Collaborating With Samuel Dushkin: “Dear Sam”

The Polish-born American violinist Samuel Dushkin (1891-1976) is widely known for his extensive collaborations with Igor Stravinsky. The two men were compatible friends from the very beginning and eventually embarked on a concert tour through Europe and the United States, which lasted for the better part of five years. Dushkin was said to have had a gentle, self-effacing, and considerate character, which sharply contrasted with Stravinsky’s fiercely dynamic, egotistical and combative demeanour. A biographer writes, “much of the success of the friendship must be attributed to the violinist’s wholly unaggressive nature, as well as to his rich sense of humour.”

Samuel Dushkin

Stravinsky and Dushkin first met in Paris in 1931, but both had been in town for some time already. Dushkin had studied at the Paris Conservatoire, taking violin lessons with Guillaume Remy and attending composition classes with Ganaye. He made his Paris début in 1918 and subsequently toured widely, giving many important first performances. One such premiere performance took place on 19 October 1924 in Amsterdam, as Pierre Monteux conducted the Concertgebouw, and Dushkin was the soloist in the orchestrated version of Ravel’s Tzigane. 

Bohuslav Martinů (1890-1959) had been living in Paris since 1923. In 1931, Dushkin premiered the Stravinsky Violin Concerto after having collaborated closely with the composer. The concerto was a resounding success, and Dushkin was very much the man of the hour. Dushkin was clearly on a roll, and he followed up by commissioning a violin concerto from Martinů in early 1932. The two men became good friends, and on the occasion of a visit, Charlotte Martinů fell ill with double pneumonia and a high fever. Dushkin took charge and had her admitted to the American Hospital at Neuilly, probably saving her life.

Bohuslav writes, “that violinist, Dushkin, is an American and has a lot of connections, so he found some help for us. There’s such an organisation among Americans that takes care of artists when they’re ill. They arranged for us to take Charlotte to the hospital, and they’re going to pay for the hospital care and the entire stay and treatment! Dushkin really devoted himself to her. He saw that I wouldn’t make it on my own.”

Bohuslav and Charlotte Martinů

The friendship between Martinů and Dushkin, however, did not make for a smooth collaboration on the violin concerto. Dushkin had been a creative and technical consultant throughout the gestation of the Stravinsky concerto. He offered advice and suggestions to Stravinsky, who had no experience as a string player. Martinů, on the other hand, had formerly been a professional violinist, and he did not need much assistance. Still, Dushkin suggested countless amendments to the solo part of the concerto, and Martinů tried to please his famous soloist. Nonetheless, as late as February 1934, he admitted in a letter to his family that Dushkin was still dissatisfied and that further work was needed.

Both men eventually lost interest in the concerto, and the score was presumed lost. A Martinů biographer wrote in 1962, “from the beginning of the thirties dates an unfinished Violin Concerto for the American virtuoso Samuel Dushkin. I recall the frequent exchange of opinions between the two artists regarding various details in the concerto, which is apparently the reason for the composer not finishing it and the manuscript of which mysteriously disappeared.” However, the complete manuscript did, in fact, exist, and it did not disappear.

The concerto manuscript was not rediscovered until 1968, nine years after the composer’s death. It had probably been sent by Martinů to Boaz Piller, a bassoonist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and a close personal friend of Martinů, Stravinsky, Bloch, and Casals, in 1937. Martinů had probably been looking to arouse the interest of conductor Serge Koussevitzky, but in the event, the manuscript was deposited by Piller into the archives of the musicologist Hans Moldenhauer in 1961.

Over the course of forty years, Moldenhauer had assembled an unparalleled collection of primary sources documenting the artistic thoughts and compositional process of celebrated and lesser-known figures of western music dating from the Middle Ages through the twentieth century. This collection, now housed at Northwestern University, was consulted by musicologist Harry Halbreich in 1968 during his work on a catalogue of Martinů’s works. Finally rediscovered, the concerto was first performed in Chicago on 25 October 1973 under George Solti, with Josef Suk as the soloist. It was not a rousing success, as a critic wrote, “it isn’t hard to deduce why the composer never promoted performance or publication of this opus during his lifetime.”

