The Slipped Disc daily comfort zone (228): On the Fritz

Larry says:

My understanding was that Kreisler did not deliberately want to fool people but assumed that he would not be taken seriously as a composer by the critics if he used his own name. Therefore, he used a pseudonym.

David K. Nelson says:

The story of the Kreisler “fakes” (which is what my first violin teacher called them) is more complex and interesting than the bland statement of the chronology would have you believe. And Kreisler was perhaps not as modest, nor as mild mannered, as he has come to be assumed.

My father heard Kreisler play before the truth was revealed about the series of so called “Classical Manuscripts” and remembered the furor – it truly made international news at the time. I might mention that in my opinion the Preghiera originally attributed to Padre Martini is one of the least convincing of the collection. Listen to the Siciliano et Rigaudon “by” Francoeur, or the Grave “by” W.F. Bach and, if you are familiar with the context of heavily arranged Baroque and Classical music (e.g. the Boccherini Cello Concerto or the Albinoni Adagio) you are more likely to see how no eyebrows were raised by Kreisler’s Classical Manuscripts even by scholars, much less other musicians.

First some background information. Kreisler (who studied composition with Leo Delibes and counterpoint with Anton Bruckner) was born into an age where what few Baroque violin pieces were commonly played in concert were invariably heavily arranged by someone – Ferdinand David, Mendelssohn’s concertmaster, made a virtual cottage industry of such arrangements, including Bach, and the “Vitali” Chaconne, but there were others, such as Hans Sitt. A common alteration is that the accompaniments are greatly re-harmonized, and the music itself is often fragmentized and sorted differently than in the original. Sometimes violinists such as Burmester would arrange for violin and piano something that existed in a piano edition which itself was already highly arranged. And just consider the many performing editions of Handel’s Messiah that were out there. There WERE music scholars back then who knew the composer’s styles but they also knew the “performing editions” that were so plentiful, so they had no revalations to make about them. It took a long time before pianists played urtext echt Scarlatti for example rather than the Tausig arrangements. So even the most informed scholar was unlikely to suspect that the Kreisler “Classical Manuscripts” were total fabrications, much less accuse him of it. They were deemed the heavily Romanticized arrangements that they admitted being.

Second of all, Kreisler had done this before! When he was a younger man he credited his “Liebesfreud” and “Liebesleid” as his arrangements of works of Joseph Lanner, and programmed them with his “Caprice viennois” which he wrote and claimed credit for, and he knew exactly what the critics would do – scorn him for daring to set his own inferior efforts next to the immortal works of a genius like Lanner. They did, and he was able to “confess” his authorship in an appearance of modesty but actually was allowing the critics to make public asses of themselves. He liked to set traps.

Third, the Classical Manuscripts series went back further than the 1920s, into the very early 1900s. The series was well along by 1909. The story is that Kreisler happened upon a wonderful library of music manuscripts in an old monastery in Avignon under the protection of an impoverished group of monks. He bought 53 manuscripts from the collection for a handsome sum – the key fact being, he had the ONLY copies. There was no other edition that anyone could check them against. The other part of his story is that he arranged 19 of the pieces in his own manner to suit to own style. Even the published versions that claimed the authorship of Pugnani or Cartier or Martini or Couperin or Vivaldi stated explicitly the the pieces were so heavily arranged that they “should be regarded as original works” and that copyright was asserted over them on that basis. Some publishers tried to issue their versions of the Classical Manuscripts and were promptly sued by Kreisler’s publisher. Another huge clue. And many of Kreisler’s violinist friends knew the truth for years.

It was not really a music scholar who finally forced Kreisler to admit the truth. In 1934 he decided to admit the hoax and told his publisher reissue the sheet music Classical Manuscripts series as “composed” by him “In the Style Of” the various Baroque and early classical composers. But in early 1935 Olin Downes was supposed to give a lecture about the music of the Baroque and of all things, the signature work he was going to base his entire lecture on was the famous Praeludium and Allegro by “Pugnani.” And Yehudi Menuhin was prevailed upon to perform it live at the lecture. Downes tried to do a bit of leg work in tracking down whatever source work by Pugnani this came from, or even other works by Pugnani that he could compare it to and came up empty, and when he finally called upon Kreisler’s publisher to see what they knew, they supplied the new catalog that had removed Pugnani’s name as composer, and just called it “In the Style Of Pugnani” but composed by Fritz Kreisler. Downes verified this with Kreisler who readily admitted that he composed all the 19 Classical Manuscripts, but for a few measures of a work otherwise attributed to Couperin. He said he did so because it was becoming tactless to have his name appear over and over as composer on his programs. Perhaps. So suddenly Downes had a huge scoop to report and he did so.

And once again a critic stepped into the mess and gave Kreisler the last laugh. No less than Ernest Newman wrote an article to the effect that Kreisler’s ability to pass off as genuine Baroque pieces things that he himself had written proved a point that Newman had been insisting on for years: that Baroque music was the purely mechanical operation of formulas pure and simple, that there was no genius in it and no real composition taking place. Newman did not exclude even Bach and Handel from this position. Kreisler in his view simply applied the formulas and that any trained musician could do the exact same thing. It took no talent because the Baroque composers had no talent.

Kreisler took strong exception. He had worked hard on these pieces and had seen them be praised for 30 years as timeless masterworks for violin. (Even his friend Vincent d’Indy had been fooled after all.) His response to Newman was that the music had been praised as good, so why did it cease to be good when the name attached to it was changed? He denied that there was any formula involved that could allow any musical person to composer in a Baroque manner. Furthermore, if “any trained musician” could do what he did, which was to fool the entire musical world for 30 years, then he invited Ernest Newman to be put to the test, be locked into a room until he could produce even one “Baroque” work that would fool — not the entire musical world, as Kreisler had — but the caretaker of Queen’s Hall. Ouch! And Newman, who made much about his supposed flawless ability as a score reader in spite of being at most a self taught pianist, had gone out on a limb of his own making about what “any” musical person could do, and had been called on it by Kreisler, just as Kreisler had delighted in exposing the ignorance of that music critic years earlier over the “Lanner” pieces. A rather wicked sense of humor.

Oh, and I agree that Cardenes is a very fine violinist.