FLATTERY, FORGERY, FLORENCE PRICE’S “RAINBOW WALTZ,” AND LESSONS LEARNED

Yesterday, Tom Service published an excellent report in the British daily The Guardian about the Vienna Philharmonic’s performance of a forged Rainbow Waltz by Florence Price in their acclaimed New Year’s concert for 2026. Folks who know Ms. Price’s music immediately raised questions about the obvious forgery (but received no replies from the offending parties), and by late January oboist, composer, and intrepid ultrablogger Katherine Needleman had begun to air some of these concerns (here are two posts that I’ve seen: January 12 and January 20). I talked about it in a post on February 1, and Needleman has kept after it, documenting in her most recent Substack post that the Vienna Philharmonic backed off the misattribution to Price in their copyright filings.

In the meantime, answers from Nézet-Séguin and the VPO fall far short of the apology and explanation that are required, and there is no hope that the best way of rectifying their malfeasance – a performance of Price’s actual Rainbow Waltz by Nézet-Seguin and the VPO – will ever come to pass. Mr. Service quotes Daniel Froschauer, chairman of the Vienna Philharmonic, as saying: “perhaps we can all learn something from this discussion.”

That's an excellent observation. Here are three things that I’ve learned:

1.     Do not trust the Vienna Philharmonic, Wolfgang Dörner, or Yannick Nézet-Séguin. If someone had performed, broadcast, and recorded a piece of music not of their making and attributed it to them, the offending parties would be awash in lawsuits claiming fraud, libel, and God knows what else. As it is, the tables are turned: Florence Price, treated so shabbily in so many ways throughout her life, is the victim – and the people who falsely claim to be her champions are the wrongdoers.

2. The U.S. press, which ought to be all over this, is useless and apathetic. It, too, is eager to cash in on Ms. Price’s name-value. But when the time comes for the U.S. press to step up and defend her, shoelaces are studied. The result: a shameful forgery committed against a composer who deserves so much better is met only with crickets in the U.S. press.

   

   3. This is a moment of opportunity for the collective action that is an important raison d’être of professional societies. Groups such as the Society for American Music, the American Musicological Society, the National Association of Negro Musicians, and others both in the U.S. and abroad (e.g., the International Musicological Society, the Gesellschaft für Musikforschung) have the ability to create public statements, collect thousands of signatures, and circulate these to the press (which, in the U.S., is currently studying its shoelaces). Professional societies have the ability to create pressure by means of numbers.

   

And perhaps a confession and overarching lesson to close: I did not watch the VPO New Year’s concert (knowing what I know now, I’m glad of that). When I awoke on January 2 I found a message from a friend who works in Vienna asking whether I had seen that Florence Price was included on that concert. I was thrilled, but when I finally got a link to the performance the next day, I was scandalized. I have no plans to continue this series of posts, but this egregious ethical betrayal of Ms. Price has reinforced something most of us probably already knew: although the strength of Florence Price’s presence and the evident commercial value of her name might suggest that the tide has finally turned in her favor, the truth is a different matter.

For from Yannick Nézet-Séguiin, Wolfgang Dörner, and the Vienna Philharmonic we have learned a lesson that Mr. Froschauer presumably did not intend: