Friday, March 16, 2007
Plagiarism On A Grand Scale
I remember reading about Joyce Hatto some years ago and receiving a measure of inspiration by the notion that an average, some would’ve even said lackluster, pianist in her seventies would exit this life leaving behind a library of recordings that appeared would go down in history. Joyce Hatto, it appeared, had more than secured her legacy in a grand, almost too good to be true manner.
There was one catch, however. It was too good to be true.
...her career was already in decline when she was diagnosed with cancer in 1972. She retired to a village near Cambridge with her recording-engineer husband, William Barrington-Coupe, and a fine old Steinway that Rachmaninoff himself had used for prewar recitals in Britain.
Then, one of the strangest turns in the history of classical music. Starting in 1989, Joyce Hatto began recording CDs for a small record label run by her husband.
Beginning with Liszt, she went back to cover Bach, all of the Mozart sonatas and continued with a complete Beethoven sonata set. Then on to Schubert and Schumann, Chopin and Liszt. She played Messiaen. She tossed off Prokofiev sonatas (all nine) with incredible virtuosity. In total she recorded over 120 CDs — including many of the most difficult piano pieces ever written, played with breathtaking speed and accuracy.
I suppose suspicion should have been raised by this:
She gave to the music a developed although oddly changeable personality. She could do Schubert in one style, and then present Prokofiev almost as though she was a new person playing a different piano. It seemed an astonishing, chameleon-like artistic ability.
And, finally, there is this:
Jeremy Distler, slid Joyce Hatto’s CD of Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes into his computer. His iTunes library, linked to a catalogue of about four million CDs, immediately identified it as a recording by the Hungarian virtuoso Laszlo Simon.
Since then, further analysis by both professional sound engineers and piano recording enthusiasts across the globe has pushed toward the same conclusion: the entire Joyce Hatto oeuvre recorded from 1989 on appears to be stolen from the CDs of other pianists.
I suppose in hindsight it should hardly come as a surprise that she never played a lick on any of the recordings, at least not on any that have been scrutinized so far. This leads me to ponder a number of things, one of which is, what drives people to carry on with artistic fraud on such a gargantuan scale? That’s not to say that any amount of fraud is acceptable, but this type of fraud on such a scale is almost assuredly going to be found out. The other notion that I pondered is the fact that, by and large, we all want to believe a good story, especially one of such apparent inspiration. I mean really; an elderly pianist diagnosed with cancer and spends the twilight of her life accomplishing the impossible, leaving behind a legacy to last through the ages.
Now that we know of the fraud, I wonder about the motive behind it. One has to wonder just what the hell she was thinking. However, in the end, none of it matters because after all, she was simply a fake, a lecherous fraud of the worst kind who prayed upon the most base of human nature of simply wanting to believe.