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Posted by Alistair Hinton on February 23, 2007, 12:12 am, in reply to "Re: Hatto? Ha!" We don't know what WB-C's motive was in doing this. We do know that only one event is likely to exonerate him from having to face the full force of the law and that this event is unlikely to be a credible and incontrovertible proof that the recordings, correspondence, biographical data, etc. are all perfectly genuine. We'll have to wait and see. Hold on to your hats - but not to your Hattos, for eBay is as likely to bar them as any seller to date that has backed away from flogging them on potential copyright theft grounds. If you are reading this, Mr Barrington-Coupe... Best, Alistair
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The very fact that, as minute follows minute, more of these recordings are being identified as fakes and the real artists' identities revealed seems indicative of the possibility that at least some of the Hatto story may be as fake as those recordings. I have alredy responded to Mr Howell's interesting, candid and thoughtful piece by suggesting that the correspondence could well be as fake as the rest and, indeed, it almost ought to be so, since a totally genuine correspondence series and a totally fake set of recordings simply wouldn't add up. Likewise, aspects of the Hatto story itself may equally have been falsified for whatever reason. Clearly, she did exist and clearly she was some kind of pianist who did some work as a pianist, but even parts of the story that relate to events allegedly having taken place well before the alleged cancer diagnosis look suspect; what evidence is there that, before 1960, she had studied composition with Hindemith, worked with Cortot and Medtner, played the complete Beethoven/Liszt Symphonies in public and over the air and so on and so on? Whether or not the ovarian cancer diagnosis is true and whether it was made in 1970 or at some other time are both open to question; what we are told about this may be true, just as it may equally be false. If, however, she really was diagnosed with this particularly unpleasant and serious form of cancer in 1970, one may reasonably assume that she had first contracted it some time before that diagnosis, which means that she would actually have lived with it for almost four decades (if indeed she really did die in 2006); whilst that may not be entirely impossible, one could surely be forgiven for assuming that William Barrington-Coupe might have made more money just by judiciously exposing this astonishing tale of survival in defiance of the worst medical odds without even having to resort to plagiarism and wholesale theft of other artists' work, for the story of someone beating ovarian cancer for nearly forty years would surely have been a massive attention-grabber and money-spinner in its own right.
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