A biography of world-renowned pianist Glenn Gould.

You might also like Arturo Benedeppi-Michelangelo's piano, his playing as if coming from another time, always speaking in the past tense.
Or perhaps you'd prefer Richter's recent playing, which seems to express a certain anticipation, a nostalgia for the future.
But the way Glenn Gould plays it in the present tense casts a decisive light, bringing to mind the flying and torn words of innocence, of angel.

At this moment when Ilsan's flesh is disintegrating, the power found in Fugue's skeleton is revealed.
When we see him bending over the keyboard as if he were about to collapse, it seems as if he is trying to abolish himself and dissolve himself into the piano, wishing that there would be no more piano between him and the music.
It's not 'Glenn Gould sitting at the piano', it's 'Glenn Gould, piano solo'.

- Awards
Winner of France's 'Prize Feminina Vacaresco'.

“Do you love me?” the soloist asks, pleading, stroking, and growling without stopping.
But his question was something else: was he really alive?
He wanted to know himself better, and to do so he had to get lost, disintegrate, re-form, and disperse again.

A night spent with my fingers wide open and my palms facing the ceiling.
What was important to him was that he still didn't touch the keyboard.
Rather than waiting, it is an effort to define and focus.
Soon there would be no one to come between the music and him.

Beneath his hand, only an abstract, undetectable tissue would remain.
Things that arise, things that float, things that fall and friction, things that do not come when called, things that come and then disappear, things that persist.

He constantly drew the boundaries of his territory of solitude.
Always backlit, I went against the darkness.
We did not know that someone was waiting for us at the threshold, and we rejected the affection deeply woven into the tight weave of time.

Even so, in order to listen, one must stop talking, and in order to hear the music in all its detail, one must stop playing.

Being alone doesn't necessarily mean you're lonely.
The solitude I speak of, of course, means 'a state in which there are no others,' but at this moment, I am taking myself away.
On the other hand, when I am lacking something in myself, whether I am alone or with someone, and when the 'someone lacking something in me' is none other than myself, this state is isolation.
(Conversely, love is the state of missing the other person even when he or she is there.) Being in solitude means feeling certain that the other person is there, inside of me.
On the other hand, there is also a disconnection where both the other person and I are lacking.
Thinking is a matter of solitude.

......

“As far as I can remember, I have spent most of my time alone.
It's not that I'm antisocial, but because if an artist wants to use his brain to work as a creator, self-regulation—a way of cutting himself off from society—is absolutely necessary.
Any artist who wants to produce work worthy of public attention must inevitably be somewhat left behind in social life.”

--- From the text