Glenn Gould Walked Off the Concert Stage at 31

On April 10, 1964, Glenn Gould walked onto the stage of the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles, played Beethoven's Sonata No. 30, selections from Bach's Art of Fugue, and Hindemith's Third Sonata, and never gave another public recital. He was 31. He had nineteen years of recordings ahead of him, and not a single one would be made for an audience in the room.

His reasoning was unfashionable. Gould thought the concert hall was an "anachronism," a "force of evil" — his words — that turned music into a competitive sport in which the listener attended mostly to see whether the pianist would crack. The performer, sensing this, stopped trying things. The interpretation calcified. Whatever was alive in the music in the practice room died on the way to the proscenium.

The alternative he wanted was the recording studio, where a take could be retried, spliced, edited the way a film is edited. Gould did not consider this a compromise. He considered it the actual medium of music in the second half of the twentieth century. The 1955 Goldberg Variations that had made him famous already lived in homes, not halls; the concert was just a vestigial promotional tour for the LP.

Critics in 1964 thought he was sulking and would be back in a year. He was not. He spent the rest of his life recording in Toronto, often through the night, humming over the microphone, re-recording the Goldbergs at half the original tempo in 1981. He died of a stroke in October 1982, eighteen years and six months after Los Angeles. The next time most of his audience heard him play, it was a posthumous reissue.