He played Bach unlike anyone else, and he probably understood Bach better than anyone else.

Gould's other extraordinary gift was the ability to make all three voices in there-part counterpoint remain completely independent even as he wove them inextricably together.The canons of The Gouldberg Variations acquired an implicitly religious quality - as they must once have had in the mind of Bach - of being simultaneously one in there and three in one.

Beyond the pretense of indifference to public attaks on one's personal behavior, there are only three alternatives: to suffer in silence, to talk back, or to revel in the role that has been assigned.

All of these possibilities, of course, confirmed Gould's own view that the public piano recitial was "the last blood sport," and that the mysteries of art could best be fulfilled in the privacy of the recording studio.

"He designed his solitude to suit himself, like a pearly shell. He made it a work of art. He distanced himself from other people's emotions - and then he was brilliant."

The pioneering Glenn Gould, Music and Mind, by Geoffrey Payzant (1978), contains a certain amount of biographical material but is essentially an analysis of Gould's aesthetic philosophy, and Payzant is quite adept in pulling together the ideas in Gould's scattered writings.