Solid Gould

Glenn Gould: The Ecstasy and Tragedy of Genius, by Peter F. Ostwald (Norton, 368 pp., $29.95)

GLENN Gould, the eccentric Canadian pianist, died in 1982, but his cult lives on. When my wife and I went to a screening of a movie about him a few years ago, a man in the row ahead of us was showing off pictures he had taken of Gould’s gravestone. The fan was also wearing gloves (Gould, terrified of catching cold, wore them when he wasn’t playing, no matter what the weather). There aren’t many movies about Rubinstein or Horowitz, and no one who went to one would go in costume.

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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Glenn Gould: The Ecstasy and Tragedy of Genius, by Peter F. Ostwald (Norton, 368 pp., $29.95)

GLENN Gould, the eccentric Canadian pianist, died in 1982, but his cult lives on. When my wife and I went to a screening of a movie about him a few years ago, a man in the row ahead of us was showing off pictures he had taken of Gould’s gravestone. The fan was also wearing gloves (Gould, terrified of catching cold, wore them when he wasn’t playing, no matter what the weather). There aren’t many movies about Rubinstein or Horowitz, and no one who went to one would go in costume.