{"id":670,"date":"2026-06-24T15:37:56","date_gmt":"2026-06-24T15:37:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=670"},"modified":"2026-06-24T15:37:56","modified_gmt":"2026-06-24T15:37:56","slug":"fantasia-for-piano","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=670","title":{"rendered":"Fantasia for Piano"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In the summer of 1989, in Royston, England, a man named William Barrington-Coupe cheerfully received a visitor from Germany: Ernst Lumpe, a high-school teacher, fervent music lover, and record collector. For a couple of years, the two men had sustained a correspondence that consisted mainly of Barrington-Coupe, a former classical-music agent and a peripatetic record producer, responding to Lumpe\u2019s questions about the authenticity of various arcane LPs.<\/p>\n

Read more Mr. Men I\u2019ve Dated<\/a><\/p>\n

During the nineteen-fifties and sixties, a number of record companies in England and America had a practice\u2014questionable but nodded and winked at\u2014of repackaging LPs by established artists as the work of fictitious performers and selling the recordings at a deep discount. Barrington-Coupe, known to familiars as Barry, worked at several music labels that helped establish the form\u2014known as the \u201csuper-bargain\u201d classical LP. Such recordings, which retailed for roughly a dollar apiece, were a wellspring of artful pseudonyms\u2014Paul Procopolis, Giuseppe Parolini, the Cincinnati Pro Arte Philharmonic, the Munich Greater State Symphony\u2014and Barry is credited with coining the wittiest of all: Wilhelm Havagesse (conducting Rimsky-Korsakov\u2019s \u201cScheherazade,\u201d as rendered by the spurious Zurich Municipal Orchestra). The small labels that Barry worked at had a tendency to run aground financially, but perhaps his most dependable asset was his resilience\u2014a facility for dusting himself off and moving on to the next venture.<\/p>\n

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Among Lumpe\u2019s fifteen thousand LPs, many of which he bought secondhand, were about five hundred of murky provenance. A punctilious collector, he wanted to know the true identities behind the masquerades. He had a particular interest in an Italian pianist, Sergio Fiorentino, and was compiling a discography. Many Fiorentino recordings had been released on Barry\u2019s principal label, Concert Artist, and his work had often been appropriated and reissued pseudonymously. Lumpe had turned to Barry for help in separating fact from fiction.<\/p>\n

By the time the two men met, Barry was no longer a visible presence on the classical-music scene, nor was his wife, Joyce Hatto, a talented pianist who had achieved modest recognition as a concert performer but hadn\u2019t played in public in more than a decade. The only Hatto recording Lumpe owned was a 1970 release of the \u201cSymphonic Variations,\u201d by Arnold Bax, a lesser-known twentieth-century British composer whose neo-Romantic works are unusually ornate.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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According to Concert Artist\u2019s catalogue, the company\u2019s founding objective was to provide \u201ca sounding board for young British talent sadly neglected\u201d by the major record companies. But Barry had produced few new recordings since the early seventies. To the extent that Concert Artist remained active, it was mainly as a recycling operation, issuing cassettes and compact disks derived from old recordings, including many from its back catalogue of LPs. Whatever commerce Barry conducted was a cottage industry, the cottage in question being a red brick house on a quiet street in an exurban village an hour north of London. He kept audio-editing equipment in an upstairs room. Downstairs, in the music room, which was furnished with a pair of grand pianos, Hatto gave private lessons; she had also taught at a nearby girls\u2019 school.<\/p>\n

Barry still possessed a discerning ear and a comprehensive knowledge of classical music, and he responded with gratifying specificity (and candor) to Lumpe\u2019s queries. Though recovering from recent heart surgery, Barry was a prodigious talker. Their conversation lasted most of a day. Toward the end, Hatto joined the discussion. A slender, unassuming woman in her early sixties, with dark eyes and dense eyebrows, a fine jawline, and a dimpled smile, she volunteered a few observations about Fiorentino, but she spoke so quickly that Lumpe had trouble understanding her.<\/p>\n

At a moment when she wasn\u2019t in the room, Barry offered to play an excerpt of a more recent recording of Hatto\u2019s: Rachmaninoff\u2019s Third Piano Concerto. He placed a cassette in a tape deck and they listened to its dizzying cadenza (the longer of two versions that Rachmaninoff wrote). Lumpe expressed admiration, only to be told, \u201cWell, I\u2019ve fooled you a little. I made a little joke. That\u2019s not actually Joyce, it\u2019s Andrei Gavrilov\u201d\u2014a former winner of the International Tchaikovsky Competition. Barry smiled. \u201cBut now here\u2019s Joyce,\u201d he said, and he put in another cassette, a different performance of the same cadenza. It was a lighthearted, insignificant jest, Lumpe thought, hardly a test or a ruse.<\/p>\n

After their meeting, Lumpe remained in touch with Barry, whose letters often included music-world gossip or bulletins about his or Hatto\u2019s health. Barry found rare 78s and LPs for Lumpe\u2019s collection, inquired about Lumpe\u2019s children, furnished seeds from his flower garden. Among the recordings he sent were works by Liszt and Chopin that Hatto had played many years earlier, in concert. Several weeks after his trip to Royston, Lumpe also received in the mail a tape of a piano arrangement of Edward Elgar\u2019s First Symphony\u2014from a Hatto recital, Barry said, that had taken place recently in Cambridge.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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This was unexpected: hadn\u2019t Joyce Hatto retired from concertizing years earlier? A thank-you note to Barry elicited more details: The second half of the concert was the Liszt piano transcription of Beethoven\u2019s Fifth Symphony, which, unfortunately, \u201cwas not recorded due to some stupidity of the University Recording engineer.\u201d But Barry had pressed the buttons himself in time to capture her encore, Liszt\u2019s transcription of the \u201cWilliam Tell Overture.\u201d For some reason, he hadn\u2019t included a copy of this recording. Lumpe filed Hatto\u2019s Elgar First Symphony among his several hundred cassette and reel-to-reel tapes.<\/p>\n

As a piano omnivore, Lumpe welcomed the advent of online group discussions and became a frequent contributor to Yahoo groups and a Usenet\/Google newsgroup, rec.music.classical.recordings, where participants embraced a hodgepodge of musical topics and the tenor of conversations ranged from meticulously informative to flamingly combative. In the comparatively genteel Yahoo group ThePiano, one popular amusement was the blind listening quiz, in which an unidentified musical selection was uploaded and members critiqued the performance. In November, 2002, Lumpe posed a different type of quiz: \u201cLook at the quite impressive list below and guess which pianist has recorded all these works over roughly the last fifteen years.\u201d The list implied an artist with exceptional breadth, depth, and stamina: Bach (Goldberg Variations), Beethoven (complete piano concertos, complete piano sonatas, complete bagatelles), Brahms (piano concertos), Chopin (complete works for solo piano and for piano and orchestra, complete mazurkas, nocturnes, and polonaises), Schubert (complete piano sonatas), Liszt (complete etc.), a lot of Rachmaninoff and Scarlatti, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Mussorgsky, Saint-Sa\u00ebns, Schumann, Tchaikovsky.<\/p>\n

No one guessed correctly, so Lumpe volunteered the answer: Joyce Hatto. It had been a trick question. These works had been recorded, he explained, but few were commercially available. In recent years, it seemed, Concert Artist and Hatto had quietly embarked upon a major endeavor. With Barry acting as producer, Hatto had tackled a prodigious repertoire in the studio. It was an unlikely undertaking for a woman now in her early seventies, made odder by the fact that Barry had expended little effort to market the records.<\/p>\n

Participants in the Yahoo group demanded to know more about Hatto, who wasn\u2019t even mentioned in the standard music reference books. Such texts can be arbitrary, Lumpe replied online, and Hatto was an artist \u201cwho worked just quietly and who acquired more fame outside her country.\u201d Quoting from Concert Artist promotional material, he cited a roster of conductors and composers with whom she\u2019d played (among them Benjamin Britten and Ralph Vaughan Williams). After a series of recitals in London, Lumpe reported, she had been \u201cdescribed by the London Daily Telegraph<\/em> as \u2018The Indomitable Champion of Liszt.\u2019\u00a0\u201d Another critic had observed that \u201cprobably not since Busoni has a pianist presented such a wide and rich in-depth repertoire.\u201d<\/p>\n

