Mamoru Samuragochi, known as the Japanese Beethoven, is facing a great deal of shame after confessing that he paid another composer to create many of his most iconic works.
Samurogochi rose to prominence in the mid-1990s with compositions that provided the sonic landscape for certain video games like Resident Evil.
His degenerative condition--which would eventually cause his hearing to go completely--gave him the "Japan's Beethoven" moniker. Alas, though, Mamoru's ears are what led him to purchase the works clad in fraud.
If that doesn't get your gut chuckling, here's how Samuragochi described himself in interviews:
"I listen to myself. If you trust your inner sense of sound, you create something that is truer," he said in an interview with TIME magazine in 2001.
"It is like communicating from the heart. Losing my hearing was a gift from God," he harped in another.
His reproachable actions have led many to boycott him and his works, including his Symphony No. 1 tribute to the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima as well as a documentary produced in 2011 that showed the "artist" touring the tsunami-battered Tohoku region.
In fact, Samuragochi created Symphony of Hope in light of his travels. Sadly, this, too, was a purchased item.
I surely wouldn't want to be in Samuragochi's shoes, but we've caught plenty of lip-syncers and outted artists who claim authorship of works they didn't create. So, perhaps, he's yet another statistic.
Here, then, is that Symphony No. 1 from "Japan's Beethoven." Of course, I'm pretty sure ol' Ludwig was the real McCoy.
