More stories

  • in

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

    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

  • in

    Goodbye, Dolly: With Their Bids, Fans Hold Onto Carol Channing

    Awards and autographs, costumes and wigs have recently been sold at auction. Even the glamorous red gown from “Hello, Dolly!” found a home.LOS ANGELES — For men of a certain age — and it is mostly men — Carol Channing was something of an obsession. They waited by stage doors from Broadway to Tampa for her to emerge. They devoured the “Hello, Dolly!” cast album as teenagers, watched her on television and in the movies and, at times, dressed up in drag to impersonate her — the exaggerated red lipstick, the drone of a nasal voice, the wide-eyed comedic delivery and the burst of puffy hair.So there was an audience ready and waiting when much of the Channing estate went to auction last month, more than two years after she died at the age of 97 in Rancho Mirage, Calif.All 400 items sold out in eight hours, of course, and the auction, authorized by Channing’s heirs, raised close to $406,000 from 6,000 registered bidders, with some of the proceedings going to charity. Fans snatched up the Tony and Golden Globe Awards, the gowns, shawls and shoes, the tattered scripts, the needlepoint pillows and the wigs. Some of this Channingabilia was quite costly: A 1964 Tony for “Distinguished Achievement in Theater” went for $28,125, while a glamorous red costume she wore parading down a staircase in the title role of “Hello, Dolly!” drew $23,750.Memorabilia from the estate, including a flag from the touring production of “Sugar Babies,” was on display at a warehouse, though all the bidding was done by phone or online.Alex Welsh for The New York Times“We have held celebrity sales in the past, but this was different,” said Joe Baratta, the vice president of development at the Abell Auction Company, which is handling the estate. “There were items that were worn, were used, were touched by her, and gifts that were given to honor her career.” (Another 300 Channing items will be auctioned in September).Given the pandemic, there was no in-person thrill — paddles in the air, an auctioneer with a gavel on a podium. It was all done online and by telephone, with bidders, and lurkers, at their screens. People who wanted to inspect the merchandise could head to the Abell warehouse in Commerce, a city just east of downtown Los Angeles. But most of the items were bought sight unseen.By whom? Here’s a look at three superfans who brought their checkbooks (or at least Venmo accounts) and walked away with a piece of Carol Channing’s six decades in public life.David Turner: Hanging onto the ‘zing’Turner in a coat that Channing wore in the London production of the musical “Lorelei.”Amy Lombard for The New York TimesDavid Turner is an actor (most recent Broadway show: “The Boys in the Band” revival) and a commercial pilot who flies for Angel Flight East. As a college student, he waited hours for Channing by the door of a Hartford, Conn., theater after a “Hello, Dolly!” performance. He was a trouper; by the time she emerged, Turner and his boyfriend were the only two fans left.“I didn’t say a word,” Turner, 46, recalled the other day. No autograph request, either. “I felt it would be predatory. I just watched her move.”By that night in Hartford, his Channing bona fides were beyond dispute. Back in 1977, he was already playing — and playing and playing — a song off the “Free to Be You and Me” children’s compilation on which Channing performed (more talking than singing) “Housework.” As a 15-year-old in New Jersey, he began doing an impersonation at the suggestion of an 18-year-old boyfriend who told him that when he had a cold, he sounded like Carol Channing.He still does it to this day, and is hoping that one of the Channing gowns he now calls his own can be pressed into service for a drag performance, assuming he can squeeze into it.“I do ‘Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend,’” he said of the song from her breakout role as Lorelei Lee in the 1949 musical “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.”It was Turner’s first auction, and he found it a little intimidating. But by the end, he had bought 25 items: an Al Hirschfeld sketch of Channing, eyes wide and with an exaggerated grimace; a few dresses and costumes; a blouse monogrammed with her initials; a pair of tap shoes; and that 1964 Tony.Truth be told, it made him a little queasy — was this ghoulish? he wondered — before deciding that this was a fine way to preserve the memory of someone who had been such a huge part of his life.