Next, Lumpe uploaded an excerpt from a Hatto recording that Concert Artist had released in 2002: Rachmaninoff\u2019s transcription of the Scherzo from Mendelssohn\u2019s \u201cMidsummer Night\u2019s Dream.\u201d At least one group member, Tom Deacon, was prompted to buy a copy of the CD. In a subsequent posting, Deacon asserted his familiarity with nearly every celebrated performance of this piece\u2014he\u2019d been the producer of a two-hundred-CD set called \u201cGreat Pianists of the 20th Century\u201d\u2014and declared Hatto\u2019s version superior: \u201cIt is just magical: light as a feather, fluent, colourful, textures limpid as a mountain spring, tonally luscious, rhythmically alive and bright. A dream.\u201d Other forum members concurred, including one who stated (\u201cThis may sound a bit blasphemous\u201d) that he preferred Hatto\u2019s playing to Rachmaninoff\u2019s.<\/p>\n

On Christmas Eve, Lumpe shared a Hatto recording of a Scarlatti sonata, and it, too, elicited unqualified praise. A few days later, Deacon announced that, after his \u201cMidsummer\u201d posting, he had received \u201ca very nice note from the pianist.\u201d (So: Hatto or Barry, or both, were keeping track of the online chatter.) Hatto told Deacon that she \u201cstudied this piece with Moiseiwitsch himself \u201d\u2014Benno Moiseiwitsch, in his day the pre\u00ebminent interpreter of Rachmaninoff\u2014as she \u201cknew him well.\u201d Deacon continued, \u201cHis influence shows. Also, the piano she uses for the recording is the piano which Rachmaninoff used in the U.K. when he was on tour there.\u201d As 2002 ended, Deacon volunteered a summary of ThePiano\u2019s accomplishments for the year and crowed, \u201cWe \u2018discovered\u2019 a seventy-four-year-old pianist by the name of Joyce Hatto who plays everything!\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Lumpe\u2019s next Hatto upload, an excerpt from Liszt\u2019s \u201cMephisto Waltz No. 1,\u201d so captivated listeners that one, Andrys Basten, posted it on her Web page. Another participant, a former professor of music, wrote that the Rachmaninoff-Mendelssohn and Scarlatti selections \u201cproved that she is a formidable pianist in the miniature arena\u201d and that the Liszt \u201cproclaims that she can do battle with the mastodons of the musical coliseum!\u201d<\/p>\n

In the months that followed, Hatto discussions percolated in other Yahoo forums. Lumpe supplied bits of biographical information culled from the Concert Artist Web site and added his own observations. As it happened, a stream of new Hatto CDs was finally becoming available. In February, 2003, MusicWeb International<\/em>, an online publication, featured a positive review of a Brahms compilation disk (Piano Concerto No. 1: \u201ca convincing performance of a frequently misread work\u201d), among the first of some seventy Hatto releases that it critiqued in the next four years. The reviewer provided some rudimentary Hatto biography, and a month later MusicWeb<\/em> posted the transcript of a lengthy 1973 interview that Hatto had apparently given to Burnett James, a British music writer, who died in 1987. There was no indication of where the interview had been published originally\u2014but, no matter, it helped to flesh out the portrait.<\/p>\n

An \u201cindustrious child\u201d (her phrase) and a \u201cborn performer\u201d (Hatto quoting the British composer Sir Granville Bantock, who, she said, had heard her play at the age of seven), she was an only child whose father had been her first teacher; he was an able pianist so enthralled by Rachmaninoff, she said, that the only time she ever saw him in tears was when the great man died. Her parents had encouraged her, installing a Bl\u00fcthner grand piano in their house in North London\u2014\u201cI spent every available hour and minute practicing. Within three years I had worn the ivories down and I was only ten\u201d\u2014but they \u201cdidn\u2019t really think that life as a musician was terribly secure.\u201d Bach was integral to her daily regimen, and she had a particular affinity for Chopin and Liszt, and had performed their works in Poland, at the peak of the Cold War, when she was invited to join an official delegation of Englishwomen. There were return trips to Poland, as well as to Russia, on concert tours.<\/p>\n

That same month, in MusicWeb<\/em>, Christopher Howell, reviewing favorably Hatto\u2019s Brahms Piano Concerto No. 2, asked, \u201cIf she has been playing around the world all these years\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. why is the world so little aware of her?\u201d Speaking of the moribund Concert Artist label, he said, \u201cWhere has it been<\/em> all these years? How is it possible for a company to issue all this repertoire with practically nobody being aware of it? How many records do they actually sell<\/em>?\u201d<\/p>\n

MusicWeb<\/em>\u2019s<\/em> critics soon found, as did Deacon and other online scribes, that Barry and Hatto enjoyed having pen pals. Only it wasn\u2019t quite that simple. The couple intuitively recognized that the Joyce Hatto boomlet was a viral phenomenon, one that they had the ability to influence. In a note to Lumpe enclosed with one of her CDs, Hatto wrote, \u201cTo Ernst\u2014my personal Internet publicist.\u201d By following threads in online discussion groups, they could potentially neutralize unflattering appraisals (should any arise) or cultivate intimacy in a virtual universe that teemed with piano lovers, each a self-anointed critic but also, if properly massaged, a potential ally. Christopher Howell later wrote, \u201cHatto\u2019s tone of kind sincerity, combined with WB-C\u2019s avuncularity, combine to give the recipient of their efforts a sense of security, that he is doing the right thing in drawing attention to these recordings, that the couple are not only grateful to him but actually interested in him in a very human sort of way.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Barry and Hatto had similar epistolary styles. The e-mails and letters that emanated from Royston blended formality with faux diffidence. (\u201cDear Mr. Howell, I do not usually write to critics as this, I feel, is a barrier that should not be crossed too often. However, your review of my Concert Artist set of Mazurkas\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u201d) Hatto thanked reviewers for their insights, volunteered nuggets of philosophy (\u201cSo many pianists ruin a perfectly singable and beautiful melodic line by simply sticking on ornaments as if with elastoplast\u201d), and reminisced about decades-old recitals. Her digressions had a music of their own, punctuated by the tintinnabulation of carefully dropped names (\u201cI also became friendly with Annie Fischer\u201d; \u201cI did have the opportunity of playing many of these sonatas to Clara Haskil\u201d; \u201cRachmaninov did pass on some of his ideas to Nicholas Medtner who allowed me to copy them into my own edition\u201d). One of Hatto\u2019s preoccupations, shared by Barry, was the tyranny of the classical-music critical establishment: \u201cI have always played what I thought was right (for me?) and have taken some censure in my life for so doing. Mostly, I must say, from English critics\u201d; \u201cThank you for the kind things that you have said about my own playing and for defending me against some quite unwarranted criticism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fundamental to the burgeoning interest in Hatto was awe that she could be so tirelessly productive during what should have been her retirement. Her exploits seemed even more remarkable after Richard Dyer, then the chief music critic of the Boston Globe<\/em>, interviewed her in the summer of 2005 and wrote an article that began, \u201cJoyce Hatto must be the greatest living pianist that almost no one has ever heard of.\u201d The next paragraph contained a surprising revelation: \u201cHatto, now 76, has not played in public in more than 25 years because of an ongoing battle with cancer. She was once told that it is \u2018impolite to look ill,\u2019 and after a critic commented adversely on her appearance, she resolved to stop playing concerts.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dyer described having come upon the Concert Artist Web site more or less inadvertently and finding the Hatto listings (which had grown to more than a hundred CDs). He contacted Barrington-Coupe and asked, \u201cWho is<\/em> she?\u201d Barry sent him a sample Hatto CD, \u201cand I was hooked.\u201d By the time Dyer wrote his article, he\u2019d listened to about a third of her CDs. \u201cAll of them are excellent, and the best of them document the art of a major musician,\u201d he wrote. \u201cThe records are well engineered, and she uses wonderful instruments; still, her beautiful sound is her own.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Boston was far enough from Royston that Dyer settled for a telephone interview. \u201cThe pianist has a high-pitched, girlish voice, and she speaks with the velocity of one of her Liszt etudes,\u201d he said of Hatto. \u201cShe will quote a Shakespeare sonnet and a remark of Muhammad Ali\u2019s (\u2018Knock me down, and I will get up immediately\u2019) in the same spoken paragraph.\u201d Barry told Dyer, \u201cShe doesn\u2019t want to play in public because she never knows when the pain will start, or when it will stop, and she refuses to take drugs.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. I believe the illness has added a third dimension to her playing; she gets at what is inside the music, what lies behind it.\u201d<\/p>\n

