# Kulikovsky and other Musical Hoaxes



## Cheyenne (Aug 6, 2012)

I am currently listening to a lovely symphony by Mykola Ovsianiko-Kulikovsky -- his 21st. Curiously enough no others have been discovered, or --


> Mykola Ovsianiko-Kulikovsky (Russian: Николай Овсянико-Куликовский, 1768-1846) was the purported author of a famous musical hoax Symphony No. 21 (Ovsianiko-Kulikovsky), perpetrated by composer and violinist Mikhail Goldstein.
> 
> In 1948, Goldstein announced that he had discovered the manuscript of a symphony by Ovsianiko-Kulikovsky in the archives of the theater in Odessa. The G minor work, numbered 21, was said to have been written in 1809; it bore the inscription "for the dedication of the Odessa Theater". The discovery caused a great deal of excitement in Soviet musical circles, for it was seen as proof that Russia had been able to produce a symphonist of comparable stature to Joseph Haydn. Furthermore, the symphony contained Ukrainian folk songs and ended with a Cossack dance, showing that the composer had a nationalist awareness. This piece was subsequently proven to be a fake.


It was written as an act of revenge:


> [Goldstein] had been stung when a critic savaged his use of Ukrainian themes in one of his own pieces, claiming that as a Jew he could not understand Ukrainian culture and had no right to use it in his music. When Goldstein replied that Beethoven also made use of Ukrainian themes in his "Razumovsky Quartets" the critic said bluntly that "Beethoven was not a Jew." The symphony, then, was written as an act of revenge, to prove that he could, in fact, write "Ukrainian" music. Vsevolod Chehovets, a philosemitic Ukrainian musician-friend of his made the suggestion to ascribe the symphony to "Ovsianniko-Kulikovsky".


What are your favorite musical hoaxes? Albinoni's immortal Adagio, Kulikovsky's 21st?


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

I love Fritz Kreisler's success with his fake classics:

http://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/fritz_kreislers_lost_classics

What I love most is that Kreisler's compositions are quite good in their own right, even if they could only have been mistaken for genuine Baroque music in a time when such music was played in a Romantic manner.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Henri Casadesus "discovered" a very fine C-minor cello concerto by J.C. Bach...it became established in the repertoire before Henri's little joke was discovered.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

^^^Like so many hoaxes, this proves that people tend to hear what they expect to hear. It doesn't sound like the J.C.Bach who inspired Mozart.


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## Dr Johnson (Jun 26, 2015)

I was amused to learn the other day that Hans Keller (he of the infamous 1967 Pink Floyd interview) had perpetrated a hoax on Radio 3 in the early 60s.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Woodduck said:


> ^^^Like so many hoaxes, this proves that people tend to hear what they expect to hear. It doesn't sound like the J.C.Bach who inspired Mozart.


As you say, "a time when such music was played in a Romantic manner." We hear differently today. I'm sure we have our own blind spots and people in the next generation of two will ask how we were so easily fooled. (Actually that touches on a common dispute around here). :lol:


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

KenOC said:


> As you say, "a time when such music was played in a Romantic manner." We hear differently today. I'm sure we have our own blind spots and people in the next generation of two will ask how we were so easily fooled. (Actually that touches on a common dispute around here). :lol:


Surely you are not suggesting that anyone here is fooling or being fooled about anything!


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

An odd hoax I read about. A late-night DJ on a classical station would routinely mix movements of Haydn symphonies and play them as symphony number such-and-such. He did this for several years and received no calls or complaints.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

That's a good one. Odds are he would have gotten away with it with other Classical-period symphonies as well, including most of Mozart's up until the last half dozen or so. Starting with Beethoven the game would have been up - but then there's Bruckner...


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## musicrom (Dec 29, 2013)

KenOC said:


> Henri Casadesus "discovered" a very fine C-minor cello concerto by J.C. Bach...it became established in the repertoire before Henri's little joke was discovered.


Casadesus also wrote a viola concerto which he claimed was by Handel, and I thought his J.C. Bach was meant to be a viola concerto - maybe that's a transcription for cello.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

musicrom said:


> Casadesus also wrote a viola concerto which he claimed was by Handel, and I thought his J.C. Bach was meant to be a viola concerto - maybe that's a transcription for cello.


Believe that's right, and if I remember right the original viola version is on YT. It seems more popular as a cello concerto, though, and is often still presented as a composition by J.C. Bach.


