The concept of authorship casts two long shadows across western creative culture: plagiarism and forgery. In the realm of music history, the first of these twin transgressions against the author will likely be rather familiar. From Franz von Walsegg’s appropriation of Mozart’s Requiem in the 1790s to the highly publicized (and still divisive) 2015 legal case surrounding the hit song “Blurred Lines,” the issues of style, authenticity, and identity raised by passing off someone else’s music as your own are profound. But what about forgery—the act of attributing your own music to somebody else without their knowledge or consent? Since musicology has remained curiously silent on this topic it is worth pausing to consider what musical forgery should be understood to mean, and why one might want to engage in such activity.
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Han Van Meegeren’s “The Supper at Emmaus” (1936)—an infamous Vermeer Forgery |
While the faux Baroque of Kreisler and his ilk is typically considered an exceptional curiosity of the early twentieth century, one does not have to look far to discover that musical forgery extends both backwards and forwards in history well beyond this period. My most recent research on the topic, for example, has focused on a case that unfolded as recently as the winter of 1993–1994, when news broke that six “rediscovered” Haydn keyboard sonatas were not by Haydn at all. Having dubbed the works “The Haydn Scoop of the Century” in the January 1994 edition of BBC Music Magazine, H. C. Robbins Landon, arguably the most influential Haydn scholar of his generation, was forced just one month later to rebrand the sonatas as a brilliant hoax.
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Joseph Haydn (??)—Sleeve Art for Paul Badura-Skoda’s CD recording of the forged Haydn Sonatas |
On one level, the rediscovered Haydn sonatas can be seen as masterful model compositions gone bad. Musically speaking, Robbins Landon was convinced not only that they were “of very high quality,” but also that, because of their perceived origin in the years leading up to the so-called Sturm und Drang period and use of “unexpected modulation,” they clarified “in a particularly striking way Haydn’s search for a new musical language of strength and beauty.”[3] Such glowing evaluations of “unexpected” details (when presumed to stem from a historical master, not a modern imitator) might be the most fascinating aspect of forgeries as aesthetic objects. There is no better illustration of the tension inherent in presuming authorial identity to be falsifiable by virtue of style alone (put simply, the idea that piece X could not possibly be by composer Y because of Z transgression against the norms of counterpoint) while simultaneously equating genius with inspired originality.
So why would someone bother to produce compositions such as these in the first place? Compared to the lucrative business of forging paintings there is little financial incentive to forge a musical work, especially given that the manuscripts falsified to contain such compositions tend to imitate the hands of obscure copyists, not illustrious authorial figures like Haydn. While there can be no simple or universal answer to the complex question of motivation, one compelling possibility is to read forgery itself as a critique—whether of aesthetic snobbery, experthood, or academic authority itself. With this in mind, it is precisely the fact that one cannot get rich by selling forged musical works that—for me at least—makes musical forgeries more intellectually intriguing than their better known visual counterparts. The relationships of power and authority at play as forgers compete against academic critics in the arena of musical composition are all the clearer without multi-million-dollar profits to consider. Beginning to take forgeries seriously as cultural acts on their own terms, then, is one means by which we can confront the ongoing challenges to authorship, authority, and truth itself that beset the modern humanities. As the Met Art curator Theodore Rousseau aptly reminds us, "we can only talk about the bad forgeries, the ones that have been detected; the good ones are still hanging on the walls." With this aphorism in mind, our familiar museums of musical works might never sound the same again.

[1] Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a System of Symbols (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1976), 112.
[2] The distinction between “referential” and “inventive” modes of forgery is developed at length in Jerrold Levinson, Music, Art, and Metaphysics: Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
[3] H. C. Robbins Landon, “The Haydn Scoop of the Century,” BBC Music Magazine, January, 1994, 11.
Has there been any recent research on Tobias Nicotra's forgeries? They spanned arts media and were apparently quite successful.
ReplyDeleteHi Kendra! It’s a great question. I must admit that, as far as I know, the existing literature on Nicotra is rather limited. While they are not particularly recent, the best places to start would probably be Bruce Haynes’s “The End of Early Music” (Oxford, 2007) and Harry Haskell’s “The Early Music Revival: A History” (Dover, 1996). Both of these books have chapters that draw Nicotra into broader narratives about the early music revival and its complex relationship to historical authenticity. That said, if there is any substantial work out there on Nicotra specifically that I am missing, I would be excited to hear about it.
ReplyDeleteHave a look at Erin Smith's MA thesis https://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/handle/1903/15385/Smith_umd_0117N_15217.pdf;sequence=1
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