“She had a way of getting a room to zing,” he said. “For me, being part of the auction was wanting to hang on to that feeling.”“I loved her,” he added. “And Carol is in many ways a very weird person. She was the first person who really took whatever it was that was weird and hitched her wagon to it.”Nicky Ciampoli: Almost familyNick Ciampoli with one of the two Bob Mackie dresses he purchased from the auction.Alex Welsh for The New York TimesNicky Ciampoli lived with Carol Channing for the last years of her life. Don’t read too much into that. He was her personal assistant, a job he began when she was still touring, and he stayed on as age caught up with her and she stepped out of the spotlight.Channing divided her time between Modesto and Palm Springs, and Ciampoli remained with her in both places.For $25,000 he snagged 18 pieces to hold on to the memories: the wedding outfit from her 2003 marriage to Harry Kullijian (she later repurposed it for book signings); two flapper dresses by Bob Mackie; a red tuxedo Ciampoli helped her put on for performances.“I would have bought more if I could,” he said. “I didn’t buy the stuff because it was Carol Channing, the Broadway actress. I bought it because it was very sentimental on a lot of levels for me.”Ciampoli met Channing in January 2006, when he was 21 and working for a theater producer who had booked her in Tampa for three performances of her solo show “The First Eighty Years are the Hardest.” He was assigned to attend to Channing and Kullijian during their stay. A bit later, back in California, she called to ask if he could become her full-time personal assistant.As part of his job, he would go through a large garage in Modesto crammed with artifacts of her life — costumes, wigs, letters from people like Joan Crawford and Barbara Walters. Much of that material was destroyed by water, bugs and rats, and at one point, he hired a 1-800-GOT-JUNK dump truck.“You wouldn’t believe what we threw away,” he said. “Old phone books. Pictures and scripts. Scrapbooks.” But some was saved — “scrapbooks that didn’t have rat poop” — and made it to the auction.Ciampoli never got to see Channing in “Hello, Dolly!,” which, over several stints on Broadway and on tour, she performed some 5,000 times. And now? You guessed it. “I have started impersonating Carol,” he said. “I’m not just a fan. I had so much personal involvement with them.”“My bedroom was right next to them in Palm Springs,” he added of Channing and Kullijian, who died in 2011. “They were like grandparents to me. I used to sit in her bedroom watching old TV shows — Andy Griffith.”A wig and headpiece were also part of Turner’s winnings.Amy Lombard for The New York TimesBrig Berney: Pouncing on a TonyBrig Berney logged on to his computer on auction morning with his eyes on one big item: the 1995 Lifetime Achievement Tony that Channing won for bringing “Dolly” back on tour. Berney had been company manager for that revival, overseeing the day-to-day business affairs of running the show, from payroll to travel.But that was way down on the list of trophies on the block, and Berney, now the company manager for “Hamilton,” decided that waiting it out in such a competitive auction was too risky.Instead, he snapped up her special 1968 Tony in a winning bid of $14,000.It is now is perched on “a lovely old music stand” in the living room of his Manhattan apartment. “If you have a Tony Award, you might as well display it in a place of honor,” he said. “No reason to put it in a drawer.”Also in his take: needlepoints that fans sent to Channing and a Theater World Award naming her a promising personality of the 1948-49 season.Berney had actually met Channing years before he started working on her shows. “Hello, Dolly!” came to to the Morris A. Mechanic Theater in Baltimore in 1978 and Berney, a wide-eyed teenager, wrangled his way backstage to get his program signed.She no doubt forgot that encounter some 20 years later when they connected again. But she was, he said, charming and patient as he peppered her with the questions of a theater fanboy: “What was David Merrick like? What was it like to open ‘Dolly’ in New York?”“I loved asking questions,” he added. “She loved to talk, and I loved to listen.” More

