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We can forgive and forget many things about those we love, especially when they're no longer alive. Glenn Gould has been dead for almost exactly 25 years, and some of his less endearing enthusiasms have been so thoroughly forgiven that many of his fans know nothing about them.

For most people, to think of Gould is to think of Bach, especially the Bach of The Goldberg Variations, the piece that launched Gould's recording career in 1955. That piece is still his greatest hit by a wide margin, and was further embedded in the Gould legend by a successful play (David Young's Glenn) and film (François Girard's 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould) that both treated the Goldbergs as the key to Gould's life and art.

Bach and the Goldbergs dominate the events planned to celebrate this year of Gould, which began even before the pianist's official 75th birthday on Sept. 25. Six pianists will play the piece in a national radio relay on Sept. 27 during the CBC's eight-day Gould festival, which starts on Tuesday. The CBC is promoting another Goldbergs concert in Calgary on Sept. 30 (with the Honens piano competition), with an African take on the piece at the Glenn Gould Studio in Toronto later the same day. There's also a souped-up new stereo version of Gould's 1955 recording, as interpreted by a band of software engineers and a Yamaha Disclavier.

But Gould was also keen on other composers that a lot of classical fans would rather not think about, including Ernst Krenek, Paul Hindemith, Anton Webern and especially Arnold Schoenberg. In Gould's opinion, Schoenberg was “one of the greatest composers who ever lived,” and he never missed a chance to show and explain why.

He recorded all of Schoenberg's music for piano, performed the concerto in public nine times, and wrote copious notes and essays about the man and his works. He made two radio documentaries about Schoenberg for the CBC, one of which (in 1974) ran to 10 instalments.

For many people, Schoenberg remains one of the last untouchables of 20th-century music. He, more than anyone else, is seen as the man who killed the delirious party of late Romanticism. His post-tonal pieces are still guaranteed to irritate somebody when they're played for a mainstream classical audience. Gould, however, described Schoenberg's first atonal composition for piano (from the Three Pieces, Op. 11, No. 1) as “a masterpiece” that was equal to the best of Johannes Brahms's intermezzos.

Gould fans who know about his Schoenberg fixation are apt to write it off as another one of his eccentricities, like wearing gloves in summer. But Gould's relationship with Schoenberg really was a key part of his artistic life, in that it affected the way he dealt with music in general and Bach in particular. What Gould liked in Schoenberg was what he liked in music.

Gould was deeply in tune with Schoenberg's emphasis on the abstract side of music over its ornamental or sensuous qualities. He saw Schoenberg as a conservative innovator, whose break from vertical, tonal harmony returned music to the horizontal, contrapuntal orientation that had been basic to music centuries earlier.

Schoenberg himself believed he was reviving a craft and an attitude that had faded since Bach's time, and he stressed this side of Bach's music when he transcribed or wrote about it. As Kevin Bazzana says in his book Glenn Gould: The Performer in the Work, Gould adopted this view of Bach as his own, and expressed it in his performances.

“In essence, the figure so influential on Gould's thinking and performing was Bach [as] seen through the eyes of Schoenberg,” Bazzana writes. Like Schoenberg, Gould focused on the “ideal” aspect of Bach's music, symbolized above all by The Art of Fugue, a comprehensive display of fugal technique written for no particular instrument.

His enthusiasm for any piece by Bach was always related to one of the traits he found most attractive about Schoenberg's “masterpiece” from Op. 11: that “the material is less important for what it is than for what it can become.” In other words, great music, for Gould, didn't require a great tune or beautiful sounds. What it needed was a fertile seed of an idea that could grow into a great arbor of contrapuntal relationships.

When Schoenberg died in 1952, Gould and his school chum Robert Fulford formed a group called New Music Associates and organized two concerts of music by Schoenberg, and a third concert featuring Bach. According to Fulford, Gould said that Bach belonged in a new-music series because he was “essentially a modern musician.” He might have been thinking of Schoenberg's semi-serious suggestion that a fugue from The Well-Tempered Clavier was the first 12-tone composition.

Through the early and mid-fifties, by Gould's own account, he was “a valiant defender of 12-tone music and of its leading exponents.” When he made his New York recital debut in 1955, Berg and Webern were on the program. That same year, of course, Gould made his smashing debut on record with music by that other “modern” giant, J.S. Bach.

Gould's Bach sounded fresh in part because of the measures he took to highlight its contrapuntal structure. His staccato touch kept the music's individual lines from getting in each other's way. Gould said with admiration that Schoenberg treated the piano as “an instrument of convenience,” not as a jewel-box of tone colours, and Gould took the same attitude when playing Bach.

Gould' s thoughts on ‘ideal' music were most vividly expressed in a few lines he wrote about Jan Sibelius in 1974: “at its best, his style partook of that spare, bleak, motivically stingy counterpoint that nobody south of the Baltic ever seems to write.”

Spare, bleak, motivically stingy counterpoint. You might describe the music of Webern or Schoenberg the same way, without meaning to praise either one of them. But for Gould, stinginess could be an artistic virtue and bleakness could be liberating, just as the North that Gould idealized was free of buildings, roads and other people.

True, he loved the music of Wagner and Richard Strauss, which isn't exactly stingy in its devotion to the pleasure principle. Gould's recordings offer lots of sensual thrills, in rhythm and energy if not always in tone-colour, as if beneath his rational, nordic exterior there was a southern hedonist fighting for the wheel.

The CBC's eight days of Gouldmania touch on some of his enthusiasms for things other than Bach, with a performance by Louie Lortie of Gould's transcriptions of Wagner and Strauss (Sept. 26), a recital by Marc-Andre Hamelin of contemporary pieces Gould played (Oct. 4), and a performance of his String Quartet No. 1 (Oct. 3). It's hard to guess what he might have thought of 10 commissioned works based on the letters of his name (Sept. 25), because Gould seemed to lose interest in contemporary music. Schoenberg was enough for him, just as he remains too much for many of the pianist's fans.

They'll get a new chance to take a panoramic view of Gould's career as of Tuesday (Sept. 25), when Sony drops an 80-disc collection of the complete piano recordings. With a retail price of around $250, it's for true believers only, but I'm betting that even they will leave many of the discs untouched. His fondness for Sweelinck, Hindemith, Gibbons and Schoenberg is probably going to remain in the trivia file in our collective dossier on Glenn Gould. He's our man for Bach, and especially one piece by Bach, and that's just the way it is. Maybe in another 25 years we'll be calling him Glenn Goldberg.