The Mozart Forgeries: A Caper Novel for the Serious Mozart Aficionado.

Krummel, D.W.

The Mozart Forgeries: A Caper Novel for the Serious Mozart Aficionado. By Daniel N. Leeson. New York, Lincoln, Shanghai: iUniverse, Inc., 2004 (address: 2021 Pine Lake Road, Suite 100, Lincoln, NE 68512). [x, 321 p. ISBN 0-595-31676-X (pbk., $19.95); 0-595-66366-4 (cloth).]

Much as Eduard Morike's Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag delighted the Romantic sensibilities in 1856, so this tale will appeal to the analytic sensibilities of today. Its diabolic story is of two characters known only as Librarian and Forger. But it is also an introduction to many other things of bibliographical interest: the technology of watermark analysis, quill pens, and ink chemistry; the history of pawn shops and the later years of the clarinetist Anton Stadler; and the rationales and practices of today's rare-book auction world and major music research institutions. It does all this with a gusto that academic seminars often find awkward to handle.

Like all good mystery personalities, these are somewhat plausible. Forger has manual skills and smarts (including jazz improvisation), but he needs direction. This is provided by Librarian, a rare-book specialist at Lincoln Center (skillfully drawn, however, so as not to be easily associated with any person I know of who works there). His setting within the bureaucracy of the New York Public Library may have been oppressive, but this is hardly sufficient reason for Librarian to mastermind what he did. (After all, the most infamous recent book scoundrels have worked not out of the New Jersey suburbs, but in Salt Lake City, Austin, Texas, and Ottumwa, Iowa.) Their turpitude lies very deep, and our few hints at explanations--even the lust for money--always leave one asking for more.

There are a few awkward moments in this story: any good forger should have caught the grammatical blunder eight lines up on p. 17. The concert in Washington around p. 106 would have taken place in the Coolidge Auditorium, the manuscript would have been on view in the Whittall Pavilion. Few forensics experts would have faulted things like this, however, and the latter does bring to my own memories of the time Frank Campbell and I stumbled across, in an arrearage file, one of the several Mozart forgeries of "Professor" Tobia Nicotra. His forgeries, as described by Wolfgang Plath (Acta Mozartiana 26 [1979]: 2-10), are of less spectacular works, to be sure, and his subjects were not limited to Mozart. (It is curious that Nicotra also did a biography of Arturo Toscanini and was a friend of Walter Toscanini; and that the copy we found at the Library of Congress was a gift from Joseph Muller, whose bibliographical studies are well known and who, as first head of the Americana collection at the New York Public Library, would understandably not wish to see the thing in his own custody. How much Librarian, or Leeson, knew of Nicotra, is not reported.)

Leeson's forgery, if and when it does turn up, should be much better than Nicotra's (whose penmanship is often shaky), and infinitely superior to the work of the totally incompetent Hopkinson forger whose sad story is related in the June 2004 issue of Notes. Forger's work may be on par with that of the Berlioz villain described by Richard Macnutt in Peter Bloom's Berlioz: Past, Present, Future: Bicentenary Essays (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2003). I still doubt that the manuscripts would fetch $20,000,000.00. (This could suggest that neither I, nor most of us, were ever made for this particular world.) All it would have taken, however, would be two bidders with those funds, and in the unlikely event that this should ever happen, I might hope that Sotheby's and the winning bidder would remember Mr Leeson and his friends with a modest bit of Schmiergeld.

A few other events--sending Librarian to a paper acidity conference in Munich, the events in southern Illinois, the Greenland episode--may also seem a bit of a stretch, but they are necessary for the point of the story, which is deliciously rich. Much as Morike probably led early listeners to hear Don Giovanni more deeply, so we may now even hear the two works in question with more delighted ears. The last word may thus belong to Leonard B. Meyer, whose essay in The Forger's Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983) asked whether, to those who do not know they are dealing with a forgery, the aesthetic experience is any the less inferior. One of the advantages of the real over the virtual world is its unpredictability, and this after all is what makes it alive.

D. W. KRUMMEL

University of Illinois, Urbana