| In the summer of 2006, an English piano teacher named Joyce Hatto died at the age of seventy-seven, following a long battle with cancer and a late-in-life stint as a musical celebrity. The Independent lauded Hatto as a “national treasure,” celebrating “the renaissance of her very last years” and crediting her rise from obscurity in part to the Internet. Not to be outdone, the Guardian hailed her as “one of the greatest pianists Britain has ever produced,” a long-neglected master who left behind recordings “equalled by few pianists in history.” By the following year, Hatto’s reputation had largely unravelled. Strange revelations emerged about the pianist’s husband, William Barrington-Coupe, a longtime record-label employee. In a technological twist, the digital advances that helped lift Hatto to renown were now driving her downfall, leaving certain critics in the wreckage as collateral damage. What did the pianist know, and when did she know it? Was she even the culprit? “The alchemy that transformed Joyce Hatto,” The New Yorker’s Mark Singer observed, “was, in its twisted way, a tour de force, a dazzling work of art, literally the performance of a lifetime.” | 
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