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    A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould's Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano
    Unavailable
    A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould's Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano
    Unavailable
    A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould's Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano
    Ebook291 pages4 hours

    A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould's Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano

    By Katie Hafner

    4.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Glenn Gould was famous for his obsessions: the scarves, sweaters and fingerless gloves that he wore even on the hottest summer days; his deep fear of germs and illness; the odd wooden "pygmy" chair that he carried with him wherever he performed; and his sudden withdrawal from the public stage at the peak of his career. But perhaps Gould's greatest obsession of all was for a particular piano, a Steinway concert grand known as CD318 (C, meaning for the use of Steinway Concert Artists only, and D, denoting it as the largest that Steinway built). A Romance on Three Legs is the story of Gould's love for this piano, from the first moment of discovery, in a Toronto dept. store, to the tragic moment when the piano was dropped and seriously damaged while being transported from a concert overseas. Hafner also introduces us to the world and art of piano tuning, including a central character in Gould's life, the blind tuner Verne Edquist, who lovingly attended to CD318 for more than two decades. We learn how a concert grand is built, and the fascinating story of how Steinway & Sons weathered the war years by supplying materials for the military effort. Indeed, CD318 came very close to ending up as a series of glider parts or, worse, a casket. The book has already been lauded by Kevin Bazzana, author of the definitive Gould biography, who notes that Hafner "has clarified some old mysteries and turned up many fresh details."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury USA
    Release dateJul 15, 2010
    ISBN9781608190454
    Unavailable
    A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould's Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano

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    Reviews for A Romance on Three Legs