So Hatto\u2019s illness, ovarian cancer, provided an explanation of sorts for where she had been all those years and burnished the myth of her remarkable renaissance. On the other hand, its sentimental gloss encouraged a mild backlash, in Yahoo and Usenet postings, from pianophiles who were vaguely suspicious because no major critics had written about her. In an online review of her recording of Debussy\u2019s Preludes, Christopher Howell acknowledged this problem: \u201cI realize that it\u2019s getting a little embarrassing that this site continues to churn out glowing review after glowing review (not only from me) of Joyce Hatto\u2019s records.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. I almost wish she would<\/em> make a really bad disk just so I can show I know how to listen. But so far she hasn\u2019t.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. If any reader who buys this or other Hatto disks on the strength of our reviews feels he has been duped, remember we have a bulletin board. I should very much like to know why<\/em> only we are pushing these recordings.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first insistent questions about Hatto came in the summer and fall of 2005, in Internet postings by Peter Lemken, a German conservatory graduate turned artist-manager turned business consultant. How was it that anyone, much less an infirm septuagenarian, could record such a splendid and voluminous body of work? Also, Lemken asked pointedly, who was Ren\u00e9 K\u00f6hler and what was the National Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra\u2014the conductor and ensemble featured on several Hatto concertos (Brahms, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev)?<\/p>\n

A colorful capsule biography of K\u00f6hler (source: Barry) eventually appeared online\u2014a Polish-French-German Jew, a survivor of Treblinka with the bad luck to wind up for twenty-five years in the Soviet Gulag\u2014but there was no mention of him or the orchestra in any reference book. If K\u00f6hler and the National Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra were phantoms, then what about Hatto? That nebulous query became the topic of more than one online discussion. It wasn\u2019t so much an expression of disbelief in Hatto\u2019s existence as it was obstinacy from live-performance purists, who argue that recordings are an unreliable measure of any musician\u2019s true qualities, given the manipulations permitted by studio technology. Still, the over-all discourse remained resolutely pro-Hatto. In light of her health crisis, her adherents found Lemken\u2019s contrariness offensively callous.<\/p>\n

Such skepticism seemed even more impertinent after a pair of reputable witnesses vouched for the fact that, literally and figuratively, Joyce Hatto was the real thing. Ates Orga, a music critic and historian, had written program notes for some of her London recitals during the seventies. \u201cHer playing struck me as big-hearted and truthful, adventurous yet with time for finesse,\u201d he later recalled. He interviewed her at a hotel in Cambridge in February, 2005, and in early 2006 MusicWeb<\/em> published his seven-thousand-word profile, along with an even lengthier account of her recording career, including critiques of selected works. Orga depicted, as had Burnett James and Richard Dyer, a charismatic woman with vivid memories of her experiences among music-world luminaries and a keen attentiveness to the stylistic distinctions of various pianists. Orga essentially sidestepped the Ren\u00e9 K\u00f6hler enigma, implying that he wasn\u2019t sure what to believe. (\u201cA survivor of the Holocaust gone missing in the murky wastelands and unspoken history of Cold War Europe, Ren\u00e9 K\u00f6hler\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u201d) About Hatto\u2019s musicianship Orga expressed no equivocation: \u201cEven when some of her decisions, her occasional urgencies, are not to my taste, there\u2019s a rightness<\/em>, an honesty<\/em>, to her recorded playing.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. I feel in safe hands.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. Tone, phrasing, projection. Articulation, pedalling, dynamics. Style, short-term shaping, long-term architecture. The ability to speak in music\u2014eloquently, rhetorically, passionately, murmuringly.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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In the summer of 2005, Jeremy Nicholas, an actor and critic, had interviewed Hatto and Barry in the same Cambridge hotel and come away with impressions almost identical to Orga\u2019s. He felt \u201can instant rapport\u201d with the couple; Barry, he thought, had a \u201cfantastic knowledge of pianists, fantastic taste.\u201d As they spoke, however, with a tape recorder running, Nicholas knew that writing about Hatto would be problematic, because she had no aptitude for linear conversation. \u201cShe was kind of daffy, endearingly scatterbrained, with this butterfly mind,\u201d he told me. \u201cI had a list of prepared questions. Like \u2018What did your father do? Were your parents musical, did they have money? When did you actually make your d\u00e9but?\u2019 Pretty simple, direct questions, but after a couple of sentences she\u2019d go off reminiscing. Very hard to pin down. Very good on her playing in the nineteen-fifties but not very good on the later part of her life. Talked very fast. Tremendous energy in her voice. Terribly enthusiastic.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nicholas, a biographer of the pianist and composer Leopold Godowsky (1870-1938)\u2014whose Studies on Chopin\u2019s \u00c9tudes are among the most difficult piano music ever written\u2014had been astonished to learn that Joyce Hatto had recorded all fifty-three of the Studies. Only three other artists, all men, had done the same. Before meeting Hatto, Nicholas listened to her recordings of Chopin\u2019s \u00c9tudes, the foundation of the Godowsky variations, and thought that they were \u201cjust about the best I\u2019ve ever heard.\u201d He had a comparable reaction to her interpretation of the Godowsky.<\/p>\n

Nicholas\u2019s encounter with Hatto resulted in two articles\u2014one in International Piano<\/em>, in January, 2006, and one in Gramophone<\/em>, two months later. A feature in Gramophone<\/em> (\u201cthe world\u2019s unrivaled authority on classical music since 1923\u201d) was bound to draw attention, especially given that Nicholas declared, \u201cI have no hesitation in saying that Joyce Hatto is one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard.\u201d He not only introduced Hatto to a wider audience; he effectively put on notice the editors of Gramophone<\/em>, who in subsequent issues published consistently favorable, at times elated, reviews of her CDs. Because, as Nicholas noted, she had \u201canother 20 (!) in preparation,\u201d fascination with Hatto seemed destined to increase, and endure, well into the future.<\/p>\n

Hatto died, of cancer, on June 29, 2006, at the age of seventy-seven. Obituaries and tributes recycled the most striking superlatives and offered up a few new ones (\u201cas completely satisfying a pianist as anyone in the history of recorded music,\u201d \u201ca national treasure\u201d). Her funeral took place eleven days later, at a crematory in Cambridge, a secular ceremony orchestrated, in every sense, by Barrington-Coupe. Twenty or so mourners listened to music\u2014Bach, Brahms, Chopin, Debussy\u2014from a Hatto sampler CD issued by Concert Artist a few months earlier. Humility was the theme of Barry\u2019s prepared remarks, beginning with a rhetorical apology to his wife that a service was being held in the first place, contrary to her wish to avoid showy valedictory gestures at \u201cyour final public appearance.\u201d To those who had sent condolences, whether they had met her or not, she was \u201csimply \u2018Joyce.\u2019\u00a0\u201d As an artist and a teacher, he said, \u201cshe would say\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. there is God, the composer, and then you. Nothing comes between composer and the listener. With Joyce you will seek vainly for ostentation, no grand \u2018Hatto\u2019 moments, simply the music.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. For her, \u2018Hatto\u2019 was simply not the important one.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Yet, even as Hatto was being eulogized, fresh suspicions were being voiced by Gramophone<\/em> readers. In the July issue, Nicholas responded indignantly to unspecified \u201cletters, phone calls, and a plethora of blogs from people who a) think I am in the pay of her record label, b) doubt that the recordings are the work of just one pianist, c) are sure that the recordings are edited performances of her pupils, d) suspect that Miss Hatto has never been ill and could not possibly have survived cancer for 25 years, e) that the whole thing is a scam.\u201d He invited \u201canyone who has any evidence whatsoever of fraud, deception, or similar activity related to Miss Hatto and her record company\u201d to come forward, with the proviso that such evidence \u201cmust stand up in a court of law.\u201d<\/p>\n

