Musical mendacity

July 8, 2:12 PMSF Classical Music ExaminerScott Foglesong

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Special Note: this is my final column for Examiner.com.

I've had a delightful time writing these articles, and my heartfelt thanks to all of you in the readership for your support and interest. I'm stepping down because my teaching schedule -- combined with my other commitments at the San Francisco Symphony and elsewhere -- demands the lion's share of my time, and the forthcoming academic year/season looks to be a whopper for me. Something has to give somewhere, and that something is Examiner -- it's the only thing that can give, in fact.

Of late I've been running through my backlog of written-but-not-posted articles, excepting this last Monday's entry, which was (obviously) new. Today's article on musical dishonesty is the last one remaining. Thus there is no connection between the article's subject and its being the blog's swansong: it's just the final completed article in the hopper.

I'm rather sad to be giving up S.F. Classical Examiner, but I would be sadder yet were the blog just to peter out from lack of attention, or worse yet deteriorate into a series of regurgitated press releases as I tried to squeeze in the occasional quick posting. The blog's future is not altogether clear. Quite possibly a new author -- perhaps somebody free to write reviews, which I am not -- will take it over, but for the moment I don't know.

As much as I would prefer the musical world to dwell in refined cloistered monasticism, undisturbed by human foibles or the dog-eat-dog everyday world, reality dictates otherwise. It's a business, perhaps not quite as driven by profit/loss as, say, investing, but nonetheless subject to the perils of ambition and greed, just like any other business.

Misrepresentation, piracy, sharp business practices, and downright fraud have disfigured the profession over the years. All things considered, the actual amount of hard-core dishonesty is relatively small. Musicians, after all, are by definition obliged to put up or shut up -- especially performers, who must sooner or later pick up their fiddle, sit down at the piano, or open their mouths, and bear witness to a listening audience whether or not their claims of competence or brilliance are indeed valid.

But fakery happens. I recall the pickup technique worked out by a fellow piano major of mine during our mutual conservatory days. Upon having met a likely young lady, the chap would first determine if she was indeed as ignorant of music as she seemed. Having established her inexperience, he would then pretend to have gone without sleep for a few days while writing a piano piece that expressed his profound feelings for her. He would show her at least enough of a scribbled hand manuscript as to be convincing, whereupon he would shepherd her lovingly to the piano and play a Chopin nocturne, Mendelssohn Song Without Words, or some such other lyrical Romantic piece, passing it off as the product of his fevered creative passion. Presumably at that point the young woman would swoon and/or suggest an evening in the sack.

Many of us remember with some amusement the spectacle of the pop group Milli Vanilli, a duo that rocketed to stardom in the late 1980s and received a Grammy in 1990. Before long it was revealed that neither of the young men -- Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan -- were the ones actually singing on their hit album. The Grammy was revoked, Pilatus passed away from a drug overdose some years later, and Morvan has kept at it, this time doing his own singing.

Milli Vanilli
Photo: Arista Records

Recently we in the classical music world have been treated to an utterly magnificent spectacle, the "Joyce Hatto" fraud. The thing played out at a downright operatic level, dragging in commentators, critics, audio specialists, and a host of assorted characters, and ending with a surprisingly large group of folks wiping a surprisingly thick layer of egg off their faces.

Joyce Hatto herself was a minor-league British pianist who suddenly began popping up in a series of recordings made, it was said, at the end of her life when she was battling cancer. A river of CDs flooded forth from the "Concert Artists" label, covering an astonishing amount of repertoire, including ferociously tough stuff like the Godowsky paraphrases of the Chopin Études and the Liszt Transcendental Études. Reviewers fell all over themselves in their rush to heap effusive praise on these astonishingly fine performances. How, they said, could this extraordinary pianistic giant have remained so completely under the radar for so long? For a short while there, it seemed as though Hatto were Rubinstein, Horowitz, Brendel, Schnabel, Pollini, and Liszt himself, all rolled into one, the absolutely perfect pianist of irreproachable musical and technical artistry.

I remember being taken aback by the extravagant ballyhoo of some of the reviews -- what the hell are these people smoking? I thought. I hadn't heard the CDs in question, but there was something decidedly fishy, something faddish, about the fawning over this elderly British lady. Given that near-cultish adorations and vendettas are apparently the emotional lot of some CD reviewers, I figured the dubiously gushy reviews to represent little more than a reverse twist on your basic Infant Phenomenon fad, and put them out of my mind.

Others shared my doubts but decided to voice them publicly, in particular questioning how an elderly, frail, cancer-ridden woman with no prior track record to speak of could have played such an amazing torrent of recorded performances, much less such expert ones. Researchers were noting troubling similarities between Hatto's recordings and those from other pianists. Others were noticing that the pianos in the recordings were clearly different -- despite Hatto's husband having insisted that they were all made on the same Steinway. Yet others were wondering about the conductor & orchestra featured on the concerto recordings: nobody had ever heard of them. Online track-lookup software, such as in iTunes, was reporting Hatto's CDs to be the work of other performers.

