The Hatto letters...

[khiemtran]

The Joyce Hatto scandal has been unfolding across the internet and the classical music world over the last two weeks.

Now, Christopher Howell, a reviewer for Music Web-International has published letters supposedly from Hatto and her husband here.

From a writing point of view, it's interesting to compare the letters and the writing styles. Were they written by two different people? Are they believable? Was the "world-building" overdone? Is this the voice of someone lying through their teeth?

The degree of background detail slipped in is quite remarkable. In that sense it exploits one of the basic human vulnerabilities - "this must be genuine because it would be too much effort to fake".

There's also the tantalising question of whether Hatto herself was complicit in the scam or not - one which will no doubt be revealed in the coming days.

Comments

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

The things I never knew...

The one thing that makes me suspicious here is that I am able to spot two things with reasonable accuracy: Leonard Bernstein conducting and the Vienna Philharmonic playing. _Whatever_ the piece. I would expect experience musicians to be able to tell more orchestras by their sound, just as I put down an interesting CD today because the recording was rubbish (Vanhal violin concertos) - and I was pretty certain what kind of sound and balance I'd get by reading which orchestra was playing (Koelner Rundfunkorchester, they're one of those technically perfectly adequate orchestras who never breathe life into performances)

The correspondence is interesting. I would submit that 'William' is the person responsible for the misspellings - he also produces faults like 'on a slightly lower plain' which I would classify as the same type of mistake as spelling Haskil 'Haskel'.

The degree of background detail slipped in is quite remarkable.

And, to my mind, entirely believable. I am enough of a musician to value its authenticity - I do not think that a non-musician could make it up, you get the feeling of skimming the surface of something much, much deeper, much as I have gotten from classical riding instructors who will equally give short, cryptic references that withstand any type of scrutinising.

It's quite some saga.

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

The one thing that makes me suspicious here is that I am able to spot two things with reasonable accuracy: Leonard Bernstein conducting and the Vienna Philharmonic playing. _Whatever_ the piece. I would expect experience musicians to be able to tell more orchestras by their sound

In defence of the critics, the sound and the tempi had been artificially modified in a number of cases. Probably the greatest distortion though was the emotional one. The story of a charming, modest cancer-stricken woman who retires early from the concert stage and then, with nothing else to do, sits down and plays and records over and over again, only finding fame as she is about to die - who wouldn't hear the music differently knowing that?

The correspondence is interesting. I would submit that 'William' is the person responsible for the misspellings - he also produces faults like 'on a slightly lower plain' which I would classify as the same type of mistake as spelling Haskil 'Haskel'.

I did wonder if the mispellings were a deliberate attempt to try to separate the two voices. It would be something that relatively easy to do, but it adds an extra layer of seeming authenticity. Reading the Hatto letters with the benefit of hindsight, they do seem a little too eager to lay on the name-dropping and slip in bits of "proof" as background. Even if they might not have looked like a fabrication, they might still have suggested the writing of a fantasist, like the ladies who earnestly believed they had sung at La Scala.

There was also the intriguing question of who did produce the Mozart sonata recordings, which received both a Gramophone recommendation (Recording of the Month, I think) and a 10/10 from ClassicsToday. For a while, it might have been possible that there might have been a little known Mozartean talent who deserved greater recognition, or that they really were by Hatto herself. Now it looks like they may have been taken from Ingrid Haebler - deserving enough, but hardly little-known.

[sciamanna.livejournal.com]

I did too sing at La Scala!

Ok, so I was in the stalls, and the only other people around were my classmates on a school visit to the theatre out of hours, and I don't expect that they particularly listened to me, but hey... :-)

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Hmm. In that case, I've sung at the Sydney Opera House, although it was in the playhouse and not the Opera Hall, and it was during the audience participation part of The Complete Works Of Shakespeare (Abridged).

[sciamanna.livejournal.com]

Well, there you go then! :-)

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Did you see the story in the Guardian about the Chinese composer, Tan Dun? (http://music.guardian.co.uk/classical/story/0,,1972066,00.html)

He meets a man he used to compete with for busking spots when he was studying in New York. Where was he now, the busker asked. Tan Dun told him: the Lincoln Centre.

"I didn't know you could play outside there. Where can you stand?"
"No," Tan Dun replied. "These days I play inside."

[sciamanna.livejournal.com]

Absolutely fascinating! I'd never heard of her, but I'll keep an eye on this story... thanks!