The day before Hatto\u2019s funeral, the usually even-tempered Ernst Lumpe confronted Peter Lemken during an exchange in the newsgroup rec.music.classical.recordings. The general topic was live performance versus studio recording, and Lemken, ever the skeptic, asked whether anyone had ever recorded a Hatto live performance. The gist of Lumpe\u2019s reply, written in German, was that Lemken had some nerve. Amateur recordings of Hatto in concert, he said, circulated privately, and he personally owned a performance of \u201cElgar\u2019s First Symphony in the two-handed piano transcription by Sigfrid Karg-Elert, recorded in Cambridge in 1989\u201d\u2014the unreleased tape that Barry had sent him after his visit to Royston. Did this information satisfy Lemken? Nein<\/em>. If it hadn\u2019t been published, it didn\u2019t count.<\/p>\n

Then, on January 22nd of this year, a participant in the newsgroup who identified himself as Seth Horus\u2014a pseudonym that referred to ancient Egyptian mythology\u2014posted this: \u201cAfter hearing so much about Joyce Hatto, I started purchasing some of her recordings. While nothing I have heard is bad (in fact, I am glad I bought these CDs), I have noticed something eerie: that the pianist playing the Mozart sonatas cannot be<\/em> the pianist playing Prokofiev or<\/em> the pianist playing Alb\u00e9niz. I have the distinct feeling of being the victim of some sort of hoax. Does anyone else share these feelings? What is actually known about the artist and the circumstances? I looked on the Web and all I can find is some sort of official story, nothing independent.\u201d<\/p>\n

Much of the ensuing discussion was the highbrow equivalent of trash talk, a volleying of erudite insults between Hatto\u2019s most ardent boosters and Lemken and various agnostics. The vituperation lasted for days, and the eavesdroppers included not only the usual hobbyists (as well as, presumably, Barrington-Coupe) but also a group of scholars at the Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM<\/em>), at the University of London. For more than a year, a musicologist named Nicholas Cook and a postdoctoral fellow, Craig Sapp, had been immersed in a comparative study of performances of selected Chopin mazurkas, using software that depicted the similarities between recordings with bright-colored geometric shapes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Although Cook and Sapp knew nothing about Hatto, they included her in the study because she, along with about thirty other pianists, had recorded the complete mazurkas. They entered into their database two tracks from her CD \u201cChopin: The Mazurkas,\u201d which, according to an accompanying booklet from Concert Artist, had been recorded in April, 1997, and March, 2004. On the CD slipcase, the latter date was changed to December, 2005, but that discrepancy was trivial in light of what a digital analysis revealed: the Hatto version and a 1988 recording by Eugen Indjic, a Belgrade-born soloist, were identical. As Cook later told the BBC, his initial reaction was \u201cprima facie, one of these people doesn\u2019t exist.\u201d A Google search confirmed that both pianists were demonstrably real\u2014Hatto had<\/em> existed, and Indjic had recently played in Poland\u2014which left the unavoidable implication that one was a plagiarist. The culprit seemed obvious, but Cook and Sapp weren\u2019t eager to broadcast the news. For one thing, British libel laws would have placed on them the burden of proof that a fraud had been perpetrated.<\/p>\n

Despite their caution, Cook and Sapp underestimated the potential repercussions. During a CHARM<\/em> staff seminar on January 26th, when they discreetly reported on their research, a stunned colleague who had been monitoring the online debate proclaimed, \u201cYou\u2019re sitting on a volcano.\u201d Cook and Sapp considered getting in touch with an editor at Gramophone<\/em>. Instead, they spent a couple of weeks writing and circulating a draft article titled \u201cPurely Coincidental? Joyce Hatto and Chopin\u2019s Mazurkas.\u201d They were still deciding how to proceed when, in mid-February, corroboration materialized an ocean away.<\/p>\n

On February 12th, in Mount Vernon, New York, Brian Ventura received a package that he had been anticipating for a long time. An avocational pianist, Ventura worked on Wall Street and had a fifty-minute commute, which he usually spent listening to an iPod. He had learned of Hatto not long before she died, and in the months that followed he closely read reviews of her recordings until he knew which ones he wanted to own. Placing an order turned out to be more of a chore than he expected, but he eventually established a friendly correspondence with Barrington-Coupe. Weeks passed, nothing came in the mail, and he wrote to Barry, who explained that the shipment had been delayed because one selection was unavailable. So Ventura asked Barry to substitute Liszt\u2019s \u201cTranscendental Studies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ventura unwrapped the \u201cStudies\u201d disk first. He placed it in his computer\u2019s disk drive and, through Apple\u2019s iTunes software, connected to Gracenote, an Internet database of CDs. According to Gracenote, which identifies a CD by the durations of its individual tracks, Ventura had loaded the \u201cTranscendental Studies,\u201d but the pianist was a Hungarian named L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Simon. L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Simon<\/em>? Ventura weighed the possibilities: Gracenote might be mistaken (mislabellings had been known to occur), or someone named L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Simon had recorded the same music with precisely the same track timings. When he listened during his commute the next morning, he felt \u201cfrom the very first piece, it was a remarkable recording.\u201d On his office computer, he went to Amazon.com and found a listing for Simon\u2019s record, including one-minute clips for most of the tracks.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cI started listening,\u201d he recalled. \u201cGoing back and forth between the iPod and the Amazon clips for individualistic things\u2014sudden changes in dynamics or ornaments, or a cadenzalike passage where the performer has more leeway in the interpretation. In slower pieces, it\u2019s easier to hear subtleties. I was ninety-five per cent certain that most of the tracks were the same. So I didn\u2019t know what to do. If she was the one that was copying, part of me didn\u2019t want it to come out. The whole Joyce Hatto story seemed so terrific you just wanted it to be true. I didn\u2019t want to bring down the story.\u201d<\/p>\n

Within seventy-two hours, the truth had not so much come out as exploded. Ventura had sent an e-mail to Jed Distler, a composer and reviewer who contributed to Gramophone<\/em> and had published positive Hatto reviews in the online publication ClassicsToday<\/em>. Distler later wrote, \u201cAfter careful comparison of the actual Simon performances to the Hatto, it appeared to me that 10 out of 12 tracks showed remarkable similarity in terms of tempi, accents, dynamics, balances, etc.\u201d When Distler next tested a CD of Rachmaninoff\u2019s Second and Third Piano Concertos\u2014ostensibly Hatto playing with the elusive Ren\u00e9 K\u00f6hler and his equally elusive National Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra\u2014Gracenote identified the soloist as Yefim Bronfman, accompanied by the Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. Distler reported his findings to Ventura via e-mail, and sent copies to the editors of Gramophone<\/em> and ClassicsToday<\/em> and to Jeremy Nicholas and two other Gramophone<\/em> critics who had championed Hatto. He also wrote to Barrington-Coupe\u2014whom he had met in London the previous fall\u2014and Barry \u201cquickly replied, claiming not to know what had happened, and to be as puzzled as I was.\u201d<\/p>\n

James Inverne, the editor of Gramophone<\/em>, enlisted an audio expert, Andrew Rose, who examined the waveforms of the Simon and the Hatto recordings. The visual match was exact, and Rose knew the result even before listening. Ten of the twelve tracks of the Concert Artist \u201cTranscendental Studies\u201d were \u201cwithout a shadow of a doubt\u201d performed by Simon, though the timing of one track had been subtly altered\u2014sped up by 0.02 per cent. Distler had sensed that another track wasn\u2019t lifted from the Simon recording, and Rose confirmed this: it had been appropriated from a 1993 release by the Japanese pianist Minoru Nojima. Again, the timing had been tweaked, but the waveform revealed the truth. \u201cNo pianist who\u2019s ever lived could replicate a performance to anything like the degree of accuracy heard here,\u201d Rose wrote. \u201cIt\u2019s simply not humanly possible, whatever the degree of Ms. Hatto\u2019s claimed virtuosity.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the evening of February 15th, Gramophone<\/em> published the story online, appending a report from Rose that rendered the evidence unassailable. When Cook and Sapp heard the news the next morning, they knew that CHARM<\/em> could freely disclose its discovery of the larceny of Indjic\u2019s Chopin mazurkas. In the days that followed, Rose continued to analyze recordings and post updates: The Rachmaninoff concertos were not Hatto but Bronfman. And had Hatto, K\u00f6hler, and the National Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra collaborated on the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 2? No, but Vladimir Ashkenazy, Bernard Haitink, and the Vienna Philharmonic had. Each new revelation increased the suspicion that every Concert Artist release credited to Joyce Hatto within the past decade was the creation of \u201cJoyce Hatto.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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In the Usenet and Yahoo groups, critics who had been most enamored of Hatto found themselves, predictably, objects of opprobrium. (Tantalizingly, shortly before Gramophone<\/em>\u2019s<\/em> public disclosure someone calling himself Simon Lasso\u2014in hindsight, an obvious play on L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Simon\u2014had warned participants on rec.music.classical.recordings, \u201cSome of you are going to be looking very silly indeed over the coming weeks.\u201d) Among shell-shocked Hattophiles, collective healing took the form of a debunking blitz, a competitive quest to unlock the mysteries of the ersatz oeuvre. Within ten days, twenty-three identifications had been made. (By last week, the tally was up to sixty-eight.) As with the Liszt \u201cTranscendental Studies\u201d and the Godowsky Chopin Studies, many CDs had been cobbled together from multiple sources, which meant that, unless Barrington-Coupe (or a co-conspirator, if any existed) came clean, the effort to unearth the genuine provenances could take years, and was still bound to fall short. For instance, no one has yet identified the pianist in the glorious recording of the \u201cMephisto Waltz\u201d\u2014assuming (the default assumption) that it wasn\u2019t Hatto herself.<\/p>\n

