Barry and Hatto had similar epistolary styles. The e-mails and letters that emanated from Royston blended formality with faux diffidence. (“Dear Mr. Howell, I do not usually write to critics as this, I feel, is a barrier that should not be crossed too often. However, your review of my Concert Artist set of Mazurkas . . .”) Hatto thanked reviewers for their insights, volunteered nuggets of philosophy (“So many pianists ruin a perfectly singable and beautiful melodic line by simply sticking on ornaments as if with elastoplast”), and reminisced about decades-old recitals. Her digressions had a music of their own, punctuated by the tintinnabulation of carefully dropped names (“I also became friendly with Annie Fischer”; “I did have the opportunity of playing many of these sonatas to Clara Haskil”; “Rachmaninov did pass on some of his ideas to Nicholas Medtner who allowed me to copy them into my own edition”). One of Hatto’s preoccupations, shared by Barry, was the tyranny of the classical-music critical establishment: “I have always played what I thought was right (for me?) and have taken some censure in my life for so doing. Mostly, I must say, from English critics”; “Thank you for the kind things that you have said about my own playing and for defending me against some quite unwarranted criticism.”

Fundamental to the burgeoning interest in Hatto was awe that she could be so tirelessly productive during what should have been her retirement. Her exploits seemed even more remarkable after Richard Dyer, then the chief music critic of the Boston Globe, interviewed her in the summer of 2005 and wrote an article that began, “Joyce Hatto must be the greatest living pianist that almost no one has ever heard of.” The next paragraph contained a surprising revelation: “Hatto, now 76, has not played in public in more than 25 years because of an ongoing battle with cancer. She was once told that it is ‘impolite to look ill,’ and after a critic commented adversely on her appearance, she resolved to stop playing concerts.”

Dyer described having come upon the Concert Artist Web site more or less inadvertently and finding the Hatto listings (which had grown to more than a hundred CDs). He contacted Barrington-Coupe and asked, “Who is she?” Barry sent him a sample Hatto CD, “and I was hooked.” By the time Dyer wrote his article, he’d listened to about a third of her CDs. “All of them are excellent, and the best of them document the art of a major musician,” he wrote. “The records are well engineered, and she uses wonderful instruments; still, her beautiful sound is her own.”

Boston was far enough from Royston that Dyer settled for a telephone interview. “The pianist has a high-pitched, girlish voice, and she speaks with the velocity of one of her Liszt etudes,” he said of Hatto. “She will quote a Shakespeare sonnet and a remark of Muhammad Ali’s (‘Knock me down, and I will get up immediately’) in the same spoken paragraph.” Barry told Dyer, “She doesn’t want to play in public because she never knows when the pain will start, or when it will stop, and she refuses to take drugs. . . . I believe the illness has added a third dimension to her playing; she gets at what is inside the music, what lies behind it.”

So Hatto’s illness, ovarian cancer, provided an explanation of sorts for where she had been all those years and burnished the myth of her remarkable renaissance. On the other hand, its sentimental gloss encouraged a mild backlash, in Yahoo and Usenet postings, from pianophiles who were vaguely suspicious because no major critics had written about her. In an online review of her recording of Debussy’s Preludes, Christopher Howell acknowledged this problem: “I realize that it’s getting a little embarrassing that this site continues to churn out glowing review after glowing review (not only from me) of Joyce Hatto’s records. . . . I almost wish she would make a really bad disk just so I can show I know how to listen. But so far she hasn’t. . . . If any reader who buys this or other Hatto disks on the strength of our reviews feels he has been duped, remember we have a bulletin board. I should very much like to know why only we are pushing these recordings.”

The first insistent questions about Hatto came in the summer and fall of 2005, in Internet postings by Peter Lemken, a German conservatory graduate turned artist-manager turned business consultant. How was it that anyone, much less an infirm septuagenarian, could record such a splendid and voluminous body of work? Also, Lemken asked pointedly, who was René Köhler and what was the National Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra—the conductor and ensemble featured on several Hatto concertos (Brahms, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev)?

A colorful capsule biography of Köhler (source: Barry) eventually appeared online—a Polish-French-German Jew, a survivor of Treblinka with the bad luck to wind up for twenty-five years in the Soviet Gulag—but there was no mention of him or the orchestra in any reference book. If Köhler and the National Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra were phantoms, then what about Hatto? That nebulous query became the topic of more than one online discussion. It wasn’t so much an expression of disbelief in Hatto’s existence as it was obstinacy from live-performance purists, who argue that recordings are an unreliable measure of any musician’s true qualities, given the manipulations permitted by studio technology. Still, the over-all discourse remained resolutely pro-Hatto. In light of her health crisis, her adherents found Lemken’s contrariness offensively callous.