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

Dr Johnson said:


> I was amused to learn the other day that Hans Keller (he of the infamous 1967 Pink Floyd interview) had perpetrated a hoax on Radio 3 in the early 60s.


Were there any reviews other than the ones listed (which all condemned the piece)? I'm interested to know if anyone actually praised it as good music.


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## Dr Johnson (Jun 26, 2015)

Mahlerian said:


> Were there any reviews other than the ones listed (which all condemned the piece)? I'm interested to know if anyone actually praised it as good music.


I only have the Wikipedia entries to go on:

"It was also from within the BBC that Keller (assisted by Susan Bradshaw) perpetrated in 1961 the famous "Piotr Zak" hoax, broadcasting a deliberately nonsensical series of random noises as a new modernist piece by a fictitious Polish composer. The hoax was designed to demonstrate the poor quality of critical discourse surrounding contemporary music at a problematic stage in its historical development; in this aspect, the hoax was a failure, as no critic expressed any particular enthusiasm for Piotr Zak's piece, and most were roundly dismissive of the work."


From here


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## joen_cph (Jan 17, 2010)

1) this one caused quite a stir, but didn´t even have any music:
http://inkpot.com/classical/mahvncon.html

2) Another Casadesus: the _Adelaide Concerto _- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adélaïde_Concerto


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## Dr Johnson (Jun 26, 2015)

joen_cph said:


> 1) this one caused quite a stir, but didn´t even have any music:
> http://inkpot.com/classical/mahvncon.html












I'm not surprised!


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

joen_cph said:


> 2) Another Casadesus: the _Adelaide Concerto _- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adélaïde_Concerto


Note: a different Casadesus, not Henri. Evidently a most naughty family.


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## joen_cph (Jan 17, 2010)

And a bewildering number of acknowledged musicians in the Casadesus family too:

http://www.casadesus.com/arbre.html


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

The violinist Samuel Dushkin fabricated a work called Sicilienne in E flat major for piano quartet, which he attributed to Maria Theresia von Paradis, an 18thc composer, and which at least one musicologist, in a book on female composers, swallowed whole. The obvious influence of Rachmaninoff on the harmony should have been a clue.


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## Orfeo (Nov 14, 2013)

Many people (in the Ukraine particularly) would argue that Mykola Ovsianiko-Kulikovsky's 21st Symphony is authentic. After being familiar with the work myself, I tend to lean towards that conclusion. I can't find anything fake or fabricated in it. And with Ukraine a slow developer musically speaking, even slower than Russia, this work is very much in the spirits of Oleg Kozlovsky, later Glinka and Dargomyzhsky, even Serov: its idiom hardly advanced though characteristically Slavic and folksy, the development fairly cyclic, and orchestration somewhat rudimentary although effective. Indeed, it even evokes Vladimir Sokalsky's Symphony in G (1892), a rather anachronistic work, though curiously with a sort of a Scriabinian twist in the slow movement). 

So either this work is for real or Goldstein is a hell of a fabricator. But I'm having trouble accepting the latter claim.


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## Cheyenne (Aug 6, 2012)

Orfeo said:


> Many people (in the Ukraine particularly) would argue that Mykola Ovsianiko-Kulikovsky's 21st Symphony is authentic. After being familiar with the work myself, I tend to lean towards that conclusion. I can't find anything fake or fabricated in it. And with Ukraine a slow developer musically speaking, even slower than Russia, this work is very much in the spirits of Glinka and Dargomyzhsky, even Serov: its idiom hardly advanced though characteristically Slavic and folksy, the development fairly cyclic, and orchestration somewhat rudimentary although effective. Indeed, it even evokes Vladimir Sokalsky's Symphony in G (1892), a rather anachronistic work, though curiously with a sort of a Scriabinian twist in the slow movement).
> 
> So either this work is for real or Goldstein is a hell of a fabricator. But I'm having trouble accepting the latter claim.


Yes I was reading up on the possible authenticity of it earlier. But why would Goldstein admit to it then, knowing it would probably severely damage his reputation?


