My thirties were partially defined by an intriguing summer gig of playing recitals on an Alaskan cruise ship. For a month or two, depending on the year, I'd board the lovable but dumpy SS Universe in Vancouver, head up the Inside Passage, and have what was essentially a paid vacation. It wasn't onerous duty. In fact, it was downright cushy. I was expected to play two recitals a week in the Universe's main lounge. I was guaranteed a single room and modified passenger status. I took my meals in the dining room and was not required to take on any duty beyond my twice-weekly show. As a rule I sprang out of bed at the crack of noon, just in time to pig out at the luncheon buffet, followed by sightseeing if we were in port, or schmoozing while poker-playing and tippling if not.
Given that the Universe cruised for a four-month summer season, I wasn't the only pianist who snagged the gig. Three of us were regulars, as I recall, plus some trial players each summer; some worked out, some didn't. One of my fellow regular pianists had a cheap but effective line worked out for landing the young ladies of the cruise staff into bed. Knowing that said young ladies didn't know jack about classical music, this chap would laboriously hand-copy out a Chopin nocturne, then present it to his target with his passionate assurances that he had been awake for 48 hours nonstop writing this music just for her. He would proceed to play "his" nocturne with appropriately faux-Romantic exaggeration, and if all proceeded according to plan she'd be on her back well before he had reached the final cadence.
Slimy guy, but you have to admire his ingenuity.
Composers have been having a grand old time borrowing, adapting, and just plain stealing each other's music for centuries. The line between borrow and steal is a fine one, to be sure. My personal definition specifies that borrowing implies foreknowledge and permission granted. Therefore I'm not the slightest bit concerned about the recent flap surrounding Osvaldo Golijov's Sidereus, which appears to be an extensive adaptation of a work by another composer, all carried out in the light of full disclosure and cheerful agreement. After all, composers have been writing variations on each other's melodies for centuries, with or without permission. Mozart's cute beginner piano pieces on contemporary opera arias by Duport, Salieri, and others; Beethoven's elevation of a humdrum tune by the humdrum Antonio Diabelli; 18th century pasticcio operas with music from a grab bag of composers. Closer to home, Richard Rodgers borrowed his own hit song Mountain Greenery for the dance scene in "Allegro". John Williams didn't swipe other people's melodies, but there's no denying the similarity between the love theme in "Superman" and the Transfiguration theme in Richard Strauss's Death and Transfiguration.
Some similarities are purely accidental, however. James Whale's droll monster-flick masterpiece The Bride of Frankenstein has as its main theme a three-note figure that is identical to Bali H'ai from Rodgers & Hammerstein's "South Pacific." But Franz Waxman's score dates from the mid-1930s, long before "South Pacific" and a good decade before Rodgers & Hammerstein replaced Rodgers & Hart.
Handel is no doubt the highest-ranking composer to be guilty of downright plagiarism. His list of 'borrowings' is extensive. To be sure, he tended to appropriate music by composers who would never know it had happened, either by virtue of living in far-off lands or by being safely dead. Furthermore, Handel didn't just stuff his appropriations into his scores willy-nilly; most of the time he took a drab original and turned it into something vibrant and wonderful. Thus he has never suffered terribly severe tongue-lashings for his trespasses, and in my opinion, that's just fine and dandy. Handel in his totality is immeasurably grander than any nitpicking about the origins of his materials. I just can't cough up much dudgeon—high or otherwise—over Handel. I'm too busy being awestruck over his accomplishments.
It's possible that no less than Ludwig van Beethoven acquired the dippy bass line that kicks off the magnificent variations of the Eroica finale from a feckless quack entertainer named Daniel Steibelt. History is secure that Beethoven & Steibelt faced off in a piano-playing contest at the home of the Count von Fries, and that Beethoven mopped the floor with his rival. (Not particularly surprising.) History also reports that Beethoven insultingly flipped the cello part to Steibelt's piece upside down, and used the first passage that fell under his gaze as a theme upon which to improvise. But whether that was actually the Eroica theme is less certain. However, as the Italians say, sì non e vero, e ben trovato—loosely translated as "if it ain't true, it oughta be."
Just last week I was reminded of plagiarism's propagandistic power (take that, alliteration lovers) via the Bartók Concerto for Orchestra in a stunning performance from the San Francisco Symphony led by guest conductor Charles Dutoit. The fourth movement documents Bartók's sneering assessment of the Shostakovich Seventh Symphony, at the time soaking the airwaves in the aftermath of the American premiere and the media bling heralding Shostakovich as a fire-helmet-clad Soviet freedom fighter. I'm not altogether sure that Bartók recognized that the marching tune in the first movement of the Shostakovich Seventh is deliberately banal; it has always impressed me as a subtle commentary on the "glory" of war—a message that would require serious softpedalling in those grim and desperate years. I've also wondered if the Concerto for Orchestra would have been better off with Bartók's lampoon excised, with something less sour-grapes-ish as the "Interrupted Intermezzo." To be sure, were that passage to have been edited out of the first draft, several generations of commentators would have been without a handy and reliable blob of material for pre-concert lectures and liner notes. Nor is there anything we can do about the passage now, save travelling back in time and taking a pair of wirecutters to Bartók's radio.
I suppose one could tsk-tsk and wax condemnatory about plagiarism and borrowing and musical theft and all that. But I'll leave that to the fault-finders amongst us. I'd rather just enjoy the music, whoever the heck the author actually was.