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    A Ravel Work Premieres at the New York Phil After Nearly 125 Years

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    A prelude and dance by the French master recently surfaced in a Paris library. Gustavo Dudamel and the New York Philharmonic will give the world premiere.The conductor Gustavo Dudamel has premiered dozens of pieces in his career.But the score that he was giddily studying on a recent afternoon at Lincoln Center was different: a nearly 125-year-old piece by the French composer Maurice Ravel that had only recently surfaced in a Paris library.“Imagine more than 100 years later discovering a small, beautiful jewel,” Dudamel, the incoming music and artistic director of the New York Philharmonic, said in an interview at David Geffen Hall. “It’s precious.”On Thursday, Dudamel and the Philharmonic will give the world premiere of the five-minute piece as part of a program celebrating the 150th birthday of Ravel, one of the leading composers of the 20th century, whose works include “Boléro,” “Le Tombeau de Couperin” and “La Valse.”The newly found piece, “Sémiramis: Prélude et Danse,” was written sometime between 1900 and 1902, when Ravel was in his late 20s and sparring with administrators at the Paris Conservatory, where he studied piano and composition.The work, from an unfinished cantata about the Babylonian queen Semiramis, reveals a young musician still honing his voice and looking to others, like the Russian composer Rimsky-Korsakov, for inspiration. “Sémiramis” lacks some of the lush textures and rich harmonies for which Ravel would become known — he was a master of blending French impressionism, Spanish melodies, baroque, jazz and other music — though there are hints of his unconventional style.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      聆听近200年后首度现世的肖邦圆舞曲

