Casadeus ?
Jukka-Pekka Naukkarinen
Handel-Casadeus and J.Chr.Bach-Casadeus viola-concertos?
-- J-P Naukkarinen
Frank Forman
together of the great Russian conductor, Evgeny Mravinsky, will answer
your question. The context is some background to a recording of
Mravinsky's of O-K's alleged 21st Symphony. Enjoy!
Frank
NOTES ABOUT THE OVSYANIKO-KULIKOVSKY SYMPHONY
By Frank Forman
This symphony, aside from Marius
Casadesus' composing the so-called "Adela‹de
Concerto" and attributing it to the young
Mozart, is one of the most notorious fake
antiques in the annals of music. It
originated when a Ukrainian-Jewish composer,
Mikhail Emmanuilovich Goldstein (1851 Odessa-
1989 Hamburg) had written a work on Ukrainian
themes and a critic claimed the composer
could not understand Ukrainian music, since a
different blood flowed in his veins. It was
pointed out that Beethoven himself used
Ukrainian material in his works; "he was not
a Jew," was the response. One of Goldstein's
friends suggested he make fools of the
critics, as Fritz Kreisler had done, by
passing off an original work as the music of
an earlier Ukrainian composer. Goldstein
chose Nikolai Dmitrievich Ovsyaniko-
Kulikovsky, an actual historical figure and
landowner who had presented his serf
orchestra to the Odessa Theater in 1810.
Goldstein then announced in 1948 that he had
"discovered" a symphony while searching in
the Odessa Conservatory library, of which he
was then the librarian. The ostensible work
was Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky's Symphony no. 21 in
g minor, subtitled "for the dedication of the
Odessa Theater," and composed in 1809. The
work caused general rejoicing among the
Soviet cultural commissars. Here was proof
positive that Mother Russia, in the face of
all those Czarist-imported Italians and
Frenchmen, could produce a symphonist of
Haydn's stature--or nearly. Furthermore, this
symphonist was no slavish imitator, but a
true patriot who had ended his work with a
Cossack dance. (Never mind that the composer
and dance were technically Ukrainian.) It was
premiered in Odessa and Kiev in 1949,
published in 1951 by the [Soviet] State Music
Publishers, hastily recorded by Mravinsky for
Melodiya, and made the subject of at least
two dissertations by Soviet musicologists.
The hoax was finally revealed when one of
the musicologists, Taranov, asked to examine
the manuscript. (Likewise, Casadesus was
unable to produce manuscripts for his own
fake antiques, which also included viola
concerti by J.C. Bach, Handel, and Hummel.)
Taranov was asked to give his opinion: he
concluded the symphony was written neither by
Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky nor Goldstein! Goldstein
was branded a liar, an opportunist, and a
traitor to Russian culture for making the
outrageous and self-seeking claim that he had
written the symphony.
Goldstein himself emigrated to East
Germany in 1964, leaving this madness behind
him. He worked as a musicologist in East
Berlin and Israel in 1967 and later taught at
the Menuhin Music School in England and the
Musashino Academia Musicae in Tokyo. He
finally settled in Hamburg in 1969 and joined
the faculty of the Hochschule f r Musik and
the editorial staff of Reimann's Musik
Lexikon. [Compiled from Allan Ho & Dmitry
Feofanov, Biographical Dictionary of
Russian/Soviet Composers (Westport,
Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1989), pp. 182-
3, and David Mason Greene, Greene's
Biographical Encyclopedia of Composers
(Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co.,
1985), p. 488.]
The English version of the trilingual
text of the Melodiya 1956 reissue, D 2954-5
(the original 1952 issue was on D 851/2),
reads as follows (grammar corrected):
"The fate of this composition is unusual
in the full sense of the word. PremiŠred in
Odessa in 1809 on the day when the town
theater was opened, the composition vanished,
leaving no trace, and was found only 140
years later. It was again successfully
performed at a concert in Kiev.
"It was ascertained that N.D. Ovsyaniko-
Kulikovsky (1768-1846), a native of Kherson
province, was the author of the symphony. But
this supposition still needs confirmation.
The meaning of the figure "21" which the
score bears is so far also not clear. Does it
mean that the composer had created more than
twenty symphonic works or that this figure
has some other, yet unknown meaning? This
problem is being given the necessary
attention and will probably be solved. But
the music of the symphony tells us a lot.
"It is obvious that the author is a
master, possessing a free style of music
writing. Methods of development of the
material tell us of great influence of the
symphonic style of the Viennese classics and
that the author had been thoroughly
acquainted with or even studied under some of
the Viennese musicians. At the same time it
is quite obvious that in his symphony the
composer does not simply aim at imitating the
great masterpieces of Mozart and Haydn but to
transplant their creative gains onto his
native soil and to inspire the music of his
symphony with the poetry of Ukrainian folk
melody.
"Themes of the First Movement are very
close to Ukrainian folksongs. It begins with
a lyrical, soft introduction of a sincere
character (Adagio), which is followed by a
buoyant Allegro, which is full of motion.
"The Second Movement (Adagio) bears the
name "Romance" and is melodiously close to
works of this type, which are very common and
loved in the Ukraine. As in many Ukrainian
ballads, you can hear in this movement the
tunes of lyrical folksongs.
"The Third Movement--Minuet (Allegro)--
also possesses the features of simplicity,
nobleness, and soft humor that connect this
classical form with Ukrainian folk music. In
the trio of the minuet, the author makes use
of a genuine Ukrainian folk song, "Oh, at the
Hill, at the Ferry."
