“The smart guys of great music” by David Christoffel

This is a book that must be read with access, via YouTube or online listening platforms, to the most unpredictable repertoire. Because all the anecdotes that David Christoffel recounts with relish – about plagiarist composers, impostors, fictitious or pasticheurs, about apocryphal or unfinished scores – are so many invitations to enter a sort of parallel musical world. What are the scores supposedly dictated by the ghosts of Liszt and Chopin, in the 1950s, to the British Rosemary Brown worth? What do the works that an artificial intelligence program programmed by Daniel Cope supposedly “conceived” in the style of Bach or Mozart look like? Of all the endings of the Turandot by Puccini that were written by others, which is the most successful? These are some of the questions that arise when reading this erudite and mischievous work like its subject. Each page is teeming with unexpected examples (the famous Toccata and Fugue BWV 565 could it not be by Bach?), amusing riddles (can we explain “why some artists have hits after hits while others remain stars of a single hit?”) and improbable names (those of composers Luigi Spaghetti and Mykola Ovsianiko-Kulikovsky, in particular). But if they form a mischievous counterpoint accompanying the history of music in its most official form, the multiple subjects addressed also give rise, beyond their sometimes humorous character, to more serious reflections on the profound nature of artistic creation or on the power of authenticity.

The smart guys of great music by David Christoffel. Presses Universitaires de France, 329 pages, €16.