Music Fraud

When I first became interested in this topic, I thought there weren't many situations like this in music, at least not in recent times (who knows what might have happened in ancient times), unless you delve into the realm of consumer music in the strict sense of the term, where it's well known that individuals who appear in public always play playback and are merely frontmen because the performers are actually others (typically session musicians).

In classical music, as far as I can remember, there were only two cases of any significance, but both involved performers, not composers, and both were deliberate frauds (I'm referring to the Joyce Hatto case and the Schwarzkopf & Flagstad case, with some notes replaced on a recording). Instead, a little searching was enough to find quite a few:

Henri Casadesus (1879–1947) was a violist and music publisher, brother of Marius, who was the uncle of the famous pianist Robert Casadesus and great-uncle of Jean Casadesus. He founded the Société des Instruments Anciens with Camille Saint-Saëns in 1901. The society, which operated between 1901 and 1939, was a quintet of performers who played ancient instruments such as the viola da gamba and the viola d'amore.

The quintet dedicated itself to rediscovering works by ancient musicians that had not been performed for centuries. It was later discovered that several pieces attributed to famous musicians of the past were actually their compositions. The Adélaïde Concerto, attributed by them to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, was written by Marius Casadesus.

Henri, however, appears to have composed the "Viola Concerto in D major" attributed to Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach, described by Rachel W. Wade in Appendix B of her Keyboard Concertos of Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach. This concerto appeared in 1911 in a Russian edition, presumably "transcribed" for small orchestra by Maximilian Steinberg, and was subsequently performed by conductors such as Darius Milhaud and Serge Koussevitsky, and recorded by Felix Prohaska and Eugene Ormandy. In 1981, Wade wrote: "Today, the most performed concerto by C.P.E. Bach was not written by him."

Henri is also credited with a Handel concerto and a concerto by J.C. Bach, both for viola. These are now used in teaching the Suzuki method for the viola, and are called "The Handel/Casadesus Concerto" and "The J.C. Bach/Casadesus Concerto."

We then move on to Gaspar Cassadò (1897–1966), a Spanish cellist and composer, remembered because some parts of his Cello Concerto in D minor and the Suite for Cello Solo were actually transcriptions or reworkings of other people's works (Ravel, Kodaly), but this is a venial sin. Cassadò wrote many transcriptions and variations on other people's works in a non-fraudulent manner. However, he also attributed to himself many pieces written in the manner of which are perhaps a little too much so.

François-Joseph Fétis (1784–1871) was a Belgian musicologist, composer, and teacher. Author of several "scherzi" (not in the sense of musical form), he wrote a lute concerto, also performed by Sor, attributing it to Valentin Strobel.

But the one who made the biggest splash was undoubtedly the Italian musicologist Remo Giazotto (1910–1998), who was a renowned expert on Albinoni, so much so that he wrote and attributed to him the celebrated Adagio in G minor, known, in fact, as the Albinoni Adagio.

Giazotto declared that he had merely "reconstructed" the work. the Adagio based on a series of fragments by Tomaso Albinoni that were reportedly found in the rubble of the Dresden State Library - the only library to possess autographed scores by Albinoni - following the bombing of the city during the Second World War. The fragments would have been part of a slow movement of a sonata (or concerto) in G minor for strings and organ.

In truth, since 1998, the year of Remo Giazotto's death, the Adagio has emerged as an entirely original composition by the latter, as no fragment or recording has ever been found in the possession of the Saxon National Library.

According to Wikipedia, Giazotto is strongly contested by contemporary Baroque music scholars, as he has been repeatedly accused of having produced outright forgeries, especially in the Vivaldi sphere.

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