To be sure, Mr. Robbins Landon and the Badura-Skodas jumped the gun by assuming that the pieces were authentic before they had had time to examine the manuscript, but this is understandable. Any scholar or scientist who has had hot stuff knows how difficult it is to behave sensibly, and those who have not had the experience probably should not judge. Part of the problem is a kind of intellectual horniness about discovery. It's not that one simply wants fame and fortune but rather that one is gripped by an almost uncontrollable excitement.

THOUGH MUSICOLOGY HAS never been the science it sometimes claims to be, there is nothing like good hard data -- for example, a newly discovered work by a great master -- to turn the cautious scholar into a drooling maniac. Good data relieve us of the onerous burden of having to be clever; ornate interpretations, subtle deconstructions and Byzantine turns of academic prose are unnecessary when you have the Real Thing. Yet a risk is always involved; if you wait until the matter is absolutely verified, it may be old news, and you may have to go back to being merely another clever scholar. On the other hand, moving too quickly can have unhappy results; as Ms. Badura-Skoda kept saying, "It's a little embarrassing."

In some ways this is all reminiscent of the cold fusion debacle that occurred when B. Stanley Pons, Martin Fleischmann and, to a certain extent, the entire state of Utah promised the world a cheap, clean energy source. A little more experimentation and some honest self-examination would have made it obvious that the initially promising results were murky at best. Gary Taubes, in his book "Bad Science," reveals what happens when scientists get caught up in the frenzy of secrecy, competition and anxiety associated with a major discovery. They usually forget the first mandate of scientific investigation, which, in the words of the noted physicist Richard Feynman, is that "you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."

Yet the issues of forgery and undue anticipation by scholars, though not without interest, are only a small part of this story. Most scholars I've spoken to insist that the sonatas are forgeries. When I ask how they know, the answer is always the same: the quality of the sources is suspicious, ergo they're fakes. But what about the quality of the music?

This is the most delightful aspect of the whole debacle. Not a single musician or scholar is willing to say for sure whether, on the basis of the score alone, these pieces are by Haydn. Our musical culture prides itself on considering superstar composers leagues above their "mediocre" contemporaries; yet no one has taken a stand and offered either analytic proof or convincing intuition as to the derivation of these pieces. Nor has anybody raised the potent question: if someone can write pieces that can be mistaken for Haydn, what is so special about Haydn?