The loving plagiarist

William Barrington-Coupe, who issued other people's recordings under his wife's name, has admitted his actions. He says he wanted his wife to receive the praise ill-health had denied her:

On its Web site on Monday, Gramophone said that in his letter to BIS Records, Mr. Barrington-Coupe said he had used other pianists’ recordings to give his wife “the illusion of a great end to an unfairly (as he terms it) overlooked career.”

Mr. Barrington-Coupe is quoted as saying that after CD technology arrived in the early 1980s, his attempts to transfer her cassette recordings to CDs proved unsuccessful. He and his wife therefore decided to re-record her repertory.

“Although she kept up a rigorous practice regime, Barrington-Coupe says that Hatto was suffering more than she admitted, even to herself,” Mr. Inverne wrote. “Recording session after recording session was marred by her many grunts of pain as she played, and her husband was at a loss to know how to cover the problem passages.”

Barrington-Coupe insists his wife, Joyce Hatto, was unaware he had started to use passages of other people's work to cover her weaker parts.

He may have been misguided, but he was motivated by love. Part of me wonders if it might have been better if we'd never known:

But Mr. Barrington-Coupe, 76, apparently declined to provide more information in his conversation with [Gramophone editor James] Inverne on Monday. “I’m tired,” Mr. Inverne quoted him as saying. “I’m not very well. I’ve closed the operation down. I’ve had the stock completely destroyed, and I’m not producing more. Now I just want a little bit of peace.”

Let's hope nobody is as vindictive to use copyright law to make the story have an even more heartbreaking end.