CELPIP Reading Part 3 Practice Test: Glenn Gould: The Pianist Who Left the Stage

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Few classical musicians have fascinated the public as much as Glenn Gould. Born in Toronto in 1932, Gould showed his talent remarkably early. His mother, a music teacher, gave him his first piano lessons, and he is said to have been able to read music before he could read words. At the age of ten, he began studying at the Toronto Conservatory of Music, and by his early teens he was performing in public, including an appearance with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra at fourteen. Even then, his teachers noticed an unusual independence: the young pianist had firm ideas about how music should sound and was rarely persuaded to change them.

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Gould’s international breakthrough came with his first major recording. In 1955, he chose to record Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations, a long keyboard work that was rarely performed at the time and was considered by many to be too dry for a general audience. Some at his record company wondered whether a little-known Canadian making his debut with such a piece could possibly sell. Their doubts proved unfounded. Released in 1956, the album became one of the best-selling classical recordings of its era, and its bright, energetic playing made Gould a celebrity almost overnight. Invitations followed from concert halls across North America and Europe, and in 1957 he toured the Soviet Union.

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Yet Gould never felt at home on the concert stage. In 1964, at the age of 31 and at the height of his fame, he gave his last public performance and devoted himself to recording, broadcasting and writing. In essays and interviews, he argued that the studio allowed a performer to shape an interpretation with a care that was impossible in front of an audience, and he predicted that the public concert would eventually disappear. His personal habits only added to his reputation. He hummed audibly as he played, sat on a battered folding chair that his father had shortened, and was known for wearing a coat, scarf and gloves even in warm weather.

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Away from the concert hall, Gould found new ways to reach listeners. For CBC Radio he created documentaries such as The Idea of North (1967), in which the voices of several speakers overlap like the lines of a piece of music, a technique he called “contrapuntal radio.” Near the end of his life, he returned to the Goldberg Variations, producing a slower, more reflective recording that was released in 1982. He died that same year, shortly after his fiftieth birthday, following a stroke. His influence has outlived him: a recording of his Bach was included on the golden records carried into space by NASA’s Voyager probes in 1977, and a bronze statue of him sitting on a bench greets visitors outside the CBC Broadcasting Centre in Toronto.