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The Composer Has No Clothes

Classical music ennobles bullshit The Los Angeles Philharmonic, November 10, 1974. | Library of Congress

In Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” a fictional French writer recreates, word for word, chapters from Cervantes’s famous novel. The new version is not intended as a mere copy but as a subterranean reworking: “To be, in some way, Cervantes and to arrive at Don Quixote seemed to him less arduous—and consequently less interesting—than to continue being Pierre Menard and to arrive at Don Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard,” writes Borges’s narrator, a fictional literary critic. The story shows the mind-tangling complexities behind the seemingly simple idea of authorship. Tristan Foison, a real-life French fabulist who built a career on plagiarism, might be considered Menard’s counterpart in the august realm of classical music.

In 2001, the Capitol Hill Chorale, an amateur group “with lawyers and government types throughout its ranks,” according to the Washington Post, gave the American premiere of Foison’s Requiem Mass. The performance was a success—the Post praised the “mellow joyfulness” of the piece—and the Chorale’s members lined up after the concert for Foison’s autograph. But the music reminded one singer in the audience of something he had performed before in Vienna (Virginia). After the concert, the singer checked his memory against the sheet music. Note by note, Foison’s Requiem was identical to the 1963 “Messe de Requiem” by an obscure French composer named Alfred Desenclos.

The next day the singer rang up the Chorale’s music director; hijinks ensued. Foison at first denied that he’d plagiarized Desenclos, only to then claim that a mix-up had occurred between him and Desenclos’s publisher. Then he admitted to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that he had plagiarized the Desenclos piece—but only in a fit of desperation. “I was very tormented at that time,” he told the paper. “I try to survive, but it’s not that easy.” Not long after, Foison disappeared, ostensibly to Paris to care for his father, who was dying of cancer. A work with his name on it hasn’t been performed since.

Such deceptions surface occasionally in classical music, enabled by the field’s fetish for name dropping, prestige, and aura. In 1964, an English lunch-lady-turned-musician named Rosemary Brown began claiming that the ghosts of composers past took control of her hands while she was playing the piano. She “dictated” new works by Bach, Brahms, and Rachmaninov, and conversed with Beethoven, to widespread credulity. (Ludwig had “obviously taken the trouble to learn English since he passed over,” she clarified.) In 2007, the pianist Joyce Hatto was exposed for having plagiarized some one hundred critically acclaimed recordings from other performers; in one instance, a reviewer panned the exact same recording when it was marketed under a different name. In 2014, Mamoru Samuragochi, a deaf composer known as “Japan’s Beethoven,” was revealed to be neither deaf nor the composer of the music that he released. (That Samuragochi was not Beethoven’s musical heir was apparent earlier.)

Likewise, Foison knew that classical music has both a deep-seated anxiety about its increasing irrelevance, and an insatiable hunger for stories that might secure its future. In a field that prizes listening, he knew he could count on willful deafness. Foison is, it turns out, just another symptom of an industry running on fumes.

Tobias Broeker, today an unassuming German who works as a special education teacher, first developed an intense fascination with classical music when he was an undergraduate in the 1990s. In a field obsessed with pedagogical genealogies and musical dynasties, Broeker “grew up music-free,” he told me wryly. His first exposure to classical music was through Woody Allen films. Broeker found canonical composers like Bach and Mozart boring, but he connected with twentieth-century music, especially the virtuosic form of the violin concerto.

Broeker neither plays an instrument nor reads music fluently. But he’s persistent. “I’m a bit of a hunter and a collector, and then I started collecting information, simply because I wanted to know a lot,” he said. Broeker was especially tenacious in his pursuit of recordings of twentieth-century violin concertos, many of them obscure. He eventually amassed a digital collection consisting of seven thousand pieces in that genre alone, including many works not available on streaming services. “My small wish is to take part in it all, without being able to play an instrument,” he said.

