Program for the annual Beethoven Center Open House and Birthday Bash, December 18, 2004

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The program for the birthday bash will feature a talk by Dan Leeson of Los Altos. Leeson is an officer of the Mozart Society of America as well as that organization's treasurer. He is also the author of two recently published books, one of which he will discuss in some detail for the meeting. That book (The Mozart Forgeries, available on-line from both Amazon and Barnes & Noble), is not musicology but a novel. Leeson wrote it to create an interesting and entirely fictitious music story, but one that is technically accurate. The issues he weaves into the tale constitute the same problem that any forger would face were an allegedly-authentic manuscript be offered for public auction. The book is about the attempt of two men to forge the manuscripts of two well-known Mozart compositions whose autographs have been lost since 1799, the clarinet concerto, K. 622, and the clarinet quintet, K. 581. Their suggested selling price is $20,000,000.

In addition to reading a short chapter from the book, Leeson will the speak about the problems of how one creates handmade manuscript paper that accurately passes for 18th century mold-made paper of Italian origin bought by Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert. Any such document presented for public sale would undergo substantial scrutiny. Scholars can generally spot a carelessly prepared forgery quickly and can weed out counterfeits from authentic manuscripts (as was the case with some recently forged Haydn piano sonatas). What about ink, pens, watermarks, and the most interesting and complex problem of all, the individualized manuscript personality -- quite different from handwriting -- found on any page of any composer's holograph? Though Leeson's book deals with these problems for Mozart alone, anyone who would want to forge, for example, a Beethoven manuscript would face the same issues.

Leeson will discuss the origin of the book, why he chose to write it at this time, and how the ideas of such chicanery came to rest in the mind of an otherwise honest man. Following his retirement after a 30-year business career with the IBM Corporation, Leeson taught mathematics at De Anza College for 15 years, and has been a professional performing musician for 53 years, 20 of which were as a performer with the now-defunct San Jose Symphony. He has also played with the San Francisco Opera, the San Diego Symphony, and a number of other orchestras. He is also one of the editors of the 120 volume complete edition of the music of Mozart known as the Neue Mozart Ausgabe, supervised by the Salzburg Mozarteum, and published by Bärenreiter, Kassel, Germany. His musicological papers have appeared in the Mozart Jahrbuch, the International Journal of Musicology, Music and Letters, Eighteenth Century Music, and many other scholarly journals.