In his own liner notes for the album, Gould considers Bach’s compositions “one of the monuments of keyboard literature” and his attempt at mastering it would consume his life. Gould’s essay is almost as impenetrable as the man himself. Writing in a detached voice, Gould describes the music as if it simply appears, with him at the keyboard, an unwitting conduit for the expression of Bach’s compositions. In fact, Gould’s ultimate goal in music—and in his life as well, as many of his friends and contemporaries would attest—was to disappear entirely into the work.

His essay about his own recording of the Variations concludes that it is music that achieves “unity through intuitive perception, unity born of craft and scrutiny, mellowed by mastery achieved, and revealed to us here, as so rarely in art, in the vision of subconscious design exulting upon a pinnacle of potency.” It’s that phrase “revealed to us” where one can begin to understand the particular genius of Glenn Gould. He is as much an audience to the music as the patrons who fill the concert halls to hear him perform.

Born in 1932, his parents would sit him at the family piano—in their modest two-story brick home in Toronto—where the child would play for hours. It’s not surprising, then, that Gould could read music before he could understand words. But it wasn’t until he began studying at the Toronto Conservatory of Music, where he met Alberto Guerrero, that Gould began to see what he could bring to the work he revered. It was this mentorship that forever cemented Gould’s unique style of tapping. Encouraged by Guerrero to use flattened fingers, his student was instructed to never lift them from the keyboard. This technique, taught to many of Guerrero’s students, was mastered by Gould, which he would eventually transform into his own signature technique.

Gould also didn’t act like a classical pianist. In a famous portrait, taken by Don Hunstein in 1961, Gould sits in a gilded chair, legs crossed, staring at the camera, with hands folded in such a way as to suggest this is his best attempt at looking like a proper pianist. He would retreat from public performance only three years later. Maybe it was the ornate chair’s fault, making him feel like an imposter.

Glenn Gould cared deeply about chairs—one chair in particular. Gould’s infamous chair has been the subject of much speculation, especially from other pianists. Instead of the brooding genius atop a tufted French armchair as depicted in his 1961 portrait, Gould always performed on a creaky wooden folding chair he customized along with his father’s help. A cheap chair, taken from a set used for card-playing, he sawed the legs down so that he would be seated no more than fourteen inches off the ground.

The chair wobbled when he sat on its edge and kept his knees higher than his backside. It was this position that allowed him to approach the piano from a low enough angle to expand upon the flat-handed tapping technique he had learned from Guerrero. The chair followed him for decades, shipped around the world for performances and rehearsals and recordings. It now sits by itself, on display at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. 

Eccentricity is often a precursor to becoming a recluse. If others find you odd, the easiest route is to avoid them. Yet, Gould was surprisingly garrulous, opinionated, funny, sarcastic, and, yes, strange. He had a small cadre of close friends that “you could count on one hand,” and cut a unique figure, wearing a long, dark overcoat, scarf, and a low-brim newsboy cap no matter the weather.

Protective of his most valuable tools, he avoided shaking anyone’s hands for fear of germs and damage to his fingers, and could often be found soaking them if they weren’t sheathed in leather gloves. Yet, there is a wealth of film footage that reveals him to be both charming and silly, even if a bit performative as a defense posture. He was uneasy in groups, enjoyed solitude, and was never able to open himself up enough to others and have a family of his own.

At the age of 31, renowned enough to embark on projects outside of performing, he created an innovative documentary radio program that captured his fascination with the farthest reaches of northern Canada. His interest in the vast expanses of white snow was certainly related to his own ideas of solitude, but he also was interested in learning new recording technology which he explored while making a series of radio shows. He started to prefer the studio to the stage.

“I detest audiences,” Gould once told an interviewer. “They are a force of evil. It seems to me to be the rule of mob law.” As Gould retreated from public life, his fascination with splicing recordings together became another route for his pursuit of ever-elusive perfection. A scene in the documentary, Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould (2009), shows the increasingly controlling Gould actually placing his hands on his recording engineer’s hands, conducting and mixing the recordings by quite literally grabbing the controls as the music pours from the speakers.

Gould’s life would be bookended by yet another attempt at recording Bach’s Goldberg Variations in 1981. Both versions, to this day, have divided listeners—those who prefer the older, more self-assured Gould; others who like the youthful risk of his original; and, yes, detractors to this day who think he has done a disservice to Bach’s compositions by imbuing them with overwhelming intensity and the pursuit of an impossible purity of sound.

For the better part of 70 years, since Gould first introduced himself to the wider world with his original recording of the Goldberg Variations, his legend has only grown deeper. The Criterion Collection recently added the experimental portrait, Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, to its enviable library of films. Directed by François Girard, the biopic mixes documentary interviews along with imagined scenes and animated sequences, emulating the peripatetic mind of its subject. The Loser, a 1983 novel by Thomas Berhard, is narrated by a fictional prodigy studying alongside Gould, learning the hard way that being born at the same time as a genius will always reduce even the very best to second fiddle.

Gould enjoyed long walks in nature, sometimes waving his arms at a waterfall as if he were conducting earth itself, mumbling along with his playing in a habit he never outgrew from childhood, and often visited his family’s cottage at Lake Simcoe, far away from his newfound fame. He was alone onstage and in life. His playful demeanor in front of cameras belied a certain anguish, a contradiction—that his determination to perform required his full self under a spotlight, when all he really wanted anyone to see was the music he heard.

“I couldn’t imagine a life in which I wouldn’t be surrounded by music,” Gould mused. “It shelters you from the world, which protects you, and keeps you at a certain distance from the world. The only advantage that any artist has is that distance from the world.”