Around 2010, Broeker came across the name Tristan Foison. Broeker read about the plagiarized Desenclos Requiem online and wondered if that was the extent of Foison’s deception. After some digging, he discovered that Foison had purportedly composed a violin concerto, premiered in full in 1998 by the violinist Beth Newdome and the Atlanta Community Symphony Orchestra. Broeker set about trying to confirm its originality.

Things progressed slowly. The orchestra didn’t answer Broeker’s emails. Newdome had died of cancer in 2010. Newdome’s widower didn’t have a recording of the piece. Neither did Newdome’s sister; her mother did, but the sister had just visited and wouldn’t be going back anytime soon. After about two years, the sister finally emailed Broeker the recording. “The world is so big, and there are so many great things that nobody knows, and that’s a shame,” he said. “I find it exciting to drill and drill.”

When Broeker first heard the piece, he thought it “wasn’t bad.” It also wasn’t familiar. Broeker listened to the concerto several times, wondering if he’d recognize it, then put it away: “I don’t have a musician’s memory,” he said. He began buying recordings and musical manuscripts to try to read along; he liked having something tangible from the music he loved. One of the manuscripts he acquired was the “Symphonie concertante” for violin and orchestra by a twentieth-century French composer named Raymond Gallois-Montbrun. In April 2016, Broeker set out the score and put on a recording of the piece. “You know this,” he thought to himself—it was, measure for measure, what Foison claimed as his own composition.

Realizing that Foison’s plagiarism extended beyond the Desenclos Requiem pricked Broeker’s curiosity. “I’ll never forget that moment,” he said. “And then of course I was super addicted because now he had stolen a second piece—what else was out there?”

In 2019, Broeker completed an ebook, which he never published, detailing the results of his research into Foison’s biography. It was the first systematic attempt to sift through fact and fiction in the composer’s impressive résumé. Foison was born in Paris (France) in 1961. Foison played the piano and the rare ondes Martenot, an electronic keyboard with an early-science-fiction sound. Few people in the world perform on the instrument; Foison was, he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, introduced to it by his adoptive mother Michèle, an ondist and composer who studied with the legendary Olivier Messiaen.

In 1987, he moved to Atlanta for reasons that remain unclear. A photo from the period shows a handsome man with Jean-Paul Belmondo’s square jaw. Foison’s background—Broeker collected three examples of his curriculum vitae from programs and people who knew him—was absurdly impressive, enough that it should have immediately triggered skepticism.

These biographies claimed Foison entered the ferociously competitive Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse in 1970, when he was nine years old. There he earned first prizes in every subject beside the decidedly unsexy fugue and analysis. Foison’s composition teacher was also Messiaen, a terse instructor who composed music of scathing power. They became so close that the usually reserved Messiaen sent Foison a letter musing on the essential mystery of reality. Foison enclosed a copy of the letter with his CV.  

Foison also studied composition with Henri Dutilleux, a subtle colorist who taught at the école normale de musique de Paris, as well as conducting with the irascible perfectionist Pierre Boulez, who was the longtime music director of the New York Philharmonic and held a status equivalent to France’s unofficial Minister of Culture. Like Claude Debussy, Foison earned the Prix de Rome, which sends composers to work on a magnificent Italian estate, and won prestigious competitions for piano, conducting, and composition in Paris, Rennes, Prague, and Leningrad. To top things off, he also earned a doctorate in musicology from the Sorbonne.

If your eyes have glazed over, that’s the point. Classical music has a near-pathological obsession with name-dropping. The program booklets for classical concerts bulge with page-long biographies leaden with names and awards, bestowing seemingly ironclad legitimacy upon a given composer or performer. Which seems necessary because a musical performance can be difficult to judge with confidence: music is intangible, and our perception is highly suggestible. Rather than using our ears, it often feels safer to form an opinion about an artist based on the solidity of the people who’ve vouched for them. That holds true not just for the neophyte listener but also for many classical music professionals, right on up to the industry’s most powerful functionaries, a fact which Foison clearly knew—and worked to his advantage.

