The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [99]
Unlike van Meegeren’s Vermeers, many of Hebborn’s fakes are in their liveliness and grace. They are, simply as basic visual beautiful to look at. His Temples of Venus and Diana, by “Breughel,” his Christ Crowned with Thorns, by “Van Dyck,” would in my opinion have done credit to their purported artists. There is no doubt that scores and hundreds of his forged Master drawings reside in and museum collections. The actual number is uncertain and bound to remain so for the foreseeable future, since there is no incentive the own ers of these works to find out whether or not they are Hebborn. This charming rogue died from a hammer blow to the back skull received in a dark alley in Rome in 1996. Police were never make an arrest for the murder. But his splendid fakes live on.
Joyce Hatto
Indisputably lovely fakes of a very different kind were produced by the pianist Joyce Hatto over an approximately seventeen-year period beginning around 1989. Born in 1928, she was the daughter of a music-loving London antiques dealer. As a teenager, she kept practicing during the Blitz, hiding under the piano when the bombs were falling. She claimed later to have known the composers Ralph Vaughan Williams, Benjamin Britten, and Carl Orff, to have studied Chopin with the French virtuoso Alfred Cortot, and to have taken advice from the pianist Clara Haskil. She was Arnold Bax’s favored interpreter for his Symphonic Variations. Hatto made recordings from the 1950s until 1970, some Mozart and Rachmaninoff, but tending toward light-music potboilers: the Cornish Rhapsody and the Warsaw Concerto. Her career was already in decline when she was given—so she claimed—a cancer diagnosis in the early 1970s. She retired to a village near Cambridge with her husband, recording engineer named William Barrington-Coupe, and a fine Steinway that Rachmaninoff himself had used for prewar recitals Britain.
Then came what seemed at the time to be one of the strangest turns in the history of classical music. Joyce Hatto began in her retirement record CDs for a small record label run by her husband. She began with Liszt, went back to cover Bach and all of the Mozart sonatas, and continued with a complete Beethoven sonata set. Then on to Schubert Schumann, Chopin, and more Liszt. Her Prokofiev sonatas (all nine) were tossed off with incredible virtuosity. In total she recorded more than 120 CDs—including many of the most difficult piano pieces written, played with breathtaking speed and accuracy. This was more than the entire recorded output of Arthur Rubinstein, and his included many repetitions.
Intriguingly, she gave to the music a developed although oddly malleable personality. She could do Schubert in one style, and then Prokofiev almost as though she were a new person playing a different piano— astonishing, chameleon-like artistic ability. We normally think of prodigies as children who exhibit some kind of miraculous ability in music. Joyce Hatto became something unheard of in the annals of classical music: a prodigy of old age, the very latest of late bloomers, “the greatest living pianist that almost no one has heard of,” as the critic Richard Dyer put it for himself and many other piano aficionados in the Boston Globe.
Little wonder that when she at last succumbed to her cancer in 2006 seventy-seven—recording Beethoven’s Sonata no. 26, Les Adieux, from a wheelchair in her last days—the Guardian called her “one of greatest pianists Britain has ever produced.” What a nice touch: playing Beethoven’s farewell sonata from a wheelchair. It went along with image in the press as an indomitable spirit with a charming personality— always ready with a quote from Shakespeare, Rubinstein, or Muhammad of life as it is presented in the music. Nothing belongs to us;