The Hunt That Caught the Wrong Man

Last time, we told you that you could miss track five — that it slips past in under two minutes, caught between Spielberg’s film and Kreisler’s hunting horns.

This is the story of the horns.

Track six doesn’t slip past anything. It arrives the way a hunt arrives: horn calls first, ringing across open country, then the gallop. For two minutes a violin pretends, with total commitment, to be something it is not — a hunting horn in E-flat major. Players love it and fear it a little; it is written so cleanly, so much in the open, that it can be played with no piano at all. Four strings, one hunt, nowhere to hide.

Now look at the credit on the album, because every word of it is working: La chasse. Caprice “by Jean-Baptiste Cartier.”

Jean-Baptiste Cartier did not write a note of it.

The piece appeared in 1911, published by Schott of Mainz, presented as the rediscovered work of an eighteenth-century French master — one of the “classical manuscripts” Fritz Kreisler claimed to have found in the library of an old European monastery. Fifty-three of them, he once told a journalist. Forty-eight, he added helpfully, were gems. For a generation, audiences heard La chasse as a dispatch from the age of powdered wigs. Then, in February 1935, Kreisler admitted he had written it himself — it, and practically the whole monastery.

We have told that story already: the confession, the front pages, the one furious critic and the many audiences who found they simply didn’t care. If you missed it, it’s here — The Violinist Who Invented His Own Masters — and it is one of the best true stories music owns. Go. We’ll wait.

• • •

But there is a man that story never gets around to. The name inside the quotation marks. The one participant in the whole affair who was never asked.

He was real — that’s the first thing to say, since Kreisler invented so much. Born in Avignon in 1765, sent to Paris at eighteen, he studied with Viotti — the most influential violinist alive — and Viotti opened the door to court. Until the Revolution ended that world, Cartier’s post was at Versailles, as accompanist to Marie-Antoinette.

Then the world burned down, and Cartier — this is the remarkable part — didn’t burn with it. From 1791 he played in the orchestra of the Paris Opéra. Later he served the chapels of Napoleon, of Louis XVIII, of Charles X. Republic, Empire, Restoration: whoever ruled France needed music, and somehow it kept being Cartier on the violin. He died in Paris in 1841, having outlasted every single régime he played for.

But survival is not why his name was still worth borrowing seventy years later. A book is.

In 1798, in a Paris still busy demolishing its own past, Cartier published L’Art du violon — not a method, though it opens like one, but a rescue operation: an enormous anthology of the violin’s first two centuries, sonatas by the Italian, French and German masters, gathered and engraved at the precise moment history was throwing that world away. Grove’s Dictionary would later call it “a practical history of violin-literature in the 17th and 18th centuries.” Call it what it was: Cartier was the librarian of the violin.

One manuscript inside it makes the case better than any praise. Printed complete in L’Art du violon, for the first time anywhere, is Tartini’s Devil’s Trill — the sonata the old master said the Devil played to him in a dream, more beautiful than anything he could manage awake. Tartini never published it in his lifetime. It reached Cartier through the violinist Baillot, and Cartier — noting how rare the thing was — set it in print and handed the most famous legend the violin owns to every generation since.

So much for the life’s work. Now the cruelty.

His own music — sonatas, études, duos, two operas and two symphonies left in manuscript — sank without a ripple. The same Grove’s Dictionary that praises his anthology dismisses his compositions in five flat words: they “are of no importance.” He wrote a history of violin playing, his second great act of preservation; it was never published, and it is lost. The man who saved everyone else’s pages could not get his own to survive.

And then, seventy years after his death, his name reappears on concert programmes across the world — attached to a sparkling two-minute caprice that audiences adored on sight.

You already know the catch. He never wrote it. The one piece “by Jean-Baptiste Cartier” the world would actually come to hear is by Fritz Kreisler.

And this is the strangest irony this series has met so far. Cartier spent his life hunting manuscripts — through libraries and private collections and other men’s memories — chasing down the real work of dead masters so that it would not vanish. And a century on, a manuscript came hunting him: a counterfeit one, wearing his name, written by a Viennese charmer who was born thirty-four years after he died.

Did Kreisler know what he was doing when he picked that particular name — signing a fake discovery with the name of music’s great discoverer of manuscripts? No document says so; he never explained his choices, and we won’t invent an explanation for him. We only note that of all the names on all the title pages in L’Art du violon, the forger reached past every composer Cartier had rescued — and took the rescuer.

Kreisler owned up in February 1935, and La chasse did what all his forgeries did: it shrugged, changed its label, and kept getting played. It has never left the repertoire — Itzhak Perlman, among many others, recorded it under Kreisler’s name. The piece turned out not to need the eighteenth century at all.

Which brings us to the credit David Garrett’s album prints, the one we started with: Caprice “by Jean-Baptiste Cartier.” Look at it again. It would have been easy to drop the dead Frenchman altogether — the attribution has been void for ninety years. Instead the name stays, held up in quotation marks: honest about the forgery, faithful to the joke, and — whether anyone planned it or not — the only place in a modern record shop where Jean-Baptiste Cartier still gets top billing.

• • •

This series keeps circling one question: what actually carries music past the people who made it? Track four’s answer was a melody handed from teacher to student, kept alive by love. Track five’s was an ache that outlived both the man who wrote it down and the woman whose letters got no reply. Track six may have the strangest answer yet: sometimes immortality doesn’t even check the name on the door.

There are two ways to outlive yourself in music. Write something the world cannot put down. Or spend your life saving what others wrote — and have a stranger, seventy years after your funeral, repay you in counterfeit coin that turns out to be gold.

Cartier got the second. The fake that borrowed his name is itself over a century old now, and audiences still sit up when the horns begin. Give it another hundred years and someone may yet “rediscover” it in a monastery, and the whole beautiful lie can start again.

The hunt goes on. It always finds somebody.

Immortal — David Garrett for Deutsche Grammophon — arrives 9 October 2026: 20 tracks in the standard edition, 25 in the deluxe, on digital, CD and vinyl, with pre-orders open now on Deutsche Grammophon. One track at a time, we keep counting the album in.

Sources & notes: publication (Schott, Mainz, 1911), key and the February 1935 acknowledgment from the first edition via IMSLP; the “Classical Manuscript No 16” numbering, the monastery story and the 1935 exposure from Hyperion’s programme notes to Kreisler: Violin Music; Cartier’s biography from the Larousse Dictionnaire de la musique; L’Art du violon and the verdicts on his own music from Grove’s Dictionary (1st edition); the Devil’s Trill publication history from Hyperion’s notes to Tartini: The Devil’s Trill. Album credit from Deutsche Grammophon. Why Kreisler chose Cartier’s name is documented nowhere; the piece says so.