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The Great Classical Music Swindle.
And what are you willing to do for love?
I have stolen, cheated, perjured, swindled, betrayed, deceived, and duped. And I have no regrets, no regrets – believe me! – I would do it all again and even worse. And I will do it again – for a kiss, for a conspiratorial glance, for a night of passion – if only the mocking plots of Fate give me another chance. And, even if some vengeful Demon were to one day present me with the bill for my misdeeds to throw me into some dark Gehenna of the Soul, I would welcome it with a satisfied smile: I have accumulated memories that will fill those apparent Eternities and, then, in that dark prison, I would find the company of other loving spirits.
And I don't think there could be better company.
Who knows, perhaps among those spirits I might even find good William Barrington-Coupe, even though his sins are not comparable to mine at all. He – after all – only lied and only about some trivial details.
And what would you have done if your wife had been an excellent pianist, an esteemed concert performer, even a soloist with the London Symphony Orchestra, but had not yet achieved the fame you knew she deserved?
And if ovarian cancer had cut short her career just as she was about to soar?
What would you have done?
What William did was to take his Joyce to the countryside of Hertfordshire and continue his work as a small record producer and artist agent. Joyce gave her last concert in '76 and then disappeared. For 24 years.
Then, in 2000, William decided to show the world what his Joyce could do, to tell everyone who Joyce Hatto really was, not to let those 24 years go in vain. And so, within a few years – from 2002 to 2006 – William managed to publish, through his production company, Concert Artists, a body of over 100 piano performances that his Joyce had recorded, amid the unspeakable suffering of the illness, in those 24 years. Extraordinary performances of pieces by Mozart, Liszt, Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, Schubert, and Rachmaninoff, among the most complex and taxing to perform, all or almost all captured in a tiny recording studio set up in a shed at the bottom of his garden in Royston, down there in Hertfordshire.
Then the illness took Joyce away in 2006, but, thanks to that tireless promotional work by her William, she had time to see her talent acclaimed and recognized.
Indeed, those records made a splash: the public and critics clapped their hands raw. Hatto’s name was compared to people like Vladimir Ashkenazy, Mitsuko Uchida, or Alfred Brendel. The Boston Globe hailed her as "the greatest living pianist almost no one has heard of." The Daily Mail wrote: “In the days before her death, Hatto even managed to record Beethoven's last sonata while playing the piano from her wheelchair. It was an achievement that brought a series of admired obituaries upon her death, with her hailed as a 'national treasure' with a 'musical repertoire and quality matched by few pianists in history.'”
How can one not be moved by such a story? How can one not be astounded and amazed at the quality of those performances (some of the most complex and daunting in the entire international piano repertoire), especially considering the condition of the person performing them?
That small, fragile sick woman, watched only by the loving gaze of her William, in the pleasant English countryside, had performed a miracle!
And the story should end here.
Instead, there is talk about a certain Brian Ventura, from Mount Vernon, New York.
Now, our Brian is a real nerd, one of those who love digital stuff and, presumably, gets laid little. That's why I love old vinyl and all that analog stuff: with vinyl, it's a thing between you and it, a relationship marked in the grooves like the wrinkles of two old lovers, and memory is only something personal, intimate. Instead, that damn digital remembers everything, notes everything, worse than an angry wife.
Practically, our Brian downloads onto the computer to transfer it to his iPod, precisely this “12 Transcendental Studies” by Hatto and notices that the iTunes database insists that the code embedded in the CD belongs to a recording by Hungarian pianist Laszlo Simon.
Brian, who probably at that time (and in my opinion even after) got laid little, instead of keeping it to himself and blaming some mysterious rogue algorithm for the anomaly, made a big fuss about telling others.
The upshot: it turned out that good William had “corrected” Joyce's recordings by adding bits and longer and longer pieces from other pianists, with a masterful job of editing and remastering: our Loving Spirit availed himself of his technical experience to subtly alter recordings made by other pianists, slowing them in some parts, accelerating them in others, altering tenor or bass lines, so as to deceive even the keenest critics.
Some got mad, some raised their voices, some called it “one of the most extraordinary cases of piracy ever seen in the record industry”, some threatened lawsuits, but, in the end, nothing came of it. And what would have been done? It was said that those recordings were "a desperate attempt to create a shrine for a dying wife" and that, in the end, no great harm was done to anyone.
In fact, Laszlo Simon, for example, who was not very famous, was rediscovered and started recording and performing again.
In the end, our William had done nothing different from what a good beatmaker does in a posse! You just need to consider Hatto's discs as a successful experiment in a fusion between Classical and Hip Hop. Or better yet, see it as something akin to the best experiments in “plagiarism” by people like Negativland or John Oswald.
That's what I did: I moved “12 Transcendental Studies” from the Classical Music shelf and placed it between Oswald’s “Discosphere” and Negativland’s “Escape From Noise” and everything fell into place!
William passed away a few years ago, in 2014; he always said that Joyce knew nothing of what he had done and I believe him. Although I would have loved to know that the two were in on it and that they laughed their heads off thinking about the critics’ faces!
Now do you understand why I say Loving Spirits are the best company with whom to spend Eternity?
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