Il Duce on one of his better days. (Photograph from Wikipedia.)

One of the hazards of ‘tidying up’ in a household as chaotic as ours is that one chances upon interesting articles that were overlooked when the newspaper or periodical first arrived. This morning, for example, I happened upon this article by Amos Elon in the New York Review of Books of February 23, 2006 which was sitting atop a duvet box in my bedroom. It’s a review of Sergio Luzzatto’s book The Body of Il Duce: Mussolini’s corpse and the Fortunes of Italy and the full text, alas, resides behind the NYRB’s paywall. Needless to say, I began to read…

Eleven days before the end of the war, Mussolini (motto: “If I advance, follow me; if I withdraw, kill me”), disguised in a German military overcoat and a helmet that covered most of his face, was caught by Italian partisans. He had left his wife and kids to face the music and was en route to Switzerland with his mistress and booty valued at $2 billion in today’s money. The partisan commander, Walter Audisio, obviously took Il Duce’s motto seriously and shot him — and his mistress, Claretta Petacci — dead outside a villa on Lake Como. This is what happened next:

On the following morning, Audisio’s men took the bodies to Milan, which had just been liberated, and threw them on the Piazzale Loreto. The choice of place was deliberate. A few days before, on this same piazza, the Nazis had dealt similarly with the bodies of partisans they had killed. The bodies of Mussolini and Pettaci were trampled, mutilated, and urinated upon by men and women. Some were armed and fired into the corpses. A woman tried to shatter the Duce’s skull with a hammer. Then Mussolini and Pettaci were hung head down from the roof of a gas station, their hands spread out in a gesture of total surrender, giving the bodies the appearance of inverted crucifixes. [Photograph here, if you’re interested.] During the ensuing autopsy, the morgue door was left open, allowing all comers to walk past and watch nurses play ball with Mussolini’s liver. This horrific episode was satisfying to many at the time and shocking to others. Edmund Wilson, arriving in Milan a few weeks later, wrote in his diary that over the entire city hung the stink of this defilement: “Italians would stop you in the bars and show you photographs they had taken of it.”

Luzzatto’s book chronicles what later happened to Mussolini’s body and reveals that his grave in Predappio (where his remains were eventually interred) still attracts 100,000 visitors a year, many of them reverential.

Hmmm… Something like this would have happened to our old friend, Saddam Hussein, if the Americans had not kept him in custody.

Hmmm… Funny what one finds on the Web. Here’s Twitter, which describes itself as “A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing? Answer on your phone, IM, or right here on the web!”

Lovely New York Times piece by Denis Dutton on the Joyce Hatto story…

We normally think of prodigies as children who exhibit some kind of miraculous ability in music. Joyce Hatto became something unheard of in the annals of classical music: a prodigy of old age — the very latest of late bloomers, “the greatest living pianist that almost no one has heard of,” as the critic Richard Dyer put it for himself and many other piano aficionados in The Boston Globe.

Little wonder that when she at last succumbed to her cancer last year at age 77 — recording Beethoven’s Sonata No. 26, “Les Adieux,” from a wheelchair in her last days — The Guardian called her “one of the greatest pianists Britain has ever produced.” Nice touch, that, playing Beethoven’s farewell sonata from a wheelchair. It went along with her image in the press as an indomitable spirit with a charming personality — always ready with a quote from Shakespeare, Arthur Rubinstein or Muhammad Ali. She also had a clear vision of the mission of musical interpreters, telling The Boston Globe: “Our job is to communicate the spiritual content of life as it is presented in the music. Nothing belongs to us; all you can do is pass it along.”

Now it has become brutally clear that “passing along” is exactly what she was up to. Earlier this month, a reader of the British music magazine Gramophone told one of its critics, Jed Distler, that something odd happened when he slid Ms. Hatto’s CD of Liszt’s “Transcendental Études” into his computer. His iTunes library, linked to a catalogue of about four million CDs, immediately identified it as a recording by the Hungarian pianist Laszlo Simon. Mr. Distler then listened to both recordings, and found them identical.

Since then, analysis by professional sound engineers and piano enthusiasts across the globe has pushed toward the same conclusion: the entire Joyce Hatto oeuvre recorded after 1989 appears to be stolen from the CDs of other pianists. It is a scandal unparalleled in the annals of classical music…

At one level, this saga invites a sanctimonious response. I first came upon the story here, a site which enabled one to listen to a Hatto recording on the left channel of my stereo while hearing the ripped-off version in the right-hand channel. But I also felt pity for Hatto’s husband, whose original motive seems to have been compassionate rather than malicious. “Joyce was beginning to find playing very painful and making involuntary noises that would be too distressing for the listeners to hear,” he wrote in a letter obtained by the classical music magazine Gramophone and quoted in a Guardian report.

On a wider canvas, the iTunes aspect of the Hatto story highlights how difficult it is becoming to plagiarise. On the one hand, digital technology makes it easy to make perfect copies; on the other hand, pattern-matching technology makes it easy to spot the copying.