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## joen_cph (Jan 17, 2010)

Mravinsky recorded the Kulikovsky work, one would perhaps assume him to be knowledgeable.
http://www.allmusic.com/album/shost...yaniko-kulikovsky-symphony-no-21-mw0001415493
But this reviewer mentions another hoax by Goldstein 
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/dec99/mravinsky2.htm
and there´s more similar info here http://howothersthink.com/ok.htm


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## Orfeo (Nov 14, 2013)

Cheyenne said:


> Yes I was reading up on the possible authenticity of it earlier. But why would Goldstein admit to it then, knowing it would probably severely damage his reputation?


Not so sure, then again, Goldstein did not have much of a reputation to begin with (esp. in Ukraine, which was rampantly Anti-Semitic and fervently nationalistic at the time).


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## Cheyenne (Aug 6, 2012)

joen_cph said:


> Mravinsky recorded the Kulikovsky work, one would perhaps assume him to be knowledgeable.
> http://www.allmusic.com/album/shost...yaniko-kulikovsky-symphony-no-21-mw0001415493
> But this reviewer mentions another hoax by Goldstein
> http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/dec99/mravinsky2.htm
> and there´s more similar info here http://howothersthink.com/ok.htm


Yes the Mravinsky recording is the one I was listening to, but that was before anything about the possible hoax was revealed apparently. I'll check the liner notes when I have access to them tomorrow.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Orfeo said:


> Not so sure, then again, Goldstein did not have much of a reputation to begin with (esp. in Ukraine, which was rampantly Anti-Semitic and fervently nationalistic at the time).


Sorry, but the work has to be a fake. The ostensible forger finds it in the library where he is the director? And Ovsianiko-Kulikovsky wrote at least 20 other symphonies, none of which survive and none of which anyone ever had heard or heard of? No manuscript available to study? Of course not! The claim would be falsified by the paper alone. Moreover, what a perfect motive for the forgery!

So, we have motive, opportunity, a confession, and absolutely no evidence to the contrary. It is obviously a fabrication. Well done, Mr. Goldstein, well done!


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## Cheyenne (Aug 6, 2012)

The liner notes do not add much, but interestingly they point out that this may be the only time where Mravinsky felt free the omit parts and add to the score -- normally he was as faithful as Klemperer.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Cheyenne said:


> The liner notes do not add much, but interestingly they point out that this may be the only time where Mravinsky felt free the omit parts and add to the score -- normally he was as faithful as Klemperer.


Makes perfect sense. There was a political/nationalistic imperative driving the performances and recording, and Mravinsky probably suspected (or was sure?) it was fake. So, being scrupulously true to the source material would have been pointless. Producing a performance that satisfied the powers that be, by whatever means, might have been the only consideration. This would perhaps have been true even if the work was authentic and simply inept.


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## PierreN (Aug 4, 2013)

> [Goldstein] had been stung when a critic savaged his use of Ukrainian themes in one of his own pieces, claiming that as a Jew he could not understand Ukrainian culture and had no right to use it in his music. When Goldstein replied that Beethoven also made use of Ukrainian themes in his "Razumovsky Quartets" the critic said bluntly that "Beethoven was not a Jew."


Interesting. When Count Razumovsky's musicians (the first violin was a friend of Beethoven) received the parts from the first commissioned quartet, and read them together, they were first astonished and then, when they finished reading the first movement, they had a good laugh. They were quite sure Beethoven was playing a practical joke on them and that the parts for the *real* quartet would soon be expedited to them. So, that's the reverse case from the topic of this thread, where a genuine composition was actually perceived as a joke.


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## Orfeo (Nov 14, 2013)

EdwardBast said:


> Sorry, but the work has to be a fake. The ostensible forger finds it in the library where he is the director? And Ovsianiko-Kulikovsky wrote at least 20 other symphonies, none of which survive and none of which anyone ever had heard or heard of? No manuscript available to study? Of course not! The claim would be falsified by the paper alone. Moreover, what a perfect motive for the forgery!
> 
> So, we have motive, opportunity, a confession, and absolutely no evidence to the contrary. It is obviously a fabrication. Well done, Mr. Goldstein, well done!


These symphonies could have been lost or destroyed, or hidden (early 1800s, there were plenty of lost works, and especially in Ukraine of all places). There could be publication issues, misnumbering, a number of possibilities. Finding works in libraries esp. around that time (and even long thereafter) after deemed lost or misplaced was not so uncommon.

There are simply too many questions surrounding this matter.


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## gardibolt (May 22, 2015)

The Albinoni Adagio is a good one, as is the sordid tale of Joyce Hatto.


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