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      晚春的一天，在曼哈顿摩根图书馆和博物馆的地下室深处，馆长罗宾逊·麦克莱伦正在整理一批文化纪念品。其中有毕加索签名的明信片，一位法国女演员的老照片，还有勃拉姆斯和柴可夫斯基的信件。当麦克莱伦看到第147号物品时，他惊呆了：The Morgan Library & Museum那是一张有破洞、索引卡大小的乐谱残篇…………上面有小小的谱号和一个显眼的名字。这首曲子被标为“圆舞曲”。有一个草写的名字：肖邦。“我心想，‘这是怎么回事？这是什么呢？’”麦克莱伦说。“我认不出这是哪段音乐。”本身也是作曲家的麦克莱伦拍下了手稿的照片，并在家里用一台数码钢琴弹奏了它。真的是肖邦吗？他有些疑虑：这部作品异常激烈，以安静、不和谐的音符开场，然后爆发出轰轰烈烈的和弦。他把照片发给了宾夕法尼亚大学肖邦研究权威杰弗里·卡尔伯格。“我惊呆了，”卡尔伯格说。“我知道我以前从未见过这个。”在检测了手稿的纸张和墨水，分析了笔迹和音乐风格，并咨询了外部专家后，摩根博物馆得出了一个重要结论：该作品很可能是浪漫主义时代伟大的幻想家弗雷德里克·肖邦创作的一首不为人知的圆舞曲，这是半个多世纪以来首次有这样的发现。郎朗在曼哈顿施坦威音乐厅演奏肖邦圆舞曲全曲。Video by Mohamed Sadek for The New York Times这一发现可能会在古典音乐界引发争论，因为这个领域有时会对新发现杰作的报道持怀疑态度，而且历史上一直存在赝品和伪造手稿的情况。但近年来也有重大发现：德国莱比锡的一家图书馆于9月宣布，该馆发现了一份时长12分钟的莫扎特弦乐三重奏的副本。肖邦于1849年去世，时年39岁，死因可能是肺结核，新近发现的肖邦作品十分稀有。虽然他是音乐界最受喜爱的人物之一——他的心脏被浸泡在一罐酒精中，保存在华沙的一座教堂里——但他不如其他作曲家高产，他创作了大约250首作品，几乎全部是钢琴独奏曲。摩根博物馆的手稿据说是在1830年至1835年之间完成的，当时肖邦20岁出头。这份手稿有着几个奇特之处。尽管人们认为作品已是完稿，但它比肖邦的其他圆舞曲短——只有48小节以及一个反复段落，大约80秒。这首曲子为A小调，有着不同寻常的力度标记，包括开始不久的一处表示最大音量的极强音。但摩根博物馆表示确信这首圆舞曲手稿是真迹，并指出了肖邦的几个特点。The Morgan Library & Museum博物馆表示，该手稿纸张和墨水与肖邦当时使用的一致。手稿笔迹与肖邦的笔迹相符…………甚至包括不寻常的低音谱号画法。摩根博物馆收藏的另一份肖邦手稿也有类似的低音谱号。那份手稿上还点缀着肖邦的涂鸦，肖邦喜欢画画。“我们对我们的结论充满信心，”麦克莱伦说。“现在是时候将它公之于众，让全世界看看，并形成他们自己的看法了。”明星钢琴家郎朗最近在曼哈顿的施坦威音乐厅为《纽约时报》录制了这首圆舞曲。他说，这首作品让他感觉像是肖邦的作品。他说，刺耳的开头让人想起了波兰乡村严酷的冬天。“这不是肖邦最复杂的音乐，”他补充道，“但它是你能想象到的最地道的肖邦风格之一。”在肖邦去世后绘制的一幅肖像。 General Photographic Agency/Getty Images肖邦1810年出生于华沙郊外的一个村庄，父亲是法国人，母亲是波兰人。1830年，20岁的肖邦离开了波兰。他定居在巴黎，很快成为一名琴键上的诗人，他的音乐将人们带到全新的情感世界。与家人的分离以及对波兰未来的担忧可能是肖邦在这个时期的音乐作品带有苦痛色彩的原因之一。19世纪30年代初，波兰爆发了叛乱，武装反抗占领波兰部分领土的俄罗斯帝国。肖邦再也没有回到过祖国。“父亲绝望了——他不知道该如何是好，也没有人帮助让母亲振奋起来，”他在1831年游历德国时在日记中写道。“而我却无所事事地站在这里——我两手空空地站在这里。我只能无病呻吟，不时地对着钢琴发泄我的痛苦。”有一次，巴黎的一位贵族请肖邦解释他音乐中的忧郁，肖邦引用了波兰语单词“zal”，意为怀旧或遗憾。著名的肖邦传记作者艾伦·沃克表示，在圆舞曲等短曲中，可以明显感受到“zal”的韵味，肖邦在其中注入了一种此前只用于更宏伟的作品的情感深度。圆舞曲曾是欢快的舞厅主打曲风。但肖邦的圆舞曲从来都不是用来跳舞的。肖邦没有创作过交响曲、歌剧或清唱剧，人们并不总是将他视为一位严肃的作曲家。“我们的先祖从未想到，肖邦的一首短小的圆舞曲或玛祖卡舞曲，内涵会比博凯里尼的整部交响曲还要丰富，”沃克说。虽然专家认为肖邦创作了多达28首圆舞曲，但只有八首在他生前出版，九首在他死后出版。其余的都已轶失或损毁。他的一些圆舞曲振奋而精致，比如这首《华丽大圆舞曲》。还有一些则是嬉戏玩闹的曲目，比如《“小狗”圆舞曲》。此曲在流行文化中经久不衰，兔八哥和芭芭拉·史翠珊都曾演绎过。还有一些是忧郁的冥想，如《B小调圆舞曲》。那个时代的许多钢琴家喜欢在众多观众面前展示令人眼花缭乱的技艺。但肖邦讨厌他所谓的“空中飞人学校”式的钢琴演奏。他更喜欢沙龙的亲密氛围，在皇室、银行家、艺术家和音乐家面前表演他的作品——作曲家弗朗茨·李斯特称这些聚会为“肖邦教堂”。在这些场合，他的乐迷有时会索要圆舞曲等小作品作为礼物。肖邦同意了，偶尔会将同一首圆舞曲送给几个人。他至少有五次将《F小调圆舞曲》的手稿送给别人，全部是女士。“请您自己留着，”他在给一位受赠者的信中写道。“我不希望它被公开。”这首摩根博物馆的圆舞曲可能就是在这种情况下写成的。它被写在一张约4×5英寸的小纸片上，是一种常用于礼品的纸张。乐谱上有指法和力度记号，这表明肖邦认为这首曲子将来可能会用于演奏。但这位严谨的作曲家——在一页乐谱上花数周时间对肖邦是常有的事——似乎对这首圆舞曲有所犹豫。他没有像通常那样在乐谱上签名。根据笔迹分析，手稿顶端的“肖邦”是别人加上去的。此外，乐谱中还有几处未更正的节奏和记谱错误。艾莉莎·拉吉威尔画的肖邦，他讨厌所谓的“空中飞人学校”式钢琴演奏，更喜欢沙龙的亲密氛围。Universal History Archive, via Getty Images不管肖邦有何意图，这首圆舞曲从未公开过，也一直不为世人所知，可能一直在收藏家手中。纽约室内设计学院院长小A·谢里尔·惠顿一度获得了这份手稿。1972年去世的惠顿是一位狂热的签名收集者。他的子女说，他的大部分收藏都是从麦迪逊大道著名的沃尔特·R·本杰明签名店获得的。惠顿是一位业余钢琴家和作曲家，曾师从名师罗杰·塞申斯和纳迪娅·布朗热，对古典音乐情有独钟。二战期间，他作为海军中尉在南太平洋服役，只带了一本书：贝多芬晚期弦乐四重奏的微型乐谱。他写了三部歌剧，在去世当天完成了最后一部。小A·谢里尔·惠顿，摄于1958年。惠顿是一位业余钢琴家和作曲家，热衷于收集签名，肖邦手稿一度为他所有，后来连同他的其它一些资料被送到了摩根博物馆。via Paul Whiton“他总是弹奏肖邦，”他的儿子保罗·惠顿说。“这是他逃避现实的方式。”惠顿回忆说，他见过在康涅狄格州威尔顿祖宅陈列的这首圆舞曲，但家人并没有意识到它的重要性。惠顿的藏品于2019年作为阿瑟·萨茨的遗赠来到摩根博物馆，萨茨是惠顿的好友，从后者的妻子珍手中买下了这些收藏。五年来，这些藏品一直没有编目，部分原因是新冠大流行。藏品附带的说明没有提供太多关于这首圆舞曲的线索，只写着：肖邦，弗雷德里克音乐手稿。四行两谱表不明钢琴曲，看起来出自肖邦之手，但未署名。摩根博物馆的专家团队在红外线和紫外线下检查了手稿，以明确是否有损坏和涂改。他们确定这首曲子是用铁胆墨水在19世纪的机织纸上写成的。音乐风格与肖邦在19世纪30年代早期的作品一致。乐谱上的记号符合肖邦著名的细小笔迹特征，乐谱上方的“Valse”字样也是这样。研究人员考虑了其他可能性。肖邦是否抄写了别人的圆舞曲？会不会是学生的作品？这两种可能性似乎都不大。圆舞曲多变的开场仍然是一个谜。帮助鉴定乐谱的卡尔伯格说，这首圆舞曲的调——A小调——或许能提供线索。肖邦一些最汹涌澎湃的音乐都是用这个调式创作的，包括所谓的《冬风练习曲》、《第二前奏曲》，以及《第二叙事曲》的一些片段。“这个调，”卡尔伯格说，“让他写出了不同寻常的作品”。肖邦在1831年写了另一首狂暴且有不协和音的圆舞曲：《E小调圆舞曲》，同样是以爆发开场。摩根博物馆的这首圆舞曲的特殊性很可能会引发对其起源的争论。剑桥大学音乐教授约翰·林克说：“其中有很多极其不寻常的元素，你不得不问，这真的是肖邦的音乐吗？”他审阅了手稿的照片，但没有参与摩根博物馆的研究。尽管如此，林克还是认为很难质疑对笔迹、纸张和墨水的分析，称其为“关键的、决定性的因素”。他说，这份手稿可能反映了“肖邦充分发挥的想象力，一种在任何想法都还没有被琢磨透之前的创造性爆发”。肖邦会如何看待这首圆舞曲的公开？他经常用愤怒的涂写和墨水斑点来遮住自己的失误，他还告诉朋友们，他希望未发表的作品都在自己死后被销毁。不过，著名钢琴家和作曲家斯蒂芬·霍夫说，肖邦可能会为自己的音乐仍然受到人们的喜爱而感到高兴。他说，这首圆舞曲“可能没那么重要，但它有一种魅力和珍贵”。“只要肖邦知道他的影响是巨大的，他的作品被很好地收集、研究和记录了下来，”霍夫还说：“我无法想象他会不高兴。”音频：《降E大调华丽大圆舞曲》，作品第18号；《降D大调“小狗”圆舞曲》，作品第64号之1；《降B小调圆舞曲》，作品第69号之2，由阿图尔·鲁宾斯坦演奏（索尼古典）。《E小调圆舞曲》，作品号KK IVa之15，由爱丽丝·纱良·奥特演奏（德意志留声机）。由穆罕默德·萨迪克为《纽约时报》拍摄视频，在纽约施坦威音乐厅录制。由约瑟芬·塞奇威克、乔莉·鲁本和瑞秋·萨尔茨制作。翻译：Ziyu Qing、Annie Xu、晋其角赫海威(Javier C. Hernández)是《纽约时报》文化记者，报道纽约及其他地方的古典音乐和舞蹈。他于2008年加入时报，此前曾任驻北京和纽约记者。点击查看更多关于他的信息。

