It’s funny how these things go. Only yesterday morning I was lecturing to my
students about National Anthems and drawing their attention to the blatant
musical hoax which is the Bosnian-Herzegovinian anthem. And now, today, a disc for review has arrived
which includes another unashamedly bare-faced musical hoax, the setting of the Ave Maria passed off by its real
composer, Vladimir Vavilov (1925-1973) as the work of Giulio Caccini
(1551-1618).
Musical hoaxes and misattributions are the stuff of
musical quizzes. Who wrote Haydn’s “Toy Symphony”?
(answer; Leopold Mozart). Who wrote
Purcell’s Trumpet Voluntary? (answer; Jeremiah Clarke). Who wrote Albinoni’s Adagio? (answer; Remo
Giazotto). But for many people, when
they learn that they have been duped by a musical hoax or led to believe that a
work is by one composer when, in fact, it is by another, they bristle with
resentment and end up ignoring music which, up to that point, they had
thoroughly enjoyed
One of the great musical hoaxers was Fritz Kreisler
who managed to pull sufficient wool over the eyes of sufficient numbers of
gullible music lovers to convince them that his own works were really the
products of composers ranging from Couperin to Boccherini by way of one of the
Bach family and an otherwise forgotten composer called Gaetano Pugnani. There are plenty of others, too. Wikipedia
delightfully tells us that Vavilov “routinely ascribed his own works to
other composers, usually of the Renaissance or Baroque (occasionally from later
eras), usually with total disregard of the appropriate style”. Yet, despite Wikipedia’s assertion that “his works achieved enormous
circulation, and some of them achieved true folk-music status, with several
poems set to his melodies”, Grove does
not deign to give this Soviet-era forger even a passing mention.
In the case of Kreisler, his hoaxes were designed to
give credibility to his own performances.
With Vavilov, there was also an element of self-preservation. Writing at a time and in a society where
Christian music was forbidden, he had no choice but to pass his Ave Maria off as the work of someone
else; although that does not justify all the other hoaxes he carried out. As for Dusan Sestic, who stole the theme
music from the 1978 movie Animal House to
enter a competition for a new national anthem for Bosnia-Herzegovina, his aim
was solely financial; he stood to earn over €15,000 for his efforts.
Others seem to have been exercises to test the gullibility
of critics like myself. In the wake of
the spoof Mobile for Tape and Percussion
by "Piotr Zak" (actually Hans Keller) I was less willing to accept
the minimalist music of Arvo Pärt at first sight, and in a Musical Times review went so far as to suggest his Pari Intervalli was a spoof. Daniel Hill (Musical
Forgeries) has written an extensive dissertation on the subject, which
makes for stimulating reading – not least his conclusion that “Let us enjoy the
forgeries as music”. He drew attention
to the great hoax of recent years, the discovery of eight apparently lost Haydn
piano sonatas by the Australian pianist Paul Badura-Skoda and the renowned Haydn
scholar H C Robbins Landon. “A little
old lady who `couldn't be disturbed' had `discovered' the completed versions of
the sonatas in her home. She in turn passed them to a relatively unknown
flautist, Winfried Michel. Michel became the only link between the source of
the documents and the Haydn scholar, Robbins Landon”. Both Robbins Landon and Badura-Skoda
were totally convinced, and only when someone thought to analyse the paper, the
ink and the actual writing did they realise they had been entirely written in
the late 20th century. As
Hill points out, having been regarded as the “musical discovery of the century…once
proved to be forgeries, the Sonatas vanished from the public domain”. Which, of course, begs the question; what
matters most, the music or the provenance?
Why should we give less credence to the Ave Maria once we know it is by a 20th century Soviet
composer than when we thought it was by a 16th century Italian one?
In these days of Photoshop, digital re-alignment and
total belief in the truth of whatever is published on the internet, we cannot
really know what is real and what is fake, but perhaps this does not
matter? Surely if we like the music, who
wrote it, when it was written and the motives behind its composition should not
concern us. I can understand why the Bosnians
want their prize money back from Sestic, but I really cannot understand why
fake Haydn is any less enjoyable than real Haydn or why spoof Zak should be
regarded as a joke while real Cage is taken so seriously.
Now its about time we dug up those unknown pieces by "Schubert","Reger","A.Dupre", "Zemlinsky", and best of all "Hans Poser", that were played by the late Ong Lip Tat (and which were so well received by audiences) in his piano recitals. He was a pianist-composer in the truest sense.
ReplyDeleteThis brings to mind the story an organist once told. The parishioners were complaining that he "played too much Bach". Thereafter, the prelude and postlude Often featured music of "John Brook". The congregation was appeased and the joke was on them. The wrong perspective and personal convictions can be dangerously misleading.
ReplyDeleteLovely to see you at the Schiff concert, Dr Marc.