It’s not just literature and visual art. Classical music has also been a happy hunting ground for hoaxers over the centuries. In a market that’s less driven by cash than the art world, however, the hoaxers’ motivations are a more complex combination of aesthetic game-playing, private jokes, a bit of good old-fashioned lampoonery and, sometimes, a more shadowy kind of compositional fakery. Here’s my pick of classical music’s finest hoaxes.

Count von Walsegg

Mozart’s Requiem would never have been known as Mozart’s, if Walsegg had got his way. He commissioned the piece in order to be able to pass it off as his own, just as he did with many other composers and their works. The Austrian aristocrat’s shameless life as a pseudo-composer is one of the most outrageous acts of vanity in creative history.

Piotr Zak’s ‘Mobile for Tape and Percussion’

This 1961 “experiment” by an entirely fictitious composer, Zak, was a wheeze by Hans Keller and Susan Bradshaw that simultaneously revealed the apparent randomness of contemporary composition, and – it was hoped – the deaf ears of critics. It was broadcast on a po-faced Radio 3 (then known as the BBC Third Programme), and reviewed. But their hoax didn’t quite work – most critics who wrote about it thought that Zak’s piece was seriously shoddy.

Fritz Kreisler

The early-20th-century violinist Kreisler composed an entire collection of hoaxed pieces in 17th- and 18th-century styles which he regularly included in his recitals. He passed them off as the works of composers such as Vivaldi, Couperin, Pugnani, Ditters von Dittersdorf and others, since it would be “impudent and tactless to repeat my name endlessly on the progammes”. Kreisler and his coterie managed to keep the secret for decades, and he relished sending up the “snobs” of the musical world “who judge merely by name”.

Haydn’s ‘lost’ piano sonatas

The world of Haydn scholarship was duped in the early 1990s by the supposed discovery of these six masterpieces for solo piano, feted as some of the finest sonatas in Haydn’s canon by the doyen of Haydn-ographers, HC Robbins Landon. But they were revealed to be the work of an extremely clever pasticheur, Winfried Michel. Which – as a New York Times piece from the time says – raises some pretty gigantic existential questions: if these pieces are good enough to be thought to be by Haydn, then aren’t they valuable on their own terms? Or is it only because of the aura of Haydn’s authorship and historical context that they become meaningful? In which case, what is our criteria for judging the immanent qualities of musical works? Why can’t works of brilliant pastiche be as good as the “real” thing, and valued as much by musical culture?

Mozart’s Adélaïde concerto for violin

A violin concerto that Mozart didn’t write, but which was even granted admission to an appendix of the Köchel catalogue of his works (K Anh 294a, since you asked...). But it was a hoax, a concocted concerto that was put together by the French violinist Marius Casadesus in 1933.

An Incomplete History of the Art of Funerary Violin

Individual pieces are one thing, but Rohan Kriwaczek invented an entire genre, a repertoire, a history, and a whole musical subculture, with his 2006 book. Publishers believed it to be a work of studious, historically researched non-fiction. But the fact that the funerary violin is a fake is really beside the point: Kriwaczek’s book is a feat of pseudo-scholarly invention and musical-literary virtuosity that makes you wish that the Guild of Funerary Violinists really did exist.

Joyce Hatto

And finally, no such list would be complete without mention of the most famous performer-hoax of recent years, the Joyce Hatto piano recordings, which were proved to be reissues of other pianists’ performances, re-released under her name.