Wild Ideas #8 Is Published by Henry Grynnsten
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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Wild Ideas #8 is published by Henry Grynnsten. The PDF version can also be found at efanzines.com. Letter of Comment: mail [email protected]. January 2021. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Editorial The idea of the “genius” is an antiquated one that doesn’t take account of modern research on expertise, but is however still used in the humanities, for example in literary studies and music history. With “genius” you can explain anything ex nihilo, since it’s kind of equivalent to the miracle. William Shakespeare, for example, is described as a genius who appeared out of nowhere, wrote the greatest literature that ever existed when he was in London, then disappeared into the countryside, where he wrote nothing. And he did this without the least trace of himself in the plays, it is claimed, it was pure invention. But how can you create great literature without using your own experience and feelings at all? Another example of a so-called genius in the arts is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He was already fully developed when he popped out of the womb, descended out of the sky like an incarnate god – but again, how can you write something that moves people at the age of five if you have no experience and your brain is still 20 years from being fully mature (25 is the age when the whole brain of a human stops developing physically)? This view of art is of something disconnected from people, their experience and struggles. Many agree that Mozart wasn’t an innovator – but being innovative is part and parcel of being a genius. It’s in the very definition of the term. This means that he wasn’t even a genius in the ordinary sense of the word. He’s just a genius by convention, we just like to call him that. Because we like miracles. But he could play the harpsichord when he was five, couldn’t he? Well, there are any number of Korean five-year-olds who can play the piano very well, are they geniuses too? The hype around Mozart is unbelievable and contains obvious semi-religious elements. Listening to Mozart while pregnant can supposedly increase your child’s IQ. It all began with Wolfgang’s father Leopold, who started the hype, and was continued by the widow and biographers close to her, then music historians and ultimately even the Nazis. Then there are the many signs that music written by him was actually written by others. Some of this is now certain and generally accepted by the authorities. Some have whispered that first his father, then possibly his sister, wrote at least some of his music, and not only that, but that the Mozart family stole music by others and pasted Wolfgang’s name on the compositions. There are whole lists of works that were previously falsely attributed to him. Since we know that works were falsely attributed to Mozart, it’s just a question of degree. But people become very upset by this. Even though not a single note of the music is changed, many don’t want their beliefs changed about how it was written – their beliefs about the genius, about the miracle. That is why this topic is highly controversial and will cause a lot of anger. However, I’m not taking a definite “anti-establishment” stance, just asking questions, because the facts of Mozart’s life so readily invite another reading of events. I freely admit that all this could just be fantasy, but there are many clues indicating that there were several other hands behind the work of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. - Henry Grynnsten. 1 The Wizard of Mozart Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!1 Pianist Joyce Hatto collapsed over the keyboard soon after she started playing during a concert at the Festival Hall in 1976. And with that her career was over. The story is told in the documentary “The Great Piano Scam”.2 Hatto withdrew, and with that the story could be over and nobody would have given another thought to who this competent but average pianist was. The world of classical music is full of pianists. But towards the end of her life she suddenly bloomed to a degree that shot her up to the status of one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century. She started making a series of brilliant recordings in a shed in the garden. “The Indomitable Champion of Liszt” wrote The Guardian. The Boston Globe thought she was “the greatest living pianist that almost no one has ever heard of ”. Classical music magazines were enthusiastic. This wasn’t without precedent. The great pianist Glenn Gould withdrew from public performances in 1964, and spent the rest of his life up to 1982 making outstanding recordings, alone in the studio with audio engineers as his only audience. But after Hatto’s death came the doubts. Was it possible that someone who suffered from cancer could have made so many brilliant recordings – in a shed in the garden? Classical music experts soon discovered that every last album had been copied outright from the records of other pianists. Over 100 CD’s worth of music, produced by Hatto’s husband William Barrington-Coupe, were fake. There wasn’t even any shed in the garden. How could the experts in the field have been so mistaken, even if the husband had manipulated the original material? For example, Barrington-Coupe slowed down the recording of Paul Kim’s performance of Vingt regards sur l’enfant-Jésus by Olivier Messiaen with 2.4 percent,3 and nobody noticed anything until the scandal broke. 2.4 percent, is that really all it takes to fool the classical music world? If a scam like this has happened once, it should have happened several times. And it has. Another case is Mamoru Samuragochi, who for 18 years composed so brilliantly that he was called “Japan’s Beethoven”. But in reality the music was composed by a professor Takashi Niigaki.4 He was just one case of musical fraud perpetrated in our digital age. The point is not to say that this is a major crime – which can be debated – but that it happens and that even experts can be fooled. If you go back in time, to a time before advanced audio software that can compare CD recordings, before the internet for research, before millions of eyes that can spot anomalies online, to a time with unsigned handwritten music sheets, when time has washed over the events and obliterated many traces, then fraud and deception should have been even easier to accomplish and even harder to detect. And it was and it is. There are numerous examples of falsely attributed music from the “classical” era, and often the only thing we have to go on is sheet music, sometimes without a name on it. Is it possible that there could be cases of musical fraud even among the greatest composers? Serious researchers are now questioning Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart himself. Dr Pei-Gwen South, possibly (not surprisingly in this context) a pseudonym, writes that It is high time that scholars and Mozartians take off the rose-coloured glasses and view the facts without reference to an image or ideal of the composer which is not only illusory but fraudulent … and predictably receives heavy criticism and ridicule. One commentator calls the article “drivel” and the author a “crank”.5 Insults and invectives aren’t arguments, but this is of course the natural result if you question established truths, however rational you are, whatever solid facts you present (not necessarily defending Dr Pei-Gwen South). 2 The ideas presented in this essay might be based on misunderstandings, misconceptions and shallow research – for various reasons I can not research Mozart or his music at any depth, one being that it would take an enormous amount of time, another that I’m not a musicologist – but they are the result of rational questioning. What I have found just by looking at Mozart’s biography are anomalies and weird facts that could point to a different story to the one we’ve been told. It can be difficult to discern what is rational questioning and what is pure conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theories make outlandish claims and involve hundreds, thousands or more people who work in the dark for years, sometimes hundreds of years, to gather power and money and steer the course of politics and history in a certain direction. Questioning Mozart is in my view not a conspiracy theory. There was no conspiracy surrounding him, it is just, as this article claims, a case of musical forgery – the degree of which is to be determined, it could well have been minor. It consisted of hype and presentation of music not written by him as written by him, perpetrated by himself, his father, his sister and after his death by his widow. That’s it. The seeds of hype from Mozart’s lifetime then continued their natural growth where they had been planted in the culture; they grew from the shape they had been given from the beginning simply by people following the example or pattern set in the second half of the 18th century. The story of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was never analyzed critically enough, which is due to the culture surrounding classical music and the humanities, as well as to an antiquated conception of “the genius”, which is a kind of miracle. As in the case of Shakespeare, there are also huge financial interests at stake. Record and concert companies live on the idea of Mozart as a prodigy and musical genius, it is essential to catch especially ordinary (non-expert, non-musician) people’s interest and get them to buy CD’s and tickets.6 One of the people who started this is conductor Herbert von Karajan (1908–1989), who … turned classical music into a cash cow for himself and his partners, Mozart into a commodity for sale by the boxset and Salzburg into an advertising hoarding for his enterprises.7 Even if you’re not that into classical music, you can always enjoy a Mozartkugel – pistachio, marzipan and nougat in a little chocolate ball wrapped with an idealized picture of the composer,8 a little piece of heaven dropped down like manna straight into your mouth.