It is a truth universally acknowledged by anyone who has taught music history on an Anglophone campus: streaming platforms have intensified the characteristic presentism of the undergraduate worldview to an extent that was impossible during the days when CD booklet annotations and LP liner notes imparted painless historiographical lessons. In consequence, expecting music students in America, Australia, or even Britain to be aware of previous ages’ outstanding pianists is asking for the moon, even when these undergraduates themselves are studying piano.

Go through the roll call of past pianistic names and see how often you elicit any response except incomprehension. Claudio Arrau? Alfred Cortot? Edwin Fischer? Walter Gieseking? Rudolf Serkin? You might as well be declaiming the sequence of Avignon popes. Nor would a recitation of the past’s world-famous violinists, cellists, or opera singers produce a different result.

Yet one pianist continues to prompt recognition: Glenn Gould. Somehow his existence, and among pianists his alone, excites the student imagination. The enthusiasm often springs from considerable knowledge of Gould’s Bach recordings (rarely from his other recordings), combined with substantial reading of Gould’s prose and familiarity with his career. His career is a curiosity—his prose mostly poison.

Born and almost entirely resident in Ontario, Gould (1932–1982) had hardly any conventional instruction in music and imperiously disdained what he did have. While he composed occasionally, he cared above all for the piano, in his playing of which he soon outgrew anything which his Canadian surroundings could offer. He came to the notice of that most intimidating and skeptical among conductors, the Cleveland Orchestra’s George Szell. Spurning euphemism, Szell declared, “That nut is a genius.”