As stated Orson Welles in the prologue of F for Fake: “Almost all stories include some kind of lie.” In the history of music there have been hoaxes, also called hoaxes or frauds. They have been few, but very famous. In a musical hoax, a work by another is intentionally attributed to some well-known composer.
What motivates a musician to disguise his own work under the name of another composer?
In art, one looks and listens differently depending on who the author is, who is the one who largely determines the value of the work. The listener’s predisposition is different if the author of the work is a well-known composer or if, on the contrary, it is a lesser-known composer.
For some performers, musical tricks were a way to put their own musical works into circulation and thus enlarge the repertoire of their instrument.
These types of tricks were used by two of the greatest virtuosos in the history of music. Both composed small musical works that they attributed to other composers, mainly from the Baroque and classical periods. Being attributed to other composers, they became known as transcriptions and not as original works.
A transcription of a musical work is an adaptation for a instrument different from what is originally written. Transcriptions require great knowledge of the register and the technical and timbre possibilities of the instrument or group for which the work is transcribed. The piano, given its register and polyphonic possibilities, has always been a perfect instrument for making transcriptions. In fact, many transcriptions have gone down in history as great works of art, such as those made by the Austro-Hungarian pianist and composer Franz Liszt.
Some transcriptions, however, have given rise to musical hoaxes.
Gaspar Cassado He was one of the most important cellists and composers with the greatest international projection of all time. He was born in Barcelona in 1897 and throughout his life he lived in different cities and gave concerts all over the world. He studied cello in Paris with Pau Casalsin addition to receiving advice from Maurice Ravel and of Falla’s Manual. At the outbreak of the First World War he returned to Spain and later decided to expatriate and settle in Florence. He formed a duet with the great pianist Alice Larrocha and trio with Yehudi Menuhin y Louis Kentner. A terrible accusation written by Diran Alexanian on behalf of Pau Casals and published in The New York Times he cut his career short in 1949 as he began his second major American tour at a time of great political upheaval.
His legacy has been scattered and historical events have not helped to keep it alive either. Throughout his life he witnessed several wars, he did not have children and, a few years before he died, he married Chieko Haraa Japanese pianist who returned to Japan with much of her husband’s sheet music when she became a widow.
Gaspar Cassadó was also a composer and today his works are part of the great cello repertoire. His best known compositions are the Suite for solo cello, compliments o to Sonata in old Spanish style. In addition to his compositions, he made multiple transcriptions for cello and piano of works by other composers, such as Granados, Chopin o Debussy.
In addition to the transcriptions, Gaspar Cassadó composed small works that he attributed to other composers and which were published as transcriptions. In 1925, Universal Edition published a series of supposed transcriptions made by Gaspar Cassadó of works by Schubert, Couperin, Muffat o Frescobaldi. One of the works he published was the “transcription” of the Toccata of Jerome Frescobaldi, an Italian composer and organist born in 1583. This work became part of the regular repertoire of recitals not only by Gaspar Cassadó, but also by other performers of great international fame. Even the conductor Hans Kindler In 1942 he made a transcription for orchestra of the Toccata from the transcription published by Cassadó. This transcription by Kindler became popular and was included in one of its concerts by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1955. To prepare the program notes for such a concert, the writer John Burk he asked Cassadó for the manuscript and the data of the Toccata. Cassadó evaded all the questions and only provided vague information, alleging that he had discovered it in the archives of La Merced, where his father had been an organist. The manuscript was never located, so in 1978 an article by Walter Schenkman in which he affirmed that Gaspar Cassadó himself was the authentic composer of the Toccata. There is no record that Cassadó has ever recognized the deception. Years later, the work was renamed Toccata in the style of Frescobaldi and to include Gaspar Cassadó himself as its only composer.
Fritz Kreisler He was one of the greatest violinists and composers in the history of music. He was born in 1875 in Austria and studied at the Vienna and Paris Conservatoires. He was a student of composers Anton Bruckner, Leo Delibes y Jules Massenet. He made his first tour of the United States at the age of fourteen. Despite his success, he was rejected by some orchestra and decided to study medicine and even served in the army for a short time before resuming his tours in 1899. During World War II he went into exile in the United States fleeing Nazism. He enjoyed worldwide popularity during his lifetime and inspired great composers such as Edward Elgarwho dedicated his Concerto for violin and orchestra.
His facet as a composer and arranger was also very important. He imitated the style of other composers in an extraordinary way, which led him to publish several works that he attributed to other composers, such as Boccherini, VivaldiCouperin, To fight, Dittersdorf o Stamitz. He claimed to have found the manuscripts of these works in churches, monasteries and bookstores throughout Europe. In his concerts it was common for him to interpret these works attributed to baroque or classical composers. They became so popular that even other performers included them in their recitals. One of his best known was the Praeludium and Allegro attributed to Gaetano Pugnani, a Turin violinist born in 1737. According to Kreisler, the manuscript had been found in an old convent in southern France.
The authorship of these works was not questioned until a critic from the Music section of The New York Times called Olin Downes began to investigate its provenance to prepare a conference on a recital. Failing to find the manuscripts, she did not hesitate to ask Kreisler if he was the author of those works. Kreisler admitted to the deception and acknowledged its authorship. Given the uproar caused by such a revelation, Kreisler wrote in 1935 in The New York Times that “his only objective was to enrich his concert programs and that it seemed inappropriate and tactless to repeat his name endlessly in the programs.”
Both Cassadó and Kreisler were great interpreters and composers, as well as masterful imitators of styles. Paraphrasing Welles again, in the world of music there are also “many oysters, but only a few pearls.” These works have endured over time and are part of the cello and violin repertoire, despite the deceptions.
Great works of art survive circumstances if they are pearls, as the false transcriptions of Kreisler and Cassadó have shown. These original works were published a few years later under the names of their true composers, with the name of the imitated composer added with the caption “in the style of…”.
As Fritz Kreisler put it in 1935: “The name changes, the value remains.”
