my Glenn Gould is incomparably greater, more deserving of worship, I thought, than theirs. When we learned that we had moved into the house of a famous Nazi sculptor Glenn burst out laughing. Wertheimer joined in this resounding laughter, I thought, the two of them laughed to the point of total exhaustion and in the end they went down to the cellar to get a bottle of champagne. Glenn popped the cork right in the face of a six-meter-high Carrara angel and squirted the champagne at the faces of the other monsters standing about, leaving only a little bit which we drank from the bottle. Finally Glenn hurled the bottle at the emperor head in the corner with such fury that we had to duck for cover. Not one of these Glenn worshipers is capable of imagining Glenn Gould laughing the way he always laughed, I thought. Our Glenn Gould was capable of unbridled laughter like no other, I thought, and for that reason must be taken most seriously. Whoever can’t laugh doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously, I thought, and whoever can’t laugh like Glenn doesn’t deserve to be taken as seriously as Glenn. At around three in the morning he draped himself over the emperor’s feet, completely exhausted, he with his Goldberg Variations, I thought. Again and again this image: Glenn pressed against the emperor’s calf, staring at the floor. One couldn’t speak to him. In the morning he was born anew, in his words. Every day I put on a new head, so he said, whereas the world thinks it’s still the old one, so he said. Every other day Wertheimer ran to the Untersberg at five in the morning, luckily he had discovered an asphalt road that went to the foot of the Untersberg, then he ran back, I myself simply walked once around the house before breakfast, although in all weather and completely undressed before washing. Glenn only left the house to go to Horowitz and come back. Basically I hate nature, he said again and again. I myself appropriated this sentence and still repeat it to myself today, will always repeat it, as I believe, I thought. Nature is against me, said Glenn, adopting my own philosophical perspective, for I also always say this sentence, I thought. Our existence consists in always being against nature and setting to work against nature, said Glenn, setting to work against nature until we give up, for nature is stronger than we are, we who in arrogance have turned ourselves into art products. We aren’t people after all, we are art products, the piano player is an art product, a disgusting one, he said in conclusion. We are the ones who continually want to escape from nature, but we can’t do it, naturally, he said, I thought, we get stuck halfway. Basically we want to be the piano, he said, not human beings but the piano, all our lives we want to be the piano and not a human being, flee from the human beings we are in order to completely become the piano, an effort which must fail, although we don’t want to believe it, he said. The ideal piano player (he never said pianist!) is the one who wants to be the piano, and I say to myself every day when I wake up, I want to be the Steinway, not the person playing the Steinway, I want to be the Steinway itself. Sometimes we get close to this ideal, he said, very close, at which point we think we’ve already gone crazy, think we’re on the highroad to madness, which we fear like nothing else. All his life Glenn had wanted to be the Steinway itself, he hated the notion of being between Bach and his Steinway as a mere musical middleman and of one day being ground to bits between Bach on one side and his Steinway on the other, he said, I thought. All my life I have dreaded being ground to bits between Bach and Steinway and it requires the greatest effort on my part to escape this dread, he said. My ideal would be, I would be the Steinway, I wouldn’t need Glenn Gould, he said, I could, by being the Steinway, make Glenn Gould totally superfluous. But not a single piano player has ever managed to make himself superfluous by being Steinway, as Glenn said. To wake up one day and be Steinway and Glenn in one, he said, I thought, Glenn Steinway, Steinway Glenn, all for Bach. It’s possible that Wertheimer hated Glenn, it’s possible he hated me as well, I thought; this thought is based on thousands, if not tens of thousands, of observations concerning Wertheimer, as well as Glenn, as well as me. And I myself wasn’t free of Glenn hatred, I thought, I hated Glenn every moment, loved him at the same time with the utmost consistency. For there’s nothing more terrible than to see a person so magnificent that his magnificence destroys us and we must observe this process and put up with it and finally and ultimately also accept it, whereas we actually don’t believe such a process is happening, far from it, until it becomes an irrefutable fact, I thought, when it’s too late. Wertheimer and I had been necessary for Glenn’s development, like everything else in his life, Glenn misused us, I thought in the inn. The arrogance with which Glenn set about everything, Wertheimer’s fearful hesitation on the other hand, my reservations about everything and anything, I thought. Suddenly Glenn was Glenn Gould, everybody overlooked the moment of the Glenn Gould transformation, as I have to call it, even Wertheimer and I. For months Glenn had drawn us into the same diet, I thought, into his Horowitz fixation, for it actually was possible that I (not to mention Wertheimer) wouldn’t have lasted through those two and a half Salzburg months with Horowitz on my own, that I would have given up without Glenn. Even Horowitz wouldn’t have been Horowitz if Glenn had been missing, the one made the other possible and vice versa. It was a Horowitz course for Glenn, I thought, standing in the inn, nothing else. Glenn had made Horowitz into a genial teacher, not Horowitz Glenn into a genius, I thought. In those months in Salzburg Glenn made Horowitz into the ideal teacher for his genius and through his genius, I thought. We get inside music completely or not at all, Glenn often said, to Horowitz as well. But he alone knew what that meant, I thought. A Glenn has to come upon a Horowitz, I thought, and precisely at the single right moment. If this moment isn’t the right one, what Glenn and Horowitz accomplished won’t be accomplished. The teacher who isn’t a genius is made into a teacher of genius by the student of genius at this precise moment for a very precise time period, I thought. But the real victim of this Horowitz course wasn’t me, it was Wertheimer, who certainly would have become an exceptional, perhaps world-famous piano virtuoso without Glenn, I thought. Who made the mistake of going to Salzburg that year to study with Horowitz and be destroyed by Glenn, not by Horowitz. Of course Wertheimer had wanted to become a piano virtuoso, I didn’t want it at all, I thought, my virtuosity at the piano had only been a way out for me, a procrastination maneuver for something that I’ve never been able to put my finger on, not even today; Wertheimer wanted it, I didn’t want it, I thought, Glenn has him on his conscience, I thought. Glenn had played only a few bars and Wertheimer was already thinking about giving up, I remember it precisely, Wertheimer had entered the first-floor room in the Mozarteum assigned to Horowitz and had heard and seen Glenn, had stood still at the door, incapable of sitting down, had to be invited by Horowitz to sit down, couldn’t sit down as long as Glenn was playing, only when Glenn stopped playing did Wertheimer sit down, he closed his eyes, I can still see it in every detail, I thought, couldn’t utter a word. To put it sentimentally, that was the end, the end of the Wertheimerian virtuoso career. For a decade we study the instrument we have chosen for ourselves and then, after this arduous, more or less depressing decade, we hear a genius play a few bars and are washed up, I thought. Wertheimer wouldn’t admit it, not for years. But those few bars of Glenn’s playing meant his end, I thought. Not for me, since even before meeting Glenn I had thought of giving up, pondered the senselessness of my efforts, wherever I went I had always been the best, being accustomed to this fact didn’t prevent me from thinking of giving up, of breaking off something senseless, against all those who affirmed that I belonged to the best, but to belong to the best wasn’t enough for me, I wanted