The Violinist Who Invented His Own Masters

Vienna, the early 1900s. A young violinist named Fritz Kreisler is building a career, and he has a problem every soloist knows: he wants to fill his programmes with charming short pieces, the kind that send an audience home humming. The trouble is there simply aren’t enough of them — and a programme stacked with his own name, piece after piece, would have looked like vanity.

So Kreisler does something extraordinary. He writes the pieces himself — graceful miniatures in the antique style — and signs them with other names. A “Praeludium and Allegro” becomes the work of Gaetano Pugnani. A “Liebesfreud,” or a tender “Preghiera,” is attributed to Martini, to Couperin, to Vivaldi. And he explains, with a perfectly straight face, that he discovered the manuscripts gathering dust in monasteries and private libraries across Europe.

Audiences adore them. And, crucially, so do the critics — who praise the “newly rediscovered treasures” of the old masters, sometimes in the very same breath as they dismiss Kreisler’s own, openly signed compositions as lightweight. For three decades the deception holds. Conservatories teach the pieces. Scholars write about them. They are recorded, anthologised, beloved.

Then comes February 1935, and Kreisler’s sixtieth birthday.

Olin Downes, the formidable music critic of the New York Times, sends a teasing cable: surely, he jokes, Kreisler himself must be the real author of all these “lost” gems? He expects a denial. Instead, Kreisler cheerfully cables back: yes. All of them. Every last Pugnani and Vivaldi and Couperin had come from his own pen.

The music world split down the middle. In London, the eminent critic Ernest Newman was furious — he had hailed these works as masterpieces, and now felt personally made a fool of. Downes, to his great credit, took it in good humour, conceding that Kreisler “has hoaxed us rather handsomely.”

Kreisler’s own defence was disarmingly simple. The pieces, he pointed out, were exactly as good — or as slight — the day after the revelation as the day before. If a critic had called a “Pugnani” a masterpiece on Monday, what had really changed by Friday, except a name on a page? The value of music, he argued, lives in the music, not in the signature at the top.

• • •

And then there is the violin

Here the story folds neatly back into our own. Because the instrument Kreisler carried through much of this was a Guarneri “del Gesù” — the very name this community gathers under. And its history is almost as improbable as the hoax itself.

The violin Kreisler played, a “del Gesù” from around 1730, had once belonged to one of Napoleon’s generals, Jean-Andoche Junot. When Junot’s ship was captured by British privateers, the instrument was carried off to the little port of Whitehaven — where, the story goes, a local vicar bought it from the sailors for two pounds. From a sailor’s plunder sold for the price of a meal, it passed through hand after hand until, in 1926, it reached Fritz Kreisler. A del Gesù that had survived war, capture and a two-pound sale, now singing in the hands of the man who had quietly fooled the entire concert world.

And there is a tenderness behind the trickster, too. Kreisler had been wounded as a soldier in the First World War, and spent much of his life giving his money away — to war orphans, to refugees, to friends in need. The man who “forged” Vivaldi was, by every account, almost incapable of keeping a fortune for himself.

And the thread runs all the way to David. The “del Gesù” name this community gathers under is no coincidence: in June 2022, at a Paris auction, David Garrett fulfilled what he called a lifelong dream and bought the 1736 “Pasquier” Guarneri “del Gesù” — then founded the “Del Gesù” Club, the annual gathering where owners of these rare violins meet to play and study one another’s instruments. He gives his concerts on the 1716 “Adolf Busch” Stradivari, but the del Gesù is the instrument of his heart. And Kreisler has never left his side: across the years Garrett has returned again and again to “Liebesleid” and “Liebesfreud” — the very encore miniatures Kreisler once slipped into the world under borrowed names. His 2011 album “Legacy” makes that devotion explicit: alongside Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, Garrett gives the second half of the record over to Kreisler — including the “Praeludium and Allegro in the Style of Pugnani,” the very “rediscovered Pugnani” at the heart of this story, and the “Variations on a Theme of Corelli in the Style of Tartini.” From a Whitehaven vicar’s two-pound bargain to a Paris auction room three centuries later, it is the same Cremonese lineage — and, in Garrett’s hands, the same composer — still singing.

A favourite tale from the archive — for everyone who has ever loved a piece without knowing whose name was on it.