Gershwin’s Short Story

1924 was a hugely successful year for George Gershwin (1898-1937). The premiere of his Rhapsody in Blue had brought down the house, and the musical Lady Be Good! received a wonderfully successful launch. Dushkin was a close personal friend, and he decided to request a recital piece from Gershwin in late 1924. Gershwin was enthusiastic, and the two young men decided to collaborate.

Gershwin was still learning the craft of orchestration and was eager to explore the palette of colours available on instruments other than keyboards. In no time, Gershwin and Dushkin put together Short Story, taking as a starting point two short piano pieces that Gershwin had written a couple of years earlier but had not yet been published. The first piece features a languid and bluesy melody, while the second, more light-hearted syncopated tune, takes on the style of a ragtime. Dushkin and Gershwin premiered Short Story in 1925, and Dushkin programmed it often and recorded it in 1928.

William Schuman

In 1946, Samuel Dushkin approached William Schuman (1910-1992) for a violin concerto he hoped he would be able to premiere with Koussevitzky and the BSO. Once Schuman had completed the score, he sent it to Koussevitzky for review in late 1947. Unfortunately, Dushkin’s playing had significantly deteriorated over the years, and Koussevitzky told Schuman, “I will play it, but not with Dushkin. You must tell Dushkin.” This put Schuman in a rather tricky situation because Dushkin had already paid for the concerto and had exclusive rights to it for three years. Koussevitzky was not interested in legal niceties and said, “I don’t care what your agreement is. Take it away from him. We’ll give it to Isaac Stern and play it with the Boston Symphony.”

Schuman broke the news to Dushkin in a hotel bar, telling him that he could not go on with the Violin Concerto. “I know you were a great performer at one time, but no one is going to play it with you.” Apparently, Dushkin erupted in white-hot anger, snapping the stem of his martini glass in two.

William Schuman’s Violin Concerto

Schuman waited for three years, as Dushkin insisted on maintaining his exclusive right to the work. Finally the concerto was scheduled for performance on 10 February 1950 with Isaac Stern as the soloist and conductor Charles Munch. While the conductor loved the work, the composer accused Stern of not having grasped the intellectual underpinnings of the work and, therefore, of not presenting the concerto in its best light.

Schuman writes, “the inability of certain performers who are only conventional literature performers to come to grips with a new piece on its own terms, so Stern never understood it except superficially. He always thought the opening, which he used to sing, was frenetic, even though I want that to be broadly romantic…he would never play it that way.” Dushkin and Schuman did stay friends, and Schuman wrote at the premiere of the concerto’s final version in 1959, “I thought about you during the period of preparation and performance of the Concerto in Aspen. I cannot help but feel that somehow you would have been pleased.”

During his extensive performance career, Dushkin published many arrangements and transcriptions for violin and piano. They are published as the “Samuel Dushkin Repertoire,” and include arrangements of music by Bizet, Rachmaninoff, Albéniz and Wieniawski, and Reger. The Dushkin Repertoire also includes a compilation of arrangements by relatively unknown composers, including C. Artok, R. Felber, A. Sasonoff, and Paul Kirman. The Dushkin arrangements were eagerly taken up by a host of eminent violinists, and they are still part of today’s recital repertoire.

Ravel: Klavierkonzert D-Dur ∙ hr-Sinfonieorchester ∙ Jean-Efflam Bavouze...

Maurice Ravel: Klavierkonzert D-Dur ∙ »Konzert für die linke Hand« ∙ (Auftritt) 00:00 ∙ Lento – Andante – Allegro – Tempo 1o – Allegro 00:36 ∙ hr-Sinfonieorchester – Frankfurt Radio Symphony ∙ Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, Klavier ∙ Juraj Valčuha, Dirigent ∙ Alte Oper Frankfurt, 30. September 2016 ∙

Yuja Wang - Ravel: Piano Concerto for the Left Hand

18,694 views Dec 23, 2023 PARIS PHILHARMONIC

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, M. 82 Yuja Wang, piano Klaus Mäkelä, conductor Orchestre de Paris Live from Grande salle Pierre Boulez - Philharmonie de Paris on 10/4/2023 Full Concert: https://philharmoniedeparis.fr/fr/liv...

