On Finishing the Requiem

Works have often been falsely attributed to a composer on the basis of stylistic arguments. These attributions had to be revised in the light of newly discovered sources, a prime example being the Jena Symphony, long thought to be penned by Beethoven. In the 1990s, the sensational discovery of six piano sonatas supposedly by Joseph Haydn was declared as “monumental musicological find”, until it turned out that the ink on the paper was, as it were, not dry. A diverting New York Times article28 addresses how shaky assessments by (historical) musicologists are when it comes to determining a composer’s style by means of musical analysis alone, without other evidence.