Lost Haydn Sonatas
In December 1993 a grand discovery was made. Six “lost” piano sonatas were unearthed, discovered by Winifred Michel, a German music teacher from Münster. To make the lie more believable, he claimed that the manuscripts, once lost, had recently resurfaced.
And in January 1994 Robbins Landon endorsed them in BBC Music Magazine, claiming that they “clarify in a peculiarly striking way Haydn’s search for a new musical language of strength and beauty which was to emerge as the beginning of the Viennese Classical style”.
Robbins Landon was one of the 20th-century’s greatest advocate of the music of Haydn and one of the editors of The Mozart Companion. In putting his weight behind the authenticity of six “lost” piano sonatas by Haydn, He became embroiled in one of the big forgery stories of the 1990s.
Michel’s original point of contact, the pianist and scholar Paul Badura-Skoda was also astonished by the discovery: “The sonatas you sent me are so original and contain so many unexpected and surprising turns that I feel quite sure that Haydn is the composer.”
In no time at all, however, they had become “a rather sinister forgery” (Landon’s words). Upon closer examination the handwriting appeared to date from the 20th-century. The engraving had probably been done with a steel-nibbed pen, something that only came into use in the 19th-century. The staves were peculiar, and so on.
In The New York Times, journalist Michael Berkerman commented on the affair of the piano sonatas falsely attributed to the Austrian composer.
”Nor has anybody raised the potent question: if someone can write pieces that can be mistaken for Haydn, what is so special about Haydn?”
Harry’s and Megan’s wedding
Just after the Dean of Windsor’s blessing, 19-year-old cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason played a Sicilienne. Decca lists the piece as being written by Austrian pianist and composer Maria Theresia von Paradis. While she wrote a tremendous amount of music that is being deservedly brought to light these days, she didn’t pen this little gem.
Violinist Samuel Dushkin claimed to have discovered the piece in the 1920s and said it was a lost work by von Paradis, a composer who lived in Vienna in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Curiously, Dushkin produced no manuscript to substantiate his claim, but it was quickly published and for decades celebrated as a piece by von Paradis. While it’s impossible to prove a negative, music scholars have recently and convincingly argued that Dushkin wrote the piece himself.
This isn’t the only time Dushkin pulled this kind of stunt. He attributed one of his own violin compositions to Johann Georg Benda.
Alcoholic and Syphilitic Composers?
Above is a portrait of Mozart from 1790, by Johan Georg Edlinger. Edlinger has painted a puffy Mozart, a bloated and greying Mozart, his face seemingly plagued by the effects of alcoholism.
The portrait was completed a year before Mozart’s death, and so the rumours began; Mozart’s swollen face and reddened cheeks being taken as proof by some biographers of the supposed alcoholism of the genius musician. The so-called “Edlinger Mozart” can be seen now in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin.
But a book released in 2014 by retired British surgeon Dr Jonathan Noble suggests the Austrian composer has been unfairly maligned by his biographers and did not have a serious drinking problem at all. In That Jealous Demon: My Wretched Health, Noble demystifies all the post-mortem reports and medical notes based on gossip that attributed alcoholism to Mozart.
He said in an article in The Telegraph, that he found no evidence of any of the health issues associated with a serious drinking problem, concluding that claims of Mozart’s alcoholism have “little foundation.” What he did find was a propensity among biographers to link musicians to certain diagnoses like alcohol abuse and venereal diseases without actual proof. “Alcoholism is inconsistent with serious, sustained musical composition. (…) If you’re a true alcoholic, there’s no way you can go around composing operas, symphonies or string quartets.”
“I started out really writing about illnesses and trying to find out what these composers actually did die of, but it soon became apparent many didn’t have any diagnosis, and their conditions were just hearsay,” he said. Dr Noble said he found no evidence to suggest that Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Schubert, Brahms, or Beethoven were alcoholics – or syphilitic, despite claims by biographers.
Neither does he believe that Maurice Ravel had syphilis, Dr Noble discovered that claims about Ravel were based purely on the word of a nurse who said she had seen his blood report years after his death.
Benjamin Britten has also been unfairly maligned with both alcoholism and syphilis. When Dr Noble was given access to Benjamin Britten’s medical notes he discovered he had a diseased heart valve, not syphilis. “For a doctor to neglect to mention a diagnosis of syphilis or not consult a specialist on the matter would be tantamount to malpractice,” he said. “It’s more likely, on the balance of probabilities, that he simply didn’t have it.” Britten’s doctor also told Dr Noble that his patient had acquired the reputation as an alcoholic from one cardiologist “largely on the basis of being an artistic type who liked a stiff drink before dinner.”
In the introduction to the book, the author states: “Many composers’ reputations have been sullied. An objective attempt is made herein to do justice to their reputations.”