The man at the centre of one of the classical music industry’s most audacious hoaxes confessed yesterday that he had passed off other pianists’ recordings as his wife’s.

William Barrington-Coupe confirmed in a letter read to The Times that he had started to manipulate Joyce Hatto’s recordings digitally when her long battle with cancer began to interfere with her performances.

He claimed that she never knew what he was doing to create the illusion of a great end to an “unfairly overlooked career”. When Hatto died last year, aged 77, she was described in the press as a “national treasure”.

The Times’s obituary related the extraordinary story of how, after her cancer was diagnosed in 1970, she had retreated from the concert platform to a Hertfordshire studio set up by Mr Barrington-Coupe “to bequeath to the discerning pianophile one of the most remarkable recording legacies of the 20th century”.

However, to many in the music industry, a cloud of suspicion hung over the promising but unremarkable concert pianist who had suddenly reemerged, late in life, as a recording artist of almost unmatched range. An investigation this month by Gramophone magazine found that four of her discs were identical to recordings by other, much better known virtuosi. One of those was Laszlo Simon’s recording of Liszt’s Transcendental Studies, on BIS records.

Mr Barrington-Coupe, who was jailed for eight months for tax evasion in 1966, initially denied that the recordings were fake and claimed that he was present during all the main sessions. However, Gramophone reported yesterday that he had admitted his guilt to Robert von Bahr, the chief executive of BIS records. Mr von Bahr said: “We had more than a week of correspondence and I told him that it is much better to come clean, and he has done that.

“He did it [the fake recordings] to give his wife the recognition that he believed she had always richly deserved and to give her comfort in the last stages of her life. I think that she is totally stigmatised now. It is very, very sad.”

Mr Barrington-Coupe explained to Mr von Bahr that his record label, on which all of Hatto’s late recordings were released, had struggled to keep pace with the switch from tape to compact discs. It was only when his wife was in the advanced stages of the ovarian cancer that eventually killed her that he learnt how to produce CDs. He decided to rerecord her repertoire but, although she kept up a rigorous practice regime, Hatto was suffering more than she admitted, even to herself.

Her husband wrote: “Joyce was beginning to find playing very painful and making involuntary noises that would be simply too distressing for the listeners to hear.”

However, she was “desperate to finish her life, which had been disappointing in so many ways, on a high note”.

It was at this point that Mr Barrington-Coupe claims he remembered how Elisabeth Schwarzkopf had covered the high notes for Kirsten Flagstad in the celebrated EMI recordings of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Inspired, he began searching for pianists whose sound and style were similar to that of his wife and, once he had found them, he would insert small patches of their recordings to cover his wife’s grunts. “I became very adept at this and, as all too often happens, gaining in confidence, I took larger portions of ready-made material to ease the editing time,” he wrote.

Now Mr Barrington-Coupe says that he is full of remorse for what he did. “I’m desperately unhappy that foolish decisions I made then to make her last months happier have dragged her name into the mire as well.”

James Inverne, editor of Gramophone, said: “This is the latest, emotional twist in a story which has amazed and shocked the entire classical music world and beyond. There has never been a music scandal quite like it.”

Confession to record company

"I’m desperately unhappy that foolish decisions I made then to make her last months happier have dragged her name into the mire as well"

William Barrington-Coupe admitting that he inserted recordings of other artists on to Joyce Hatto’s CDs

Explore Music

• Festivals

• CD Reviews

• Live Reviews

• Classical

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette