Pianist Joyce Hatto.
The Joyce Hatto story was always too good to be true. And finally, yesterday, Hatto's husband and producer William Barrington-Coupe admitted he had confessed to the hoax. Having repeatedly denied the claims, Barrington-Coupe now admits to having copied the recordings and invented details of later recordings sessions. He claims it began when Hatto's increasingly painful recording efforts produced only mixed results, so he started splicing passages from other recordings, similar to Hatto's in their style and intention, until, as is now clear, Hatto's continuing efforts became unusable. All the pianist's acclaimed "recordings" are copies, occasionally doctored slightly and repackaged.
Some are hardly surprised. Others undoubtedly sense a failure - on behalf of the critics, journalists, and recording professionals - to discover the lie sooner. After all, most of the reviews of Hatto's "recordings" refer in some way to the heroic story of a pianist's triumph over adversity, and many will suggest that critics, in being duped by the story, allowed this story to taint the listening process.
But can critics really be blamed for allowing the Hatto story to affect their listening? The 20th century laboured long under a myth of music as pure and absolute, of a listening experience consisting of untainted, unadulterated cerebral contemplation. In reality, though, we grasp on to what narratives we can in order to make sense of the deep emotions we experience. The Hatto story, if taken at face value, is precisely the kind that really would enhance a performance's magic.
Listen to a beloved, familiar recording, and part of what you will hear is that it is beloved, that it is familiar; this, in itself, can be valuable, like the reassuring company of an old friend. Listen to a new discovery, and the fascination of exploration, of novelty, will be part of what you hear, bringing the notes and harmonies to life with fresh excitement.
Arguably, then, the critics cannot be accused of failing to engage properly with the music since, in taking the recordings at face value - which, by and large, one must - the Hatto myth was as much a part of the music as the notes played and recorded by unnamed others.
More interesting, perhaps, is the way in which Barrington-Coupe's practice evolved into one primarily of cherry-picking the back-catalogue for performances that, effectively, he thought his wife would have liked to have been able to record. The musical intentions of an ailing Hatto and her vicarious husband really are reflected faithfully in the pianist's "recorded legacy".
There was a time when musicians' struggles with the past took the form solely of composers' attempts to forge a path beyond the gravitational pull of the greats of the newly forming canon. Beethoven and, later, Wagner exercised a power over their successors that reduced many of them to weak-kneed imitators. Now, together with the force of this compositional past, congealed and made ever-present by a century of recording, is the added weight of the great, "definitive" reference recordings that form the centre of an expanding, immense mass of perfectly preserved musical matter.
In some ways the Hatto story is that of classical music recording in the 20th century. Hatto's name - effectively reduced to a brand for an undiscovered, discretely British greatness - perhaps provides a clue as to what fuels the increasingly fragile engine of classical music recording.
Though, in ethical terms, Barrington-Coupe's work of fraudulent repackaging has been specious to say the least, in another way his virtual Joyce Hatto - an artist complete with a moving biography, genuine history and extensive documentation in letters, interviews and eulogising newspaper obituaries - was the complete pianist for our times.