Germaine Tailleferre

by Georg Predota, Interlude

“Perhaps women have always been in closer contact with reality than men”

Germaine Tailleferre (1892-1983) was the sole female member of the intriguing group of young French composers eventually known as “Les Six.” Her association with “Les nouveaux jeunes” aside, Tailleferre was a prominent and prolific composer writing in a wide range of musical genres. Her memorable music for opera and ballet is augmented by piano concertos, symphonic works, solo piano pieces, music for small ensembles and well over 40 movie soundtracks. She left behind an extensive body of works representing almost 70 years of compositional engagement and over time forged a distinctive musical voice that valued clarity, spontaneity and charm. Tailleferre strongly believed that a composition would lack artistry if a listener couldn’t identify a composer’s style after three bars. “I write music because it amuses me,” Tailleferre suggested. “It’s not great music, I know, but it’s gay, light-hearted music which is sometimes compared with that of the “petits maîtres” of the 18th century. And that makes me very proud.”

Currently, Tailleferre is considered the “most important French woman composer of all time.” This appreciation, however, has only been forged during the 21st- century, and its cultural reinterpretation and revival of her music. Born Marcelle Taillefesse at Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, Val-de-Marne, France, her early years were marked by persistent struggles against her father. He considered music an unworthy pursuit, and a “woman studying music” he once remarked, “was no better than her becoming a streetwalker.” She eventually changed her name to spite her father, but never forgave him for his inflexible attitude towards her artistic gifts. Embittered, “she is said to have regarded his demise in 1916 as something of a relief.” Despites her father’s strong opposition, she began her study of piano and solfege at the Paris Conservatory in 1912, and immediately won various prizes in counterpoint and harmony. Tailleferre quickly caught the eyes of her fellow students Darius Milhaud, Georges Auric and Arthur Honneger. Upon the publication of her first string quartet in 1918, she was welcomed as a major talent into the private musical club that eventually blossomed into “Les Six.”

Les Six © s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com

Tailleferre rubbed shoulders with the greatest creative minds of her time. She was a close friend of Maurice Ravel and Erik Satie, a favorite of Jean Cocteau and acquainted with Aaron Copland. Her circle of friends included Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Guillaume Apollinaire, George Balanchine and Sergei Diaghilev, among numerous others. She once remarked that Picasso gave her the “best lesson in composition” she ever received as he told her to “constantly renew yourself; avoid using the recipes that you have already found.” Many of her most important works emerged during the 1920’s, including the First Piano Concerto, the Harp Concertino, the ballets Le marchand d’oiseaux and La nouvelle Cythère, which was commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev for the Ballets Russes. These highly successful and critically acclaimed compositions were followed by the Concerto for Two Pianos, Chorus, Saxophones, and Orchestra, the Violin Concerto, the opera cycle Du style galant au style méchant, the operas Zoulaïna and Le marin de Bolivar, and La cantate de Narcisse, in collaboration with esteemed French poet Paul Valéry.

Wanting to breathe new life into her career, Tailleferre moved to New York in 1925. Leopold Stokowski, Willem Mengelberg, Serge Koussevitzky, and Alfred Cortot performed her compositions, and her short-lived marriage to the New Yorker magazine artist Ralph Barton further enhanced her celebrity status. Musically reinvigorated and her marriage in tatters she returned to France, but World War II brought her once again to the United States. The war years severely stifled her musical creativity and productivity, and affected a fundamental cultural and artistic dislocation. Upon her return to France in 1946 Tailleferre continued to compose orchestral works, ballet and chamber music. However, most of these works were published posthumously with a substantial number of her compositions still unknown today. She nevertheless continued to compose until a few weeks before her death in 1983, and her last work Concerto de la fidelité pour coloratura soprano et orchestra premiered at the Paris Opera in 1982. Her music never failed to give voice to an extended French artistic tradition, and the seductive grace and charm of her work are perhaps best summed up by Cocteau’s famous assessment of Tailleferre “as the musical equivalent to painter Marie Laurencin.”

Playlist: Water Games

by Frances Wilson, Interlude

‘Water games’ is one translation of Jeux d’eau by Maurice Ravel, others being Fountains and Playing Water.

