Glenn Gould's 1955 recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations fundamentally altered how the work could be heard. Rejecting reverent slowness, Gould rendered the counterpoint with crystalline clarity and conversational intimacy, separating voices so distinctly that the architecture became audible rather than monumental. Recorded in two days with an unconventional chair and audible humming, this performance transformed a scholarly monument into something urgent and alive. Essential for anyone reconsidering what the piano and Bach can express together.
There is a recording that changed what people thought a piano could say, made by a twenty-two-year-old Canadian who hummed along to every note and finished the whole session in two days.
Glenn Gould walked into Columbia’s 30th Street Studio in New York on June 10, 1955 — a converted church on East 30th that engineers loved for its vast, forgiving acoustics — and recorded Bach’s Goldberg Variations in a manner nobody had attempted before. The work had been considered a kind of scholarly monument, reverent and slow, the territory of harpsichordists and the very serious. Gould treated it like conversation.
The Piano, the Chair, the Hum
He brought his own chair. Not a concert bench — a rickety, sawed-down folding chair his father had made, so low that Gould’s hands sat almost level with the keys rather than above them. It put him in a different physical relationship with the instrument than any other concert pianist of the era. You can hear it in the touch: intimate, almost lateral, like he was reaching across instead of reaching down.
Producer Howard Scott and engineer Fred Plaut were behind the glass. Plaut was known for his patience and his ears, and he made the call to capture Gould close — very close — which is why you can hear the piano mechanism, the bench, the room, and that now-infamous humming. Columbia would later receive complaints about the vocalizing. They didn’t know what to do with it. Gould didn’t stop.
The Aria that opens the record is unhurried in a way that feels almost defiant. Most pianists in 1955 played the Goldbergs, if they played them at all, with a kind of museum reverence. Gould plays the Aria like he already knows the ending and wants you to know he knows. Each of the thirty variations that follow has its own weather: the canons placed at regular intervals like structural columns, the quick variations crackling, the slow ones genuinely still.
What Gould Actually Did
The contrapuntal lines — the separate melodic voices woven together by Bach — are something most pianists blend into a general texture. Gould separated them. He could make the left hand and right hand sound like two distinct people who happened to share one instrument, and when a third or fourth voice entered, you heard that too. This is harder than it sounds. Most people who try it produce a lesson. Gould produced music.
Variation 13 is probably my favorite thing he ever recorded. It sits in the middle of the set, unhurried and bright, and Gould voices the inner lines with something close to tenderness. You don’t expect tenderness from a recording this cerebral.
The session wrapped June 16th. The record came out that fall and sold, unexpectedly, well. Classical records didn’t do that. Columbia didn’t know what to make of the numbers. It became Gould’s signature and, in some ways, his burden — he would revisit the Goldbergs in 1981, in a famous final studio session, and the two recordings together trace an entire life.
But the 1955 version is the one. Young, fast, completely certain. He plays the closing Aria — the same music as the opening, now heard differently — and then the record ends.
He never performed in public again after 1964. He spent the rest of his life in the studio, which, listening to this, seems entirely right.