In search of the holy grand

Throughout the 1950s, as his fame grew, Gould searched fruitlessly for his dream piano. Then, in 1960, he discovered it under his nose in Eaton's, a department store, in his hometown of Toronto, which featured a concert hall on the top floor. Unfortunately, nobody has attested to being with Gould when he found the piano, known as CD 318, so Hafner is left without a eureka-moment scene. Regardless, she does a delicate job of re-creating Gould's thrill at first touching its keys. As it turned out, he had played CD 318 before, though wasn't sure where, as a concert piano makes the rounds of local halls and arenas. "His ears now remembered its refined sound: the lovely, singing treble and clean, taut bass. And his fingers recalled its extreme responsiveness."

As perfect as the piano sounded to Gould, it was an instrument as mercurial as he, and needed constant attention. Hafner cleverly makes the point that Edquist, as the piano's caretaker, was also looking after its master. "As preternaturally gifted a musician as Gould was, he was still utterly dependent on the technician to keep 318 in top condition," she writes. "So it was Edquist, the man who would tune, regulate, and modify the instrument according to Gould's unorthodox ideas -- some of which horrified the traditionalists at Steinway -- became almost as important to Gould as CD 318 itself." Clearly, Gould was pleased with Edquist, and one day exclaims about his refurbished piano, "It's a chest of whistles, it's a set of virginals. It's just about anything you want to make of it. It's an extraordinary piano."

Hafner ends her central chapter with Gould in high spirits, lending her story a slightly portentous tone, which is intentional. After playing CD 318 exclusively for 11 years, recording numerous albums with it, including his iconoclastic and vivifying takes on Beethoven's famous sonatas, the piano encounters a horrible fate. The unenviable task of reporting it to Gould falls to the brave Edquist. As Hafner recounts the piano's literal downfall, she allows readers to sympathize with the soulful instrument as Gould himself did. It's a deft trick, bridging a connection to the wondrous musician, and stands as the author's best accomplishment.

As a Gould fan, I put down "A Romance on Three Legs" with a grateful smile. I love that it's essentially a book about a piano, a piano tuner and his insane client. Edquist's relationship with Gould reveals a dependent side of the storied pianist that we have never seen before, and that's a wonderful insight. I felt disappointed, in fact, that Edquist faded into the background in the book's second half.

Hafner leaves us with a fine portrait of Gould, but it ends up feeling a little flat. Perhaps any book about Gould sets up expectations that can't be delivered anymore. The Bazzana biography, Gould's own essays and radio shows, interviews with him holding forth in his apartment, stuffed with scores and books, dealing out hilariously pompous and piercing aperçus on Beethoven or the Beatles (hated 'em), and film documentaries that show him driving his big black Lincoln and delivering his benighted outlook -- "My private motto has always been: Behind every silver lining there's a cloud" -- add up to an incredibly vivid picture of the man and musician. It's nearly impossible for a journalist, even a good one like Hafner, to compete with that legacy.

In the end, too, Hafner doesn't quite capture the electricity of Gould's music. Ultimately his quest for perfection isn't about a piano, it's about producing music that's aligned with the stars. Heavyweight classical music critic Richard Taruskin, author of the "Oxford History of Western Music," once wrote that he has no idea how Gould produced certain rolling chords in a recording of a Bach gamba sonata, only that he has been haunted by the chords for years, by the pianist's "famously ahistorical ... uncanny, extraordinary, disembodied touch!"

Disembodied touch is one of the best descriptions of Gould's magical playing. He causes the scales to fall from your eyes about classical music and hear it like you never have before. For me it's his rendition of Bach's Concerto No. 1 in D minor. Although he recorded it before he discovered CD 318, you feel his featherweight hands on the piano, shaping the work with a fearful precision that makes the notes dance in your heart. Gould was 24 when he recorded the concerto with Leonard Bernstein and the Columbia Symphony Orchestra, and you wonder how so much beauty and wisdom could be sealed in his playing. Hafner knows the immortal thing about Gould, even if she doesn't make us feel it as deeply as we could. But then perhaps no writer can: The freak was a genius.

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