A Romance on Three Legs by Hafner Katie

Author:Hafner, Katie [Hafner, Katie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2010-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

FROM THE MOMENT when Glenn Gould first began touring in earnest, in the mid-1950s, he began to have thoughts that he would have to give up performing because there were no pianos he could bear to play. But rather than abandon his career, he developed a means of compensating for this problem away from the keyboard.

Gould was unique among pianists in that he never felt a compelling need for constant access to a piano. He had an extraordinary ability, developed long ago as a young student with his teacher Alberto Guerrero, to study a score and automatically associate it with a specific tactile response. He could read a piece of sheet music, then go straight to the piano and play it perfectly with limber, knowing hands. “When I haven’t played for a few weeks the nicest moments I have are when I first sit down to play,” he once told an interviewer. “I have never understood the stiff-finger syndrome or whatever it is people talk about, because during all of however many weeks that may have elapsed without playing, there is no hour of the day in which some music doesn’t enter my head and instantly get translated into a kind of spontaneous finger system.”

Still, he knew what he was looking for in a piano. Gould didn’t necessarily want an instrument with a big sound, even when he was playing in large halls. He preferred pianos whose sound might be described as “puritan”: not dry, exactly, or constrained, but clear and detached. But Steinway concert grands typically sounded just the opposite, with a growling, powerful bass and a brilliant treble.

Gould developed his ability to “play” away from the instrument because he was convinced that every piano other than his beloved Chickering had an inadequate action. Knowing this distracted him enough that he couldn’t play well. Or so he believed. Powerless to change this unfortunate circumstance, he resorted to unusual tricks of the imagination.

Such was the case in Israel in 1958, when Gould went to Tel Aviv to play a series of recitals and orchestral appearances with the Israel Philharmonic. The schedule—nine concerts in eleven days—was grueling enough. But the piano he was given to play was, he later recalled, possibly the worst concert instrument he had ever encountered. After the third performance, Gould got to the point where he felt like he could no longer control it.

“It was running away from me,” he told an interviewer years later. “It was like a car with power steering and I was a driver who was used to a stick shift. And it was frightening.”

Gould determined to reinstate his mental image of some other instrument while continuing to play the concerts on the dreadful piano in Tel Aviv. And of course the piano of his dreams was the Chickering.

So he drove up to Herzliya, a city on the Mediterranean fifteen miles north of Tel Aviv, and found a sand dune facing the sea. There he sat in a Hertz rental car, trying to feel and recall the precise sight, sound, and tactility of his Chickering at home.

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