I had almost forgotten the story of Joyce Hatto, supposed master pianist who was discovered to have stolen other people's recordings and appropriated them. Modern technology (iTunes) helped a musical connoisseur discover the fraud, but not before she died and was dubbed "one of the greatest pianists Britain has ever produced." This wonderful New York Times Opinion piece by Denis Dutton explains what Hatto did but not why she did it, and perhaps that is what all of my blog posts ask. Are the reasons for stealing something and passing it off as your own the same as those for making something and passing it off as someone else's? As Dutton explains:
Joyce Hatto was not a pianistic forger. In order to forge a piano performance she would, for example, have had to record Beethoven's Hammerklavier sonata herself and sell it to the world as a lost recording by Artur Rubinstein.
She was instead a plagiarist: she stole other pianists' work from published CDs and, with only a few electronic alterations, sold them as her own.
I dislike the deceit involved with forgery and imposture, but, as Dutton describes it, there is something so much worse about plagiarism. Hatto never faced any repercussions of her plagiarism during her life, and probably died just as she lived: "bubbly, confident, witty; a bit boastful perhaps." I wonder what justice comes to liars when they die.
