Internationally renowned ‘Japanese Beethoven’ deaf composer of Symphony No. 1 Hiroshima not deaf.
Also not composer.
But did come from Hiroshima.
Two out of three ain’t bad.
He was celebrated as a prolific musical genius whose compositions appeared everywhere from popular video games to the competition routine of a top figure skater in the upcoming Sochi Olympics. His deafness won him praise as Japan’s digital-age Beethoven.
But on Thursday, Japan reacted with remorse, outrage, and even the rare threat of a lawsuit after the composer, Mamoru Samuragochi, 50, admitted that he had hired a ghostwriter since the 1990s to write most of his music. The anger turned to disbelief when the ghostwriter himself came forward to accuse Mr Samuragochi of faking his deafness, apparently to win public sympathy.
The scandal began on Wednesday, when Mr Samuragochi suddenly confessed that someone else had written his most famous works. These include Symphony No. 1 Hiroshima, about the 1945 atomic bombing of his home city, which became a classical music hit in Japan; the theme music for the video games Resident Evil and Onimusha; and Sonatina for Violin, which the Japanese Olympic figure skater Daisuke Takahashi is scheduled to use in his short program performance at the Winter Games in Sochi.
“Samuragochi is deeply sorry as he has betrayed fans and disappointed others,” said the written confession, released by Mr Samuragochi’s lawyer. “He knows he could not possibly make any excuse for what he has done.”
The reason for this sudden display of repentance seemed to become clear on Thursday when the ghostwriter revealed himself to be Takashi Niigaki, 43, a hitherto largely unknown part-time lecturer at a prestigious music college in Tokyo. Mr Niigaki said he had written more than 20 songs for Mr Samuragochi since 1996, for which he received the equivalent of about $US70,000 ($78,000).
He said he felt so guilty about the deception that he had threatened to go public in the past, but Mr Samuragochi begged him not to. He said he finally could not take it anymore when he learned one of his songs would be used by the Olympic skater. He told his story to a weekly tabloid, which went on sale on Thursday.
“He told me that if I didn’t write songs for him, he’d commit suicide,” Mr Niigaki told a crowded news conference. “But I could not bear the thought of skater Takahashi being seen by the world as a co-conspirator in our crime.”
Perhaps just as shocking was Mr Niigaki’s allegation that Mr Samuragochi was never deaf. Mr Niigaki said that he had regular conversations with Mr Samuragochi, who listened to and commented on his compositions. Mr Niigaki said the deafness was just “an act that he was performing to the outside world".
Repeated calls and faxes to Mr Samuragochi’s lawyers after Mr Niigaki’s news conference were not answered.
The scandal has brought an abrupt fall from grace for Mr Samuragochi, a man who looked the part of a modern-day composer with his long hair, stylish dark suits and ever-present sunglasses.
Much of Mr Samuragochi’s appeal seemed to lie in his appropriately inspiring life story. He presented himself as someone who overcame a physical disability, the loss of almost all of his hearing at age 35 because of a degenerative condition, to achieve his dream. In a 2007 autobiography entitled Symphony No. 1, Mr Samuragochi described himself as the son of an atomic bomb survivor and as a musical prodigy who could play Beethoven and Bach on the piano by age 10.
Mr Samuragochi seemed to reach the height of his popularity last year, when Japan’s public broadcaster, NHK, aired a documentary entitled Melody of the Soul: The Composer Who Lost His Hearing that followed him as he met survivors of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in northern Japan.
He regularly appeared in many major media, including Time magazine, which quoted him in a 2001 interview as saying that the loss of hearing turned out to be “a gift from God”.
“I listen to myself,” he told the magazine. “If you trust your inner sense of sound, you create something that is truer. It is like communicating from the heart.”
The disclosure of his deception brought a wave of apologies by major Japanese news media, which expressed regret for failing to uncover Mr Samuragochi’s deceit.
“We want him to explain his behaviour,” said the Asahi Shimbun, Japan’s second-biggest-selling newspaper, in a mea culpa published on Thursday, “but the media must also consider our own tendency to fall for tear-jerking stories”.
The scandal also shook Japan’s struggling music industry, for whom Mr Samuragochi had offered a rare respite from declining sales of classical CDs. The Hiroshima symphony sold 180,000 copies in a classical music market where sales of 10,000 constitute a hit.
The music company Nippon Columbia said in a statement that it was “appalled and deeply indignant,” and would stop selling his CDs. Orchestras across Japan said they were cancelling concerts that featured Mr Samuragochi’s music. One, the Kyushu Symphony Orchestra, said it was considering a lawsuit to retrieve lost ticket sales, an extreme expression of anger in nonlitigious Japan.
The mayor of Hiroshima also threatened to strip Mr Samuragochi of a “citizen’s award” that the city had given him for promoting the city’s message of opposing nuclear weapons.
“We never imagined this,” the mayor, Kazumi Matsui, was quoted as telling the daily Yomiuri Shimbun. “We are aghast.”
http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/music/famous-deaf-composer-mamoru-samuragochi-neither-a-composer-nor-deaf-20140207-hvbi6.html?skin=text-only
Symphony No 1 Hiroshima: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6ffWlF9NBo
I prefer Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. Lots of cannon fire.
Only one bang possible in anything about Hiroshima.