The recrimination directed at the critics who had been duped was both understandable and overwrought. In 1992, in Gramophone<\/em>, the critic Bryce Morrison found that Yefim Bronfman\u2019s Rachmaninoff Third Concerto lacked \u201cthe sort of angst or urgency that has endeared Rachmaninov to millions\u201d and that \u201cBronfman sounds oddly unmoved by Rachmaninov \u2019s intensely slavonic idiom. In the sunset coda of the Adagio his playing is devoid of glamour and in the finale\u2019s fugue he lacks crispness and definition.\u201d Fifteen years later, he wrote of Hatto\u2019s release of the same recording: \u201cstunning\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. truly great\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. among the finest on record\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. with a special sense of its Slavic melancholy.\u201d Ates Orga and Jeremy Nicholas were taken to task for not having demanded more extensive documentation from Hatto. The various sources cited by Orga in his lengthy profile on MusicWeb<\/em> had an uncanny tendency (a) to be no longer alive or (b) to originate and terminate at the intersection of Hatto and Barrington-Coupe.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was aware that there was a lot of obscurity, absence of paper trails,\u201d Orga conceded. \u201cOne takes a certain amount on faith. I cross-referenced a few things and came up with answers and I cross-referenced a few others and came up with blanks. The CDs that had been sent to me were extremely good. Whatever critical comments I offered about recordings purporting to be by her, I have to stand by. It\u2019s only when you begin to realize that they\u2019re not<\/em> by her\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. I didn\u2019t give her any scripted questions. I felt she gave me some very, very good answers, intelligent, alert. Looking back, maybe there was a lot of name-dropping. But what she was saying I felt was musically right.\u201d<\/p>\n

The long-dead Burnett James supposedly recorded his interview with Hatto in 1973. But there was no evidence that it had appeared in print before it turned up on MusicWeb<\/em>, via a transcript provided by Barry. Did she or didn\u2019t she meet the celebrated French pianist Alfred Cortot, charm him into inviting her to play for him, and, in later years, often accompany him on visits to the National Gallery? Was she or wasn\u2019t she, as a young woman, awarded \u201ca Bach Prize by Michael Tippett,\u201d the British composer? In recounting details of her performances in Russia and Poland, Hatto included a heartrending vignette of a visit to Auschwitz. Who, until the scandal broke, would have dared to question the credibility of such reminiscences?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The one person who did was Peter Lemken, whose acerbic manner, along with the fact that he happened to be German, subjected him to nasty insinuations. Lemken\u2019s suspicions about Hatto\u2014fuelled by his incredulity at the tragic fable of Ren\u00e9 K\u00f6hler\u2014owed as much to logic as to prescience. According to Barry, before the Second World War K\u00f6hler had studied music at the Jagiellonian University, in Krakow. Then: \u201cIn the Polish capital, unable to join the Conservatoire because of his Jewish faith, he studied privately with the pianist Stanislaw Spinalski. In 1940, his left hand was crushed irreparably by a young German \u2018officer,\u2019 so-called. He survived the Ghetto but in the summer of 1942 was deported to Treblinka.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Who Killed Carol Jenkins?<\/a><\/p>\n

Except that, as Lemken learned when he sent a query in early 2006 to the Jagiellonian University, no record existed of a student named Ren\u00e9 K\u00f6hler. Furthermore, the university never had a music department. In a Usenet discussion, he demanded, \u201cWhat kind of frame of mind must one possess to invent a fake Holocaust-survivor biography?\u201d<\/p>\n

As Hatto\u2019s reputation collapsed, Barry did his best to stay in character, beginning with a shameless denial. When confronted by James Inverne, the Gramophone<\/em> editor, he said that he\u2019d been warned that the magazine was working on a story and was aware of the L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Simon duplication but couldn\u2019t account for it.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow do you explain the Rachmaninoff?\u201d Inverne asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, I can\u2019t,\u201d Barry replied, adding\u2014with what Inverne deemed \u201cbreathtaking audacity\u201d\u2014\u201cIf anyone can give me any clues to help explain it, I\u2019d be very grateful.\u201d<\/p>\n

An interview he gave to the Daily Telegraph<\/em> bore the headline \u201cMY WIFE\u2019S VIRTUOSO RECORDINGS ARE GENUINE<\/em>.\u201d She was the \u201csole pianist on those recordings,\u201d he declared, and he was present \u201cat all the important sessions,\u201d in his capacity as recording engineer. \u201cIf it was all a fake, why would I put my wife\u2019s name on it?\u201d he said. \u201cI would have put someone else, some Russian name, and we would have sold ten times as many. The English don\u2019t like success\u2014you are successful for a year, then they start putting the boot in.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The telltale Brahms Piano Concerto No. 2? \u201cThey\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. say that I swiped the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, probably the greatest orchestra in Europe. It\u2019s ludicrous.\u201d<\/p>\n

Barry\u2019s bravado diminished after the Daily Mail<\/em> dug up a 1966 conviction for tax fraud, for which he\u2019d been fined and sentenced to a year in prison. At the time, the judge admonished him and four co-defendants, \u201cThese were blatant and impertinent frauds, carried out in my opinion rather clumsily, but such was your conceit that you thought yourselves smart enough to get away with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Within a couple of news cycles, Barry confessed\u2014sort of\u2014in a letter to the head of the Swedish label that had released L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Simon\u2019s Liszt recording. The executive shared excerpts with Gramophone<\/em>, which paraphrased Barry\u2019s mea culpa as \u201cI Did It for My Wife\u201d\u2014as if they were both victims of his gallant uxoriousness. \u201cIt\u201d referred not to bootlegging entire performances but to having borrowed bits of other recordings to solve technical problems. Hatto had played all the pieces herself, Barry explained, but they had been marred by involuntary grunting noises prompted by the pain from her advancing cancer. So he had searched for recordings by artists with similar styles and spliced patches into her work. \u201cMy wife was completely unaware that I did this,\u201d he wrote. \u201cI simply let her hear\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. the finished editing that she thought was completely her own work.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his funeral eulogy, when Barry spoke of there being \u201cno grand \u2018Hatto\u2019 moments,\u201d he might well have been describing his own methodology. For the most part, the pianists whose work he poached eschewed stylistic idiosyncrasies: no Glenn Gould, no Vladimir Horowitz. To simplify the editing, he said, he began to lift somewhat longer passages, along the way realizing that he could alter the result by digitally speeding them up or slowing them down. His motive, he maintained, had never been mercenary; it had been to salvage the respect and adulation that had been unfairly denied Hatto\u2014by mean-spirited critics and by her unfortunate illness. In this scenario, Hatto remained heroic and sympathetic, and, implicitly, so did her faithful mate.<\/p>\n

Barry\u2019s \u201cconfession\u201d aside, the evidence pointed toward sustained wholesale plagiarism rather than piecemeal peccadilloes. When Ernst Lumpe reflected upon his relationship with Barry, he recalled the unexpected gift that he\u2019d received from him in 1989: the tape of Hatto\u2019s recital performance of Elgar\u2019s First Symphony. An acquaintance of Lumpe\u2019s suggested that the actual pianist must have been David Owen Norris, a noted Elgar interpreter; virtually no other artist played it in public. Lumpe took a fresh look at a note that Barry had written at the time, which he\u2019d saved. It said, in part, \u201cDavid Owen Norris is playing the Elgar Transcription for the BBC in a month or two. He played it a couple of years ago in London and has since worked through it with Joyce and has, as a consequence, got the speeds up a little.\u201d<\/p>\n