"The most vivid, as far as national
coloring is concerned, is the Finale
(Presto), with its brilliant Cossack national
dance, which is full of gaiety. Before the
listener pass dances of young lads, swift as
a whirlwind, and which give place to graceful
and swimming dances of girls. It is as if the
composer was painting a colorful picture of
the life of his people.
"The symphony as a whole gives a true
picture of the peculiarities of the Ukrainian
character: deep lyricism and meditation, soft
humor, and boisterous manifestations of
energy and merriment.
"The symphony was published in 1951 by
the State Music Publishers. It has been
edited for the modern symphony orchestra by
A.G. Svechnikov."
Although the hoax was revealed over
thirty years ago, the work is still regarded
as genuine in some references. The New Grove
(1980), for example, states in its article on
Ukrainian music:
"A number of outstanding composers were
active [in Ukraine] in the 19th century,
including Nykolay Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky, whose
Symphony No. 21 was discovered in manuscript
in the Odessa archives in 1949 by the
violinist Gold'stein. The symphony shows
advanced compositional techniques;
structurally it closely resembles Haydn,
although it is based on Ukrainian folk
themes. It was given premiŠre in 1809 at the
inauguration of the Odessa theater" (Vol. 19,
p. 407).
I doubt the error will ever go away
entirely. In 1917 H.L. Mencken published "A
Neglected Anniversary," which he had thought
was an obviously false history of the use of
the bathtub in America. Later he wrote:
"I had confidence that the customers at
the [New York] Evening Mail would like it.
Alas they liked it only too well. That is to
say, they swallowed it as gospel, gravely and
horribly. Worse, they began sending clippings
of it to friends east, west, north, and
south, and so it spread to other papers, and
then to the magazines and weeklies of
opinion, and then to the scientific press,
and finally to the reference books. To this
day it is in circulation, and, as I say, has
broken into the reference books, and is there
embalmed for the instruction and edification
of posterity....
"My point is that, despite all this
extravagant frenzy for the truth, there is
something in the human mind that turns
instinctively to fiction.... It is a sheer
impossibility for human beings to think
exclusively in terms of the truth. For one
thing, the stock of indubitable truths is too
scanty. For another thing, there is the
aversion to them that I have mentioned. All
of our thinking is in terms of assumptions,
many of them plainly not true. Into our most
solemn and serious reflections fictions
enter--and three times out of four they
quickly crowd out all the facts.
"That this is true needs no argument.
Every man, thinking of his wife, has to
assume that she is beautiful and amiable,
else despair will seize him and he will be
unable to think at all. Every American,
contemplating Dr. Coolidge [then President of
the United States], is physically bound to
admire him: the alternative is anarchy. Every
Christian, viewing the clergy, is forced into
bold theorizing to save himself from
Darwinism. And all of us, taking stock of
ourselves, must resort to hypothesis to
escape the river.
"What ails the truth is that it is mainly
uncomfortable, and often dull. The human mind
seeks something more amusing, and more
caressing. What the actual history of the
bathtub may be I don't know: digging it out
would be a dreadful job, and the result,
after all that labor, would probably be a
string of banalities. The fiction I concocted
back in 1917 was at least better than that.
It lacked sense, but it was certainly not
without a certain charm. There were heroes in
it, and villains. It revealed a conflict,
with virtue winning. So it was embraced by
mankind, precisely as the story of George
Washington and the cherry tree was embraced,
and it will live, I daresay, until it is
displaced by something worse--and hence
better" (The Chicago Sunday Tribune,
1926/7/25).
As late as 1948, Mencken noted that,
"scarcely a month goes by that I do not find
the substance of it reprinted, not as
foolishness but as fact, and not only in
newspapers but in official documents and
other works of the highest pretensions." I
myself last spotted the bathtub hoax passed
off as serious history in late 1991.
The 1956 Westminster issue of the
ostensible Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky symphony did
not expose its authorship, but that was
during the days when even mild criticism of
the Soviets could result in the withdrawal of
future licensing arrangements with Melodiya.
So American record companies, wishing to
continue using Soviet material, had to be
very careful.
Likewise, when Yehudi Menuhin recorded
the Adela‹de Concerto, with Pierre Monteux
and the Paris Symphony about 1938, the notes
said only that the work was orchestrated by
Marius Casadesus. Menuhin, who was about
nineteen years old at the time of the
recording, must have felt proud at being
given the honor of making the first recording
of the work. When Menuhin rerecorded the work
for EMI about 1976, the liner notes were also
kind to him and noted merely:
"Mozart is said to have composed his
Concerto in D ("Adela‹de"), K.Anh. 249a, in
1766, at the age of ten for the royal
violinist Madame Ad‚la‹de of France, eldest
daughter of King Louis XV. The young musician
wrote the piece, destined for a "petit
violon," or "violon de dame," as a simple
sketch on only two staves, the upper being
devoted to the solo part and the tutti, while
the lower accommodated the bass part. The
score, traced to a private collector in
France, was edited for publication by Marius
Casadesus; cadenzas, brilliant but somewhat
unidiomatic, were provided by Paul Hindemith.
The composition is fluent and graceful; its
charms are real and beguiling."
Being nice to Menuhin by not embarrassing
him is one thing, but the sheer sycophancy of
many liner notes of Western releases of
Soviet recordings is another matter entirely.
These notes often scrupulously followed
whatever was then the current Soviet
propaganda line. Finding out when the Soviets
first dropped Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky from their
roster of composers would truly be "a
dreadful job." Perhaps he is still in certain
Soviet reference works. Mencken again: he
wrote an expos‚ of his bathtub hoax, which
was printed in several newspapers, including
the Boston Herald. "And then on June 13,
three weeks later, in the same editorial
section but promoted to page 1, this same
Herald reprinted my 10 year old fake--soberly
and as a piece of news!
1993 January 10