Shipwreck

Each is equally apt: in this piece Ravel brilliantly evokes “the splashing of water and by the musical sounds of fountains, cascades and rivulets” (Ravel) through shimmering figurations, cascading arpeggios and other fluid textures. It’s a masterpiece of Impressionism and was the well-spring for other water-inspired piano music by Ravel, namely Une barque sur l’océan from Miroirs and Ondine from Gaspard de la Nuit. 

Fountain in Villa d’Este, Tivoli

But the forerunner of these pieces was undoubtedly Franz Liszt’s Les jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este, which, like Jeux d’eau, evokes the sparkling play of fountains and the fluidity and brilliance of water. The Villa d’Este boasts an extraordinary system of fountains, with some fifty-one fountains and nymphaeums, 398 spouts, 364 water jets, 64 waterfalls, and 220 basins, fed by 875 metres of canals, channels and cascades, and all working entirely by the force of gravity, without pumps.

Reflections on water

Debussy was also a master of depicting water in music. Reflets dans l’eau (Reflections in the Water). Here Debussy imitates not just the sounds of water – droplets and burbles, splashes and raindrops – but also reflections, the pictures that float upon the surface.

n. The Lone Wreck, from The Tides by English composer William Baines, is a dramatic tone poem which paints a haunting picture of an abandoned ship deep in the ocean, complete with the calls of sea birds.

Night gondola in Venice, Italy

The Barcarolle, or “boat song”, inspired by the songs of Venetian gondoliers, seeks to portray the rocking motion of the sea and the rise and fall of waves. Chopin’s Barcarolle is perhaps the most famous work in this genre. Mendelssohn’s Venetian Gondolier’s Song in f-sharp minor from his Songs Without Words is dark and atmospheric, suggesting nighttime on the Venetian lagoon.

Liszt was also adept at portraying the motion of the ocean. In his Legende No. 2, St. Francis of Paola walking on the waves, the waters roll and bubble beneath the saint’s feet as he crosses the Straits of Messina.

Meanwhile, Benjamin Britten transports us to more serene waters in Sailing from his Holiday Diary suite. The wind gets up in the middle section, tossing the boat about, before calm is restored.

Maurice Ravel La Valse

1,369,696 views Aug 14, 2010

Myung-Whun Chung Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France

Sir Stephen Hough: The Composer

by Georg Predota, Interlude

One of the most distinctive artists of his generation, Sir Stephen Hough combines an international career as a pianist with those of composer, writer, and painter. The first classical performer to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (2001), Hough is a true renaissance man, exceedingly gifted as a pianist, educator, writer, painter, and composer.

Sir Stephen Hough

While his achievements as a pianist are well-known and documented, Hough is also a respected author with four books and hundreds of articles to his name. In addition, a solo exhibition of his paintings was presented in London in 2012. It’s hardly surprising that The Economist included him in the list of “Twenty Living Polymaths.”

In addition, Hough is also a published and frequently commissioned composer, having crafted works for orchestra, choir, chamber ensemble, organ, harpsichord, and solo piano. He has received commissions from the Takács Quartet, the Cliburn, the Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet, and the Gilmore Foundation, among many others. 

First Compositions

According to his father, Hough had memorised seventy nursery rhymes by the age of two. Be that as it may, singing was indeed his first form of musical expression, “especially as we had no classical music in my childhood home.” Hough sang hymns in primary school and church; later, he joined a choir in high school, and he joined the compulsory chorus at Julliard.

Hough started piano lessons at the age of six, and he began to compose at around the same time. He remembers writing a “Mass” in his teenage years, but Hough is generally dismissive of his juvenilia compositions. As he writes, “the Mass 

Transcriptions

Apparently, Hough composed a substantial number of works, but as he related in an interview, “mercifully, that pile of smudged sketches has disappeared.” These early efforts culminated in a viola sonata, the only early work that was actually published. However, for the next twenty odd years, Hough composed next to nothing, except an odd transcription or two. Hough related the story that after a recital in New York in the late 1990s, when he played his transcription of Rodger’s Carousel Waltz, he was chatting with the composer John Corigliano. 

Corigliano told Hough, “You should compose your own music. The only real difference between a transcription and writing your own pieces is using your themes rather than someone else’s.” This conversation became the starting point for a renewed engagement with compositions. Hough started to write little pieces for friends, and the bassoonist Graham Salvage from the Hallé Orchestra asked him to write a concerto. As Hough explained, “In a mad moment or reckless courage, I agreed to have a go and started sketching what eventually became The Loneliest Wilderness, my first serious piece in two decades.”

