In 1935, the violinist Fritz Kreisler finally admitted to something he had hidden for nearly three decades: a string of “long-lost” Baroque miniatures he had been performing under names like Francœur, Pugnani, and Padre Martini — including the Sicilienne and Rigaudon, supposedly discovered “in the style of Francœur” — were entirely his own invention. Confronted with the outcry, Kreisler was unrepentant: “The name changes, the value remains.” It is a slippery, brilliant piece of self-defence, and also an accidental thesis statement. Every piece on tonight’s program asks some version of the same question Kreisler forced into the open: what actually changes when a musician looks back — at a lost era, a folk tradition, a national style, even at their own earlier self — and remakes it for present ears? Is the “value” really untouched by the name, the century, the hand that reshaped it? Across six works spanning four centuries, we hear composers borrowing, forging, arranging, and reimagining, each answering that question differently.

Tartini and the Grief of Dido
Giuseppe Tartini: Violin Sonata in G minor, Op. 1, No. 10 (“Didone abbandonata”)

Tartini published his set of twelve violin sonatas, Op. 1, in Amsterdam in 1734, but the G minor sonata heard tonight likely dates from earlier in his career, around 1731. The nickname “Didone abbandonata” — Dido Abandoned — was not Tartini’s own; it only attached itself to the piece in the nineteenth century, apparently because early audiences heard in its alternately smouldering and turbulent character an echo of Pietro Metastasio’s popular opera libretto about the Carthaginian queen deserted by Aeneas. That story itself was already a layered reimagining: Virgil’s Aeneid had reshaped an older Phoenician legend of Elissa, a queen who died by her own hand to avoid a forced marriage, into a doomed love story serving Rome’s own political mythology — the version of Dido that stuck was already a rewrite of a rewrite.

Structurally, the sonata follows the sonata da chiesa model Tartini inherited from the previous generation, slightly compressed: a slow, cantabile opening movement, followed by two allegros, the second lighter and dance-like, all three sharing the same key and the same repeated binary form. There is no literal program in the music, but the sonata’s mood — anger giving way to lament, tenderness curdling into agitation — has made the Dido title feel inevitable even though it was applied after the fact. It is a case of a later century naming an earlier one’s raw material and, in doing so, changing how it gets heard, without touching a single note.

Two Spanish Songbooks, Refashioned for Violin
Manuel de Falla: Suite populaire espagnole

Falla wrote his Siete canciones populares españolas (Seven Popular Spanish Songs) for voice and piano in 1914–15, shortly after returning to Spain from his formative years in Paris. Most of the songs’ melodies are genuine folk material gathered from across Spain’s regions — Asturian, Aragonese, Andalusian — though the melodies of two of the songs, “Polo” and “Jota,” are Falla’s own inventions dressed in folk clothing. Around 1924–25, the Polish violinist Paul Kochański — a close friend of Falla’s — worked directly with the composer to select six of the seven songs, reorder them, and adapt them for violin and piano, adding idiomatic violin techniques (the famous pizzicato “guitar” strumming in “El Paño Moruno,” for instance) that do not exist in the vocal original. The result, the Suite populaire espagnole, has become far better known in the concert hall than Falla’s own song cycle — a folk melody, filtered through a nationalist composer’s imagination, then filtered again through a violinist’s hands, ending up more famous in its third form than its first or second.

Kreisler’s Confession, in Miniature
Fritz Kreisler: Sicilienne et Rigaudon “in the style of Francœur”

This piece gives tonight’s program its central provocation. Kreisler began his career performing an entire cabinet of “newly discovered” Baroque and early Classical works — supposedly by François Francœur, Gaetano Pugnani, Giovanni Battista Martini, and others — that he had, in fact, composed himself, deliberately imitating eighteenth-century style closely enough to fool critics and colleagues for decades. The Sicilienne and Rigaudon, attributed to “Francœur,” were among the most durable of these; some editions still print them under that misattribution today. When Kreisler finally admitted the deception in 1935, the backlash focused less on the music than on the betrayal of trust from critics who had praised “Francœur’s” originality — Kreisler’s retort, “the name changes, the value remains,” reframed the entire scandal as a question about where musical worth actually resides [web:12]. Heard without the backstory, the piece is a charming, dance-derived diptych in the elegant Baroque manner — a lilting Sicilienne followed by a spirited Rigaudon. Heard with the backstory, it becomes something closer to a magic trick performed twice: once on Kreisler’s original audiences, and again, knowingly, on us.

