THE SINCEREST FORM OF INSULT:

Florence Price’s Rainbow Waltz and the Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s Concert

It’s been a while since I’ve had time to blog because work on the world premiere of Margaret Bonds’s late musical on the life of Elizabeth Keckley, Bitter Laurel, has taken all the time and energy I have apart from what’s devoted to my teaching and my beloved family. But since January 2 something else has been knocking at my door, unwilling to go away.

So here I am. And I think the best way to start this post is to offer two loosely related general notes:  

1. It’s often said that “plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery.” (The quote is apparently from Nelson DeMille’s The Cuban Affair, and a play on Oscar Wilde’s original witticism that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.”) And

2. The opposite of plagiarism is forgery. That is, plagiarism is presenting another’s work as one’s own, while forgery is presenting one’s own work as someone else’s.

And that is where things get interesting. Because who would have thought that the New Year’s Concert of the Vienna Philharmonic (one of the world’s greatest orchestras), the conducting of maestro Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and the music of Florence B. Price would offer the intersection of those two points? 

Perhaps someone did see this coming, but I didn’t. In any event, I think I now owe you an explanation. Here goes:

• One of the most widely viewed classical-music events in the world is the annual New Year’s concert of the Vienna Philharmonic – a concert that has been a regular feature of concert life since 1939, and that historically has been almost exclusively devoted to waltzes and polkas by white European men (notably Johann Strauss I and II). Few American composers have ever graced the programs, and no African American women.

• This year, the conductor of the VPO New Year’s Concert was maestro Yannick Nézet-Seguin, a brilliant Canadian-born U.S. conductor and pianist who, as Music Director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, made history by winning Florence Price her first grammy with his superb 2021 recordings of her First and Third Symphonies. Those who admire Price’s music were thus understandably enthused when it was announced that Maestro Nézet-Séguin was performing an arrangement of Florence Price’s sparkling Rainbow Waltz (composed for piano solo and first published by Dr. Barbara Garvey Jackson and ClarNan Editions in 2016, in Florence Beatrice Price: An Album of Piano Pieces [CN 101]) on this year’s Neujahrskonzert with the VPO. Florence Price, it seemed, was again making history by breaking through the solid wall that previously had excluded her and other African American women from the VPO’s programming.

• But then came the problem – for despite a beautifully produced video introduction repeating the oft-recounted story of the discovery of a trove of Price’s manuscripts in an abandoned house in St. Anne Township in 2009, the music (“arranged” by Wolfgang Dörner) that Nézet-Séguin and the VPO performed was not the Rainbow Waltz at all – or, for that matter, by Florence Price at all. The annals of music history are filled with “arrangements” that provoke controversy because of perceived excessive creative license on the part of the arrangers, but none of those known to me has as little to do with its source-material as the VPO “Price” waltz has to do with the music of Florence Price. This is not an arrangement; it’s a different piece. Why attach Price’s name to such un-Priceian music?

• At this point, you, dear constant reader, are probably wanting to compare the two – Florence Price’s actual Rainbow Waltz and the piece that the VPO performed. Here is what you need:

  • A side-by-side shot of the first page of the music of one of the surviving autographs of Price’s waltz and the first page of Dr. Jackson’s 2016 edition, which is easily available and must have been at the easy disposal of the Viennese:

    

    First page of “Autograph A” (JMC designation) of Florence Price’s Rainbow Waltz (University of Arkansas Libraries, shelfmark MC 988a Box 18, folder 12); and first page of edition by Dr. Barbara Garvey Jackson, from Florence Beatrice Price: An Album of Piano Pieces [Fayetteville, AR: ClarNan Editions, 2016])

  • A recording of Price’s actual music by distinguished Price champion Professor Kevin Wayne Bumpers of Miami-Dade College:

    The recording of the music the Nézet-Séguin and the VPO performed in their concert:

    Any comparison, whether cursory or more nuanced, immediately reveals that what the Vienna Philharmonic billed as Florence Price’s Rainbow Waltz is no such thing. Or, if you will, that those who have been waiting for the VPO to break ranks and welcome Ms. Price or any other African American woman into the programming of their vaunted New Year’s concerts must continue their wait. Because despite all the hoopla (including social-media publicity shared by Nézet-Seguin’s Philadelphia Orchestra, a blog post by Normal Lebrecht a.k.a. “Slipped Disc,” and many more), Florence Price’s music still has not been performed by the Vienna Philharmonic. Sadly enough, every time someone repeats the assertion that what was performed in Vienna was Price’s Rainbow Waltz, they only confirm that they don’t know the actual piece and haven’t bothered to learn it.

Beyond this, there are only questions:

• What made the Viennese think that it was a good idea, or even marginally acceptable, to perform someone else’s music (presumably Dörner’s) under Florence Price’s name – to perform a forgery?

• More troublingly, this was a grand opportunity to end the exclusion of Florence Price -- who wrote many splendid waltzes that would be a credit to this program -- from the VPO's programs, and (as the above-mentioned publicity suggests) a grand publicity opportunity. Why did Herr Dörner not arrange Florence Price’s actual Rainbow Waltz – why did he substitute his own music for hers? Was her music (in his opinion) “not good enough” for his tastes, for this orchestra’s programming, for this concert? Was it “not Viennese enough”? I can think of no answer that does not make me cringe.\

• And finally, through private circles I know of other journalists and bloggers who have reached out to Nézet-Séguin, the VPO, and Wolfgang Dörner with these questions and others – but so far they have gotten no answers. Why are the principals not forthcoming if the answer is, as one would hope, some sort of innocent misunderstanding? (I cannot imagine what such an understanding would look like, but I would be relieved if that were the case.) Again, any answer that comes to mind is cringeworthy in the extreme.

You see the point: if “plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery” and forgery is the opposite of plagiarism, then what happened at the VPO on New Year’s Eve was the sincerest form of flattery’s opposite – the sincerest form of insult. To put it simply, what happened in Vienna was the sincerest form of insult to Florence Price. The mind boggles at the affront.

That’s it – that’s the end of the post. In response to a “Rainbow Waltz Challenge” I shared on Facebook some time back, a number of pianists are planning to perform and/or record and/or post Florence Price’s actual Rainbow Waltz in the near future, simply in order to tell the truth of her music where others have forged it. But beyond this, I can say only, and again, that if you’ve been waiting for the exclusion of Florence Price from the hallowed programming of the Vienna Philharmonic to end, your wait is not over.

May that soon change.

BUT HOLD ON – there are two postscripts!

P.S. 1: Copyright cannot have been the issue that led to the Viennese snafu (if that’s what it is): apart from a small handful of works that do not include the Rainbow Waltz, the Intellectual Property (IP) of Florence Price’s complete catalog passed into the Public Domain on January 1, 2024. (The exceptions are works that were published before January 1, 1978, if those works' copyrights were renewed within the 28th year. Publishers of course retain rights on their editions according to the year in which those editions were released, but the IP of Price's catalog itself is in the Public Domain except for that small handful of works.)

P.S. 2: As I mentioned above, I am not the only one talking about this. In particular, intrepid classical-music commentator Katherine Needleman has posted brilliantly and pointedly in Substack about the issues in play here, and freelance journalist and researcher Hannah Edgar is writing what promises to be a major investigative piece. I will update this post with future work from those authors as I learn of it.