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      Hear a Chopin Waltz Unearthed After Nearly 200 Years

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      Deep in the vault of the Morgan Library & Museum in Manhattan on a late-spring day, the curator Robinson McClellan was sorting through a collection of cultural memorabilia. There were postcards signed by Picasso, a vintage photograph of a French actress and letters from Brahms and Tchaikovsky.When McClellan came across Item No. 147, he froze:The Morgan Library & MuseumIt was a pockmarked musical scrap the size of an index card…… with tiny notation and a conspicuous name.The piece was marked “Valse,” or waltz.And a name was written in cursive across the top: Chopin.“I thought, ‘What’s going on here? What could this be?’” McClellan said. “I didn’t recognize the music.”McClellan, who is also a composer, snapped a photo of the manuscript and played it at home on a digital piano. Could it really be Chopin? He had his doubts: The work was unusually volcanic, opening with quiet, dissonant notes that erupt into crashing chords. He sent a photograph to Jeffrey Kallberg, a leading Chopin scholar at the University of Pennsylvania.“My jaw dropped,” Kallberg said. “I knew I had never seen this before.”After testing the manuscript’s paper and ink, analyzing its handwriting and musical style, and consulting outside experts, the Morgan has come to a momentous conclusion: The work is likely an unknown waltz by Frédéric Chopin, the great fantasist of the Romantic era, the first such discovery in more than half a century.Hear the full Chopin waltz, performed by Lang Lang at Steinway Hall in Manhattan.Mohamed Sadek for The New York Times More

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      Byron Janis, Pianist of Romantic Passion, Dies at 95

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      He had a brilliant career before arthritis in his hands forced him from the stage, but he overcame the condition and returned to performing.Byron Janis, an American pianist renowned for his commanding performances of the Romantic repertory and for his discovery of manuscript copies of two Chopin waltzes, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 95. His death, at a hospital, was confirmed by his wife, Maria Cooper Janis. He remained active, writing about his career and managing recordings of his music, until recent days, she said. On the concert stage, Mr. Janis could seem like a tightly wound spring, full of tension that, when combined with the sheer physical energy he brought to his performances, yielded interpretations that could be overpowering and seductive, by turns. At the height of his career, in the 1950s and 1960s, he was known for the tremendous sound and colorful sonorities he drew from the piano, and for a freewheeling interpretive approach that sometimes led him to bypass composers’ expressive markings when they were at odds with his conception.“Mr. Janis has a quirky physical style compounded of nervous hovering, sudden jabs, bounces, brittle taps and tentative caresses,” the critic Will Crutchfield wrote in The New York Times, reviewing a recital at the 92nd Street Y in 1985. “The music emerges a little like that too; occasionally it’s disconcerting, but at least he has a style, and more often it is engaging.”What audiences did not know was that by the early 1970s, Mr. Janis was experiencing pain and stiffness during his performances, the result of psoriatic arthritis in both hands and wrists. After he was diagnosed, in 1973, he maintained his concert schedule, and his five-hour daily practice regimen.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’ Manuscript Settles in Cleveland

