William Barrington-Coupe slips a CD into a modest-looking machine and raises
his index finger in the air. “There!” he says triumphantly after a minute or
so. “Can you hear it?”
A sprightly 76-year-old in cavalry twills and tweed sports jacket,
Bar-rington-Coupe isn’t referring to the magnificent rendition of Bach’s
Gold-berg Variations that is now overwhelming the room. He is speaking of an
almost inaudible (to me, anyway) sound that, when I do finally hear it, is
like a sigh or a little cry.
It was these sounds, which Bar-rington-Coupe says were gasps of pain emitted
by his late wife the virtuoso pianist Joyce Hatto in the throes of a long
and painful cancer, that set her husband and record producer on a trail of
deception and fraud that has rocked the world of classical music.
Ironically, Hattogate, as it’s been dubbed, began to unravel with Joyce
Hatto’s death eight months ago, when she was eulogised in the obituaries as
“a national treasure” and “one of the greatest pianists ever”. An American
fan inadvertently became the whistle-blower while he was transferring
Hatto’s rendition of Liszt’s Transcendental Studies to his iPod. He was
startled to see the screen crediting the performer not as Hatto but as the
Hungarian pianist Laszlo Simon, who recorded the studies in l987.
More detective work followed and a BBC sound engineer tested sample tracks of
Hatto and Simon and discovered two were the exactly the same and another had
been doctored.
Was Joyce Hatto’s work all a brilliant hoax engineered by her scheming
fraudster husband Barrington-Coupe? Did Joyce Hatto exist at all? Have the
classical music critics been exposed as a bunch of prize chumps?
At first Barrington-Coupe denied any tampering or wrongdoing with his wife’s
CDs. Then last weekend he wrote to Robert von Bahr, the chief executive of
BIS, Laszlo Simon’s Swedish record label, admitting: “I have acted stupidly,
dishonestly and unlawfully.”
Sitting in what was once Joyce’s music room and latterly her bedroom,
Barrington-Coupe looks an unlikely conman, even though he has a history of
fraud, having been jailed for tax evasion in the 1960s. With his wild grey
hair and mournful tone, he exudes the air of a retired music master who
doesn’t quite know what to do with himself since the death of his beloved
wife.
Hatto’s Steinway piano, which once belonged to Rachmaninov, dominates the
room. On the floor lie piles of her CDs, spilling out of boxes, still in
their wrappers. On every surface sits something of Joyce’s: her concert
programmes, her photographs, her letters and papers, a pile of her gloves
ready for the charity shop.
On the piano stool sits a box containing Joyce’s ashes. Her grieving husband
still can’t decide what to do with them. The couple had few friends, he
says, because they needed only each other. Barrington-Coupe seems not so
much lonely as adrift, the purpose of his life, caring for his wife, ebbing
into deep but distant memories.
I remove the ashes from the piano stool to sit on the least cluttered surface
of the room. Always a perfectionist, Joyce Hatto sat here at the Steinway
trying to achieve two notes in a piano transcription of Beethoven’s Pastoral
Symphony that sound, says Bar-rington-Coupe, like a cuckoo. “Several hours
passed. I’d been shopping and made tea, and I said to her, ‘How much longer
are you going to be play-ing?’ On her 49th go she said, ‘That’s what I’ve
been wanting.’ And the birds in the garden all began to sing!” Around this
time, he says, their recording sessions were marred by her gasps of pain.
“I’d say to her, ‘I’m sorry, you were breathing very heavily; we have to do
that again.’ She’d get very irritated because she was in a lot of pain.
Sometimes I’d say we’d had a bit of technical trouble.”
Soon Barrington-Coupe began dealing with the “technical trouble” himself by
editing noisy “ambience” between the movements his wife was playing. Editing
is one thing; what he describes as “taking portions of ready-made recorded
material” is another: most would call it theft.
Barrington-Coupe blinks back tears behind his glasses and raises his hands as
though I were pointing a gun at him. “It wasn’t something I liked doing,” he
says finally. “But Joyce’s music was everything to her — and to me, too.”
Joyce Hatto was born on September 5, 1928, in Maida Vale, the only child of a
master baker who loved antiques and the piano. He taught his daughter to
play before she could read.
According to Barrington-Coupe, Joyce’s love for the piano was crucial to her
emotional wellbeing, as the rest of her life was not particularly happy. Her
mother could be cruel, her father, who was something of an obsessive, felt
outshone and ignored his prodigy daughter. Leaving school, Joyce went to an
interview with the Royal Academy of Music but felt uncomfortable when she
was told that rather than becoming a virtuoso pianist it would be much
better if she learnt how to cook a roast dinner.
Meanwhile, after a stint in the army in the early 1950s for national service,
Barrington-Coupe planned to enter civvy street as a concert agent and
advertised for clients in The Daily Telegraph. Joyce answered his ad.
“She was seen by a friend of mine who said she was exceptional. I rang and got
her mother, who asked me if I was Joyce’s boyfriend. Eventually Joyce rang
back. We talked for an hour, about Shakespeare and music. By the time I put
the phone down I couldn’t wait to hear her voice again.”