Which doesn\u2019t quite square with what Norris told Lumpe: \u201cI never heard of Joyce Hatto until the recent news items.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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So Barry had been placed at a crime scene, holding a smoking gun, at least a decade earlier than the confirmed plagiarisms suggested. The only surprise, really, was that a Hatto CD of the Elgar had never been released.<\/p>\n

How long, exactly, had Concert Artist actually been Con Artist? Did it matter? To fixate upon this or that fugitive datum, or upon the technical details of how the CDs might have been concocted, was to overlook Barry\u2019s grander accomplishment. He had not merely pinched or polished a few, mostly marginal, recordings. With his collection of more than a hundred Joyce Hatto CDs, Barry had created the most diversely prolific and gifted pianist to emerge in decades, with a corresponding narrative that aroused the esteem and good will of music lovers around the world. Since early in his checkered career, he had deftly manipulated musical identities. What he confected on his wife\u2019s behalf, in her twilight, was vastly more audacious than anything he had pulled off during his \u201csuper-bargain\u201d years. The alchemy that transformed Joyce Hatto into \u201cJoyce Hatto\u201d was, in its twisted way, a tour de force, a dazzling work of art, literally the performance of a lifetime.<\/p>\n

A terrific amount of labor went into the deception. Case in point: Ren\u00e9 K\u00f6hler. Barry had first deployed the K\u00f6hler pseudonym in the fifties, but until Peter Lemken raised questions a layered biography didn\u2019t become necessary. In March, 2006, responding to an e-mail from Lemken, who stated that he was preparing an article about Hatto and had questions about K\u00f6hler (place and date of birth and death, location of gravesite, etc.), Barry invited Lemken to Cambridge to meet \u201cMiss Hatto,\u201d who \u201cwould be happy\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. to talk over with you any aspect of her playing, teaching or recording work.\u201d Online, Lemken had speculated that \u201cSt. Mark\u2019s Church, Croydon\u201d\u2014identified on Concert Artist CD packages as a venue for Hatto\u2019s recording sessions with K\u00f6hler\u2019s orchestra but strangely missing from maps\u2014was yet another fiction.<\/p>\n

Thus Barry, blithely: \u201cIn addition, whilst you are in Cambridge, I would be able to show you the recording facilities that we [have] available.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. I would be very happy to arrange for you to visit a \u2018non-existent\u2019 church in Croydon and speak with the priest in charge of it. That would occupy a full day going from Cambridge but I would do my very best to accompany you myself or provide a member of staff to accompany you. If your time schedule allows you, Miss Hatto would raise no objections to my inviting you to one of her recording sessions.\u201d<\/p>\n

After Lemken neglected to call this bluff\u2014he didn\u2019t feel like travelling to England\u2014Barry reiterated the invitation two months later, having meanwhile added some filigree to the K\u00f6hler saga: he was born in the Weimar region, travelled on a Swiss passport, and had a grandnephew, \u201cnow safely settled in Israel,\u201d who was \u201ca musician and budding conductor.\u201d Then this inspired bit about the grandnephew: \u201cWe are trying to make arrangements to bring him to London when he has finished his National Service in the Israeli Army. We have offered recordings with Joyce Hatto, if she is still able to undertake such a commitment, and have offered to finance a career launch at the Royal Festival Hall with as many members of the original National Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra as can be reassembled.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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It is hard to fathom what was motivating Barry at that moment. (Buying time, perhaps? Hatto would be dead within two months. Delusional grandiosity? Pathological duplicity?) He stood as much chance of reassembling \u201cmembers of the original National Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra\u201d as he did of producing, in the flesh, Wilhelm Havagesse. There was no St. Mark\u2019s Church in Croydon. Nor, most likely, was there a staff member available to escort Lemken anywhere. A Hatto collector tracked down by the BBC recounted that he\u2019d bought a hundred or so CDs directly from Concert Artist and that, during a twenty-seven-month period, he\u2019d exchanged roughly twelve hundred e-mails with more than a dozen Concert Artist employees\u2014or, anyway, with that many Concert Artist e-mail addressees. The collector was under the impression that the company employed thirty-two people in four locations. In fact, Concert Artist\u2019s Hatto endeavors appear to have been a one-person operation\u2014two, if Hatto counts.<\/p>\n

If so, how much did she know? Or need to know? Among the artifacts that made a compelling case for her complicity were the Rachmaninoff and Brahms concerto recordings. Even if one conceded some variant of Barry\u2019s alibi for her\u2014she recorded everything, he tinkered, she heard the result and somehow remained oblivious of his misdemeanors\u2014that couldn\u2019t explain how an artist capable of functioning at such a high level wouldn\u2019t have mused, \u201cWhy don\u2019t I recall any recording sessions with an eighty-piece orchestra?\u201d<\/p>\n

When Christopher Howell, one of the critics with whom both Hatto and Barry corresponded\u2014in exceptionally recondite discussions of piano technique and music history\u2014sifted for clues in the correspondence he\u2019d saved, he realized that the first letter he\u2019d received from Hatto was \u201cchilling evidence that, if she really wrote it, she was involved up to the hilt.\u201d He recalled, \u201cThe subject was \u2018her\u2019 recording of the Chopin Mazurkas, and that is now known to be the work of Eugen Indjic.\u201d Howell also noticed that certain pianists\u2019 names were often misspelled in the letters signed by Barry but the ones ostensibly from Hatto got them right. His inference: \u201cThis would seem to prove at least that two different people were writing.\u201d Over all, he felt, the hoax had been \u201cthought through very carefully.\u201d Peculiar errors in Hatto\u2019s letters, however, led him also to contemplate \u201cthe possibility\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. of a person with almost total recall of the past but living in a present of her own imagining.\u201d<\/p>\n

With that hypothesis in mind, I recently took a train from London to Royston for a conversation with Barrington-Coupe. I went with some questions but certainly not with accusations. I didn\u2019t plan to bring up, for instance, a story in the Independent<\/em> that quoted Hatto\u2019s radiologist to the effect that she\u2019d received her first cancer diagnosis in 1992 rather than in the early seventies, as legend had it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Barry greeted me on the station platform. Despite protestations to reporters that he was in fragile health, he struck me as quite vigorous: a trim fellow (\u201cI can still get into my Army uniform\u201d) in his mid-seventies, dressed in a tan raincoat and black leather gloves, taupe slacks, an olive tweed jacket, a green shirt, a brown print necktie. He had the look of an indoorsman\u2014pale, fleshy face, bony nose, thick eyebrows, ruffled brownish-gray hair, black glasses. It was a fifteen-minute walk through the village\u2014past the usual shops and caf\u00e9s, an ivied Anglican church, a park\u2014to the small housing development on a cul-de-sac where, he said, he and Hatto had moved from Hampstead Garden Suburb in 1976.<\/p>\n

Along the way, I asked about Royston, and his answer set the tone for our conversation. Many American servicemen were stationed in the area during the Second World War, and there was a large American military cemetery nearby, in Cambridge. \u201cJoyce occasionally had young pupils who would say negative things about Americans, and she would always correct them by pointing out how wonderful the Americans had been during the war,\u201d he said. \u201cShe liked to go to the cemetery occasionally and leave bouquets of flowers. I remember one time, we arrived and we met this elderly American gentleman standing next to a wall engraved with the names of fallen soldiers. As he was touching one of the names\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u201d<\/p>\n

I more or less knew what he was going to say next. All Barry knew about me, from a few phone calls and e-mails, was that I was a polite-sounding American reporter. That sufficed; he was born to ingratiate.<\/p>\n

\u201c.\u00a0.\u00a0. tears were running down his cheeks, and he turned to us and said, \u2018This is all I have left of my son.\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n

Christopher Howell, the MusicWeb<\/em> critic, had written of Barry\u2019s and Hatto\u2019s propensity for \u201cgrafting past realities onto present falsities with scarcely a false step\u201d\u2014and how, simultaneously, \u201cthe work proceeded of buttering up anybody perceived to be of possible use.\u201d So I\u2019d been buttered. In the course of the next five hours, he dissembled and I silently marvelled at his technique. He seemed to make things up effortlessly as he went along. As he angled for my sympathy and confidence, he remained courteous and affable, a perfectly decent-seeming fellow.<\/p>\n