Such skepticism seemed even more impertinent after a pair of reputable witnesses vouched for the fact that, literally and figuratively, Joyce Hatto was the real thing. Ates Orga, a music critic and historian, had written program notes for some of her London recitals during the seventies. “Her playing struck me as big-hearted and truthful, adventurous yet with time for finesse,” he later recalled. He interviewed her at a hotel in Cambridge in February, 2005, and in early 2006 MusicWeb published his seven-thousand-word profile, along with an even lengthier account of her recording career, including critiques of selected works. Orga depicted, as had Burnett James and Richard Dyer, a charismatic woman with vivid memories of her experiences among music-world luminaries and a keen attentiveness to the stylistic distinctions of various pianists. Orga essentially sidestepped the René Köhler enigma, implying that he wasn’t sure what to believe. (“A survivor of the Holocaust gone missing in the murky wastelands and unspoken history of Cold War Europe, René Köhler . . .”) About Hatto’s musicianship Orga expressed no equivocation: “Even when some of her decisions, her occasional urgencies, are not to my taste, there’s a rightness, an honesty, to her recorded playing. . . . I feel in safe hands. . . . Tone, phrasing, projection. Articulation, pedalling, dynamics. Style, short-term shaping, long-term architecture. The ability to speak in music—eloquently, rhetorically, passionately, murmuringly.”

In the summer of 2005, Jeremy Nicholas, an actor and critic, had interviewed Hatto and Barry in the same Cambridge hotel and come away with impressions almost identical to Orga’s. He felt “an instant rapport” with the couple; Barry, he thought, had a “fantastic knowledge of pianists, fantastic taste.” As they spoke, however, with a tape recorder running, Nicholas knew that writing about Hatto would be problematic, because she had no aptitude for linear conversation. “She was kind of daffy, endearingly scatterbrained, with this butterfly mind,” he told me. “I had a list of prepared questions. Like ‘What did your father do? Were your parents musical, did they have money? When did you actually make your début?’ Pretty simple, direct questions, but after a couple of sentences she’d go off reminiscing. Very hard to pin down. Very good on her playing in the nineteen-fifties but not very good on the later part of her life. Talked very fast. Tremendous energy in her voice. Terribly enthusiastic.”

Nicholas, a biographer of the pianist and composer Leopold Godowsky (1870-1938)—whose Studies on Chopin’s Études are among the most difficult piano music ever written—had been astonished to learn that Joyce Hatto had recorded all fifty-three of the Studies. Only three other artists, all men, had done the same. Before meeting Hatto, Nicholas listened to her recordings of Chopin’s Études, the foundation of the Godowsky variations, and thought that they were “just about the best I’ve ever heard.” He had a comparable reaction to her interpretation of the Godowsky.

Nicholas’s encounter with Hatto resulted in two articles—one in International Piano, in January, 2006, and one in Gramophone, two months later. A feature in Gramophone (“the world’s unrivaled authority on classical music since 1923”) was bound to draw attention, especially given that Nicholas declared, “I have no hesitation in saying that Joyce Hatto is one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard.” He not only introduced Hatto to a wider audience; he effectively put on notice the editors of Gramophone, who in subsequent issues published consistently favorable, at times elated, reviews of her CDs. Because, as Nicholas noted, she had “another 20 (!) in preparation,” fascination with Hatto seemed destined to increase, and endure, well into the future.

Hatto died, of cancer, on June 29, 2006, at the age of seventy-seven. Obituaries and tributes recycled the most striking superlatives and offered up a few new ones (“as completely satisfying a pianist as anyone in the history of recorded music,” “a national treasure”). Her funeral took place eleven days later, at a crematory in Cambridge, a secular ceremony orchestrated, in every sense, by Barrington-Coupe. Twenty or so mourners listened to music—Bach, Brahms, Chopin, Debussy—from a Hatto sampler CD issued by Concert Artist a few months earlier. Humility was the theme of Barry’s prepared remarks, beginning with a rhetorical apology to his wife that a service was being held in the first place, contrary to her wish to avoid showy valedictory gestures at “your final public appearance.” To those who had sent condolences, whether they had met her or not, she was “simply ‘Joyce.’ ” As an artist and a teacher, he said, “she would say . . . there is God, the composer, and then you. Nothing comes between composer and the listener. With Joyce you will seek vainly for ostentation, no grand ‘Hatto’ moments, simply the music. . . . For her, ‘Hatto’ was simply not the important one.”