The next day Barrington-Coupe wrote to Joyce enclosing a photograph of
himself. “I said it just so happens I have some leave — I hadn’t! — and two
tickets to see Henry V. Or was it Hamlet? Anyway, it was with Richard
Burton, at the Old Vic. I said I could meet you under the clock at Waterloo
station.”
She didn’t reply but she came to meet him. “There was no great running into
arms or passionate kissing,” reports Barrington-Coupe. “But it was very
companionable and we began to care for each other deeply.” It was l951; they
married in l956. “She said, ‘I couldn’t think of marrying anyone but you’.”
In the 1960s and early 1970s Joyce Hatto played everywhere and loved an
audience. The couple wanted to have children but Joyce miscarried twice. The
second time it was discovered she had cancerous fibroids so she had a
hysterectomy.
Barrington-Coupe had begun recording her work on cassettes. He also sold
everything from cassette players to transistor radios but omitted to pay the
purchase tax. In l966 he was sent to prison for a year for tax evasion. “The
judge said some rather harsh things,” says Barrington-Coupe, adding
dismissively: “But it wasn’t too bad; the army was good for me in that way.”
After eight months in prison he was released, but Joyce’s health began to
deteriorate dramatically. By this time she’d taken to wearing Jean Muir
kaftans to cover up her protruding stomach. “She could look nine months
pregnant,” says Barrington-Coupe.
After a critic derided her as a “Sit-wellian figure”, Hatto vowed never to
appear in public again. Her pain intensified and the recording became
harder. Barrington-Coupe found himself making more excuses as to why he
needed to record again a particular passage.
Then he read an article in a music magazine describing how Elisabeth
Schwarzkopf had covered the high notes for Kirsten Flagstad in the
celebrated EMI recording of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. Immediately he knew
he’d found a solution.
He thinks he began editing “ambi-ence” in the late 1980s. Not long afterwards
he began editing in small bits of others’ recordings whose sound and style
were similar to his wife’s.
“Everyone will say it’s impossible but I did it on a MiniDisc,” he says. “It
has a wonderful capability; you can edit from one frame to another.
Technically I was proud of what I did although I’m not proud of anything
else. Maybe I began living a lie, and maybe that’s why I’m being punished
now.”
By the mid1990s Barrington-Coupe was presenting other people’s work as his
wife’s as a matter of course. “It’s the old thing,” he
says. “If you’ve killed someone once it’s easy to do it the second time, so
in the end you kill ceaselessly. It wasn’t easy but God gave me a good ear.”
Ask Barrington-Coupe exactly what he has edited, and from whom he has
plagiarised and when, and he responds with the somewhat implausible
explanation that the more he reveals the more people will hound him.
“Whatever I do, it won’t be enough. They want to see me kill myself because
they want to believe that I can’t live with myself.”
His reasons for his deception were simple: “Joyce’s life was hell. She was in
such pain and it was so humiliating for her for such a long time.”
At the time of her death Barrington-Coupe had recorded more than l00 of
Joyce’s CDs, but had made little if any money. Today his own life has turned
into something of a nightmare. The blogosphere has gone crazy with
accusations and theories about the Hattogate fraud.
“The most terrible things are said about me and I get the most disgusting
e-mails,” says Barrington-Coupe. “What I’ve done is wrong and I regret
causing so much unhappiness. But I don’t quite understand why so many people
all over the world are so interested. I get requests for interviews from
everywhere, even Beijing,” he says. “Beijing!”
Back in Royston, Hertfordshire, Wil-liam Barrington-Coupe is escorting me to
the railway station when we meet two neighbours. The man bids him good day;
the woman pointedly ignores him. “Typical!” he bristles.
At one time Barrington-Coupe says he contemplated going into the local church.
He doesn’t strike me as a man of God. But nor does he strike me as a
villain. Before I leave, I ask him what he would do if he were faced with
the same situation again.
He looks puzzled. The next day he phones to say he’s been thinking about this
until 3am. “Yes, I would do it again,” he says. “Because it made Joyce so
happy. But this time I wouldn’t publish the CDs.”
Too late, too late, for such a solution. He has confessed his crime and now
has to face the music.
Musical plagiarism has a long history
George Frideric Handel famously reworked musical material throughout his life,
drawing not only on his own works but on those of lesser contemporaries.
Some of his reworkings from other composers were noticed during his
lifetime: allegations of plagiarism in Handel’s music have been voiced from
the early 19th century onwards.
The authorship of Mozart’s iconic Requiem was the subject of skulduggery. Its
commission was famously shrouded in secrecy, which enabled Mozart’s patron,
Count Franz von Walsegg-Stuppach, subsequently to copy the score out in his
own hand and claim its authorship himself. Mozart died before the work was
completed.
Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s premature death in 1736 led to a number of works
by minor contemporaries being deliberately misattributed to him in order to
cash in on the romanticised myth of a composer who had died so young. It
emerged later that only approximately one-tenth of the music bearing the
name “Pergolesi” is genuine.
