Pill-popping pianist

What would Glenn Gould’s playing have sounded like if he hadn’t chomped his way through bucketloads of Valium? It’s not a question that is asked in Genius Within, a much-praised documentary about the tortured Canadian pianist that has just been released in Britain.

What would Glenn Gould’s playing have sounded like if he hadn’t chomped his way through bucketloads of Valium? It’s not a question that is asked in Genius Within, a much-praised documentary about the tortured Canadian pianist that has just been released in Britain. But perhaps it should have been. In the nine months before his death at the age of 50 in 1982, Gould consumed more than 2,000 pills of every variety. His self-medication is admittedly one of the most famous things about him, but unless you’ve tried some of the tranquillisers he took — and, as it happens, I have — it’s hard to grasp how profoundly they mess with your consciousness.

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Gould was a shameless ‘doctor-shopper’, signing up to several GPs simultaneously, extracting a script from one and then phoning another to obtain a different bunch of pills without mentioning the previous prescription. One dreads to think what he would have got up to if he’d lived long enough to discover internet pharmacies. He treated his bathroom cabinet like a box of Quality Street and was also keen to try out other people’s medications — never a good sign. He took tranquillisers to control his hypochondria, but to say that they didn’t work is an understatement.

There’s footage in Genius Within of Gould singing Mahler to the elephants at Toronto Zoo, one of those tiresome zany tricks that he inflicted on Canadian television viewers after he suddenly stopped giving concerts. But more revealing of the real man is the fact that just before the filming he warned the producer that he was suffering from five of the six symptoms of ‘sub-clinical polio’ and if the sixth appeared he’d have to pull out.