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Nothing like a juicy scandal - especially when it occurs in the world of classical music!
This story appeared in The Gramophone last week:
It was already one of the strangest stories the classical music world had witnessed. But the discovery of the late English pianist Joyce Hatto as the greatest instrumentalist almost nobody had heard of, appears to have taken a bizarre, even potentially sinister turn.
The late pianist Joyce Hatto, had released a series of recordings with a very broad repetoire of difficult music, leading to a near-cult following. Now there are allegations that many of these supposed recordings of her were actually those of other artists.
It gets better.
Her husband has made claims that the recordsing truly were genuine, in this interview. He disputes the technical analysis of the records, which do indicate they came from a variety of artists.
''The English don't like success, you are successful for a year then they start putting the boot in." He added: "She was a pianist who developed all through her life. It was amazing. She had this wonderful independence of the hands."
He said he was amazed when the respected music magazine Gramophone questioned the authenticity of his wife's recordings. "I was astounded. I had no idea it was coming." He disputed the accuracy of the expert analysis of the CDs saying "the evidence that they rely on isn't proven – it would have been possible to change the speed of the recordings until they matched".
But he admitted: "I cannot explain some of the things that they say are there."
Finally, a number of limericks have popped up, further feeding the flames:
The critics' acclaim for Joyce Hatto
Had reached an impossible plateau,
And her falling from grace
Was quite clearly a case
Of her spouse over-egging the gateau.
as well as some more speculations:
Ms Hatto's death in June last year is being called into question, as is the treatment she allegedly received in Addenbrooks hospital in Cambridge, UK and whether she even had cancer at all; after all, she was supposedly diagnosed with it in 1970 and survived until 2006, which is pretty extraordinary (though perhaps not entirely impossible). Questions are now being asked as to whether she may have died many years ago and also whether the same or similar fakery might have attached to the Sergio Fiorentino recordings on the same label. Hospital records are, of course, confidential, even after death (other than to the executors of the deceased and not even always to them), but death certification (including cause of death) is in the public domain so can - and no doubt shortly will - be checked by those interested in pursuing such things. Some people are also interested in checking the authenticity of the marriage (if any) between Hatto and William Barrington-Coupe, which would also be public domain material if it exists.
and
Think Norma Desmond, Miss Havisham, Baby Jane, and the mother of Norman Bates. Think Frankenstein; think Awakenings. This is a living dead tale, a twisted reanimation project.
In order for it to have worked, it needed an impressario -- in this case, Hatto's husband -- and a snobby world of music lovers, ever-alert for emerging phenomena of which only they and other cogniscienti would be aware. ("What? You haven't heard of Hatto...?").
The key player in this scenario, though, is Hatto's husband, so let us look more closely.
My theory dismisses Hatto herself as a significant player in the hoax. She is very ill, very old, very tired. Mentally, she is weakened from decades of fighting her illness, and decades of isolation from the world. She is in no position to intervene in her husband's machinations. Even if she is aware of them, she doesn't understand them. Seeing her husband busy in the studio, she's probably pleased he's got something other than worrying about her to do.
She and her husband live a removed, eccentric life, self-sufficient yet lurid, with her terrible slow-motion decline. Her husband spends his days wasting time in his little recording studio, absent-mindedly mixing this, stretching that... techno-fiddling, to no point...
Under the pressures of isolation, illness, misery, and eccentricity, both husband and wife begin to go batty. Mentally, she's now back in her glory days, and he joins her there, with long conversations between the two of them that embellish her triumphs. "You were the greatest, darling... the absolute greatest... listen..."
He delights her by playing her old recordings... though maybe one day for whatever reason he doesn't play one of hers, but someone else's... maybe just meaning to entertain her with another pianist's work... But she says "I remember that one!" And he plays along... "Yes, that one... I remember that one..."
As a kind of present to her he begins creating cd's that mix some of her tracks with those of others. What's the harm in allowing her last months to be a somewhat fictive luxuriating in her brilliant truncated career? There's a satisfaction in it for both of them, this sonic affirmation of her genius.
"What have you been doing? How are the two of you?" a friend, and a fan of Joyce's, asks her husband one day. "We're preparing cd's of her performances," he finds himself responding; and his friend says: "What? You mean new performances...?"
And seeing the excitement on his friend's face, Hatto's husband senses what it would mean to the world if his wife rose from her sickbed...if she roused herself for a final sweep of the repertoire...
As she fades into dreams in her bed, he is completely alone, in a world full of her sound. He sits in his studio, panicked at her imminent loss, compulsively playing her work, and it occurs to him that the only way to monumentalize her, the only way to keep her alive, as it were, is to create a great comprehensive offering of her work.
His method is postmodern bricolage -- a little of this, a little of that -- with Joyce herself eventually dropping out altogether in his relentless search for the very very best rendering of each piece... Of course he recognizes that these artists are not his wife; yet her spirit infuses each piece. Without her championing of these sorts of pieces, without the example of her genius, none of this music could have been made...
Update:
The hoax was discovered by Gracenote, the company that iTunes uses to identify recordings, when it appeared to be more than a coincidence that one of her recordings was identical to that of another artist.
Metahoax: a movie in the works?
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