Yet, even as Hatto was being eulogized, fresh suspicions were being voiced by Gramophone readers. In the July issue, Nicholas responded indignantly to unspecified “letters, phone calls, and a plethora of blogs from people who a) think I am in the pay of her record label, b) doubt that the recordings are the work of just one pianist, c) are sure that the recordings are edited performances of her pupils, d) suspect that Miss Hatto has never been ill and could not possibly have survived cancer for 25 years, e) that the whole thing is a scam.” He invited “anyone who has any evidence whatsoever of fraud, deception, or similar activity related to Miss Hatto and her record company” to come forward, with the proviso that such evidence “must stand up in a court of law.”

The day before Hatto’s funeral, the usually even-tempered Ernst Lumpe confronted Peter Lemken during an exchange in the newsgroup rec.music.classical.recordings. The general topic was live performance versus studio recording, and Lemken, ever the skeptic, asked whether anyone had ever recorded a Hatto live performance. The gist of Lumpe’s reply, written in German, was that Lemken had some nerve. Amateur recordings of Hatto in concert, he said, circulated privately, and he personally owned a performance of “Elgar’s First Symphony in the two-handed piano transcription by Sigfrid Karg-Elert, recorded in Cambridge in 1989”—the unreleased tape that Barry had sent him after his visit to Royston. Did this information satisfy Lemken? Nein. If it hadn’t been published, it didn’t count.

Then, on January 22nd of this year, a participant in the newsgroup who identified himself as Seth Horus—a pseudonym that referred to ancient Egyptian mythology—posted this: “After hearing so much about Joyce Hatto, I started purchasing some of her recordings. While nothing I have heard is bad (in fact, I am glad I bought these CDs), I have noticed something eerie: that the pianist playing the Mozart sonatas cannot be the pianist playing Prokofiev or the pianist playing Albéniz. I have the distinct feeling of being the victim of some sort of hoax. Does anyone else share these feelings? What is actually known about the artist and the circumstances? I looked on the Web and all I can find is some sort of official story, nothing independent.”

Much of the ensuing discussion was the highbrow equivalent of trash talk, a volleying of erudite insults between Hatto’s most ardent boosters and Lemken and various agnostics. The vituperation lasted for days, and the eavesdroppers included not only the usual hobbyists (as well as, presumably, Barrington-Coupe) but also a group of scholars at the Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM), at the University of London. For more than a year, a musicologist named Nicholas Cook and a postdoctoral fellow, Craig Sapp, had been immersed in a comparative study of performances of selected Chopin mazurkas, using software that depicted the similarities between recordings with bright-colored geometric shapes.

Although Cook and Sapp knew nothing about Hatto, they included her in the study because she, along with about thirty other pianists, had recorded the complete mazurkas. They entered into their database two tracks from her CD “Chopin: The Mazurkas,” which, according to an accompanying booklet from Concert Artist, had been recorded in April, 1997, and March, 2004. On the CD slipcase, the latter date was changed to December, 2005, but that discrepancy was trivial in light of what a digital analysis revealed: the Hatto version and a 1988 recording by Eugen Indjic, a Belgrade-born soloist, were identical. As Cook later told the BBC, his initial reaction was “prima facie, one of these people doesn’t exist.” A Google search confirmed that both pianists were demonstrably real—Hatto had existed, and Indjic had recently played in Poland—which left the unavoidable implication that one was a plagiarist. The culprit seemed obvious, but Cook and Sapp weren’t eager to broadcast the news. For one thing, British libel laws would have placed on them the burden of proof that a fraud had been perpetrated.

Despite their caution, Cook and Sapp underestimated the potential repercussions. During a CHARM staff seminar on January 26th, when they discreetly reported on their research, a stunned colleague who had been monitoring the online debate proclaimed, “You’re sitting on a volcano.” Cook and Sapp considered getting in touch with an editor at Gramophone. Instead, they spent a couple of weeks writing and circulating a draft article titled “Purely Coincidental? Joyce Hatto and Chopin’s Mazurkas.” They were still deciding how to proceed when, in mid-February, corroboration materialized an ocean away.

On February 12th, in Mount Vernon, New York, Brian Ventura received a package that he had been anticipating for a long time. An avocational pianist, Ventura worked on Wall Street and had a fifty-minute commute, which he usually spent listening to an iPod. He had learned of Hatto not long before she died, and in the months that followed he closely read reviews of her recordings until he knew which ones he wanted to own. Placing an order turned out to be more of a chore than he expected, but he eventually established a friendly correspondence with Barrington-Coupe. Weeks passed, nothing came in the mail, and he wrote to Barry, who explained that the shipment had been delayed because one selection was unavailable. So Ventura asked Barry to substitute Liszt’s “Transcendental Studies.”