First Commissions

The Loneliest Wilderness was inspired by the poem “My Company” by Herbert Read (1893–1968), containing the following lines:

But, God! I know that I’ll stand
Someday in the loneliest wilderness,
Someday my heart will cry
For the soul that has been, but that now
Is scatter’d with the winds,
Deceased and devoid.

I know that I’ll wander with a cry:
‘O beautiful men, O men I loved,
O whither are you gone, my company?’

The work is based on two main musical ideas: the interval of a descending fourth and a rising chain of thirds. Introvert and restrained, this musical oration has a strong Jewish flavour to it, taking its inspiration from “the heart-breaking regret of an army officer as he looks back at the loss of the company of soldiers under his command.” 

Takács Quartet

Stephen Hough’s String Quartet No. 1

Dedicated to the Takács Quartet, Hough’s first string quartet premiered in December 2021. As it was commissioned as a companion piece to works by Ravel and Dutilleux, the composer set out to explore “not so much what united their musical language, but what was absent from them.” Although there are no quotes or direct references to the composers of Les Six, as captioned in the subtitle, the composer imagines unspecified places and memory where meetings might have taken place.

This string quartet “evokes a flavour more than a style,” according to Hough, “but a flavour rarely found in the music of Ravel and Dutilleux. In Les Six it’s not so much a lack of seriousness, although seeing life through a burlesque lens is one recurring ingredient; rather it’s an aesthetic re-view of the world after the catastrophe of the Great War. Composers like Poulenc and Milhaud were able to discover poignance in the rough and tumble of daily human life in a way which escaped the fastidiousness of those other two composers.”

Sonatas and Beyond

Stephen Hough’s Broken Branches

The term “Sonata” had a multiplicity of meanings over the years, but for Hough “it has kept its wordlessness and its seriousness; a sonata, regardless of form, is a statement of unity, if not uniformity.” And although the composer is wary of words or descriptions attached to them, he argues that “music is neither a thought nor an emotion nor a person, but very much its own entity. His sonata “Broken Branches,” is an oblique tribute to Janáček’s On an Overgrown Path, and a passage from Scripture: “I am the vine, you are the branches. Cut off from me you can do nothing.”

The sonata is constructed of sixteen small and inconclusive sections, like branches from a single tree. “Broken branches” functions in three ways; fragments of fragility, related in theme but incomplete and damaged.” The work seems to grow naturally out of Hough’s style of playing, and it opens with a “Prelude” and ends with a “Postlude” of identical music, but the anguish of the opening G-sharp minor becomes a glowing G major at the end. “Branches beginning life anew in a new spring.” The climax of this sonata is a section called “non credo,” based on “material from the Credo of my Missa Mirabilis, which explores issues of doubt and despair in the context of the concrete affirmations of the Nicene Creed.” 

A Statement of Faith

Stephen Hough joined the Roman Catholic Church at the age of 19, and he considered becoming a priest, in particular joining the Franciscan Order. Hough has extensively written about his homosexuality and its relationship with music and his religion. As he wrote, “Catholicism is still home for me. And despite everything, I haven’t found anything that suits me better.” Hough is attracted to the idea that Catholicism doesn’t emphasise rich and powerful people, but embraces poverty and simplicity. “Christianity celebrates what is ultimately important about being human—community, and concern for the widows, the prisoners, the prostitutes, people who are outcasts. I find that very attractive.”

The Missa Mirabilis is connected with a highly personal experience. Hough had been working on the piece for about one year when he had a serious car accident, overturning his car on the motorway at 80 mph. “I stepped out of the one untouched door in my completely mangled car,” he remembers, “with my Mass manuscript and my body intact, then wrote part of the “Agnus Dei” in St. Mary’s Hospital, waiting for four hours for a brain scan. I was conscious, as I was somersaulting with screeching metallic acrobatics on the M1, of feeling regret that I would never get to hear the music on which I’d been working so intensely in the days before. Someone had other ideas.” 