  • in

    Lois Kirschenbaum, the Ultimate Opera Superfan, Dies at 88

    In New York opera circles, an autograph request from her, the mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade said, was considered “a special type of approval.”For more than a half-century, nearly every prominent singer to perform at the Metropolitan Opera could expect to be approached backstage afterward by a wispy woman in thick glasses, who held piles of memorabilia to be autographed while she praised the performance in a raspy Brooklyn accent.This was Lois Kirschenbaum, one of New York’s biggest and longest-standing opera buffs and a nightly staple at the opera since the late 1950s, before Lincoln Center was built, when the Met was located in Midtown.Few operatic performances took place at the Met without being observed through Ms. Kirschenbaum’s large binoculars (she was legally blind from birth), usually from a seat in the uppermost balcony secured for little or no money by canvassing operagoers at the entrance just before the opening curtain.And few prominent singers went home without signing numerous items for Ms. Kirschenbaum, whose constant desire to get backstage helped her befriend some of the world’s most famous opera singers, from Beverly Sills to Plácido Domingo.Ms. Kirschenbaum died on March 27 at a hospital in Manhattan after suffering from pneumonia and renal failure, her longtime friend Sally Jo Sandelin said. She was 88.Such was Ms. Kirschenbaum’s reputation at the Met, as well as at New York City Opera, that singers half-joked that they had truly arrived on the New York opera scene only after being approached by Ms. Kirschenbaum after a performance.“It was like getting a special type of approval,” the mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade said. “I never met anyone who didn’t welcome her backstage and want to hang out with her.”She added, “We’d always look out for her and bring her in early if we could, because everyone loved her, and she’d have a hundred things to sign.”The bass singer Samuel Ramey said he was first approached by Ms. Kirschenbaum in his dressing room immediately after his first major role, as Don Basilio in “The Barber of Seville” with City Opera in late 1973.“I was told, ‘You’ve made it now — Lois has asked you for your autograph,’” he recalled, adding that Ms. Kirschenbaum became a constant presence backstage after his performances and that the two became good friends.“She was something else — she always got on the backstage list,” he said.Ms. Kirschenbaum, a wisecracking native of Flatbush, defied the stereotype of a highfalutin opera aficionado. She worked as a switchboard operator for the International Rescue Committee, the humanitarian aid organization, until retiring in 2004. She lived nearly her entire adult life in a rent-controlled apartment in the East Village, from which she would travel by subway and city bus to Lincoln Center while lugging a huge handbag full of photos, programs and recordings to be signed.Ms. Kirschenbaum with the soprano Renata Tebaldi in the late 1960s. Ms. Kirschenbaum’s love of opera began when she heard a recording by Ms. Tebaldi being played in a record shop.via Ken BensonIf she was unable to score a free or cheap ticket just before the performance, she would often slip in with the help of a friendly staffer.“Everyone knew her, from the workers who cleaned the bathrooms, to ticket takers, to the administration and of course the singers,” said another longtime friend, Carl Halperin. “All you had to say was ‘Lois’ and everybody knew who you meant.”Ms. Kirschenbaum was the grande dame of a group of hard-core fans who would flock to the backstage door for autographs and chats.With the help of her formidable handbag, she would quickly find her way to the front of the line and approach singers with complimentary and detailed critiques of their performances — from that night or from years earlier.“She could tell you anything going on in your performances on any given night — this or that particular phrase and what it meant,” the soprano Aprile Millo recalled. “For a singer, it gave you the feeling that you were being heard.”“She was so much part of the opera lore of New York, like the aficionados at La Scala,” the opera house in Milan, Ms. Millo said. Working the switchboard allowed Ms. Kirschenbaum to call singers and opera insiders for updates on news like cast changes or show cancellations, information she would then relay to fellow opera buffs.“For opera, she really was the internet before there was the internet,” said Ken Benson, a manager of opera singers and another longtime friend.And before the Met began putting out detailed schedules months in advance, Ms. Kirschenbaum became known for the homemade lists she compiled of upcoming performances and featured singers.She would distribute copies to fellow buffs during intermission, while enjoying the coffee and sandwiches she routinely smuggled in to avoid the expense of buying food at Met prices.“People would say that Lois’s list was more precise than what you’d get from the press,” Ms. Millo said.Ms. Kirschenbaum “was so much part of the opera lore of New York,” the soprano Aprile Millo said. Ms. Kirschenbaum’s request for an autograph, Ms. Millo added, meant “you got the blessing.”Julie Glassberg for The New York TimesMs. Kirschenbaum gleaned much of her information while soliciting singers’ autographs.“She’d ask them, ‘When are you coming back and what are singing next year?’” Mr. Halperin recalled. “And while Luciano Pavarotti was signing something for her, he’d say he’d be singing ‘La Bohème’ and ‘Tosca’ next season. And she’d collect all this.”Ms. Millo said Ms. Kirschenbaum might have her sign up to 20 pieces of memorabilia at a time. “It was a way to keep you engaged — it was clever of her,” she said.Lois Kirschenbaum was born in New York City on Nov. 21, 1932, to Abraham and Gertrude Kirschenbaum. Her father was an optometrist.An only child, she grew up in Flatbush and graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn. Ms. Kirschenbaum was an avid Brooklyn Dodgers fan, but when the Dodgers left New York for Los Angeles in 1957, her obsession shifted to opera after she heard a recording by the soprano Renata Tebaldi being played in a record shop.In her later years, Ms. Kirschenbaum alternated between haunting the margins of the Met for tickets and autographs and being honored as a special guest at fancy galas held by opera organizations.For her 75th birthday, in 2007, she was feted at a party by singers like Marilyn Horne and Renée Fleming, as well as the Met’s musical director, James Levine — “Jimmy” to Ms. Kirschenbaum — who gave her a ring and an autographed operatic score of “La Bohème.”In 1980, she won a raffle to see Beverly Sills’s farewell performance gala at City Opera, after having seen every role Ms. Sills sang in New York, except one, for 25 years.“Beverly saw me after that and said, ‘Lois, it was fixed,’” Ms. Kirschenbaum laughingly told The New York Times in 2012.In recent years, Ms. Kirschenbaum had begun using a wheelchair and went to the Met only sporadically. She continued to listen to opera (and to Yankees games) on the radio.Friends said she never married and never spoke of any surviving family members.It was unclear what would become of the trove of autographs, programs and photographs left behind in Ms. Kirschenbaum’s apartment.“There was no one more devoted to opera and the artists she loved than Lois,” Ms. Fleming said. “She was a beloved member of the Metropolitan Opera family, like a favorite aunt. I will miss knowing she is watching from the balcony and seeing her afterward at the stage door.” More