At one point, he asked me if I was Jewish. \u201cI had a Jewish doctor, solicitor, accountant,\u201d he said warmly. \u201cThey all said, \u2018You\u2019re more Jewish than the Jews.\u2019 At school I used to be given a hard time by the other boys because I looked Jewish. They kept it up until, finally, just to make them stop, I said, \u2018O.K., I am<\/em>.\u2019\u00a0\u201d He went on, \u201cJoyce, when we met, thought I was Jewish. I told her, \u2018Oh, no, when I was a boy I was thinking of going into the Church. I sang in the choir.\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat church did you belong to?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, dear. I\u2019m trying to think of the church I sang in when I was a boy soprano. I used to be a regular carol singer. Singing all the soprano parts. Why can\u2019t I think of the name of that? Well, it was hit by a rocket, you see.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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We sat in the music room, which was furnished with an oak table, a couple of bookcases and armchairs, a sideboard, a leather settee, and a piano. Oriental rugs were scattered over wall-to-wall crimson carpeting; lace curtains framed a bay window that faced the street; sheer curtains covered French doors that led to the back yard. Hatto had died in this room. Even minus the hospital bed in which she had spent the last weeks of her life, it felt overstuffed. There was a surfeit of tchotchkes\u2014life-size plaster cats beneath the piano, a plaster squirrel and rabbit flanking a brass vase of artificial flowers atop the table, and assorted cloisonn\u00e9 bowls. The BBC had reported that an English online retailer had handled a hundred thousand dollars\u2019 worth of Hatto CDs; definitive sales figures were impossible to come by. But if the hoax had proved materially rewarding there was no sign of it here.<\/p>\n

The dominant object, of course, was the piano, a mahogany Steinway concert grand that Rachmaninoff, so one was told, had used for concerts outside London. I did my best to imagine it being routinely shuttled between the house and Hatto\u2019s apocryphal recording venues. During a radio interview broadcast in New Zealand a few months before she died, she had been asked about those exact logistical arrangements and had ignored the question. The most quotable quote from that interview referred to her parents, during her childhood: \u201cThey always said, \u2018Just make certain you\u2019re not a disappointment. Don\u2019t think you\u2019re so important.\u2019 And so I\u2019ve never thought I\u2019m so important.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. I expect even Mozart was a disappointment to his father.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perched on the piano bench, with his legs crossed and his hands\u2014he still wore a gold wedding band\u2014clasped around one knee, Barry said, \u201cHer mother was the kind of person who, if God himself came down, she would have found fault. It wasn\u2019t until the last six weeks of Joyce\u2019s life that she began to tell me some of the things that had happened to her as a child. I knew that she hadn\u2019t had a very happy childhood. And this is the reason. In life, there are amazing coincidences. The very first afternoon I\u2019d taken her out, we went rowing in Hyde Park and we passed another boat with identical twins, boys. Afterwards, we had a cup of tea beside the Serpentine, and as we were sitting there Joyce said, \u2018I was a twin. I had a brother who was born dead.\u2019 The amazing thing was that I<\/em> was a twin and my sister<\/em> was born dead. Consequently, my father wanted a daughter and her mother wanted a son. And both parents treated us in exactly the same way. The very first day we met\u2014it was a Saturday, almost exactly this time of year\u2014we felt a bond with each other and we had it all our life. People say it was romantic. It was almost a brotherly-sisterly bond. It seemed to transcend just ordinary marriage and sex and everything else. Sometimes we didn\u2019t need to talk to each other\u2014we just knew what the other was thinking.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cHer mother took to me. But when she started criticizing Joyce, trying to put me off, it was exactly what my father did when he came to meet her family. He said the same things about me. Her mother was very talented, had a beautiful singing voice, and so did Joyce. I think her mother resented her success. She wouldn\u2019t go to her concerts but would tell everybody that we hadn\u2019t given her tickets. Joyce would be shut in the cupboards when she was a little girl, and her mother would lock the piano. She did it very cleverly so the father didn\u2019t know. I liked him. He was a very nice man. He had cancer as well. Joyce got her stoicism from him. He was rather a Jane Austen character\u2014he wasn\u2019t one of life\u2019s happy people.\u201d<\/p>\n

The most plausible theory of the motivation behind the hoax was quintessentially British: a revenge tale fuelled by class resentment. Hatto had described to interviewers being condescended to during an adolescent audition at the Royal Academy of Music. A career as a concert soloist was a dauntingly lofty ambition, she was advised; what a young woman really needed to know was how to prepare a roast. Years later, she failed to impress when auditioning for the Proms, an annual series of prestigious summer concerts produced by the BBC. Barry told me, \u201cOne of the reasons that the establishment didn\u2019t take to her was that her whole technique was different from the English way of playing. She played with a more open hand. The thumb didn\u2019t tuck itself under. A lot of technical schools have all this preparation of the hand\u2014you\u2019ve got<\/em> to tuck the thumb under.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hatto either had or had not studied composition with the eminences M\u00e1ty\u00e1s Seiber and Paul Hindemith, who, by the time she began invoking their names in program and liner notes\u2014Seiber died in 1960, Hindemith in 1963\u2014were no longer in a position to confirm or deny. \u201cShe did do a bit of composition, yes,\u201d Barry said. \u201cBut she destroyed everything she had. Why? She thought she was criticized enough. She didn\u2019t have a sacrificial burning, but she put the whole lot into the bin. I asked her \u2018Why do that?\u2019 and she said, \u2018Well, they criticize everything<\/em> I do, and the last bit would be to criticize my composition.\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n

Another question I didn\u2019t bother asking Barry is whether Hatto was in on the con. The emerging consensus of people close to the scandal was that indeed she had been. Earlier that week, I\u2019d met with Jeremy Nicholas, who showed me a document that appeared, like the concerto recordings, to place a second smoking gun in Hatto\u2019s hand. It involved the Godowsky Chopin Studies\u2014upon reflection, hardly the most judicious theft. When the audio consultant retained by Gramophone<\/em> analyzed Hatto\u2019s Godowsky CD, he found that it had been pieced together from recordings by Marc-Andr\u00e9 Hamelin, Carlo Grante, and Ian Hobson; Barry had covered up the crime by shrinking the timings of various tracks. In March, 2006, after Nicholas published his reverential article about Hatto in Gramophone<\/em>, he received from her a printed program from a famous 1938 concert at the Royal Albert Hall, during which Rachmaninoff performed. A handwritten note said, \u201cWe have looked after this Rachmaninoff programme for many years, but feel it should now be passed on to you. Also I have re-worked the Godowsky, as I\u2019m always trying to achieve the impossible and I hope you will enjoy the result. With all good wishes, Joyce.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Nicholas wanted to know, \u201cWhy is she saying \u2018I have reworked<\/em> the Godowsky\u2019 if she didn\u2019t play them in the first place?\u201d<\/p>\n

Among the most diligent and dispassionate students of the Hatto hoax is Andrys Basten, the woman who had posted the \u201cMephisto Waltz\u201d on her Web site. She is a retired computer consultant who lives in Northern California. According to her, the Godowsky and other examples in which recordings have been sped up or slowed down\u2014\u201cwith results which some listeners even now can find more pleasing than the original pianists\u2019 versions\u201d\u2014suggest that Hatto and Barry had set out to create \u201ctheir own ideal versions, using her musical ideas and his technological know-how.\u201d In Basten\u2019s interpretation of their<\/em> interpretation, \u201cHe was the producer of these improved versions, while she was the musician behind them. They both could enjoy the accolades rolling in. Sweet revenge for what was felt to be insufficient recognition of past achievements and a means of financial survival. A more practical form of folie \u00e0 deux.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ates Orga, for his part, had reconsidered Hatto\u2019s accounts of concert tours in Eastern Europe. He said, \u201cI can\u2019t think of many English artists in the fifties, sixties, or early seventies going to the Soviet Union or Poland unless they were big-time competition players.\u201d Barry had told Orga that Hatto hadn\u2019t bothered to save copies of her reviews. Yet he was able to produce reviews\u2014O.K., not actual clippings but typed transcripts\u2014from her putative trips to Russia and Scandinavia in the early and mid-seventies. The prose had the same conquering-heroine flavor as her liner notes: \u201cHer performance of the Brahms Piano Concerto in D minor was a triumph. The technical virtuosity was compelling in its complete nonchalance but it was the blazing passion that brought a huge audience to its feet\u201d; \u201cMiss Joyce Hatto, an English woman pianist, proved herself to be a pianist of unique technical talent and possessed of much more than exceptional musicality. Her power to hold an audience and move them to near hysteria is rarely encountered\u201d; \u201cJoyce Hatto completely dominated her Steinway and it was very noticeable that the orchestral players were perspiring and not this soloist! The explosive reception she received demanded six encores.\u201d<\/p>\n

