"The slow, impending death of a great entertainer. It’s rare that we could actually see such a thing, but there it is, in Glenn Gould’s legendary 1981 performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Fans have watched the video for decades as if it were his epitaph.
And, in a way, an epitaph is what it turned out to be. As the camera slowly zooms in on the solitary pianist, at first we see Gould with his head all but buried in his Steinway, hunched over and getting as close to the keyboard as possible, an old man shriveling before our eyes. It is difficult to distinguish what is more compelling — the stark visual of the man or his melancholic music, slow and contemplative, surely a reflection, an outpouring of his troubled soul, a lonely artist losing control of his environment. He looks ill, as though he has taken a pounding, physically and emotionally, as though life should not have required five decades to bring him to his knees. Wearing heavy-rimmed glasses, he could be blind. And yet there is poetry to this scene — a bittersweet self-consciousness as Gould chatters and sings quietly to himself. Tender and loving is the voice from his piano. The video ends with Gould dramatically dropping his hands and, finally, his weary head.
Arguably the greatest piano virtuoso of his time was expiring.
And, in ways, these Goldberg Variations — a beautifully complex score written by Johann Sebastian Bach — reportedly as a charming sleeping pill in 1740 to please an insomniac Russian count — helped put Glenn Gould, age fifty, to sleep. Within seventeen months of this recording, he was dead and the album was released posthumously to rave reviews, winning a Grammy award."
Michael Clarkson, The Secret Life..., ix-x
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