The Partita was commissioned by the Naumburg Foundation for Albert Cano Smit in 2019. As Hough explains, “composing four sonatas of a serious, intense character, I wanted to write something different – something brighter, something more celebratory, more nostalgic.” Scored in five movements, the outer movements “Overture” and “Toccata” are inspired by the world of a grand cathedral organ. The short three inner movements, “Capriccio,” and “Canción y Danza I & II,” are based on the interval of a fifth and partially represent an explicit homage to Federico Mompou.

Stephen Hough’s Fanfare Toccata

In 2002, Hough was commissioned to write a work for the 2022 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, performed by all 30 competitors. Hough took his inspiration from a variety of toccatas he had learned over the years, including Scarlatti, Liszt, and Rachmaninoff, Poulenc, Prokofiev and Samuel Barber. This inspiration accounted for the fanfare flourish complemented by a deeply romantic tune. It really does speak well of Hough’s composition that all 30 competitors have decided to make the Fanfare Toccata a part of their regular recital repertoire.

10 Greatest Musical Hoaxes and Pranks

by Hermione Lai, Interlude

A musical hoax is sometimes described as a musical forgery or mystification. It basically refers to a work of music composed by an individual and intentionally misattributed to someone else. Most frequently, such music hoaxes are attributed to historical figures of easy recognition, but attributions to non-existing historical individuals also appear. We thought it would be great fun to listen to some of classical music’s best hoaxes.

The Kreisler Scandal

Fritz Kreisler

Let’s get started with the grandfather of all musical hoaxes, the violinist Fritz Kreisler (1875-1962). The violinist was at the vanguard of the emerging music recording industry, and he delighted audiences with performances of lost classics by famous composers. According to Kreisler, he personally discovered manuscripts of unknown compositions by Corelli, Pugnani, Vivaldi, and Couperin in a French monastery. Audiences were enchanted to hear yet another unknown masterpiece.

However, on Kreisler’s 60th birthday on 2 February 1935, the violinist unapologetically confirmed that he had been the composer all along. The music industry was outraged, but Kreisler pointed out “that it should make no difference who wrote the works as long as people enjoyed them. The name changes, the value remains.” Clearly, audiences agreed with Kreisler’s assessment as his popularity skyrocketed following the scandal. 

The David Popper Ruse

David Popper

David Popper (1843-1913) was one of the last great cellists who played without an endpin. His tone was described as “large and full of sentiment, and his execution highly finished, and his style classical.” Popper was not only a fantastic cellist, but also a highly prolific composer. He composed four cello concertos to his name and stunned audiences at the Crystal Palace in London on 1 December 1894 with the premiere of a newly discovered cello concerto by Joseph Haydn. According to Popper, during a concert in Vienna, a man handed him a few sheets of wrinkled manuscript papers, claiming that they were sketches for a cello concerto by Haydn.

Initially, so the anecdote relates, Popper was skeptical, but a few years later he judged them to be genuine themes by Haydn. He worked them into a concert form in three movements and provided the piano accompaniment and orchestration. The Popper “Haydn” concert was published in 1899, but questions started to be raised as the original sketches could not be found. As the Musical Times wrote in 1895, “Unfortunately, the evidence adduced is inconclusive, but the concerto is decidedly pleasing in character. If not written by Haydn, it is certainly thoroughly Haydnesque both in form and spirit.” You can be the judge, as the concerto was taken up by a number of eminent cellists, including the fabulous Mstislav Rostropovich. 

The Marius Casadesus Hoax

Marius Casadesus in 1957

The supposed musical discovery of the 20th century took place in 1933. The Hungarian violinist Jelly d’Aranyi stepped onto the London stage and performed a completely unknown violin concerto by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The performance caused an absolute sensation, and the score turned out to be an arrangement by the French violinist Marius Casadesus. Casadesus claimed that he had arranged the work from a manuscript by the ten-year-old Mozart, with a title page containing a dedication to “Madame Adélaïde de France,” the eldest daughter of Louis XV, and dated “Versailles May 26, 1766.”

Things got interesting in a hurry when scholars were not allowed to see the autograph score, and young Mozart had actually arrived in Versailles 2 days after the dedication. In addition, father Leopold Mozart did not include the work in the catalogue of his son’s works. Some people called it “a hoax ala Kreisler,” but the musical world really wanted to believe in a new Mozart concerto. As such, the “Adélaïde Concerto” was assigned a Köchel number, and Yehudi Menuhin made a famous recording. Only in 1977, during some heated litigation concerning royalties, did Marius Casadesus admit that he was the actual composer. 

