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Saturday, February 17, 2007
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"The iPod Did Her In." UD's friend Jeff, a musicologist, identifies the technical source of pianist Joyce Hatto's downfall, though larger questions of motive remain, in a bigtime breaking hoax involving musical plagiarism. You know, if you know UD, that she loves hoaxes; yet this one seems to her too sad and unsettling to enjoy, centering as it does on a dead woman and a devoted husband, rather than on the wretched desperate schemers you usually find behind these tricks. A very promising concert pianist when younger, Hatto got sick with cancer decades ago and left the stage. Her husband recently released, on his small label, an astonishing series of recordings of Hatto playing, at the very end of her illness, a range of the most challenging compositions for the instrument. This achievement -- a woman in the last stages of cancer producing a significant body of brilliant recordings -- stunned the music world, which hailed her posthumously as not only courageous, but the best unknown pianist in history. "To love [Joyce] Hatto [piano] recordings was to be in the know, a true piano aficionado who didn’t need the hype of a major label’s marketing spend to recognise a good, a great, thing when they heard it," writes one observer. Yet even before iPods began identifying Hatto's swan song as the recordings of other pianists which had been slightly tampered with and then appropriated, there were problems with Hatto's husband's claims about the way his recording studio operated. As the Telegraph notes, "The idea was that she had cancer and didn't want to be seen so her husband built a studio for her, but nobody explained how they managed to squeeze an entire orchestra in there." In an online chat, a listener remarked: "It is hard to believe that one pianist unknown to us suddenly plays every composition in the repertoire better than any other pianist ever did." Despite its seeming lack of cynical and mercenary motives (it may turn out to be about these; it's just that at this early stage it seems to UD to be about something else, a kind of mad devotion on the part of the husband), the Hatto story does in one important respect look like your classic hoax. It has the too-good-to-be-true plot elements that seduce people who have an intense desire to believe certain things. This is the familiar kitsch aspect of hoax, the way it often features a feel-good storyline that one can't resist. In this instance, everyone wanted to believe in the scrappy heroine who struggles against her own mortality to make one last great aesthetic gesture. It's as if you were told that Jacqueline du Pre's multiple sclerosis went into remission for two weeks at the end of her life, allowing her to record a transcendent Elgar interpretation. Irresistable. But of course this is where audiences need to be skeptical. Any series of events that plays so perfectly into their desires is liable to be manufactured by someone who knows all too well the profundity of those desires. |