So here's a fun story that doesn't initially sound like much fun: it involves classical music, a deceased female pianist and Chopin. But it gets spicy really fast, so hold on tight.
Joyce Hatto—who died last year at the ripe old age of seventy-seven—is considered by some circles in the world of classical music to be one of the greatest recording artists of the 20th century. Obviously, because classical music has to be old to be classical, a recording artist in the ""classical music world"" is not someone who writes their own music but, rather, records the music of someone else. Hatto was particularly well known for her piano recordings of music by Chopin, Rachmaninoff and Liszt (FYI: Liszt is a Hungarian piano recording artist from the 19th century—I had to look him up, so don't feel bad if the name doesn't ring a bell). Her story is perfect for remembrance: a brilliant but somewhat overlooked virtuoso who was forced to give up her concert career to battle cancer, which some argue is the inspiration for her most beloved studio recordings.
Okay, so, whopdee-doo, right? But get this: a monthly music magazine in Britain called Gramophone has accused Mrs. Hatto of plagiarism. At first I thought this was a joke—how can you plagiarize classical music? In fact, if you don't plagiarize it aren't you doing it a disservice? But that isn't what Gramophone meant. According to the magazine, Mrs. Hatto's recordings—the physical tapes/CDs with her name on them—are actually recordings by other musicians entirely.
Because Mrs. Hatto is deceased, it's difficult to figure out exactly what happened. Because she is one of those artists who was ""re-discovered"" after the brunt of her work had already been recorded (or not), no one seems to remember exactly when or how she ostensibly recorded her specific albums. Music critic Jeremy Nicholas, who originally propagated Mrs. Hatto's work, recollected that he was ""one of the few people in the music world that actually met her,"" but that he had never actually technically heard her play the piano.
Now, Mrs. Hatto was a concert pianist before she supposedly recorded her recordings, so she obviously knew how to play and play well enough that people paid money to see her. But recent technological advances have discredited her studio works: a sound engineer named Andrew Rose has taken twelve songs Mrs. Hatto supposedly recorded of Liszt's—a series called ""Transcendental A%tudes,"" if that means anything to anyone—and run it through some sort of electronic analysis. The results are shocking: Ten out of the 12 songs were perfect matches—duplications of or the recordings themselves—of a different studio musician. Other discoveries included a Rachmaninoff piece of Hatto's that was actually recorded by one Yefim Bronfman and a song on her album of Godowsky music that was actually recorded by pianist Carlo Grante. Many of these ""recordings"" of Mrs. Hatto's were released on a small music label run by her husband, obviously now under some suspicion of copyright infringement and fraud (at bare minimum), and who—naturally—can't be found at the moment.
Since Gramophone published their accusations, several classical music aficionados have come forward saying more or less the same thing: ""Hey, yeah, I always thought that Hatto recording of ____ sounded a lot like _____'s recording, but I thought I was just crazy!"" Apparently they were not, but it shouldn't come as a galloping shock to them: this isn't the first time a scandal of this sort has ripped through the upper-crust world of highbrow music.
Many classical music enthusiasts are still reeling from the realization that The Monkees didn't write their own songs or play their own instruments, and none but the most sensitive have forgiven Ashley Simpson for the horrific lip-syncing scandal of 2006 on Saturday Night Live. Record industry insiders are deeply concerned that this most recent scandal might discourage the classical music fan base—all six of them—and hurt sales for the highly anticipated posthumous album from Mrs. Hatto, Hatto Plays the Greatest Hits of Milli Vanilli.