But according to Broeker’s exhaustive research, Foison invented almost every detail of his CV. He didplay the piano and ondes Martenot, and he may have written some original compositions. But he almost certainly never attended the Conservatoire National Supérieur or studied with Messiaen, Dutilleux, or Boulez. (The letter from Messiaen was originally published in a program booklet; Foison seemingly inserted the greeting “Cher Tristan” in his best imitation of Messiaen’s handwriting.) The Prix de Rome was renamed and its application process revamped in the wake of May 1968, meaning there’s no way Foison could have won it in 1970. Of the competitions Foison claimed he won, they either never existed, weren’t held on the stated year, or were phrased vaguely enough that they could have referred to several different contests.

A reader familiar with the French music scene in the twentieth century would have found Foison’s credentials implausible. One with even basic common sense would have realized he sounded too good to be true. If he could be jet-setting across Europe to work with the world’s great orchestras, why was he teaching piano in suburban Atlanta? “Everybody was surprised about his CV, wondering why he was hanging around in the middle of nowhere in Georgia, conducting the orchestra there and not one of the international giants,” Broeker told me. “And he always said he wanted to do something for the amateurs, for the music, for the area and for the community.”

Still, until the Desenclos Requiem incident, no one questioned Foison, so dazzled were they by his credentials, which helped him win genuine prizes and gigs. In 1994, he won the American Society of Composers, Artists and Publishers’ “ASCAP-Plus standard award,” which was given solely on the basis of a composer’s résumé, no actual artistic creation—let alone talent, skill, or originality—required. (The monetary prize was negligible, however.) The next year, Foison was appointed music director of the Rome Symphony Orchestra in Georgia “by a search committee that had never heard him conduct but was dazzled by his résumé,” as the Atlanta Journal-Constitutionreported in 2001. But Bayne Dobbins, the orchestra’s principal horn, later told the same paper that Foison lacked the most basic conducting skills: “He was unable to control our tempo or cue us. Every concert was a disaster.” (I wasn’t immune to lazy assumptions either: the first time I skimmed through Broeker’s book, I assumed Foison had been music director in the Eternal City.) In 1998, Foison and the Rome Symphony Orchestra parted ways.

When Broeker got in touch with the orchestra for his book, a representative told him, “We respectfully request that you do not contact us in the future regarding T. Foison.”

Of the fifty-one pieces Foison claimed to have written, Broeker identified sixteen plagiarized works, twenty-two that “likely never existed,” and thirteen—some of whose performances were announced in newspapers—about which little else is known. Those sixteen forgeries were unsubtle. Most of the time, Foison invented a new title, whited out the name of the original composer, drew his own signature, and handed in the score. (Sometimes he even left the plate number, or publisher’s serial number, intact, making the original work easy to identify.) Broeker calls this the “Foison technique.”

Foison’s aesthetic approach—the curation of the music he was stealing—was not without a whiff of genius. The sixteen pieces Foison demonstrably pilfered were almost all by obscure French composers, written between 1934 and 1992. Desenclos, Gallois-Montbrun, Jacques Chailley, and Pierre Sancan all actually studied at the Conservatoire National Supérieur, and their pieces demonstrate the stolid craftsmanship and profound aesthetic conservatism associated with the institution, especially before the upheavals of May 1968.

These pieces have in common a hear-no-evil approach to the twentieth century, their (real) composers composing as if the modernist developments pioneered by Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg at the fin de siècle never happened. The Foison (Desenclos) “Messe de Requiem” (1963) features counterpoint that would have been basic in the Middle Ages. The Foison (Gallois-Montbrun) “Symphonie concertante” for violin and orchestra (1949) overflows with dated High Romantic lyricism. The Foison (Chailley) “Missa Solemnis” (1947) resolves its dissonances properly, like a well-behaved Conservatoire student anxious about passing his examinations; the tidy, indifferent jazziness of the Foison (Sancan) Piano Concerto (1957) disdains the anarchic spirit of the bebop music of the time. Foison chose to plagiarize works from which the innovations of the best twentieth-century classical music were distinctly absent.