The Henri Casadesus Viola Pranks

Henri Casadesus, c 1900

It’s easy to be dismissive of Kreisler’s and Marius Casadesus’ misattributions, but it is worth remembering that these “forgeries” appeared during a time when the avant-garde and 12-tone followers were aggressively shouting down the old musical system. The Casadesus family was one of the most prominent French artistic families, an integral part of the international classical music landscape. Music lovers almost certainly remember the pianist Robert Casadesus, who collaborated with Maurice Ravel. And Henri Gustave Casadesus (1879-1947), uncle of Robert and brother of Marius, had his own musical surprises ready.

Henri was a gifted violinist, and together with Camille Saint-Saëns, he founded the Society of Ancient Instruments in 1901. They performed on Baroque period instruments and introduced eager audiences to a number of unknown musical masterworks by famous masters. Henri “found” violin concertos by George Frideric Handel and Luigi Boccherini, and two famous viola concertos by Carl Philipp Emanuel and Johann Christian Bach. The concertos appeared in various editions and were performed and recorded by Darius Hilhaud and Felix Prohaska. It was pretty obvious from the beginning that Henri composed all those works himself, a charge he never denied. 

The Remo Giazotto Deception

Remo Giazotto/Albinoni: Adagio in G minor

The Italian musicologist and critic Remo Giazotto (1910-1998) is not necessarily a household name. He taught music history at the University of Florence and authored studies on the music history of Genoa. Contributing to a number of music dictionaries, Giazotto also authored romanticized biographies of various composers, including Vivaldi, Viotti, Stradella, and Tomaso Albinoni. By far his most famous publication, however, was a short “Adagio in G minor” that he attributed to Albinoni.

When Giazotto was working on his biography of Albinoni in a German library, he claimed to have found a fragment of an Albinoni composition. That fragment supposedly contained snippets of a melody and a supporting continuo part. Relying on the stylistic features of the Italian Baroque, Giazotto “completed” the fragment, and the Italian publisher Ricordi published the “Albinoni Adagio” in 1958. It all sounds pretty plausible up to a point, however, the mysterious Albinoni fragment was never located or examined. Initially, Giazotto stated that he had merely arranged the work, but subsequently revised his story and claimed that it was his original composition. 

The Nanny Trickery

Édouard Nanny

The French double bass player Édouard Nanny (1872-1942) was a long-time professor at the Paris Conservatory. He penned an important collection of pedagogical works and gained some international exposure as a composer during his lifetime, but he was really only popular in France. Among his most famous works are a Concerto in E minor, and a Concerto in A major attributed to the Italian double bass virtuoso Domenico Dragonetti (1763-1846).

The basic story is a familiar one by now. Nanny supposedly discovered a manuscript of the concerto in the British Museum Library, however, no such manuscript could ever be found. The answer to the Nanny trickery might be located in his friendship with Stuart Sankey, an important double bass pedagogue. When Sankey needed a work for double bass that could be sold quickly Nanny agreed, and he provided his Concerto in E minor under his own name. Since Nanny was not really famous as a composer, the work did not sell and the two accomplices decided to publish another concerto by Nanny, but this time attributed to Domenico Dragonetti. The “Dragonetti” concerto became immediately popular, but as you can hear, it has stylistically very little in common with Dragonetti’s music. 

The Michel Deceit

Winfried Michel

The German recorder player, composer, and editor of music Winfried Michel has published a number of compositions under his own name. In addition, he also published numerous pieces in the style of the early 18th century under the pseudonym Giovanni Paolo Simonetti. However, his main claim to fame was the supposed discovery of six long-lost piano sonatas by Joseph Haydn in 1993. In fact, Michel managed to convince the noted Haydn scholar H. C. Robbins Landon and Paul and Eva Badura-Skoda that an important Haydn discovery was at hand.

