[F_minor] NY Times article

["Axel Van Looy" <axelvanlooy@orange.fr>]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/books/review/Brockes-t.html?_r=1&8bu&emc=bua2&oref=slogin

A ROMANCE ON THREE LEGS 

Glenn Gould's Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano. 

By Katie Hafner. 

Illustrated. 259 pp. Bloomsbury. $24.99. 

June 15, 2008
Love at First Touch 
By EMMA BROCKES
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A ROMANCE ON THREE LEGS 

Glenn Gould's Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano. 

By Katie Hafner. 

Illustrated. 259 pp. Bloomsbury. $24.99. 

The real hero of Katie Hafner's book "A Romance on Three Legs" is not, as the subtitle suggests, the pianist Glenn Gould, or even the piano he was obsessed with, but a nearly blind man named Verne Edquist, who confirms that behind every great pianist is a great tuner. 

Hafner, a former correspondent for The New York Times, tells Gould's story through his obsessions, for which this Canadian virtuoso became almost as well known as he was for his 1956 recording of the "Goldberg" Variations. He sometimes performed with his nose practically against the keyboard, and was so terrified of catching a chill that at the height of summer he wore a heavy coat and gloves. He shrank from shaking hands with people. His greatest obsession, though, was his search for the perfect piano, which after years of frustration was finally resolved the day he sat down in an auditorium in Toronto in front of Steinway grand No. CD 318. And so began the most important relationship of his life. 

The suspense in this story is mostly flattened by the sheer weight of technical detail it is made to bear, which cramps the writing and makes it seem hurried. Lively encounters between Gould and his technicians or his handlers at Steinway & Sons are invariably cut off with an explanation of how pianos work or a history of the industry as bland as an encyclopedia entry. There are a few "fancy that!" sweeteners to get you through these bits - for example, that "in the early 20th century, piano tuners outnumbered members of any other trade in English insane asylums." Or that during World War II Steinway ran a neat sideline in the manufacture of coffins. But it is a relief to get back to the dysfunctional buddy movie with Edquist and Gould, or rather - since Gould is already the subject of several biographies - back to Edquist. The freshest material is the piano tuner's tale. 

Verne Edquist was born in 1931 to impoverished Swedish immigrants in rural Saskatchewan and was discovered at 6 years of age to have congenital cataracts, which surgery didn't mend. At 8 he was put on a train bound for the Ontario School for the Blind, where poor students were taught a variety of trades: shoe repair, the proverbial basket weaving and piano tuning. Edquist, who Hafner says had an ear so fine "he could tell the make and model of a car by the sound of its engine," chose to specialize in tuning. When he left school at 19, he got a job as an apprentice tuner at a Toronto piano factory, which divided its many visually impaired staff members into two groups, "gawkers" (who had less than 10 percent sight) and "gropers" (who were totally blind). Technically, Edquist was a gawker, but he found it easier to tune by feel alone, and so became a groper by choice. 

By the time he met Gould he had risen to the position of chief concert tuner at the T. Eaton Company in Toronto, where CD 318 had awaited the pianist's discovery. CD 318 was the Seabiscuit of the piano world, battered and marked for the glue factory when Gould discovered it in 1960. It was instantly familiar to him; the piano, made during the war, was one he had probably played as a child. And it had the sound he said he desired: "a little like an emasculated harpsichord" - perfect for Bach. The pianist and the tuner had first met when Edquist was called to Gould's house to do a patch-up job on another piano, which, to Gould's astonishment, Edquist refused to do. Professionalism compelled him to recommend that the piano be taken in for full service, and in that moment a respect was forged between the two awkward men. Thereafter, Gould always requested that Edquist work on CD 318, and he was present at the marathon overnight recording sessions, when Gould would send him out to fetch what he called his "double doubles" - coffee with two sugars and extra cream, which Edquist gently suggested might not be good for him. 

The piano, meanwhile, after more than 25 years of service, had an unhappy accident. In 1971 it was calamitously dropped on the way back from Cleveland, where Gould had shipped it for a recording session he never played, and despite being sent to New York for repairs it was never the same again. To Edquist's horror, Gould briefly took up with a Yamaha, and after the pianist's death in 1982, CD 318 was put on display in the National Library of Canada. The most vivid passage, however, has nothing to do with Gould or the piano. It is Hafner's description of how Edquist remembers his childhood 60 years on, through senses other than his sight: "Each season had a distinctive aroma and its own set of sounds. In the winter ... the smell was of heavy wool socks drying near the stove. In spring it was the black soil warming and the sound of returning crows. Summer brought the smell of the poplars and the sounds of rustling leaves, frogs croaking in sloughs. ... In the summer came the grasshoppers." And in an otherwise workmanlike book, there is suddenly music.

Emma Brockes writes for The Guardian and is the author of "What Would Barbra Do? How Musicals Changed My Life."
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