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      The Cleveland Orchestra has been given the autograph score, which was sold at auction to a previously anonymous buyer for $5.6 million.When Gustav Mahler took the New York Philharmonic to Cleveland for a concert in December 1910, he drove the critic Miriam Russell, of The Plain Dealer, to paroxysms of prose:Little Mahler with the big brain.Little Mahler with the mighty force.Little Mahler with the great musical imagination.That, however, was to be his sole appearance there; by the following spring, he was dead.An important piece of Mahleriana will nevertheless now reside in Ohio for good. The Cleveland Orchestra announced today that it has received the manuscript of Mahler’s Second Symphony as a gift. And in doing so, it revealed the identity of the mystery buyer who paid $5.6 million for that autograph score in 2016: Herbert G. Kloiber, an Austrian media mogul.“He’s very much in the family,” André Gremillet, the orchestra’s president and chief executive, said of Kloiber, who is a trustee and chairs its European advisory board. “Given his deep knowledge and love of music, the fact that it’s coming from him has special meaning to us. It’s not just any collector who bought the score.”Kloiber, 74, who built his Tele München Group into a major European media company before selling it to the investment firm KKR in 2019, said that his decision to buy the Mahler manuscript had reflected a lifelong interest in music, as well as a friendship.The godson of the conductor Herbert von Karajan, Kloiber ran the production company Unitel, which made several renowned films of performances, before founding Clasart Classic in 1976. Clasart distributes Met in HD broadcasts internationally, and has made visual recordings of the Clevelanders playing Bruckner and Brahms with their music director, Franz Welser-Möst.It was through his business dealings that Kloiber became acquainted with Gilbert Kaplan, the Mahler devotee who had bought the 232-page manuscript in 1984 from the foundation of Willem Mengelberg, a Dutch conductor who had received it from the composer’s widow, Alma. Kaplan, a financial publisher with no musical training, was obsessed with the “Resurrection,” as the work is known, and controversially conducted it with leading orchestras, recording it twice.“We had both sold a piece of our companies to Capital Cities, the owner of the ABC network, so every year we gathered in Phoenix, Arizona, at the Biltmore Hotel for a corporate retreat,” Kloiber said. “Whilst everybody else was doing horse routes or playing golf, we were sitting at the bar talking about Gustav Mahler, and his particular inclination to the Second Symphony.”The score is unaltered, unbound and marked in blue crayon with Mahler’s own edits.David A. Brichford, the Cleveland Museum of ArtWhen Kaplan died in 2016, he left the manuscript to his widow with the intention that it be sold. Kloiber’s winning bid at Sotheby’s that November set a record for a manuscript score at auction. The acquisition was anonymous, but not entirely a secret.“We agreed to have a coffee in Vienna,” Welser-Möst said, recalling a meeting from a few years ago with Kloiber, a friend. “I knew he had bought it, but that was it. He showed up with a black briefcase. We sat down for coffee — you know, chatty, chatty — and it was like in one of those spy films. He pushed the briefcase underneath the table and said, ‘Have a look at it.’”For Welser-Möst, who occupied Mahler’s post of general music director at the Vienna State Opera from 2010 to 2014, examining the pristinely preserved manuscript — unaltered, unbound and marked in blue crayon with the composer’s own edits — was an emotional experience, not to mention a nerve-racking one. The clarity of Mahler’s handwriting convinced him, he said, that his scores ought to be followed to the letter.“When I opened the score in our apartment in Vienna, I got really teary,” Welser-Möst said. “How close can you get to a masterpiece, whatever it is? You can’t get any closer than that, and to have that intimate moment just for myself, not being in a museum and pushing other people to the side to get a glimpse of it, that was really a very special moment in my life.”He hid the manuscript under his bed, then returned it three days later.Kloiber, who admires the Cleveland Orchestra’s commitment to its youth programs and has been a board member since 2010, told officials that he would give them the manuscript in 2019, after a Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra concert at St. Florian, the abbey near Linz, Austria, where Bruckner was organist.“They are a lovely lot,” Kloiber said. “I like the way they are run and come on all these tours, and make a really big effort for the United States to be present on the European concert circuit.”Selections from the manuscript will be displayed at Severance Hall in a free public showing on Wednesday, and for ticket holders at the orchestra’s season-opening performances of the “Resurrection” on Thursday and Friday. The score will then be housed nearby at the Cleveland Museum of Art, which is led by William M. Griswold, the former director of the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, where several of Mahler’s other manuscripts are held.“It will be kept permanently at the museum,” Gremillet said. “We are still working on where it will be exhibited, but we want people to see that score. Certainly this is going to be a great source of pride for Cleveland as a whole, in addition to the Cleveland Orchestra.” More

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      Galileo Forgery’s Trail Leads to Web of Mistresses and Manuscripts

