To celebrate 1 April, a selection of musical jokes and hoaxes:
The Kreisler scandal
In 1935 when renowned violinist Fritz Kreisler, at his 60th birthday party, admitted that several beloved pieces he had performed and published as works by earlier composers like Gaetano Pugnani and Giovanni Battista Pergolesi were in fact his own compositions.
For years, Kreisler had presented these works as rediscovered classics, enhancing their prestige and audience appeal, but his confession sparked debate about authenticity, artistic honesty, and whether the value of music depends on its true authorship.
While some critics felt deceived, many listeners and musicians ultimately continued to admire the pieces, and Kreisler’s reputation remained largely intact due to the enduring quality of his music.
‘New Hindemith’
Arthur Hutchings, the English composer and musicologist, had the habit of composing new pieces in Paul Hindemith’s style and, in some cases, presenting them in a way that blurred the line between homage and authenticity.
Unlike the clear confession in the Kreisler scandal, this was less a public scandal and more an academic and musical curiosity: Hutchings used stylistic imitation partly as a teaching and analytical tool, demonstrating how convincingly a modern composer’s voice could be recreated.
While some viewed it as playful pastiche or scholarly exploration, others raised concerns about attribution and the potential to mislead, highlighting broader questions about originality, authorship, and authenticity in 20th-century music scholarship.
[Sadly we can’t find a recording, but a well-known example is Sonata in E minor (in the style of Hindemith) by Arthur Hutchings, a deliberately tongue-in-cheek pastiche of Paul Hindemith. In this piece, Hutchings exaggerates Hindemith’s characteristic features—sturdy contrapuntal textures, motoric rhythms, quartal harmonies, and a somewhat austere, academic tone—to the point of caricature. The joke lies not in obvious incompetence but in over-authenticity: the music is so convincingly “Hindemithian” that it borders on parody, highlighting the formulaic aspects critics sometimes perceived in Hindemith’s style. The humour emerges from recognising these stylistic tics being pushed just beyond plausibility, blurring homage and satire.]
New Viola Works
The case of Henri Casadesus—a friend of Camille Saint-Saëns—involves a series of deliberate musical forgeries in the early 20th century, where Casadesus composed new works but attributed them to earlier composers such as Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and even Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, to the point where his Mozart Concerto was added to the official catalogue of Mozart’s works (K Anh 294a).
Unlike the more playful or later-confessed deceptions of figures like Fritz Kreisler, Casadesus’ works—such as a supposed “viola concerto” by C.P.E. Bach—were presented as authentic rediscoveries and circulated as genuine for years.
The episode raised serious concerns about scholarly credibility and authenticity in music history, especially as these pieces were accepted and performed before being exposed as modern pastiches, illustrating how convincingly historical styles could be imitated and how easily audiences and experts could be misled.
A Musical Joke
A Musical Joke (K. 522) by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is a finely judged exercise in deliberate incompetence, likely composed in 1787 as a satire on inept contemporaries and dilettante composition.
Cast as a divertimento ostensibly for two horns and strings, the work systematically violates late eighteenth-century conventions: phrase structures are asymmetrical to the point of absurdity, harmonic progressions lapse into crude or illogical sequences (most notoriously the piling up of unresolved dissonances), and the handling of counterpoint betrays a wilful misunderstanding of voice-leading norms.
The finale culminates in a famously chaotic cadence in multiple, mutually incompatible keys, exposing the performers’ and listeners’ expectations of tonal closure.
The Listening Project Blog 