There are three main characters: the narrator (who is the only survivor), Glenn Gould, who died a natural death at fifty-one, and Wertheimer who committed suicide some time later.

In Mozarteum in Salzburg in 1953 the main characters meet a young Canadian prodigy who plays the Goldberg Variations miraculously and who, they quickly come to realize, is a greater pianist than even their teacher—indeed, "the most important piano virtuoso of the century," as the narrator puts it in the novel's opening sentence.

So the narrator eventually decides to give up the piano in favour of philosophy, and spends much of his subsequent time composing a rambling, never-completed essay entitled "About Glenn Gould".

It is Gould who, with his "ruthless and open, yet healthy American-Canadian manner" first calls Wertheimer, to his face, "The Loser" ("Der Untergeher"—a much more evocative word, lit.

[1] The Brooklyn Academy of Music commissioned a one-act chamber opera by David Lang based on the novel, which had its premiere in September 2016.