Were he still alive (he would be only 71), his apartness might by now be even more striking: He was, as Bazzana notes, "in transition." One problem he faced was that of burning up his repertory, for where a concert pianist could return again and again to favorite pieces, Gould as a recording artist had to be constantly moving on. He almost never went back to offer a second version: One great exception was his return to the Goldberg Variations--in 1981, twenty-five years after his first recording came out--which eerily gave his life a pattern. Just as Bach's work is a great journey that arrives back at its starting place--with a repetition at the end of the opening "Aria," whose potentialities have now been fully extended--so Gould's life as a recording musician ended as it had begun, his death coming the month after the second Goldberg disc was released. For one who was determined to be in control, to the extent of scripting his broadcast interviews (which therefore, as much as his recordings, disturb our judgment of what is natural, casual or incidental, forcing us to hear intention everywhere), a perfectly timed departure might not seem out of the question. And though death was not what he had in mind, he clearly felt his life as a pianist was reaching a terminus. In the seventeen months after the Goldberg remake he recorded only a Brahms album and the sonata by Richard Strauss, while all around him doors were closing. The artists in charge at his record company were being replaced by businessmen. He was losing the Toronto studio where he had been recording since 1971. He was drawing away from Steinway and moving tentatively toward Yamaha. He was worried that age was beginning to limit his technique. He was fully aware of reaching the end of the keyboard repertory that meant most to him.

Of course, he could have looked a little harder at what he had rejected. His Schumann, his Chopin or his Debussy--evenly articulated, displayed as counterpoint, no doubt with some pieces bewilderingly fast or slow--might have been as refreshing/maddening as everything else he recorded. He could also have considered music by contemporaries other than the three Canadians he recorded: Bazzana informs us that he found Pierre Boulez's second sonata "intellectually intriguing but cold," but he might have had a different opinion of the sonata by Jean Barraqué or of pieces by Elliott Carter and Brian Ferneyhough. Besides all that, he would by now be preparing his third, fiftieth-anniversary recording of the Goldberg Variations.

That is one possibility. Perhaps more likely is that he would have abandoned the piano for the orchestra. Two months before his death he conducted Wagner's Siegfried Idyll in the studio, and Bazzana lists many other works he was considering recording, including pieces by such cherished composers as Schoenberg, Strauss, Haydn, Sibelius, Wagner, Brahms and, of course, Bach. He would have had to work fast, because apparently he was planning to make, as his farewell to conducting, a film of Bach's B-Minor Mass in the composer's tercentenary year of 1985.

After that, or alternatively, he might have flourished as a film director, developing the work he had begun in his radio documentaries of the late 1960s and early '70s, when he had, characteristically, exploited the technology to produce counterpoints of several speaking voices. Or he might finally have emerged as an original composer. As Bazzana points out, one of the things that drew Gould to Bach was that you could take the music apart and put it back together pretty much as you liked, in terms of speed, articulation and dynamic level, and he applied that approach to other music--not least to Mozart in his celebrated/notorious sonata recordings. This was not so much interpretation as reconstitution, the work of a co-creator, and in his youth Gould evidently thought of himself as a composer, perhaps first and foremost. He completed a string quartet in 1955 and sketched other works, the most tantalizing of which is A Letter From Stalingrad, setting a German officer's expression of stoicism in the absence of hope. Maybe, having come to the end of the road as a pianist, he would have had the time and the need to explore musical worlds that were his alone. This might have been advance from a further level of retreat, from the recording business as well as from the concert world, for maybe, as Bazzana imagines, he would have become a master of the Internet, and we could all be regularly visiting www.gould.com to download kits for putting together Bach fugues from keyboard lines in alternative colors, speeds and phrasings, or montages of wind and snow scenes and Sibelius, or comic dialogues (all voices by Gould), or the unimaginable inventions of an artist in the ecstasy of total solitariness.

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