In 2018, the American shoe chain Payless ShoeSource took over a former Armani boutique, filled it with golden mannequins and glass shelving, and stocked it with shoes that normally sold for $40 or less. They invented an Italian-sounding luxury brand, ‘Palessi’, complete with a website and Instagram account, and invited fashion influencers to the grand opening. One shopper called a stiletto heel ‘elegant, sophisticated’. Another praised the ‘high-quality’ material of a shoe. Customers paid as much as $600 for shoes they could have bought at the mall for a fraction of the price. When Payless revealed the trick, the influencers were stunned. The shoes hadn’t changed. Only the name had.
I think about that experiment often, because I’ve studied a case where the same trick played out – not over an evening, but over two and a half centuries. And not with shoes, but with a flute concerto.
In the cramped back rooms of 18th-century Viennese music shops, copyists reproduced concertos by hand for their customers – typically, wealthy amateur musicians who played at home or at private gatherings. In this environment, speed mattered more than accuracy. And when a copyist wanted to shift a few extra copies, there was a simple trick: replace the actual composer’s name with a more marketable one.
From the late 1750s and through the 1760s, the composer Leopold Hofmann became a staple of the Viennese musical establishment. His prolific output and important roles – the musical director at St Peter’s Church (Peterskirche) and keyboard instructor to the Imperial family – made his name a mark of quality. However, the 1770s saw the beginning of the meteoric rise of Joseph Haydn, whose reputation was built on the emotional intensity and individualistic flair of his compositions. A copyist savvy to changing tastes might realise that, while a concerto by Hofmann was a safe bet, the same work sold under the name of the revolutionary Haydn offered an edge that the contemporary amateur hungered for.
Sometime around 1771, a copyist mislabelled the manuscript of a flute concerto in D major. The work was by Hofmann. But the name that was written on the manuscript was ‘Haӱdn’. That same year, the error appeared in a supplement of the Breitkopf Catalogue. Although there were subsequent efforts to correct the record, the Haydn label stuck – for centuries. In the 20th century, by which time Haydn was much more celebrated than Hofmann, various recordings and sheet-music editions of the flute concerto came out under Haydn’s name. Emmanuel Pahud made a recording for EMI in 1998, and it’s still listed under Haydn on streaming platforms.
Then something curious happened. The publication of a new sheet-music edition in 2001 brought the concerto – now, correctly, under Hofmann’s name – into wider circulation, and the misattribution became increasingly difficult to sustain. Flautists who had grown up performing the beloved concerto as Haydn began to encounter it as Hofmann. As the truth spread, the work’s prominence in teaching and performance repertoire appears to have faded.
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