Glenn Gould was once arrested on a Florida park bench for wearing a heavy winter overcoat, beanie, and mittens in sweltering heat. Born in Toronto in 1932, he hummed instead of crying as a baby, had perfect pitch by three, and studied the decay of a single piano note rather than banging the keys. After a back injury at age ten, his father sawed down a folding chair to a 14-inch height, and Gould used it for the rest of his life, pulling down on the keys with the finger-tapping technique he learned from Alberto Guerrero. That independence made his 1955 recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations an earthquake in classical music.

This episode follows his 1957 Soviet tour, where he championed forbidden atonal music, his clash with Leonard Bernstein over a Brahms concerto in 1962, and his decision in 1964, at age 31, to walk away from live performa ...