A Chaconne Without a Confirmed Author
Tomaso Antonio Vitali: Chaconne in G minor

If Kreisler’s forgeries show a musician inventing a false past on purpose, the Vitali Chaconne shows how a false past can simply accumulate through accident and enthusiasm. The piece survives only in a manuscript in the Dresden library, where a copyist scrawled “Parte del Tomaso Vitalino” — “a piece by [the] little Tomaso Vitali” — at the top of the page, an attribution too casual to be considered definitive. Vitali (1663–1745), son of the composer Giovanni Battista Vitali, is otherwise not known to have written anything resembling this work: its harmonic language ranges into remote, almost proto-Romantic keys that have led generations of scholars to suspect it cannot be an authentic product of the early eighteenth century at all. Some have proposed that the piece is actually the work of the nineteenth-century violinist-composer Ferdinand David, who first published it in his 1867 anthology of historical violin music and who had both the technical vocabulary and, some argue, the motive to inflate his own composition with a Baroque pedigree. Whoever wrote it, the Chaconne — a set of continuous variations over a repeating bass pattern — has become one of the most performed “Baroque” showpieces in the violin repertoire, its authorship permanently, perhaps productively, unresolved.

Schnittke’s Old Style, Filtered Through Soviet Cinema
Alfred Schnittke: Suite in the Old Style

Schnittke’s relationship to the past was rarely nostalgic in a simple sense — he called his own technique “polystylism,” the deliberate collision of historical styles within a single piece, and he found some of his freest creative space not in concert works but in film scores, where Soviet censors paid far less attention than they did to music submitted to the Composers’ Union. The Suite in the Old Style began life as the score for the 1965 film The Adventures of a Dentist, in which a set of Baroque-flavoured movements, each scored differently, represented the hero at different stages of his life; in 1972, Schnittke adapted the material into a concert suite for violin and piano (or harpsichord). It borrows the outward shell of a Baroque dance suite but, tellingly, gives us five movements instead of the traditional six: Pastorale, Ballet, Minuet, Fugue, and Pantomime.

The homage is knowing rather than reverent. Sequences run on a beat too long, ornaments land slightly askew, the fugue is not really a fugue in the strict sense, and moments of pure Baroque grace are undercut by dissonances that could not have occurred to an eighteenth-century ear [web:18]. Schnittke described this kind of borrowing plainly: “Sometimes I’m tweaking the listener. And sometimes I’m thinking about earlier music as a beautiful way of writing that has disappeared and will never come back; and in that sense, it has a tragic feeling for me”. That double edge — affection and irony inseparable from each other — makes the Suite the most self-aware “reimagination” on the program: a twentieth-century Soviet composer building a loving, slightly crooked replica of a world he knew he could never actually inhabit.

An English Folksong, Given Wings
Ralph Vaughan Williams: The Lark Ascending

The program closes with a work whose “reimagination” is not of another composer’s music but of language itself — translating a poem into sound. Vaughan Williams began composing The Lark Ascending in 1914, inspired by George Meredith’s 1881 poem of the same name, a 122-line hymn to the skylark’s song written in rhyming couplets. Vaughan Williams headed his score with twelve lines of Meredith’s verse and was reportedly drawn to the poem’s central tension: the skylark’s song is described as a purity of expression that human art can only gesture toward, never equal.

Work was interrupted almost immediately by the outbreak of the First World War — in a strange episode, a boy on the Kent coast spotted Vaughan Williams jotting musical notation on a clifftop and reported him to the police as a suspected German spy taking coded notes. Vaughan Williams served through the war and did not complete the piece, revising it for violin and orchestra until 1920; it received its first documented performance that December, played by Marie Hall, the violinist to whom the work is dedicated. The music draws on the modal, unhurried contours of English folksong without quoting any specific tune, letting the solo violin drift in long, cadenza-like lines that suggest the bird’s flight far more than they depict it literally. Vaughan Williams’s wife Ursula later wrote that in this piece “the violin become[s] both the bird’s song and its flight, being — rather than illustrating — the poem from which the title was taken” [web:20]. It is the gentlest possible answer to the evening’s opening question: sometimes reimagining an older source does not distort or disguise it, but simply lets it be heard differently — closer, perhaps, to what it always was.

Taken together, these six works trace a spectrum of honesty about the act of looking backward — from Tartini’s sonata, retitled by history rather than by its composer, to Kreisler’s calculated deception, to Vitali’s accidental or contested authorship, to Schnittke’s open, ironic pastiche, to Vaughan Williams’s transparent translation of poetry into sound. Kreisler’s line — “the name changes, the value remains” — turns out to be only half true. The name changes constantly across this program. What remains, stubbornly, is the listener’s experience of the music itself, whoever is finally credited with making it.