in charge of choosing from among a stable of large grands for visiting concert artists.

Oh, yes, said Mussen when Kallmann explained why he was calling. CD 318. And Glenn Gould. Of course. The piano, she said, had come to Eaton’s around 1946, and for years famous pianists who came through Toronto in the course of a concert tour had played on it. But as the piano had aged, it had lost its appeal. In fact, in the 1950s, concert pianists began to complain about it. And in 1960, just as Eaton’s was preparing to dispose of it–by which she meant that the company planned to ship it back to Steinway in exchange for a newer instrument–Glenn Gould chanced upon it.

From the moment he lifted the fallboard, Gould was smitten. He had been famously fussy about his pianos and spent years rejecting most factory-issue Steinways. But here was a piano whose qualities just happened to be ideally aligned to his particular style of playing. Before long, he was playing on CD 318 exclusively. That piano, Mussen observed, came to be as eccentric as Glenn Gould himself, coddled and tweaked and regulated by Mr. Gould’s principal technician–a man Muriel Mussen referred to simply as Verne–to achieve the supremely responsive keyboard action that Gould required. She explained that Gould grew so attached to CD 318, and became so fearful of unfamiliar pianos, that he insisted on taking it with him for important concerts. Later, after he stopped performing in public, he made nearly all his recordings on CD 318.

Once, Mussen recalled, in the course of extolling the virtues of this piano, Gould told her something about his relationship to CD 318 that she would never forget: “This is the first time in history,” he said, “that there has ever been a romance on three legs.”

Media reviews

“Hafner has clarified some old mysteries and turned up many fresh details, even some genuinely newsworthy scoops.”
— Kevin Bazzana, author of Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould

This book is about the oldest human intoxicant, the quest for perfection. Katie Hafner describes in fascinating detail the entire human apparatus — teachers, tuners, piano builders, sound engineers, impresarios — that made possible Glenn Gould's singular art. With the narrative force of fiction she explores the uncertain territory where unbridled artistic imagination meets the limits of an instrument, and shows us the emotional costs."
— Thad Carhart, author of The Piano Shop on the Left Bank

“Plucky New York Times correspondent Hafner …weaves together three stories — of the pianist, the tuner and the piano itself — into a single cohesive narrative, the musical version of Seabiscuit…. Drawing on hours of recorded interviews, she filters out the redundant and inconsequential to lucidly grasp the essential: the complex interaction among an artist, a craftsman and the precious tool they both revered. Written with authority and enthusiasm, a treat for armchair musicologists, Gould fanatics and even those who never heard a note he played."
— Kirkus

“[An] evocative, detailed account of the compulsive search for a sensitive, highly responsive concert piano by Canadian musical wunderkind Glenn Gould….Hafner presents a fascinating biography of Gould…. The book will greatly appeal to those intrigued by the history of the influential German-bred Steinway piano company, but it is the close interaction of Gould and Charles Verne Edquist, the nearly blind piano tuner, with a Steinway CD 318 concert piano, that lift the book above the usual biography….”
— Publishers Weekly

“Reading Hafner on Gould is sometimes as much fun as listening to him play. And that’s saying a lot.”
— Newsweek

“Hafner’s book belongs to that gee-whiz genre perfected by writers such as John McPhee, Susan Orlean and Mary Roach…. A Romance on Three Legs is a source of delight and illumination.”
— San Francisco Chronicle