Price, rearranged
The Florence Price waltz programmed at the Vienna Philharmonic's New Year's Concert Straussified her music. Endnotes from a controversy
WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times just published my story on a fracas that has made the rounds for a few months now. The Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s Concert1 — one of classical music’s most fêted events, by one of the most most fêted orchestras — programmed a piano waltz by Florence Price on its program this year, making Price the first composer of color and, indeed, the first non-European ever featured on the annual program. The inclusion was, by all accounts, at the urging of conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who has championed Price’s music through his post at the Philadelphia Orchestra.
The problem: the orchestral arrangement of that piece, “Rainbow Waltz,” sounds quite different from Price’s original. Since then, the VPO and its on-call arranger, Wolfgang Dörner, have been accused of everything from deception to forgery.
Dörner chose not to speak to the press about this episode. Neither did Nézet-Séguin, beyond a written statement quoted in the above article and widely circulated elsewhere.
However, Vienna Philharmonic chair and violinist Daniel Froschauer spoke to me back in February, and, with the approval of the Philharmonic’s lawyers, provided me a PDF score to Dörner’s arrangement.
So what, exactly, are we hearing?
The anatomy of an arrangement
As Froschauer also told Austrian media, he and Nézet-Séguin apparently first discussed programming the Juba from Price’s Symphony No. 3. Froschauer had already heard the symphony live when the Chicago Symphony played it at the Musikverein in 2024.2 That idea was eventually tabled; the reason Froschauer gave me and others was that the Juba, particularly its percussion complement — which includes xylophone, sandpaper, and woodblock, among others — didn’t fit the Neujahrskonzert’s style and specs.
Through whatever sequence of events led the VPO to commission an original arrangement for the concert, Froschauer says he ultimately directed Dörner to “have in mind the sound of Johann Strauss Vater and the ländler of Schubert.” (Froschauer is quoted more fully in the WBEZ/Sun-Times article.)
Indeed, Dörner’s arrangement spins the “Afro-American pastoralism” of Price’s original — in the words of scholar Alexandra Kori Hill, who, along with Samantha Ege, co-edited a brand-new Cambridge companion on Price’s music — into a quintessentially Viennese waltz. That much is obvious, score or not.
The same Wienerization happens structurally. According to Price waltz specialist and pianist Michael Clark, who performed the above studio recording of “Rainbow Waltz,” Price wrote many of her mature waltzes in an ABACA rondo form. She typically casts the contrasting themes in the subdominant and the chromatic submediant, as she does in “Rainbow Waltz.”
By adding material to Price’s original, Dörner’s version changes it into a textbook Viennese waltz: an original, slow introduction/call to the dance derived from Price’s suspension–resolution motif (visible in m. 4 of the above manuscript), a series of waltzes, then a coda, bumping up the main theme to a swaggering D major.
Dörner’s most faithfully rendered section is “Rainbow Waltz’s” G-flat major trio — brief in both original and arrangement, but pretty much recreated verbatim in Dörner’s violin/oboe melody and accompanimental gestures. The section arrives around two minutes into the three-and-a-half-minute arrangement.
At one point in our interview, I asked Froschauer what he thought, in hindsight, about calling Dörner’s version an “arrangement” as opposed to some other alternative — “a fantasia on,” “a waltz based on,” “inspired by…,” etc. He gave it some thought, but felt that, if other VPO arrangements of other works were to be credited to their original composers, “Rainbow Waltz” likewise ought to be credited to Price.
Froschauer brought up two salient comparisons. The first was 19th-century Austrian composer Constanze Geiger’s “Ferdinandus-Walzer,” which last year became the first work by a female composer to be featured on a Neujahrskonzert since the tradition began in 1939.3
Like “Rainbow Waltz,” Geiger’s five waltzes are originally for piano. Also like “Rainbow Waltz,” Dörner arranged them for the 2025 Neujahrskonzert… and added an introduction. Since it’s a set of short pieces, Geiger’s original, naturally, starts right on the first waltz, heard below in a recording courtesy of ONEcomposer co-founder Stephen Spinelli (who also sourced and provided a score to the “Ferdinandus-Walzer”!):
In order to fit into the introduction–waltzes–coda schema, Dörner also uses material from the first and last waltzes to create a coda, which Geiger’s original lacks.
Froschauer also pointed to a piano Quadrille by Anton Bruckner, arranged by Dörner and featured on the 2024 Neujahrskonzert. Dörner has yet again supplied an original introduction here, but it is very short — just a few bars — before jumping into the first “Pantalon” dance.4 Generally, Dörner’s treatment of the Bruckner is much more liberal than his of “Ferdinandus-Walzer”: He incorporates sections from some movements while skipping over others, and he often elaborates on Bruckner’s original.