The few reviews of Hatto\u2019s work that can be verified as genuine are less kind. In 1953, a critic from the London Times<\/em> said of a local recital, \u201cJoyce Hatto grappled doggedly with too hasty tempi in Mozart\u2019s D Minor piano concerto and was thereby impeded from conveying significant feelings towards the work, especially in quick figuration.\u201d In a 1961 Gramophone<\/em> assessment of Hatto\u2019s LP of Rachmaninoff\u2019s Second Piano Concerto, the conductor Trevor Harvey wondered \u201cwhether her technique is really on top of the difficulties of this music.\u201d He concluded, \u201cIt remains a small, rather pallid performance.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a moment of contrition, Barry said, \u201cI can see why I\u2019ve been criticized for what I\u2019ve done. Apart from being unlawful, it wasn\u2019t right. I know I shouldn\u2019t have done it.\u201d Then he got over it. \u201cThe letters I\u2019ve been getting\u2014the nasty ones\u2014tell me at least I could publish the names of the wonderful artists who played this work. But there aren\u2019t<\/em> any \u2018wonderful artists.\u2019 The things that she was playing, if it was very difficult, it was fine, she didn\u2019t make noises\u2014the mechanical memory was all going right. Almost on autopilot, I suppose; her fingers would just be there. The body has learnt, you\u2019ve gone up and down those difficult passages so many times. It\u2019s like a hurdler. Sometimes they don\u2019t know what they\u2019re doing\u2014the brain doesn\u2019t but the body does. What was difficult for her, where the problems occurred, was immediately before she started she\u2019d take a deep breath. Pull herself and stretch, take a deep breath, and the pain would start. She couldn\u2019t seem to stop herself from doing that. Consequently, when it was a slow piece, that\u2019s when the problems came in, because only her mind was being engaged and the pain had a chance to take over. Very often the patching had to be done there. We never used a famous pianist or anything to cover up any technical deficiencies. There weren\u2019t any. It was so remarkable\u2014someone said the piano had a hold on her, but I would say she had a hold on the piano. It did what she wanted it to do, in a remarkable way, too.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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I listened and wondered: Did he actually believe any of it? And what had she believed? Had Joyce Hatto died happy?<\/p>\n

Barry\u2019s gift for artifice notwithstanding, he\u2019d spun such dense layers of fabrication that inevitably he lapsed into self-contradiction. When I asked how Hatto felt about the attention she\u2019d received during her final years, he said, \u201cYou see, the thing about her was it meant her life hadn\u2019t been a waste of time. But she didn\u2019t glory in anything, really. Music was kind of an essential thing. If there was a criticism, she would say, \u2018Well, I know what I know.\u2019\u00a0\u201d In the next breath, he mentioned that, shortly before she died, when he\u2019d shown her a favorable review of one of \u201cher\u201d CDs, \u201cShe looked at me and said, \u2018It\u2019s just too late.\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n

In the wake of the scandal, some listeners had obtained copies of Hatto\u2019s early LPs and detected genuine promise. Christopher Howell, after listening to her 1963 recording of Mozart\u2019s Piano Concerto in A Major, said that \u201cthere is a certain glow to the tone. The slow movement is beautifully shaped while the finale, at a pretty fast tempo, has a joyous spring. Overall, the performance has a certain luminosity of spirit.\u201d But it was indeed too late.<\/p>\n

From papers atop the table, Barry produced a condolence note that he\u2019d received from a Dutch fan of Hatto\u2019s, just before the hoax was exposed: \u201cDear Sir! First I must condole you with your wife. It\u2019s a great loss, not only for you, but also for the lovers of piano music. I am a great admirer of your wife\u2019s records, the first of them I bought in the sixties.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. It\u2019s a pity she is only now recognized as the great pianist she always was.\u201d<\/p>\n

When I handed it back, he said, \u201cIn the end, you just sort of shrug your shoulders. I haven\u2019t made a lot of friends, actually. I suppose it\u2019s because Joyce and I were married for almost fifty years. I really haven\u2019t had time for friendships. It is very strange. I\u2019ve found that the ones I thought were friends have to pontificate. But I have one friend who\u2019s been wonderful. When I told him what I\u2019d done, there was no lecture; he simply said, \u2018I understand why you did it.\u2019 There\u2019s no use having a friend who\u2019s going to lecture you. I think Marlene Dietrich said it best\u2014Joyce and I both knew Marlene Dietrich. She said, \u2018It\u2019s no good forgiving your husband if you\u2019re going to make him eat it for breakfast every morning.\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n

Just about every anecdote Barry shared, or invented on the spot, conformed to a fundamentally sentimental narrative that retained at least a quotient of plausibility, allowing him to harvest a bit of sympathy for two lifetimes\u2019 accumulation of grievances. Of course, there was a transparent poignancy to the con: Hatto had possessed genuine talent but there had been no brilliant career. The con had a genius and the revenge a sweetness, the false persona providing a balm for her failed ambition. Still, how satisfying could it have been to live merely the simulacrum of success\u2014to read about \u201cher\u201d inspiring renaissance, to hear \u201cher\u201d music so extravagantly extolled? The name-dropping, the evasiveness, the delusional stories, the woundedness, the self-pity, the resentment toward the establishment: it formed a ziggurat of self-deception. It was also a love story, one that would have been right at home on Sunset Boulevard.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Hatto\u2019s ashes, in a cardboard parcel the size of a shoebox, rested on the oak table. Three days before she died, Barrington-Coupe said, he proposed that they be transported to Chopin\u2019s garden, outside Warsaw, but she said that she wanted them scattered beneath a conifer in the botanical garden in Cambridge. Unfortunately, that wasn\u2019t allowed. Another possibility was a prehistoric burial mound in Royston, but the ground there had been sinking and was roped off.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe died just where you are,\u201d he told me. \u201cThat\u2019s roughly where her bed was. The amazing thing about her is that she was rather ageless. Children and young girls would discuss things with her that they wouldn\u2019t discuss with their parents. People never thought of her as being elderly, and, frankly, neither did I. About two years before she died, I said, \u2018You know, Joyce, you don\u2019t look any different from when we first met.\u2019 She had a remarkable youthfulness. And yet when she actually died\u2014the moment of death, the doctor was on one side and I was on the other\u2014it was as if a sponge wiped her face and her whole personality went and there was this old lady. When I went to the undertaker the first time to see her, I went in and there was this elderly lady in this coffin. I looked at her and I came out smiling and said, \u2018That\u2019s the wrong body.\u2019 They said, \u2018No, that\u2019s Joyce.\u2019 So I went back in. She had a little birthmark. I went back in, and there it was. I\u2019ve seen many deaths. Most people I\u2019ve found in death seem to lose a few years. She didn\u2019t. The act was over.\u201d\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more Trump Solo<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mark Singer on how the pianist Joyce Hatto became a sensation owing to deceptions by her husband, William Barrington-Coupe, known as Barry, who presented recordings by others as hers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":669,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[95],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-letter-from-england"],"yoast_head":"\nFantasia for Piano - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=670\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Fantasia for Piano - City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Mark Singer on how the pianist Joyce Hatto became a sensation owing to deceptions by her husband, William Barrington-Coupe, known as Barry, who presented recordings by others as hers.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=670\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-06-24T15:37:56+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"57 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=670#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=670\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3e7ce0c0c60d21e12a5ac61fb2b786d4\"},\"headline\":\"Fantasia for Piano\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-06-24T15:37:56+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=670\"},\"wordCount\":11438,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=670#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/06\\\/e1eca7b27e54047cb0084ea48bdcf417.webp\",\"articleSection\":[\"Letter from England\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=670#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=670\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=670\",\"name\":\"Fantasia for Piano - 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