Frederick Reece’s forthcoming first book, Forgery in Musical Composition: Aesthetics, History, and the Canon, is a feast of a read, offering far more than a history of fakery in classical music. It asks: How was the canon formed and when did we begin to care about authenticity in art? Can lies be beautiful? What is art and who has the authority to determine its value?
These are difficult questions, raised by Reece—who is Assistant Professor of Music History at the University of Washington—at a time of anxiety about ways of knowing and the spread of disinformation. He doesn’t pretend to have concrete answers, but he does believe there’s use in looking at forgery as a means of better understanding ethical and political issues in the wider world.
Four cases are put under the microscope, split into two sections—Romantic Cultures of Forgery (1791-1945) and Modern Cultures of Forgery (1945-2000). Reece begins with Mozart and Franz Xaver Süssmayr’s controversial completion of the Requiem Mass in D Minor, an act “alternately accepted as benign by some and decried as the archetypal compositional forgery by others with little sign of definitive consensus.” Fritz Kreisler comes next, the world-famous Austrian violinist who in the early 20th century claimed 17 of his own works were based on source material from forgotten composers, mostly from the 18th century. His ruse went undetected for 30 years, only to be exposed by The New York Times in a sensational front-page splash.
Reece calls Schubert’s missing “Gastein” Symphony “the single greatest archival holy grail in the history of musicology.” The strange tale of how it magically turned up near Frankfurt in the 1970s opens part two of the book. We finish in the 1990s with the case of five missing Haydn sonatas being unearthed in Münster, to the delight of scholar H. C. Robbins Landon, pianist Paul Badura-Skoda and his musicologist wife, Eva—all of whom believed they were genuine. I spoke with Reece recently over Zoom.
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