    4.5/5

    12 ratings8 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A most unusual biographical study, this is a book about a musician and his music, but even more it is about his search for perfection. The author writes of a search for a piano that is more intense than anything I have experienced in my piano-playing life. While I have encountered several different pianos, from the old upright of my youth to the local public library grand and sturdy spinets at the University of Wisconsin School of Music, I have never obsessed the way Glenn Gould did. Katie Hafner makes the story interesting with details of the life of the piano, its caretaker and the marriage of artist and piano in the studio. The piano is a Steinway grand piano known as CD318. The caretaker, an almost completely blind piano tuner, reminded me of a piano tuner who maintained my own spinet for several years. The marriage meant that this piano became part of the history of music performances by one of the greatest pianists of the twentieth century. While the marriage of piano and pianist was not fated to last forever, that part of the story is best left for the reader to discover for himself. It is a story that this music lover found exceptional. And it is a unique perspective on the life of an artist notorious for his personal eccentricities.
    • 5/5
      Fascinating and insightful look into the habits of a great genius. Gould comes off looking like a sensitive artist, and not like a "nut job" as in some bios.
    • 4/5
      Canadian pianist Glenn Gould was well-known as an eccentric genius. He searched all his life for a piano that could play music as he heard it in his head, and he finally found it in CD 318, a Steinway concert grand. The piano was specially modified to provide the “featherweight” touch that Gould preferred, and he made many recordings on it. In Hafner’s recounting, the piano takes on a life and even a personality of its own. The author also delves into the stories of the Steinway Corporation and of Charles Verne Edquist, Gould's loyal piano tuner. I enjoyed this absorbing and moving book.
    • 4/5
      I would dispute some of the things Ms. Hafner says about piano tuning in this book. Most piano tuners will use the "equal temperment" method of tuning, whereby all semitones are tuned to the same ratio, which works out to 1/12 of an octave. This results in the fifths being slightly flat, and the thirds being slightly sharp. There are other methods of tuning a piano, but the piano tuners I have met will only use the equal temperment method. They also use computerized tuning gadgets, which assign an exact frequency to every note. A professional tuner, however, is capable of tuning every note from a single reference, usually A440, derived from a tuning fork. I have tried to do this and believe me, it is not easy.Another problem is that Beethoven composed his earlier piano sonatas for an instrument known as a fortepiano, which has two strings for the notes in the middle registers. The modern instrument, the pianoforte, has three strings for these notes, and the sound is rather different.I learned from this book that "voicing" a piano is a completely different activity than tuning. I have never had my piano voiced, and your typical tuner will probably not know how to do it. But I did have a piano on which a few notes buzzed, and now I know that this is a voicing problem, not a tuning problem.After reading AROTL. I heard Ms. Hafner speak about her experiences in coming to write this book. Apparently her father, a physicist, is an amateur piano tuner, and piano lover, and she was looking to write a biography of one famous piano. She chose this piano, used by Glenn Gould, designated CD318. The story is fascinating and very readable, complete with surprise ending.Nowadays, pianos are sold in music stores rather than in department stores. If you go to a store which sells Steinways, you will be told, naturally, that Steinways are the best. If you go to a store that sells Bosendorfers, you will be told that they are in fact the best. The Steinway, however, is generally considered to be a superior concert piano, suitable for larger halls. The Bosendorfer is more suitable for smaller venues, including living rooms, in my humble opinion. However that may be, I actually prefer a Chickering, and apparently Mr. Gould did also, as that was his main practice piano. The tone is rich but not too bright, an essential requirement for smaller living rooms where the sound will bounce off the walls a lot. Ms. Hafner gives us more of the personal history of CD318, rather than a technical treatise on its musical qualities, and that makes the book more suitable for the general reader. I am an avid fan of Glenn Gould's recordings, and I consider his last one, of the Richard Strauss sonata, to be the finest recording of piano music ever made. If you listen carefully, you can hear him humming in the background, and this adds to the recording rather than detracts from it. Unfortunately, I don't know what piano Gould used, but we can imagine from this recording what CD318 must have sounded like.
    • 4/5
      This book is portrait of three individuals. The first is, of course, Glenn Gould: the highest paid concert pianist of his day who, nonetheless, abandoned the "jungle" of the concert stage and worked only in recording studios; a hypochondriac and sometimes bizarre figure who often refused to accept reality. The second is Verne Edquist: virtually blind, educated by the state in a trade school for the blind, who became one of the most gifted piano technicians in North America and, eventually, the person who made Gould's piano sound the way he envisioned it. The third is Steinway CD 318: a piano deemed past its useful life as a concert piano, dented scratched and relegated to be sold second hand, which became his perfect instrument.Hafner tells the story of Gould's half-career search for a piano that would allow him to play the music as he heard it in his head, the decades of perfecting its sound and creating an enormous catalog of recorded music upon it and, finally, the bittersweet loss of the instrument. Along the way, we are offered a look behind the curtain at the Steinway Company, particularly its Artists Program—an endorsement program similar in scope to Nike's dominance of sports figures today—as well as a glimpses of other major figures on the musical scene.I enjoyed the book and read it in a single sitting. However, I can't help but compare it to the work by Perri Knize that I read earlier this year, Grand Obsession. They are similar in theme (the search for an ideal piano) but this book is drier, more intellectual. While I have a preference for that in Bach, I don't in biography and think that...if you must read only one...you should choose Knize's.Recommended.
    • 4/5
      Subtitled “Glenn Gould’s Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano”The characters make this creative non-fiction book about Glenn Gould’s search for the perfect piano. There is Gould himself, of course. The author does not make a judgment about his mental health, letting his actions speak to the reader. Think the character of the detective Adrian Monk from the popular TV series. To me Gould seems to have obsessive-compulsive character disorder as well as being borderline autistic.Gould could not find a perfect piano with a piano tuner-technician to keep it perfect, and that character is the practically blind piano tuner Verne Edquist. Edquist’s story is, to me, as fascinating as Gould’s. Raised on a poor farm in Saskatchewan, he was forced to attend a school for the blind where he learned the rudiments of his trade, working his way up through the ranks of piano tuners to become the best.The third major character of the book is the piano itself, one of the few Steinways manufactured during the war years when the factory was re-tooled for the war effort. That it was constructed at all seems a miracle. Gould found it languishing in a department store in Canada. He was looking for a super-light action and a clean sound, and it was Edquist that brought that sound out of the piano.A lot of fascinating details are also revealed about the Steinway Artist program as it existed after the Second World War. Once an artist signed an exclusive contract with Steinway they were supplied with pianos and even piano tuners when they toured.Unfortunately, shipping Gould’s Steinway led to the end of it’s useful life, at least for Gould. It was dropped five feet on a loading dock and the plate was cracked. After it was rebuilt, even Edquist was unable to get it back to the pre-accident condition that Gould obsessively desired.This is a non-fiction book, so the facts get in the way of a happy ending, but it’s still a fascinating account of two interesting men and the piano they shared.
    • 5/5
      Glenn Gould's life, interwoven with that of the Steinway company, including how a piano is built. Very interesting insight in both.
    • 5/5
      Excellent writing and fun.