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      The unmasking of a fake Galileo manuscript this summer brought renewed attention to a colorful, prolific early-20th-century forger named Tobia Nicotra.When the University of Michigan Library announced last month that one of its most prized possessions, a manuscript said to have been written by Galileo around 1610, was in fact a 20th-century fake, it brought renewed attention to the checkered, colorful career of the man named as the likely culprit: Tobia Nicotra, a notorious forger from Milan.Nicotra hoodwinked the U.S. Library of Congress into buying a fake Mozart manuscript in 1928. He wrote an early biography of the conductor Arturo Toscanini that became better known for its fictions than its facts. He traveled under the name of another famous conductor who had recently died. And in 1934 he was convicted of forgery in Milan after the police were tipped off by Toscanini’s son Walter, who had bought a fake Mozart from him.His explanation of what had motivated his many forgeries, which were said to number in the hundreds, was somewhat unusual, at least according to an account of his trial that appeared in The American Weekly, a Hearst publication, in early 1935.“I did it,” the article quoted him as saying, “to support my seven loves.”When the police raided Nicotra’s apartment in Milan, several news outlets reported, they found a virtual forgery factory, strewn with counterfeit documents that appeared to bear the signatures of Columbus, Mozart, Leonardo da Vinci, George Washington, the Marquis de Lafayette, Martin Luther, Warren G. Harding and other famous figures.Investigators had also found a sort of shrine to his seven mistresses, at least according to The American Weekly. The article described a room with black velvet-covered walls, with seven panels featuring paintings, sketches and photographs of the women — one of whom was said to be a “novelty dancer,” and another an “expert swimmer” — with fresh flowers in front of each. “The pictures in some cases displayed their physical attractions with startling frankness, but they were in general highly artistic,” the article noted.“Incidentally,” the publication added, “he had a wife.”Over the years Nicotra’s counterfeits have fooled collectors and institutions, sown confusion, and been denounced by the esteemed Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, who collected musical manuscripts and who wrote an article in 1931 naming Nicotra as a forger. Now Nicotra is back in the news, thanks to the Galileo forgery in Michigan, which was unmasked by Nick Wilding, a historian at Georgia State University who showed that the paper it had been written on had a watermark dating from the late 18th century, more than 150 years after Galileo supposedly wrote it. He also linked it to several other Nicotra forgeries.“Either he thought he was just invincible, or he was maybe just incredibly desperate,” Wilding, who is working on a biography of Galileo, said of Nicotra. While other forgers have been more prolific, Wilding said, few have been as daring — or as talented.“Everything Nicotra does is plausible; there are no jarring anachronisms,” he said. “He knows enough to try and get it right.”This manuscript was one of the University of Michigan Library’s most prized possessions when it was thought to be by Galileo. It was unmasked this summer as a 20th-century forgery, most likely by Nicotra.via University of Michigan LibraryThere is relatively little concrete information about Nicotra, and, given that he was a professional forger, the existing documentary evidence must be taken with a grain of salt. “The facts just seem to slip away from him,” Wilding said. While some accounts say he was 53 at the time of his trial, a birth certificate suggests he may have been 44. Contemporary news accounts, and interviews with several scholars who have studied him, however, begin to give some sense of the man and his prolific career.A courtroom sketch of Nicotra that appeared in The American Weekly portrays him as a balding, thin-faced man with glasses perched on a pointy nose, sporting a mustache and goatee, and wearing either a thick scarf or some kind of furry, Astrakhan-like collar on his coat.Nicotra cast a wide net in the types of documents he counterfeited, and seems to have possessed real talent and learning. He forged a poem he claimed was by the Italian Renaissance poet Tasso, musical manuscripts by leading composers, and was even said to have started a minor international incident by creating a fake Columbus letter identifying his birthplace as Spain, not Italy, prompting the mayor of Genoa to write a lengthy rebuttal reaffirming Columbus’ Italian ancestry.An account of his 1934 conviction by The Associated Press, which ran in The New York Times under the headline “Autograph Faker Gets Prison Term,” described how Nicotra operated: “His method was to visit the Milan Library and tear out the fly leaves of old books or steal pages of manuscript and write on them the ‘autographs’ of famed musicians. The librarians of Milan testified that he had ruined scores of their books.”In 1928, he sold what appeared to be a signed Mozart aria called “Baci amorosi e cari,” supposedly written by the composer at age 14, to the Library of Congress.“It was so special because first of all it was unknown, so it wasn’t reported in any of the thematic catalogs of Mozart at that time,” Paul Allen Sommerfeld, a music reference specialist at the Library of Congress, said in an interview. “He claimed that he found this manuscript and then published the song.”The library paid $60 for the document, which was later believed to have been composed by Nicotra himself.Nicotra said he was the son of a botany professor, and he wrote in one letter that he had graduated with a music degree from a conservatory in Naples in 1909. “We don’t know whether that’s a true fact or not,” Wilding said.When he published his biography of Toscanini in 1929, early critics noted that it contained a number of errors. It is seen as even more unreliable today.“It’s mostly invented conversations and so on,” said Harvey Sachs, the author of a definitive 2017 biography, “Toscanini: Musician of Conscience.” “Just made-up stuff.”His conviction in 1934 made headlines around the world, including in The New York Times.In 1932, Nicotra toured the United States while masquerading as Riccardo Drigo, an Italian conductor and composer who had been the conductor of the Imperial Ballet in Russia and who may be best remembered for the arrangement of “Swan Lake” he created after Tchaikovsky’s death. (The Associated Press reported that Nicotra had been “feted widely in the United States as the former orchestra conductor of the Czar of Russia.”) Apparently no one realized that Drigo had died two years earlier, in 1930.“My main way of characterizing him would be ‘bold,’” said Erin Smith, who wrote her master’s thesis on Nicotra at the University of Maryland in 2014. “He was able to carry on with this for a good number of years.”Nicotra was also known for forging works by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, an early-18th-century composer who died at the age of 26 and whose posthumous fame attracted forgers. One Pergolesi forgery wound up in the collection of the Metropolitan Opera Guild. When Christie’s auctioned it in 2017, it described it as an “intriguing forgery, once thought to belong to the hotly debated Pergolesi canon” and cited authorities who list it as “created by the prolific forger Tobia Nicotra.” It fetched $375.The discovery of the Galileo leaves open the question of what happened to the many other forgeries Nicotra created, which he was quoted as saying could number as many as 600.“I don’t know if he did 600, but I’m sure he did more than the little we’ve found so far,” said Richard G. King, an associate professor emeritus at the University of Maryland School of Music, who has been researching Nicotra. “I don’t think people are willfully hiding these things, but it’s just hard to find them.”Unless an institution has a record of buying documents from Nicotra, Wilding said, it may be hard to identify other forgeries. He suggested that documents by figures Nicotra habitually forged that lack clear provenance before the 20th century “are probably really worth looking at very, very closely.”Nicotra eventually ran afoul of the law after selling the fake Mozart manuscript to Walter Toscanini, who persuaded detectives in Milan to investigate the case. Nicotra was convicted, fined 2,400 lire and sentenced to two years in prison.Some accounts suggest that Nicotra was let out of prison early, because the Fascist government wanted his help forging signatures. That story, notes Wilding, “is just too good to be ignored, and maybe too good to be true.” More

