One could say that it's never really quite gone away, especially since Farhan Malik and others have been busily beavering away adding to the correct identifications of all those tracks on all those CDs, although until the recent publication of this American piece the story may seem, one could as well say, to have gone somewhat cold. All of this onerous detective work, laudable as it will have been, could of course have been avoided had WB-C simply owned up to the whole thing and provided all those details, along with sales statements and other accompanying documentation, himself; his defiant refusal to do any such thing is what has caused the case to drag on for months with still no prospect of anything resembling an airing in court, let alone a final outcome. The Hertfordshire Trading Standards office is apparently amassing evidence and we have pointed them in the directions of where the identifications are being revealed, but we have no idea when a prosecution will occur, let alone how it will be handled and what the outcome is likely to be. The extent to which W-BC has profited from this scam has presumably also remained in question, unless those goodly employees of HMRC have gotten interested (and there's no published evidence of that, as far as I know).
I know Jeremy Nicholas and have discussed the case with him as well as corresponding about it with Christopher Howell and Ates Orga. I also studied years ago with Humphrey Searle who, in his days at BBC in the 1950s, is supposed to have masterminded JH's "world première broadcast of the complete Beethoven/Liszt Symphonies"; now given Searle's vital rôle in the history of Liszt appreciation and given also that he and I discussed Liszt and Alkan at considerable length, it would seem just a mite odd, would it not, that so momentous a broadcast event as this had somehow escaped from his memory to the extent that not only did he never mention JH to me at all but also omitted all reference to her in his memoirs
Quadrille with a Raven?
I wonder just how long it might have been before "Joyce Hatto"'s CD of some Sorabji pieces might have been "made", accompanied by the composer's long-ago endorsements of her artistry? After all, the only major work that she does seem to have recorded herself, Bax's Symphonic Variations for piano and orchestra, was much admired by Sorabji (who other than this work and a couple of the symphonies had little time for Bax) and yet he never mentioned her to me either; had that Beethoven/Liszt broadcast really taken place, would Sorabji not have noticed and remembered it?
These are thoughts on just a few of the elaborate and less elaborate deceptions in this extraordinary affair.
The article itself suggests that the writer has pretty much done his homework. In the end, one may suppose that the most interesting fact to emerge from this entire débâcle is that it will have been proved possible for someone to perpetrate such an elaborate hoax in front of so many people including professional musicians and critics and maintain it successfully for so long.
From one Joyce, stream of consciousness; from another, stream of conmanship. From Schumann addressing a gathering about Chopin, "Hats off, gentlemen? A genius!"; from me, substitute "Hatto" for "hats off" and recognise that, if any genius in involved here, it extends no farther than the ability to deceive...
Best,
Alistair