Ventura unwrapped the “Studies” disk first. He placed it in his computer’s disk drive and, through Apple’s iTunes software, connected to Gracenote, an Internet database of CDs. According to Gracenote, which identifies a CD by the durations of its individual tracks, Ventura had loaded the “Transcendental Studies,” but the pianist was a Hungarian named László Simon. László Simon? Ventura weighed the possibilities: Gracenote might be mistaken (mislabellings had been known to occur), or someone named László Simon had recorded the same music with precisely the same track timings. When he listened during his commute the next morning, he felt “from the very first piece, it was a remarkable recording.” On his office computer, he went to Amazon.com and found a listing for Simon’s record, including one-minute clips for most of the tracks.

“I started listening,” he recalled. “Going back and forth between the iPod and the Amazon clips for individualistic things—sudden changes in dynamics or ornaments, or a cadenzalike passage where the performer has more leeway in the interpretation. In slower pieces, it’s easier to hear subtleties. I was ninety-five per cent certain that most of the tracks were the same. So I didn’t know what to do. If she was the one that was copying, part of me didn’t want it to come out. The whole Joyce Hatto story seemed so terrific you just wanted it to be true. I didn’t want to bring down the story.”

Within seventy-two hours, the truth had not so much come out as exploded. Ventura had sent an e-mail to Jed Distler, a composer and reviewer who contributed to Gramophone and had published positive Hatto reviews in the online publication ClassicsToday. Distler later wrote, “After careful comparison of the actual Simon performances to the Hatto, it appeared to me that 10 out of 12 tracks showed remarkable similarity in terms of tempi, accents, dynamics, balances, etc.” When Distler next tested a CD of Rachmaninoff’s Second and Third Piano Concertos—ostensibly Hatto playing with the elusive René Köhler and his equally elusive National Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra—Gracenote identified the soloist as Yefim Bronfman, accompanied by the Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. Distler reported his findings to Ventura via e-mail, and sent copies to the editors of Gramophone and ClassicsToday and to Jeremy Nicholas and two other Gramophone critics who had championed Hatto. He also wrote to Barrington-Coupe—whom he had met in London the previous fall—and Barry “quickly replied, claiming not to know what had happened, and to be as puzzled as I was.”

James Inverne, the editor of Gramophone, enlisted an audio expert, Andrew Rose, who examined the waveforms of the Simon and the Hatto recordings. The visual match was exact, and Rose knew the result even before listening. Ten of the twelve tracks of the Concert Artist “Transcendental Studies” were “without a shadow of a doubt” performed by Simon, though the timing of one track had been subtly altered—sped up by 0.02 per cent. Distler had sensed that another track wasn’t lifted from the Simon recording, and Rose confirmed this: it had been appropriated from a 1993 release by the Japanese pianist Minoru Nojima. Again, the timing had been tweaked, but the waveform revealed the truth. “No pianist who’s ever lived could replicate a performance to anything like the degree of accuracy heard here,” Rose wrote. “It’s simply not humanly possible, whatever the degree of Ms. Hatto’s claimed virtuosity.”

On the evening of February 15th, Gramophone published the story online, appending a report from Rose that rendered the evidence unassailable. When Cook and Sapp heard the news the next morning, they knew that CHARM could freely disclose its discovery of the larceny of Indjic’s Chopin mazurkas. In the days that followed, Rose continued to analyze recordings and post updates: The Rachmaninoff concertos were not Hatto but Bronfman. And had Hatto, Köhler, and the National Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra collaborated on the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 2? No, but Vladimir Ashkenazy, Bernard Haitink, and the Vienna Philharmonic had. Each new revelation increased the suspicion that every Concert Artist release credited to Joyce Hatto within the past decade was the creation of “Joyce Hatto.”

In the Usenet and Yahoo groups, critics who had been most enamored of Hatto found themselves, predictably, objects of opprobrium. (Tantalizingly, shortly before Gramophone’s public disclosure someone calling himself Simon Lasso—in hindsight, an obvious play on László Simon—had warned participants on rec.music.classical.recordings, “Some of you are going to be looking very silly indeed over the coming weeks.”) Among shell-shocked Hattophiles, collective healing took the form of a debunking blitz, a competitive quest to unlock the mysteries of the ersatz oeuvre. Within ten days, twenty-three identifications had been made. (By last week, the tally was up to sixty-eight.) As with the Liszt “Transcendental Studies” and the Godowsky Chopin Studies, many CDs had been cobbled together from multiple sources, which meant that, unless Barrington-Coupe (or a co-conspirator, if any existed) came clean, the effort to unearth the genuine provenances could take years, and was still bound to fall short. For instance, no one has yet identified the pianist in the glorious recording of the “Mephisto Waltz”—assuming (the default assumption) that it wasn’t Hatto herself.