Composing Authority in Six Forged ‘‘Haydn’’ Sonatas FREDERICK REECE On the morning of 14 December 1993 musi- cologist H. C. Robbins Landon stood before a crowded London press conference and announced that six Haydn keyboard sonatas (Hob. XVI:2a–e and 2g) had been rediscovered after more than two hundred years (fig. 1). 1 The response was electric: articles featuring celebratory soundbites from musicologists sprang up overnight in international news outlets, Harvard University scheduled a lecture recital for the following February, and the BBC moved to secure the first radio broadcast of the sonatas. Earlier that winter Landon had received an unusual package from Vienna. Sent by his colleague Eva Badura-Skoda, it contained a bulky sixty-five-page photocopy of what appeared to be a handwritten copyist’s manuscript of the six Haydn scores along with a series of tapes. 2 The Research undertaken for this project was generously supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (Deutscher Akade- mischer Austauschdienst) and by the Richard F. French Fellowship from the Harvard University Department of Music. I am grateful to Winfried Michel, Armin Raab, and Stephen Roe for their willing- ness to correspond with me during the preparation of this article. I also wish to thank those who read and provided feedback on the text before its publication, including Alexander Rehding, Su- zannah Clark, Emily Dolan, Christopher Hasty, Kay Kaufman Shelemay, W. Dean Sutcliffe, Michael Uy, and the anonymous re- viewers for this journal. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. 1 An article on the front page of the Times of London had already alerted the public that morning. Barry Millington, ‘‘Lost Haydn Sonatas Found in Germany,’’ Times (Lon- don), 14 December 1993, 1, 29. 2 Scores of the six sonatas have since been published. Joseph Haydn, Sechs Sonaten fu ¨r Klavier, edited and completed by Winfried Michel (Winterthur: Amadeus Verlag, BP 2557, 1995). 104 The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 35, Issue 1, pp. 104–143, ISSN 0277-9269, electronic ISSN 1533-8347.  2018 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permis- sions web page, www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/JM.2018.35.1.104