Las dos caras de Glenn Gould (1932-1982). Salud y personalidad del pianista canadiense

Abstract

Forty years afler his death, Glenn Gould continues to enjoy enormous international attention and prestige, and to provoke considerable debate not only about his exceptional piano-playing but about his ideas and personality. A truly overwhelming amount of information about him is now available, requiring careful evaluation of sources in order to distinguish proven data from the many, widespread exaggerations and legends about him. lt is essential to evaluate Gould as a whole, taking a panoramic view in which his physical, psychological, and social aspects are integrated within a particular context. There is an abundance of articies and theses on Gould as an artist, but much less literature centered on Gould as a human being. My doctoral dissertation focuses on his health and personality. I reviewed the main biographical facts, and I extracted data about his personality and the illnesses and disorders by analyzing private documents preserved among his papers in the Library and Archives Ganada, in Ottawa. Questions continue to arise about Gould, generating considerable discussion: Did Gould have autism spectrum disorder? Did he suffer from focaJ dystonia? Or his decisoo to retire definitively from the concert stage, at the age of just thirty-one. The main condusion of my own research is that Gould qualifies for a diagnosis of “twice exceptionality”, a dual diagnosis with high intellectual abilities, accompanied by a second ·“exceptionality”, ‒some disorder, difficulty, or disability of a different nature. The two ‘faces’ in his case were, on the one hand, the intelligent and extraordinary pianist, and on the other, the anxious being, full of oddities, fears and worries ‒the ecstasy of the musician, the anguish of the man.