Forgettable as this music is, its intentional ignorance of modernism was almost certainly a major component of Foison’s strategy. Many classical music lovers still reject aesthetic developments made over a century ago: they object to some contemporary music’s excoriation of bourgeois concert rituals and dismiss even more of it as just plain ugly. Foison’s fake biography claimed just enough modernist credentials—composition with Messiaen, conducting with Boulez—to shield him from accusations of dilettantism, while his fake compositions offered the comforting illusion of an unbroken tradition, where art’s role is akin to that of a Hallmark card. “In music, there is always a message, a spirituality,” Foison wrote in the program note for the Capitol Hill Chorale performance. “It’s a gift just to be alive. The Requiem Mass, as all Requiems, is written as a reminder to people who take everything for granted.” (Foison didn’t respond to my emails or phone calls.)

So Foison knew his target audience well. But besides easy familiarity with the world of classical music, it remains unclear why the Frenchman, with his obvious personal charm and talent for fakery, chose to act in the field. Performers and composers are constantly contending with pinched purses; they are subject to the whims of philistine philanthropists or, in the best-case scenario, governments with opaque political priorities. Foison earned $4,000 for his plagiarized Violin Concerto, which might sound like a lot until you think about the time it takes to compose an original thirty-minute work for soloist and orchestra: easily years. A man with Foison’s looks, accent, charm, and chutzpah could have gotten rich in America in any number of ways.

Broeker speculates that Foison’s primary motive was adulation. Foison’s personality “brought him into places where he could shine more, I think, than what he was really capable of as a musician,” Broeker told me. As a comparison, he noted the “reverence” directed at Teodor Currentzis, the charismatic music director of the SWR Symphonieorchester in Stuttgart. (Currentzis, though, actually is an excellent musician.) “I can imagine that as a rising young composer and conductor, you get caught up in it, and that you obviously like it,” Broeker said of Foison. “And I think that appealed to him.” Maybe Foison wanted lawyers and government types to line up after the concert for his autograph, to sign his name on a score with a dramatic flourish. His forgeries were both easier and perhaps more rewarding than making real new art.

Foison’s grift had the unintended consequence of revealing exactly how classical music ennobles bullshit, encasing turds in gold that glitters without masking the stench. The major orchestras, conductors, and institutions whose endorsement Foison claimed didn’t fall for his scam—but they did invent the cycle that led to his rise. Once an artist has enough impressive names on their résumé, industry leaders often stop listening to the actual music. Among the results are Mason Bates’s millimeter-deep opera about Steve Jobs, premiered at the well-regarded Santa Fe Opera and recorded for the prestigious boutique label Pentatone; a pretentiously banal Sonata for Violin and Piano “September 11” by Lera Auerbach, whose work has been performed by some of the best soloists alive, and who has been a Davos World Economic Forum Cultural Leader since 2014; and the Bach Prize for J?rg Widmann, that ubiquitous, critically acclaimed purveyor of ugly fluff who works with no less an ensemble than the Berlin Philharmonic. A prominent German artistic director for classical music institutions once admitted to me that he only listened to contemporary music if he already knew the composer personally, or if they came recommended by someone he knew. He likely would have been impressed by Foison.

Though two decades old, Foison’s brief success reveals the rot at the heart of the classical music industry, where name-dropping passes as a substitute for ability; where many audiences would rather be coddled than challenged; and where a résumé is grounds for utter suspension of disbelief. And where people hear what they want to hear: because clues to what Foison was up to were everywhere. In Paris, Rome, Atlanta, and Waleska, Georgia, where a stage work attributed to Foison was performed in 1995. The title? “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”