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It soon became brutally clear that “passing along” is exactly what up to. When, a few months after she died, a buyer of one of was up to. When, a few months after she died, a buyer of one of CDs slid her recording of Liszt’s Transcendental Études into his computer, it immediately identified the track as a recording by the Hungarian pianist László Simon. Since then, analysis by professional sound engineers and piano enthusiasts across the globe has confirmed that entire Joyce Hatto oeuvre recorded after 1989 is without exception stolen from the CDs of other pianists—mainly young, lesser-known, vigorous artists.

Joyce Hatto was not a pianistic forger. In order to forge a piano perfomance, she would have had to record Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata herself and sell it to the world as a lost recording by, for instance, William Kapell. She was instead a plagiarist: she stole other pianists’ work and with only a few electronic alterations—usually speeding difficult pieces to make them sound more brilliant—sold it as her own. Plagiarism is hard to bring off with any public art, because sooner later any generally available source is likely to be noticed. (This explains most plagiarism occurs not in the area of public art but in private, largely perpetrated by students against their teachers.)

In retrospect, the critics who praised van Meegeren’s Vermeers look foolish. The same cannot be said of the critics who were entranced Hatto’s perperformances, which were culled from the more obscure corners the CD catalogue. The only serious embarrassment was experienced those few magazine critics who had given unenthusiastic reviews original performance but had fallen all over themselves in praise same recording when they thought the pianist was the seventy-five-year-old lady who had for years been battling cancer. But in that respect, every listener who was thrilled by this artistry was to some extent affected—some would say suckered—by the appealing idea of an aged pianist at the end of her life producing such dazzling virtuosity. I myself, since I’d heard a radio documentary on her before death and found her Liszt and Schubert recordings stupendous for woman of her age.

IV

Goodman’s approach to the problem of forgery throws light on the psychological dynamics of historical responses to fakes and copies, but it does not explain exactly why we object to forgeries in the first place. A broadly social-constructionist answer to that question is given by musicologist Leonard Meyer. We may imagine that we can separate aesthetic criteria we use to evaluate forgery from other cultural norms criteria, Meyer says, but this is a mistake: it is actually impossible apart our aesthetic and our cultural values. It follows that insisting should make no difference whether a work is forged or not is simply naive: it asks us to turn our backs on our cultural heritage and the value culture places on originality. The understanding of any human product requires, Meyer writes, “understanding how it came to be what it is and . . . if it is an event in the past, . . . being aware of its as realized in history.” We can no more rid ourselves of these presuppositions of perception than, as he puts it, we can breathe vacuum. Meyer’s position implies that if our culture set less store by and originality, we might come to accept forgery as a normal practice.

If Meyer’s position is correct, it would follow that in another culture someone like van Meegeren might be lauded as being as fine an artist Vermeer: this is at least in principle imaginable, whatever we happen now to think of van Meegeren’s fakes. It would certainly follow that there should be no principled aesthetic objection to Eric Hebborn’s better forgeries, only a cultural or legal objection. As for Hatto, if you enjoy piano playing, her recordings are as good as anyone else’s—in fact, they are anyone else’s—made all the better as displays of virtuosity for being speeded up by as much as 20 percent.

But claims on behalf of Meyer’s position are trickier than they may first seem.