''Wondrous strange" is all too apt a description of Glenn Gould. His sheer otherness, the sense that he was beyond or above other pianists, has made him an endless source of fascination to writers, film- makers and philosophers. However, there is a fairly consistent split between musicians, who acknowledge Gould's amazing talents but also his serious limitations, and cultural critics, who tend to adore him unreservedly.
To the critics, Gould was the quintessential Canadian genius - a type built, in the words of Northrop Frye, on "the unknown, the unrealised, the humanly undigested". According to Edward Said, Gould realised better than any musician the implications of modern performance, with its demands for an inhuman perfection. His response to this "extreme occasion" was to turn his back on it. In 1964, at the age of only 32, he gave up concert-giving in favour of recording, which he brought to a pitch of refinement through painstaking editing and overdubbing. Said claimed it was simple envy that caused pianists such as Andras Schiff to hold Gould in low regard. The idea lurking behind this rather outrageous statement is that Gould's project was so singular that he cannot be judged by normal musical criteria. That, combined with his legendary austerity - he apparently had no interest in food or sex, was never seen drunk, didn't like to be touched, and so on - makes Gould a doubly lonely figure.
Thanks to Kevin Bazzana, we now have a rounded portrait, which shows that although Gould was indeed touched by genius, he was no saint. Having already written an excellent study of Gould's music, Bazzana is eminently qualified to write his biography, and he has clearly researched every nook and cranny of the pianist's life - no easy feat when dealing with someone so secretive and private. In Wondrous Strange, he shows that the "inhuman" aspects of Gould have a very human side. Despite Frye's mystical evocation of illimitable horizons, it was not the northern tundra that moulded Gould. Instead, his upbringing was shaped by the protected environment of home and the very English, bourgeois stuffiness of Toronto, with its church meetings and organ recitals.
Bazzana is sceptical of the idea that an artist's stature is enhanced by lonely isolation. He points out that Gould's famously eccentric tempi in Bach and Mozart were anticipated by older pianists such as Walter Gieseking and Artur Schnabel. Even his extraordinary playing pose, crouched low over the piano on a battered old stool built by his father (Gould's "security blanket", as Bazzana calls it), was modelled on his teacher Alberto Guerrero, who emerges from this book as an extraordinary musician, almost as compelling as Gould himself.
When it comes to Gould's literary efforts, Bazzana is properly severe. Where Edward Said described Gould as "not perfectly cultured", Bazzana writes of "hardened prejudices supported by wilful ignorance". But he praises, too, and makes a few grand claims of his own - for example, that Gould "was the first postmodern performer". Gould did indeed show extraordinary prescience in his understanding of the recording medium. He talked of creating "kit" performances that would be completed by the audience - an idea that is only now being realised, 22 years after his death.
Bazzana has no time for the idea that Gould died a virgin, or that his hypochondria and isolation amounted to a form of mental illness. He shows that Gould's solitude was not the result of incapacity, but was consciously chosen; nor was it so absolute that he could not cultivate friendships and show normal human frailties and wants. In revealing all this with tact and sympathy, and demonstrating how it coexisted with an extraordinary gift, Bazzana has done much to bring Gould in from the cold.
Ivan Hewett's most recent book is Music: healing the rift (Continuum)