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      Rare-Book Dealer Charged After Pilfered Eagles Lyrics Come to Light

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      Glenn Horowitz and two other men are accused of conspiring to sell Don Henley’s notes, including the words to “Hotel California.”In the late 1970s, as Southern California’s Eagles sailed into rock superstardom, one of the band’s main songwriters generated reams of handwritten lyrics and notes — among them, the words to such FM-radio staples as “Hotel California.”And then, the papers vanished.Nearly five decades later, Glenn Horowitz, a New York rare-book dealer, and two other men were charged on Tuesday in State Supreme Court in Manhattan with conspiring to sell about 100 pages of the stolen notes written by the songwriter, Don Henley, lying to law enforcement authorities and fabricating stories about the provenance of the papers, which are valued at around $1 million.“This action exposes the truth about music memorabilia sales of highly personal, stolen items hidden behind a facade of legitimacy,” Irving Azoff, Mr. Henley’s manager, said. “No one has the right to sell illegally obtained property or profit from the outright theft of irreplaceable pieces of musical history.”Those charged include Mr. Horowitz, 66, who helped create a frothy market in writers’ archives, curating filing cabinets’ worth of manuscripts, drafts, letters and ephemera into a coherent and sellable whole. He placed the papers of Norman Mailer, Gabriel García Márquez, Tom Wolfe, Alice Walker and others in leading university libraries, and brokered major deals with musicians: In 2016, he sold Bob Dylan’s vast archive to two institutions in Oklahoma for a sum estimated to be as high as $20 million.Lawyers for Mr. Horowitz and the other defendants, Craig Inciardi, 58, and Edward Kosinski, 59, denied the charges.“The D.A.’s office alleges criminality where none exists and unfairly tarnishes the reputations of well-respected professionals,” the lawyers said in a statement. “These men are innocent.”A lawyer for Mr. Inciardi added that the men had turned themselves in and had been released on their own recognizance.The indictment is a stunning turn for Mr. Horowitz, a mainstay of New York City’s rare book and manuscript market who is known for mixing a keen business sense with deep literary learning and a showman’s flair.A visit to his Midtown Manhattan office with its terrace overlooking the Museum of Modern Art sculpture garden might offer a glimpse of a choice historical letter or a jaw-dropping literary artifact — accompanied by a comment that the viewing was off the record.“As Glenn himself says, he’s a terrific combination of a scholar and a grifter,” Rick Gekoski, a book dealer in London who regularly did business with Horowitz, told The New York Times in 2007.The notes at the heart of the case announced on Tuesday are the lyrical spine of what would become one of the most recognizable, ubiquitous albums of the 1970s. The Eagles made music that drew on blues and country rock but that was suffused with the particular malaise of Southern California in its post-hippie, pre-punk period.Half a century since its 1976 release, the “Hotel California” album and Mr. Henley’s gnomic musings — “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave” — have fueled unending speculation among fans about the lyrics’ meaning. The band’s continuous world tour, on which it plays the album front to back with a full orchestra, has filled arenas for more than two years.Mr. Horowitz obtained Mr. Henley’s notes in 2005, according to a news release from Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney. The manuscripts were originally stolen from the songwriter in the late 1970s by a writer working on a book about the band, the release said. The notes include handwritten lyrics to “Hotel California,” the albums’s title track.Mr. Henley became aware of the notes’ reappearance when Mr. Horowitz sold them to Mr. Inciardi and Mr. Kosinski, fellow collectors who tried to market them further. According to the district attorney’s office, Mr. Henley filed police reports and told the collectors the notes were stolen.“Rather than making any effort to ensure they actually had rightful ownership, the defendants responded by engaging in a yearslong campaign to prevent Henley from recovering the manuscripts,” the district attorney’s release said.The men sought to launder the notes through Sotheby’s auction houses and engaged in a five-year effort to hide where the documents had come from, the district attorney’s office said. Mr. Horowitz later tried to leverage the 2016 death of Glenn Frey, the Eagles’ other frontman, as possible cover, suggesting that Mr. Frey was the initial source for the papers, according to the news release.Mr. Frey “alas, is dead, and identifying him as the source would make this go away once and for all,” Mr. Horowitz said in a fabricated statement of provenance after the notes were seized by investigators from a Sotheby’s warehouse, the district attorney’s office said.Mr. Horowitz was charged with conspiracy, attempted criminal possession of stolen property and hindering prosecution. Mr. Inciardi and Mr. Kosinski were charged with possessing stolen property and conspiracy.Alex Traub More