Supposedly, the works are based on the opening bars of six lost Haydn works, found in an old thematic index. The sonatas were published in 1995 as works by Haydn, “supplemented and edited by Winfried Michel.” “Some of the finest sonatas by Haydn,” however, turned out to be a rather clever pastiche. For a commentator in the New York Times, this raised some pretty big questions. “If these pieces are good enough to be thought to be by Haydn, then aren’t they valuable on their own terms? Or is it only because of the aura of Haydn’s authorship and historical context that they become meaningful? In which case, what is our criteria for judging the immanent qualities of musical works? Why can’t works of brilliant pastiche be as good as the “real” thing, and valued as much by musical culture.

The Dushkin Con

Samuel Dushkin

The Polish-American violinist and composer Samuel Dushkin (1891-1976) initially studied at the Conservatoire de Paris, and with Leopold Auer and Fritz Kreisler. He collaborated closely with Igor Stravinsky on the Violin Concerto, and Stravinsky also composed his Duo Concertante and his Divertimento to play with Dushkin on concert tours. Dushkin also gave the premiere of the orchestral version of Ravel’s Tzigane, and William Schuman composed a dedicated violin concerto for him.

Like other violinists of his time, Dushkin published countless arrangements and transcriptions for violin and piano. As an editor and arranger, he also published a “Sicilienne for strings and clavier” by the blind Maria Theresia von Paradis, and a “Grave for violin and orchestra” by Johann Georg Benda. Most likely both works had actually been composed by Dushkin, who only took credit as the editor. The obvious motive might well have been to increase sales, and with the attribution to the lesser-known Paradis and Benda, the works certainly didn’t raise red flags as might have been the case with an attribution to Haydn or Mozart. Dushkin never admitted his authorship, so there might still be some room for discussion. 

The Goldstein Revenge

Mykailo Goldstein/Nikolay Ovsianiko-Kulikovsky: Symphony No. 21

Ukrainian-born violinist, conductor and composer Mykailo Goldstein (1917-1989) gave his first public concert performance at the age of eight, but after an injury to his left hand, he turned to teaching and composition. One of his compositions, a Fantasy on Ukrainian themes got savaged by a critic who claimed that “Jews could never understand Ukrainian culture and have no right to use it.” Apparently, Goldstein replied that Beethoven also used Ukrainian themes in his Razumovsky Quartets, to which the same critic replied “Beethoven was not a Jew.”

To prove the critic wrong, Goldstein invented the Ukrainian composer Nikolay Ovsianiko-Kulikovsky and provided him with a detailed biography. Supposedly, Kulikovsky came from an aristocratic family, and in 1809 he composed a Symphonie No. 21 in G minor, with an inscription “for the dedication of Odessa Theatre.” Goldstein announced the discovery of the manuscript, and it immediately caused a great deal of excitement in Soviet musical circles. Here, after all, was proof that the Ukraine had produced a composer comparable to Joseph Haydn. It was performed by major orchestras and conductors, and the work and fictitious composer were included in the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia. Goldstein was shocked that his hoax went undiscovered, and came forward to claim the work as his own. The initial reaction from the authorities was even more shocking, as it concluded that neither Ovsianiko-Kulikovsky nor Goldstein had written the symphony. It actually took a criminal investigation in the late 1950s to confirm Goldstein’s authorship. 

The Vavilov Mystification

Giulio Caccini/Vladimir Vavilov

Vladimir Vavilov (1925-1973) was a Russian guitarist, lutenist and composer. A student at the Rimski-Korsakov Music College in Leningrad, he was highly active as a performer, and also as a music editor of a state music publishing house. Most importantly, however, he was also an accomplished and gifted composer. Vavilov had a great sense of humour as he routinely ascribed his own works to other composers, usually masters from the Renaissance or Baroque.

Vavilov composed the “Ave Maria” around 1970, and he himself published and recorded the piece on the Melodiya label. At that point, the work was ascribed to “Anonymous.” It is generally believed that organist Mark Shakhin, one of the performers on the original Melodiya LP, first ascribed the work to early Baroque master Giulio Caccini after Vavilov’s death. In no time, the piece became a worldwide mega-hit. As to the reason for this mystification, Vavilov’s daughter Tamara explained, “My father was convinced that the self-taught works of unknown composers with the trivial name “Vavilov” would never be published. But he really wanted his music to reach the audience and he went so far as to give all the glory to medieval composers and unknown authors.”