“Making his first public statement since admitting last week that a ghostwriter had written his best-known compositions, the man once hailed as Japan’s deaf musical genius said Wednesday that he had also at least partly faked his own hearing loss,” writes Martin Fackler in Wednesday’s (2/12) New York Times. Mamoru Samuragochi “said in an eight-page handwritten statement released by his lawyers that he had regained some of his hearing three years ago.… Samuragochi, 50, had risen to classical music stardom in Japan by presenting himself as a deaf composer who could feel the music in his heart, even though he could not hear it. … Last week … he confessed that someone else had been secretly writing his pieces for the past 18 years,” Takashi Niigaki, 43, a lecturer at a music college. “In his autobiography, Mr. Samuragochi said he had lost all hearing in both ears at age 35 because of a degenerative condition. In his statement on Wednesday, Mr. Samuragochi said his hearing remained partly impaired..… Samuragochi is known in Japan for the Symphony No. 1 ‘Hiroshima,’ about the atomic bombing, and Sonatina for Violin, which the Japanese figure skater Daisuke Takahashi plans to use at the Sochi Olympics.”
Posted February 12, 2014
