Free Republic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LIMxSVywqA

When Glenn Gould died unexpectedly in 1982, a victim of a stroke at the unseemly age of 50, his red-hot reputation had calmed to a simmer. Gould, a sufferer from extreme stage fright but a winner in the stock market, had quit performing in public 18 years earlier, using the proceeds of his financial ventures to soften the burdens of early retirement. Much of his time later was spent with television projects in his native Toronto, not all of which had to do with the piano. In death, Gould came to life. Music business operatives appeared suddenly and in hordes,...

More has been said and written about Glenn Gould than about any other classical musician of the 20th century. The late pianist and broadcaster is classical music's Elvis, growing larger in death than he was in an already public life. Only instead of Elvis's kitsch factor, he had a peculiar geek factor. Instead of helping popularize a new kind of music, like Elvis with rock 'n' roll, Gould made an old kind of music sound new again. As we approach what would have been his 75th birthday on Tuesday – and the 25th anniversary of his death on Oct. 4...

Was that relief I felt as the piano was playing? A feeling that some worry had been alleviated or a fear quieted? Why then was it also mixed with disappointment, as if some deep yearning had been thwarted? Not yet, not yet, not yet: relief and frustration intertwined. For months I had deliberately avoided listening. A technologically oriented, musically sophisticated company, Zenph Studios (zenph.com), claimed that it could bring the voices of the musical dead back to life. It could achieve, that is, what technology has long dreamt of: It would make light of the material world and all its...