Of course it was all a big fake: the "Hatto" CDs were actually copies of other recorded performances, typically pirated intact or else subjected to a bit of minor digital manipulation -- slightly sped up or slowed down -- in order to avoid clear identification. Hatto's husband made a game attempt to throw up a series of increasingly threadbare cover stories, but the gig was up, Humpty-Dumpty came crashing down, and a thwacking good time was had by all. Well, maybe not all.

For me the most delectable thing about the affair was the way some CD reviewers heaped praise on the Hatto copies after having had lambasted the originals. The Hatto scandal, from first to last, bore eloquent witness to the influence of backstory and venue on the supposed objectivity of music critics; caught up in the romanticism of the story, they did not realize that they were being duped. I suppose that's the definition of a really good fraud, and by that standard Hattogate is one of the juiciest of all time.

I recommend Mark Singer's article for The New Yorker for a thoroughgoing coverage of the entire scandal.

Joyce Hatto
Photo: Jeremy Nicholas

Other instances of musical dissembling pale in comparison to the sheer effrontery of the Hatto scandal, but they're still worth bringing up.

I would place the so-called "Mozart effect" as a prime example of shoddy statistical science enciting a fad amongst anxious parents who only want the best for their little darlings. The basic idea is that listening to specific Mozart pieces somehow improves your intelligence, and might be particularly beneficial to babies and young kiddies. Anybody with half a grain of skepticism in his/her makeup is likely to ask the first, critical question: why Mozart? After all, he was writing in a pan-European musical style that varied only slightly from locality to locality, or even composer to composer in some instances. Why not, say, Vanhal? If Mozart's presumed intellectual rigor lies behind the effect, then why not Haydn -- a writer of incomparable structural and musical integrity? Why not, for that matter, Stravinsky's neo-classical works like the Octet? The whole thing smacks of new-age silliness, reeking of pyramid power, crystals, or the miraculous properties of bee pollen.

Its promoters may or may not have been sincere, but nonetheless there is no "Mozart effect" except in a the sense of a lucrative, trademarked set of commercial recordings and stuff. You may find a very solid rebuttal here, another here, and another here.

Certain historical figures fascinate me for their audacity. Proto-pop pianist Daniel Steibelt (right) remains a delightfully intriguing character, not precisely a charlatan in the absolute sense of the word, but hardly the mature musician he claimed himself to be. You may remember Steibelt as the chap who got played under the rug by an angry, insulted Ludwig van Beethoven; engaged in an impromptu competition at a nobleman's house, Steibelt whacked through a series of trumpery variations on a simple tune then smugly awaited Beethoven's response. Beethoven flipped the music upside down, thumped out the first four notes, and proceeded to improvise as only he could; Steibelt slunk out of the room, exposed for the mediocrity he was.

Nonetheless, his pretty wife played the tambourine quite nicely and might on occasion flash the audience a glimpse of a shapely forearm in the process, ensuring his continued popularity on the road. He was a bonafide plagiarist, dishonest in his dealings with publishers, and a so-so pianist who depended primarily on flash and showmanship to make an effect. But there is something irresistably entertaining about him, especially from the safe distance of several centuries, when one needn't put up with his preening vanity and arrogance.

On the subject of publishers, it is my sad duty to relate that Joseph Haydn himself was not altogether honest in his business dealings. On several occasions he duped publishers, mostly for a relatively short period during the 1780s. He paid the price for his sharp practices -- lawsuits, difficulties with the public, and distinct awkwardness with some of his publishers. Haydn's avarice represents the one clear personality flaw in an otherwise admirable man, surely one of the most attractive and centered composers in history.

Furthermore, Haydn was himself the victim of unscrupulous practices; the number of spurious "Haydn" symphonies, quartets, and trios well outnumbers the real ones, and those many fakes have created untold difficulties for later scholars, who have been obliged to separate out the real Haydn from the chaff. It wasn't all that long ago that an "Opus 3" set of string quartets were accepted as Haydn, although they are all by other writers and have been removed from the catalog. Other composers suffered from similar problems, mostly posthumously -- such as Pergolesi, while others -- such as Handel with his "borrowings" -- weren't always the ethical paragons one might have preferred them to be.

So we wait for the next big, hot musical scandal...what will it be? Hopefully nothing boring like the violin dealer shafting his clients, or that sad, confusing tale about the saxophone mouthpiece chap. The Hatto-level volcanos erupt but rarely, but when they do, they make for a nice break from the ordinary.