A Strange Story

Today Pliable, on the other side of the pond, gives his readers a link to a very strange story involving an almost-famous British pianist, Joyce Hatto. Long story short, that's what happened to her: she was a promising but not totally successful pianist in the 1950s and 1960s, although she had the chance to study with some luminaries, such as Cortot and Boulanger; in the 1970s it seems that her career would take off, and she was being noticed for her interpretation of the 20th-century British repertoire as well as of Lizst and Chopin, but then she was diagnosed with cancer. She continued to perform in recitals for a short while, but her fear of having a breakdown during a performance, coupled with a critic's commentary, forced her forever out of concert halls, and then she dedicated herself to recordings for a small label, Concert Artist, which counted her husband among the producers working for it and using its studios. Her recordings remained mostly unnoticed until the 1990s, when her output suddenly and considerably increased, and in 2005 her fame reached across the Atlantic, when Richard Dyer from the Boston Globe wrote an article praising Hatto and claiming she "must be the greatest living pianist that no one has even heard of." She died last year, aged 77, and leaving 119 recordings for posterity to do whatever it wanted with them.

And it seems posterity has not been very kind to her and to these recordings. Even before Hatto's death there were skeptics who could not believe that a person fighting against cancer would be able to play so well so much of such a different repertoire: she recorded the complete works of Chopin, Prokofiev's sonatas, Rachmaninov's, Tchaikovsky's, Beethoven's and Brahms's piano concertos; she also recorded Scarlatti, Mozart, Bach, and also Messiaen and Ravel. Even though there were skepticals, there was no factual evidence that she had not played some, or all, of these pieces. After all, why would a pianist play a work and accept to be credited as someone else?

There was no factual evidence, until a couple of recording specialists stumbled upon recordings by other pianists that, upon close scientific analysis of the sound, were exactly like Hatto's recordings. Or rather, Hatto's recordings were identical to these pianists', not in terms of interpretation or rhythm, but really in terms of the frequencies reached, the beats, the length of the tracks. Truth be said, some of Hatto's tracks were not exactly like the ones by other performers. There was a slight stretch or shrinkage in the overall length of the track; the track might be equalized afterwards as well, but these specialists were able to identify the original track and reverse the changes that had been made in the Concert Artists CDs.

Supposing these tracks were actually not performed by Mrs. Hatto, but rather, as appears to be evident, were copied and perhaps slightly manipulated in studio, this story does not show anything particularly new about human nature. Blatant artistic plagiarism has been around for a few ages, just think of all the fake Vermeers and Rembrandts wandering around the world, or of the few lawsuits by obscure musicians against famous musicians who stole their melodies. When it comes to books, examples abound of scholars falsifying scientific or archaeological evidence, or of writers creating books strangely similar to something that had been written some years before, as has been claimed, e.g., of Nabokov's Lolita in relation to various other books.

So, what is so different about Hatto's wondrous 119 albums, or the share of them that was allegedly stolen from someone else? One thing is that it is not clearly evident why this hoax was created. Money doesn't seem to be the cause, since my impression is that very few people, a few privileged conductors, pianists, violinists and singers (and their agents), make a huge amount of money in the classical music industry, but most of the other ones don't seem to be exceptionally wealthy. If Mrs. Hatto was not a darling of the British critics before having cancer, it was not likely she would become rich by selling discs for an obscure label, and without performing in public as a way to gain visibility.

And then there are the wild hypotheses, such as "Joyce Hatto and her husband wanted to take revenge on all the critics who shunned her when she became sick. She exposed the contradictions and the lack of auricular sensibility of present-day critics." One would have to analyze music and the musical world the way Hercule Poirot analyzes crimes in order to reach such a conclusion, so revenge seems to be out of question.

It seems that, if not out of a desire for revenge, at least out of a desire for irony did the couple produce these discs. When I imagine a critic such as the Globe's Richard Dyer listening to Hatto's album of Chopin Mazurkas and feeling delighted at the sublime image of a terribly ill woman sacrificing herself for the sake of Music, I can't help remembering the concluding scene of Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, when the famed writer's half-brother sits by his side as Knight is dying in a hospital, and imagines some sort of mystical communion with him, only to find out later that Sebastian Knight was lying in a different room. Likewise, when listening to the recording attributed to Joyce Hatto, a listener aware of her life story wouldn't help attributing a sense of grandeur to her interpretation, until the listener finds out that the recording had actually been made by an arguably healthy pianist.

Seen through the prism of irony, it is indeed possible to make sense of the name of the recording label that issued all of Hatto's post-1976 albums: "Concert Artist" is definitely not what Mrs. Hatto was, since she only played inside the studio.

Yet some things remain totally obscure in this story. Even the recourse to irony does not explain convincingly why Joyce Hatto and her husband decided to issue these recordings. Another strange thing is the pattern, if any, of the altered recordings. Among the recordings that have been altered, there are two by widely known soloists and orchestras, the Rachmaninov concerto under Esa-Pekka Salonen and Yefim Bronfman (on a Sony Classical CD), and the Brahms concerto under Haitink and Ashkenazy (on a Decca CD). However, three other recordings that have been identified are by lesser-known soloists for smaller labels, such as Laszlo Simon for BIS, Carlo Grante for Altarus or Eugen Indjic for Claves. More interesting that discovering what motivated the entire enterprise would be perhaps to understand why the "producer" and the "performer" in Concert Artist's recordings used specifically these recordings. A reason perhaps is that, in the randomness of these choices, Hatto and her husband thought their mischief would be less perceptible.

However, it is possible that the couple also wanted to disclose, albeit in a rather subtle way, their hoax. All of Hatto's recordings with an orchestra, except for a few from her early years (and I suppose these were actually made by her), were made with a certain "National Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra" under the baton of "René Köhler." It should be evident that such a name for an orchestra is just a concoction of the terms that are more commonly used when naming ensembles: "national," "symphony," "philharmonic." But "Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra" is almost a redundancy (one might claim that "philharmonic" and "symphony" are synonims, but there is a subtle difference between the terms). Furthermore, Maestro Köhler hasn't recorded anything else, at least not classical music. René Köhler (yes, with the same diacritics, by the way) even has a website, but he seems to be a singer and songwriter from somewhere in Scandinavia. We can't help wishing him the best of luck in his new musical ventures.

Maestro René Köhler, since he decided to abandon the podium and dedicate himself to songwriting. Image Credit: www.renekohler.com, picture by Richard Fieten.