# Music, paintings, and forgery



## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

In response to some things posted in another thread: Paintings, even of great artists, can be and are forged. Even experts, trained in the minutest details of an artist's style, can be fooled. There are many examples, some undoubtedly still undiscovered.

But who can forge great music? Can anybody write a "newly discovered" Beethoven piano sonata that will be perceived of having the same value as the best of Beethoven's own? To do that, the forger would have to have talent, inspiration, and technique equal to Beethoven's own.

So my question is, why is this so? What is the difference between visual art and music that makes one relatively easy to forge, the other not?


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

Fritz Kreisler produced a number of forged violin concertos in the style of composers like Vivaldi, WF Bach, Couperin, and so forth. At the time, the Baroque revival was just beginning, and critics were fooled. He eventually revealed that the pieces were his.

I'm not sure if he would be able to get away with it today, since there are many more experts in the field, and far more is known now about the individual nature of the composers than was in the early 20th century.


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## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

I can't answer the question, but I look forward to more learned replies. It's a great idea for a thread. 
However it seems to me that some painters of the past painted in the style of a 'school' & some works may be accredited to the Old Masters but really painted by one of their 'school', and this artist too 'would have to have talent, inspiration & technique equal to' the Old Master's own. Similarly, early composers writing in the style of the age may have followers & have works accredited to them falsely & undiscovered. You have chosen Beethoven, who is a mountain in the middle of foothills, and a mountain with its own distinctive crags. But the same would apply to Shakespeare - people could 'forge' his early works or his collaborative works, but nobody could 'forge' great tragedies like Hamlet & King Lear. 

So this question isn't really quite as simple as the one you pose...


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## ahammel (Oct 10, 2012)

KenOC said:


> But who can forge great music? Can anybody write a "newly discovered" Beethoven piano sonata that will be perceived of having the same value as the best of Beethoven's own? To do that, the forger would have to have talent, inspiration, and technique equal to Beethoven's own.


This isn't true. The forger can learn things from Beethoven what Beethoven had to figure out for himself. It's much easier to ape an already-mature style than to do the work to develop one's own.

The forger would also presumably have the considerable advantage of not being deaf.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

ahammel said:


> It's much easier to ape an already-mature style than to do the work to develop one's own.


Sir George Grove wrote that Beethoven, like Shakespeare, didn't have a "style." I think this is very true. Dudley Moore can ape *one* of Beethoven's middle-period styles (and very amusingly), but nobody could mistake his music for Beethoven's.


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## GGluek (Dec 11, 2011)

Back around 1970, there was a British housewife named Rosemary Brown, who claimed that dead composers dictated pieces to her from beyond the grave. EMI (I think) even made a recording of her playing some of these pieces. The interesting thing was that all of the pieces were trifles -- a Beethoven bagatelle, Mozart minuet, Schubert march, etc. i.e. works that, if I had a conduit to the living, would be the last things I'd want to dictate.  Works that, to a musician, or someone with a good ear, could more easily fool the gullible because of their inconsequence/minor status. Even Shakespeare forgeries over the years have tended to the quality of the lesser works, not Hamlet. Art forgeries are often mere copies of extent works -- so that's just a matter of matching brushstrokes. Forgeries of "lost" works often followed known copies of the missing, again necessitating a little imagination but a lot of knowledge of technique. I'm not aware of many art forgeries that were hailed as masterpieces in their time.


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## Manxfeeder (Oct 19, 2010)

Thanks. I was wondering about Ms. Brown.


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## ahammel (Oct 10, 2012)

KenOC said:


> Sir George Grove wrote that Beethoven, like Shakespeare, didn't have a "style."


If he meant that they each have more than one, then I agree, but my point stands.

If he meant that neither has any particular style at all, then I think he's just wrong. Both Shakespeare and Beethoven have very distinctive fingerprints all over their work.


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## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

Beethoven & Shakespeare are bigger than 'style' which is why they are timeless giants. You can relate them to the fashions of their age, through philosophy & worldview & (musical or linguistic) vocabulary. But as GGluek points out (also me, above) it's easier to forge quirky juvenilia & bagatelles rather than their major works, which are unique and contain multitudes. 

Forgery is much like parody. Even Shakespeare couldn't 'forge' another Hamlet.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Mahlerian said:


> Fritz Kreisler produced a number of forged violin concertos in the style of composers like Vivaldi, WF Bach, Couperin, and so forth. At the time, the Baroque revival was just beginning, and critics were fooled. He eventually revealed that the pieces were his.


Well, Vivaldi, Telemann, WF Bach, and some other worthies wrote a LOT of music, especially concertos. Most of them were simply cut to pattern and, although pleasant enough, don't qualify in my book as "great music" (with some exceptions). It's easy to imagine that a talented guy like Kreisler could write imitations that were and maybe are hard to tell from the real articles.

The test to me is that the discovery of "another concerto" by any of these people, as happened quite recently with Vivaldi, is quite unexciting to anybody except musicologists.

Which raises the question: Who has the talent to forge some new Kreisler "bon-bons"? That might be a harder thing...


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

I can't speak for music... but forgery in art is not something that is "easy". It generally involves a scientific knowledge of the materials, tools, techniques, etc... employed by a specific artist in a specific time and place. It also involves an ability to mimic or employ materials of the proper age and place. Add to this a technical facility that is often well beyond that employed by many contemporary artists. What is perhaps "easy" about forgery vs the creation of a masterful work of original art is that it is easier to convince a buyer to part with large sums of money in return for a painting he or she thinks is by Rembrandt or Vermeer than it is to get the same individual to part with such sums for the work by an unrecognized artist.