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      Library of Congress Acquires Neil Simon Papers

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      The collection of approximately 7,700 items, donated by Simon’s widow, includes dozens of unfinished shows, including a screenplay written for Bette Midler and Whoopi Goldberg.As Mark Eden Horowitz, a senior music specialist at the Library of Congress, was digging through the playwright Neil Simon’s manuscripts and papers earlier this year, he made a surprising discovery.Simon, the most commercially successful American playwright of the 20th century, could also draw. Like, really draw.“They’re almost professional,” Horowitz said in a recent phone conversation of some of the pen-and-ink drawings and paintings he found tucked among the scripts. “There are two watercolors in particular that are quite beautiful landscapes.”More than a dozen notepads filled with drawings, cartoons and caricatures by Simon, who died in 2018, was just one of the surprising discoveries Horowitz made in the trove of approximately 7,700 of the playwright’s manuscripts and papers (and even eyeglasses), a collection that the library on Monday announced had been donated by Simon’s widow, the actress Elaine Joyce.An event on Monday at the library in Washington, which will stream live on its YouTube channel at 7 p.m., will include a conversation with the actors Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker, who are starring in the Broadway revival of Simon’s 1968 comedy “Plaza Suite,” as well as remarks by Joyce.The collection includes hundreds of scripts, notes and outlines for Simon’s plays, including handwritten first drafts and multiple drafts of typescripts — often annotated — as well as handwritten letters to luminaries like August Wilson. There are more than a dozen scripts (sometimes many more) for some of his most celebrated shows, including “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” “The Odd Couple” and “Lost in Yonkers,” Simon’s dysfunctional-family comedy that won a Tony Award as well as the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1991.Sometimes, Horowitz said, it took some detective work to identify a famous play, which existed in an early version under an alternate title. (An early script for “Lost in Yonkers” has the title “Louie the Gangster,” and “Brighton Beach Memoirs” was once “The War of the Rosens.”)“Sometimes you’re not sure when you open the title and then you realize, ‘Oh, this became that,’” he said.The collection includes materials from the 25 screenplays Simon wrote, including “The Prisoner of Second Avenue,” “The Heartbreak Kid” and “The Goodbye Girl,” for which he won a Golden Globe in 1978. There are also several scripts for shows never completed or produced, such as one titled “The Merry Widows,” written for Bette Midler and Whoopi Goldberg, and a musical that uses the songs of George and Ira Gershwin, called “A Foggy Day.”“Every time you open a carton, it’s like, ‘Oh my God, what’s going to be in here?’” Horowitz said.Beyond dozens of unknown works in progress — some comprise just a few scenes, while others have multiple drafts — the archive also includes Simon’s Pulitzer Prize, his special Tony Award and at least two Golden Globes, as well as photographs, programs, original posters and even baseballs signed by several Hall of Famers, among them Tommy Lasorda, Eddie Murray and Tony Gwynn. (Simon was a noted baseball fan.)Dozens of spiral notebooks are also packed not just with revisions and “miscellaneous attempts at plays,” as Simon wrote in one, but drafts of speeches and tributes Simon delivered. In one case, a script for a show called “202 and 204” is interrupted by handwritten letters to cast members of “Lost in Yonkers” for opening night — plus the set designer, lighting designer, even the casting director, Horowitz said.Horowitz said that, once the library finishes combing through the items and putting scripts in alphabetical order, it plans to develop a digital tool similar to the ones they have to search other collections of work by theater professionals like Simon’s close friends Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon, with whom he collaborated on the musical “Sweet Charity.”He also hopes that not just researchers, but also producers, might dive into the archives — and that some of the unproduced works might be staged, and the unfinished ones perhaps completed.“It’s so frustrating,” he said, laughing. “I desperately want to know how they end.” More

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      Christopher Coover, Auction Expert in the Printed Word, Dies at 72

