Musical Forgeries: Follow up

About a year ago I wrote an article titled “Musical Crimes: Forgery, Deceit, and Socio-Hermeneutics” at Cambridge, under the excellent supervision of Dr. Benjamin Walton, Jesus College. Since putting the article online, I’ve had a lot of feedback from people all over the world, so I thought I’d share it in the public space, along with the original article.

I’ve just had a very interesting email from Frank Manheim in Fairfax VA, who commented that:

Thank you for a stimulating foray into the world of artistic forgery. I have always admired and venerated Elemer De Hory, the Hungarian painter who more or less by accident launched forgeries of the great Parisian painters of the early 20th Century, and Hans van Meegeren, the Dutch forger of Vermeer who nearly got himself executed for collaboration with the Germans because he delivered supposed Vermeer masterpieces into the hands of Hermann Goring.

I revere Fritz Kreisler and appreciate the BBC jokesters who put together a totally ad hoc, mechanical combination of music played backward, vacuum cleaner noise and other excrescences and portrayed them as new compositions by a composer with an unpronounceable Polish name, (gaining respectful mention by some British music critics for London papers before the fraud was revealed).

It seems to me that these evidences stamp the 20th Century arts establishment as phony: pretense and arbitrariness mascarading as depth and discernment. I’ve also observed that such “smoking guns” are never explained or even mentioned by the magisters of the formal arts world. They are astutely simply ignored - as thought they didn’t exist. That has been a successful strategy, because if they were attacked, writers who have penetrated the veils like my heroes in music, Henry Pleasants and Nicholas Tawa could gain influence with younger musicians graduating from conservatories and undercut the future existence of the establishment in its present form.

Now there is a caviat to be mentioned in a book that I seem to have mislaid, that deals with the psychology and pscychoneurology of music. It claims that neuropsychiatric and physiologic studies have shown that certain areas of the brain become better developed in professional composers or other musicians who are actively interested in experimental contemporary music. In other words, musicians who work intensely with complex musical structures develop the ability to enjoy certain kinds of compositions that may have little meaning for average music lovers. And once they pass that threshhold they may no longer be able to identify with normal classical musical audiences - even if they wanted to.

A case in point is Leonard Slatkin, a conductor, who served as music director for the Washington National Symphony for many over the past dozen years. He is famous for his affinity for audiences, and enjoys giving “afterwords”, discussions of music after concerts. Yet, not a single one of his 73 commissions of new music - however beguiling they may sound when described - have aroused any affection in audiences.

Now my question. I agree wholeheartedly with you. If there are “Haydn” forgeries that sound as good as Haydn, let’s enjoy them! Can the Haydn works be accessed? And are any of the enterprising groups in the UK going to offer CDs of them. I’ll be the first buyer! Moreover, I think that the “fake” business could enormously stimulate museum visits for art - though I suspect the establishmentarians would energetically reject anything that could discredit their august authority.

Cordially, Frank Manheim, Fairfax VA.

So, to answer Mr Manheim’s questions. The ‘lost’ Haydn keyboard sonatas cannot, as far as I know be accessed anywhere; Robbins-Landon and Badura-Skoda destroyed any reference to the works, alongwith, I believe the ‘original’ manuscripts. I spent some time networking around various scholars trying to see if anything could be found, but my efforts were to no avail. The works were going to be recorded as part of one of the most anticipated releases of the decade - a ‘complete’ set of the keyboard sonatas - but once proved to be forgeries record companies quickly lost interest. To the best of my knowledge, the only record of the event ever occuring is in newspaper clippings and the memories of amused musicologists.

Interestingly, my article has somehow (honestly not by myself) become the Wikipedia definition of a musical hoax at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_hoax and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Turovsky-Savchuk.

Do write any comments beneath on your views on the subject - let the debate continue!