It is actually surprising how museum directors and curators and art historians fall for various forgeries. I think the problem here is two-fold. The museum directors, etc... want to believe that recently uncovered painting X is by artist Y because such discoveries are what makes careers in academia. At the same time... a good many within academia don't really have much of an aye. I am ever surprised at how a bad forgery... or merely a painting by a student of a given master... is taken to have been by master X.

One of the most notorious instances of forgery was that of Han van Meegeren. When art critics decried his work as tired and derivative, van Meegeren felt that they had destroyed his career. Thereupon, he decided to prove his talent to the critics by forging paintings of some of the world's most famous artists, including Frans Hals, Pieter de Hooch, Gerard ter Borch and Johannes Vermeer. During World War II, wealthy Dutchmen, wanting to prevent a sellout of Dutch art to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, avidly bought van Meegeren's forgeries. The same buyers, fearing that the paintings in question might have questionable provenance (ie. have been siezed from Jewish owners) avoided bring in any experts to examine the works. They merely counted their blessings in stumbling upon a brilliant paintint for far less than it was worth. Following the war, a forged Vermeer was discovered in Göring's possession, and van Meegeren was arrested as a collaborator, as officials believed that he had sold Dutch cultural property to the Nazis. This would have been an act of treason, the punishment for which was death, so van Meegeren fearfully confessed to the forgery.

Beyond the political realities of WWII which leant a cover to van Meegeren's forgeries, the artist was also quite astute in mimicking lesser works. In the case of the Vermeer forgeries, van Meegeren did not chose to imitate Vermeer's inimitable mature works... but rather his less-well known and earlier religious paintings.

Even so... looking at the paintings now, it is impossible to imagine anyone confusing these works...



















... for a legitimate Vermeer (although the second painting is far more successful)...



















There's something almost blatantly 1940s-ish about van Meegeren's forgeries. And this brings us to an issue that just as "our" Beethoven... what we hear and emphasize and stress and value in Beethoven differs from that of the Beethoven of the 1950s which differs from the Beethoven of the 1880s which differs from the Beethoven of the composer's own life time... so it is that a forgery of Vermeer of our time would look drastically different from a forgery from 70 years ago. Both are a form of performance or interpretation of another's work... filtered through the vision or hearing of the time at hand. I suspect that a forgery of Beethoven made today would sound like a horribly bad pastiche in another 50 years.


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

Well, Vivaldi, Telemann, WF Bach, and some other worthies wrote a LOT of music, especially concertos. Most of them were simply cut to pattern and, although pleasant enough, don't qualify in my book as "great music" (with some exceptions). It's easy to imagine that a talented guy like Kreisler could write imitations that were and maybe are hard to tell from the real articles.

The test to me is that the discovery of "another concerto" by any of these people, as happened quite recently with Vivaldi, is quite unexciting to anybody except musicologists.

Ummm... no. This is just the usual bias against older musical styles voiced by one raised on Romanticism/Post-Romanticism. To someone first coming upon classical music, Romanticism or and later classical music all sound just as much the same as the Baroque or Medieval music does to those who haven't really exposed themselves to this music.

The fact that many of the concertos by Bach, Telemann, Vivaldi... and I'll assume Handel, Corelli, Zelenka, Biber, etc... do not qualify as "great" "in your book" says more about "your book" than about their music. I can quite assure you that the "recent" discovery of a cache of hitheto unknown music by Vivaldi is not a discovery of interest only to musicologists. The largest portion of this music is vocal music... arias, motets, choral works, and even entire opera. These are slowly being released in top notch recordings which are greatly changing opinions with regard to Vivaldi... just as the recordings of all of Handel's operas and oratorios and cantatas over the past couple of decades have led to his reputation being greatly increased.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

StlukesguildOhio said:


> This is just the usual bias against older musical styles voiced by one raised on Romanticism/Post-Romanticism. To someone first coming upon classical music, Romanticism or and later classical music all sound just as much the same as the Baroque or Medieval music does to those who haven't really exposed themselves to this music.


Presumptuous to say the least. Did I say they all "sounded the same"? I said that many of the works of the composers I mentioned were written to a pattern, which is certainly true. And, in many cases, without distinctive physiognomies.

Re the other composers you mention, I would consider Zelenka particularly resistant to "forging," and of course Handel and Sebastian Bach (it goes without saying I suppose). Well, maybe Corelli and Biber too...


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## drpraetorus (Aug 9, 2012)

Not to be disagreeable, but every artists in whatever medium has a style. For the mediocre their style is all they have. It is the bag of tricks they trundle out with formulaic consistancy. For the good and great, it is a basis for expantion and growth. Using Shakespeare and Beethoven as the stated examples, Beethovens early work, for example his first symphony, is very much influenced by Haydn, but by the time we get to the ninth, Beethoven has out grown the Haydn constraints. The Beethoven voice is always there but it grew beyond what could be expressed in the late classic style. The same is true of Shakespeare. It is a long way from Henry the 6th to The Tempest. But they are both Shakespeare and have his style. His joy in the, his insights into human character and growing mastery of the subtleties of character development. At the first, he is one of the playrights of London, compeating for the approval of the crowd. Trying to out Marlow, Marlow. As he becomes more sure of his craft and style he becomes the pre eminante playright of his time. And from Act 1 to Act 5 curtain, it is His voice, or style, growing and maturing.


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