Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould's Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano »

Katie Hafner is a correspondent for the New York Times and a dedicated amateur pianist. She is the author or coauthor of four previous books: Where Wizards Stay Up Late, Cyberpunk, The Well, and The House at the Bridge. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“When Gould was paired with the right composer…he could make you wonder if he was altogether human. And reading Hafner on Gould is sometimes as much fun as listening to him play. And that’s saying a lot.”—Newsweek

Hugely talented and famously eccentric, pianist Glenn Gould fought a running battle with a long list of lessthan- perfect pianos. A Romance on Three Legs is the story of a love that changed Gould’s life: his partnership with the Steinway CD 318, a piano whose peculiar action and temperament ushered Gould closer than ever to interpretive perfection. Katie Hafner weaves the compelling tale of Gould, his favorite piano, and the men who worked on it, revealing new details and nuances in the work and mind of one of the twentieth century’s greatest artists.

Publishers Weekly

This evocative, detailed account of the compulsive search for a sensitive, highly responsive concert piano by Canadian musical wunderkind Glenn Gould combines the parallel histories of one of the most controversial and brilliant pianists of the last century and the incredible keyboard instrument on which he played for some of his most important recordings. Hafner, a New York Timescorrespondent, presents a fascinating biography of Gould, who was known for his quirks, including his wearing of winter gear on summer days, his donning of fingerless gloves while playing, his manic fear of germs and hand shaking. The book will greatly appeal to those intrigued by the history of the influential German-bred Steinway piano company, but it is the close interaction of Gould and Charles Verne Edquist, the nearly blind piano tuner, with a Steinway CD 318 concert piano, that lift the book above the usual biography. This book will aid the reader to fully appreciate Gould's creative work in interpreting the early sonatas of Mozart and his majestic rendition of the Goldberg Variations. (June)

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Prologue: Ottawa, 1983 1

1 Toronto 9

2 Saskatchewan 31

3 Astoria 57

4 The Trouble with Pianos 83

5 Eaton's 113

6 A Romance on Three Legs 129

7 CD 318 in the Studio 151

8 Broken Piano 167

9 Making Do 177

10 The Defection 207

11 Afterlife 225

Acknowledgments 233

Notes 243

Index 251