The Chair

Glenn Gould is widely considered one of the greatest pianists of the twentieth century. His 1955 recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations made him famous overnight. Columbia Records couldn't sign him fast enough.

He performed on a folding chair fourteen inches high.

His father had built it for him as a child, sawing the legs down so young Glenn's hands could meet the keys at the angle he wanted. Gould never switched. He carried it to every concert hall, every recording studio, every country. By the late 1970s the seat had worn completely through. He was performing on the bare wooden frame. Technicians offered replacements. He declined. They tried padding. He removed it. The chair was by then held together with duct tape, piano wire, and an assortment of screws that would not have looked out of place in a junk drawer. You could not have got a dollar for it at a yard sale. From this object came some of the most precisely controlled piano recordings ever made. When Gould retired from live performance at thirty-one, calling audiences "a force of evil," the chair went with him into the studio for eighteen more years of recording. It outlasted his concert career, his health, and very nearly his life. Today it sits in a glass case at the Library and Archives Canada, still fourteen inches high.

The seat is still missing.