Buggerino

By now, only a few cave-dwellers and home-schooled children are unfamiliar with the intricate hoax created by Dapper Clementine. This enterprising grad student created a scandal with his senior thesis Grignotti and the "Buggeroni" BDGDB Motive, the point of which was to prove that the B-D-G-D-B sequence of Paolo Grignotti's "Buggeroni" (1789) was a reference to the ‘‘B’’iberoni, ‘‘D’’iamanta, ‘‘G’’rignotti love triangle.

Dapper toyed around with these thoughts for a few months before sitting down to write, inventing “Buggeroni” out of whole cloth to illustrate his belief that Grignotti often left clues in his work regarding his tumultuous private affairs. Rather pleased with the result, he became determined to submit this essay as his senior thesis. Knowing that his advisors would be well aware that there was no “Buggeroni”, he worked quickly to establish the back story. Taking advantage of his position in the music-library, it was a fairly simple matter to change some old records, alter a few old catalogues.

As the story goes, his professors, befuddled that they’d never heard of the piece and ashamed that they couldn’t understand why they were unable to locate a recording or a score of the composition, were at first dubious and launched a rather serious quest. Dapper managed to stay one step ahead of them, embedding more and more references to the “Buggeroni”, visiting area libraries with forged periodical citations, crafting new indices in card catalogues, and, eventually, slipping critical appraisals of “Buggeroni” into various periodicals and newspapers of yore. The meticulous work he applied to this series of forgeries is legendary and far too complex to detail here. That a young student could have fooled so many experts struck many as unbelievable, but the fact that it is all true is a testament to the wicked genius of this merry young counterfeiter.

And then he was caught. Not by his professors, although many were on the verge of declaring that Clementine was a fraud. No; his efforts had drawn the attention of a more infamous sort: the Framers. Impressed. They made him an offer, and Clementine found himself employed, allegedy as a disinformation specialist.

In 1999, a recording of “Buggerino” emerged. Spectacularly rendered, it is Grinottian to the core. Dapper said tts origins, its author and its source were all unknown.

Even the casual observer will note an interesting discrepancy. Dapper was said to have invented a piece called "Buggeroni." The recording which has surfaced, however, is called "Buggerino." The jacket of the album, plus the announcement of the piece by the conductor confirm that this is not a typographical error. The piece, by all rights is indeed "Buggerino."

What then, are we to make of this recording? A recent spate of controversial literature upends a decades worth of accepted facts. This new research, especially with documents retrieved from impregnable repositories, indicates that Buggeroni was in fact a real piece, composed by Grignotti in 1789.

The story of the hoax then, is itself a hoax. Clementine claimed to have discovered a new piece that was in fact obscure, but still well-documented. Why he would claim to have discovered the piece has been written off by many as self-aggrandizement; any serious Grignotti scholar, however would know of "Buggerino", which appears as "Buggeroni" in more than one important folio. Although the actual title preferred by Grignotti has been hotly debated, Grignotti's own letters make reference the work by both names, with no indication there were two separate pieces; they are one and the same. Clementine invented nothing. His later claims to the contrary are untrue, and his senior thesis a groundbreaking work which many specualate he later tried to pass off as a hoax in order to somehow hinder efforts by reader to use his information to decode messages encrypted in this and other operas directed towards La Ligue du Masque Cancéreux.

The recording, moreover, is of easily verifiable origin as the jacket itself is legitimate. The recording was made in 1977 by the Plüntz Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Josef Liebenfeld.

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