Yet that was just the start of the Gould myth. He died shortly after his 50th birthday, on 4 October 1982. He was also an eccentric hypochondriac, whose obsessive personality traits (he wore an overcoat and gloves no matter the temperature, and insisted on playing on the same ancient, battered chair) were exacerbated in his final years by cocktails of antidepressants and anxiety-suppressing pills that were, ironically, more harmful to him than helpful.
His ideas on editing were decades ahead of their time: he dreamed of a true democracy of recordings, when listeners would be able to edit their own versions of tracks, as we can now all do at the click of a mouse. One of his final recordings was a second, markedly slower and more deliberate version of the Goldbergs in 1981. He gave his last concert in 1964, confining himself to the recording studio for the rest of his short life. Lauded the world over – his tour to Russia in 1957 is still remembered fondly by Vladimir Ashkenazy and by everyone else who packed out the concert halls to hear him – Gould none the less seemed to steadily retreat from public view. It's no surprise that this record launched the myth of Gould as much as it signalled the start of his career, but no one could have predicted the effect this young Canadian pianist would have on music.
I t still sounds like nothing you've ever heard, however many times you listen to it: Glenn Gould's first recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations, made in 1955, has an energy, an intensity and a sheer joy that is as irresistible today as it was when astonished record-buyers first heard it nearly 60 years ago.
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