This obituary of the composer Zalvader Ipako has got to be an April Fool’s joke, according to the New Yorker’s Alex Ross. (Especially since there are no previous Google results for him.) It’s enjoyable on a highbrow level.

Born in 1903, in Valletta, he began his musical career almost a century ago, when—so the story goes—at the age of seven he was heard by a priest as he sang folksongs to draw customers to the sardines he was selling at the quayside.

…

He worked his way into the theatre when he knew Diaghilev’s company was rehearsing, came to the notice of the great impresario, and in 1922 gained a commission to write a ballet of his own. Diaghilev appears to have intended a satirical-sentimental treatment of the Russian Revolution—the title was to be Lenine!—for which Ipako was to create an orchestral score out of songs by Brahms.

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After his break with Thibaud, Ipako withdrew more and more into himself. From this point the chronology becomes hazy, but it was probably in 1928 or 1929 that he embarked on what would be the major endeavour of his Paris years, though probably not completed until after he had gone back to Valletta on the outbreak of war: his Tristan Mass. Far more ambitious than the Tosca violin concerto in every way, this was a setting for eight voices (it is not clear whether Ipako intended eight soloists, or four soloists with a four-part chorus, or an eight-part chorus), seemingly prompted by the conviction that Wagner’s music could expand—had to expand—into harmonic realms the original composer did not begin to envisage.

Ipako’s Tristan Mass starts exactly as Wagner’s opera does, but with the opening phrase setting the words ‘Kyrie eleison’. From there it gradually unfolds into its own universe while maintaining, all the time, its connection with Wagner’s material. The entire ‘Credo’ is built as an eight-part fugue lasting forty minutes, with complex mensuration procedures used with almost incredible skill to preserve the intervallic outlines of the themes within the consistently developing harmony. No less remarkable is the second ‘Agnus Dei’, in just two parts: a coloratura soprano line that stays always above the treble staff and goes up as high as an A in altissimo, and a basso profundo part that, conversely, lies always below the bass staff. These two voices, as they interlock and counter each other, imply a great abundance of harmonic movement in the middle of the texture—of harmonic movement that is not actually heard.

Too bad it’s not real. I’d love to hear it.