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      At Christie’s, he managed sales of rare books, manuscripts and documents by the likes of da Vinci, Lincoln and Kerouac. On TV, he lent his eye to “Antiques Roadshow.”Christopher Coover, who made a career out of reading other people’s mail as an expert in rare books and manuscripts at Christie’s Auction House, where he oversaw the authentication, appraisal and sale of documents ranging from the original texts of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” to George Washington’s annotated copy of the Constitution, died in Livingston, N.J., on April 3, his 72nd birthday.The immediate cause was pneumonia complicated by Parkinson’s disease, his son, Timothy, said.As a connoisseur of curios, Mr. Coover was enlisted as an appraiser for the PBS program “Antiques Roadshow,” where at a single glance he could transform an all-but-forgotten autographed book or letter, retrieved from a starry-eyed guest’s basement or attic into a valuable historical heirloom.“The sense of discovery never fails,” he told The Colonial Williamsburg Journal in 2011. “I like the challenge of seeking out the larger background, the hidden meanings and connections of a given document. This means I am sometimes overworked, occasionally out of my depth, but never bored.”Mr. Coover in 2004 with letter from Abraham Lincoln to Ulysses S. Grant. “The historical nuggets in original manuscripts are often buried, but rarely deeply,” he said. Ruby Washington/The New York Times)For 35 years as senior specialist in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Department at Christie’s in Manhattan, he would authenticate material offered for auction, describe its provenance and history for the catalog, and suggest the opening price.Among his career milestones was assisting in the sale of the oil magnate Armand Hammer’s copy of an early 15th-century scientific manuscript by Leonardo da Vinci — known as the “Hammer Codex” — to Bill Gates, the Microsoft chairman, for a record $30.2 million in 1994.Mr. Coover appraised and managed the sale of the publisher Malcolm Forbes’s collection of American historical documents in six auctions from 2002 to 2007. The sale set records for letters by 15 presidents and generated more than $40.9 million. The sale’s catalog included a manuscript of Abraham Lincoln’s last speech; Robert E. Lee’s message to Ulysses S. Grant, in which he said he was ready to discuss the “cessation of hostilities” to end the Civil War; and a 1939 letter from Albert Einstein to President Franklin D. Roosevelt encouraging the American effort to build the atomic bomb.Mr. Coover also wrote the catalog for the sale of Kerouac’s “On the Road” manuscript, typed on a 119-foot-long roll of United Press Teletype paper ($2.4 million); and appraised and managed the sales of Lincoln’s 1864 Election Victory speech ($3.4 million), Washington’s letter on the ratification of the Constitution ($3.2 million), Washington’s personal annotated copy of the 1789 Acts of Congress ($9.8 million) and the original manuscript of James Joyce’s “Ulysses.”Christopher Coover was born on April 3, 1950, in Greeley, Colo. His parents left his middle name blank on his birth certificate so that he could choose one later himself. He selected Robin, from his favorite childhood books; his full name became Christopher Robin Coover.The family moved shortly afterward to Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where his parents were hired by Vassar College — his father, James Burrell Coover, as a professor and music librarian, and his mother, Georgena (Walker) Coover, as a teacher and specialist in early childhood education.Chris attended Arlington High School in Poughkeepsie before his father took a teaching post at the State University of New York at Buffalo, bringing his family with him. Chris graduated from Kenmore West High School in Buffalo. He earned a bachelor’s degree in musicology from SUNY Buffalo in 1973.He subsequently formed a band that played at weddings and other receptions, drove a school bus, worked for The New Grove Dictionary of Music in London and in the rare books room of the Strand book store in Manhattan before he was hired by Sotheby’s in 1978.He left for Christie’s in 1980. While working there, he earned a master’s in library science from Columbia University. He retired in 2016 as senior specialist and vice president of the auction house.Mr. Coover also lectured on American documents and built his own collection of literary and historical books and manuscripts, which he donated to Columbia.Mr. Coover, who died in a hospital, lived in Montclair, N.J. In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife, Lois (Adams) Coover; a daughter, Chloe; and two sisters, Mauri and Regan Coover.In the authentication of documents, Mr. Coover said, most forgeries are readily apparent, typically because the paper cannot be faked. Such was the case with a supposed 1906 first edition of “Madame Butterfly,” purportedly signed and dedicated by the composer, Puccini, which a reader of The Chicago Tribune asked Mr. Coover to authenticate.Sight unseen, he was able to recite the dedication, in Italian (he said he had seen 10 to 15 copies of the score with the same words), and identified the reader’s find as only a photolithographic copy.Then again, he said, ordinary-looking documents can contain surprises.“An otherwise boring diary or series of family letters mainly recording weather and local news may contain a long description of an election campaign, demonstrations against the Stamp Act, the convening of the Confederacy to draft a constitution, or a raid by Pancho Villa,” he told the Williamsburg journal.“The historical nuggets in original manuscripts are often buried, but rarely deeply,” he added. “I once discovered an exceptional letter of Ethan Allen at the bottom of a pile of old deeds, copies of minor poetry and otherwise uninteresting papers.”Assessing the monetary value of an item is highly subjective, he said.“Family bibles and birth and death records are valuable for their genealogical information, but they have very little commercial value,” he was quoted as saying in Marsha Bemko’s book “Antiques Roadshow: Behind the Scenes” (2009), “and I think it is a shame to see little old ladies waiting in line for hours while hefting a 40-pound Bible that is worth very little monetarily.”“You have to trust your innate instincts and perception of the size of the potential market,” he said. “The value of some letters and documents can only be determined by letting the free market operate, at auction.”Mr. Coover recalled that in 1992 he was asked by the grandson of a woman who had recently died to appraise her collection of books. He visited her Manhattan apartment and immediately realized that the books were not very valuable, but as he was leaving, the grandson asked him to look at some papers in a tattered Manila envelope.Inside, Mr. Coover told The Times in 2004, he found an old black leather book with the word “autograph” embossed in gold on the cover. On the very first page, he recognized Lincoln’s signature, followed by the last handwritten paragraph of his Second Inaugural Address. He told the young man that that one page alone was worth at least $250,000. When it finally went to auction, it sold for $1.2 million. More