Yet again, he devises a coda which doesn’t appear verbatim in the Quadrille. In a very “Rainbow Waltz”-ish move, it’s introduced by a stepwise modulation of the final dance.
Listening to these back to back, however, any serious comparisons between these arrangements and the Price/Dörner feel a bit apples–oranges. You’ll hear that Dörner’s arrangements of the Geiger and Bruckner at least resemble their originals, as both were plainly Austro-German parlor music to begin with. Meanwhile, the Price has been profoundly transformed: melodically, harmonically, stylistically.
Copyright conundrums
Pretty much evaded entirely for space in my WBEZ/Sun-Times story are salient copyright questions raised by oboist and activist Katherine Needleman and Vienna-based composer/satirist/whistleblower Johannes Glück.
As I’ve come to understand, this is a complicated and somewhat fraught topic in Price performance and scholarship. Many of you may recall when G. Schirmer bought Price’s “catalog” some years ago, to much fanfare.
But Schirmer has since clarified that there are “several” Price works that aren’t part of their catalog, meaning they entered the public domain on January 1, 2024: 70 years from Price’s death in 1953, rounded to the next calendar year.
Despite being listed as the original rights-holder on several music licensing databases, Schirmer confirmed to me that “Rainbow Waltz” is among Price’s public domain works, and that they do not own the copyright to the piece. The same goes for many other unregistered, then-unpublished works recovered from Price’s summer home in downstate Illinois in 2009, which weren’t part of the Schirmer sale.
It’s likely that “Rainbow Waltz” being in the public domain sweetened the deal for the VPO when it, in coordination with Nézet-Séguin, selected the piece. And do you know who else’s work is in the public domain?
This was one of the biggest points Dr. Eduard Strauss — the chair of the Wiener Institut für Strauss-Forschung (WISF) and de facto spokesman of the Strauss family — wanted to hit home when I spoke to him for the WBEZ/Chicago Sun-Times story. You might see his great-grand-uncle’s visage on tchotchkes all over Vienna, but he doesn’t see a dime from any of it: The Strauss family never made moves to safeguard their intellectual property, and Johann Strauss II’s music has been in the public domain in Austria since 1932.5
While they were working in Vienna, the Strauss brothers were typically paid an upfront sum by publishing companies, often a very handsome one. But the companies themselves usually reaped the profits of their compositions — if they were published at all. Notoriously, the Strausses destroyed nearly all of their manuscripts, with most arrangements being made on spec for gigs.
“There are no royalties left,” Dr. Strauss told me. “Everything is gone.”
So, he worked full-time as a judge in the city for decades, and ran the WISF on the side, as he does today.
“My problem is that, for 40 years, I’m keen on promoting Strauss research, but nobody wants to pay for it,” he told me. “They always say two killing arguments. One is: why? They play Strauss; why should we have research? And the second is, ‘Strauss should be played no matter how.’ And that’s my greatest problem, because there are so many people playing shows, but in a style or in a form which is just wrong.”
(To circle briefly back to Price: I’m struck by the parallels between her and Dr. Strauss’s complaints in this undated letter to the American Music Institute, which she accused of shoddily arranging one of her pieces for jazz band.)
Hey, Hannah, what do you think?
Not like anyone needs to know, or cares. But for some background on what drew me to this story:
I moved to Chicago for college in 2014, where I first learned about Florence Price. The renaissance of her music was in full swing by the time I graduated with my bachelor’s degree in musicology.
During the same period, I briefly lived in Vienna in 2016 and 2018. There, I spent my days researching, attending all the VPO and Staatsoper performances I could, visiting the Vienna Philharmonic Archives on a couple occasions (see below), bopping around Wien Modern, and becoming a gravesite-and-house-museum completionist for all the great composers. I still have dear friends in Vienna, thanks to an exchange program between my alma mater and Universität Wien; the good folks at the Arnold Schönberg Center continue to be staggeringly generous with score requests and research queries I’ve lobbed them in the years since I lurked there.
When the Chicago Symphony programmed Price’s Symphony No. 3 for its 2024 European tour, its performance at the Musikverein was a huge catalyst in convincing me — and the Chicago Tribune, for whom I covered the tour — to do whatever I could to be there. I love Chicago, I love Vienna, I’m proud of the rich musical lineage of both cities, and I love when those lineages intersect.
That said, I also appreciate the cultural specificity of each setting. The Neujahrskonzert is not a typical subscription concert.6 It’s firstly a celebration of the Viennese light music tradition — a more populist genre even the VPO took some time to come around to, despite onetime membership overlap with Eduard Strauss I’s orchestra. And that’s a tradition worth celebrating.
But as Americans highly attuned to our own racial politics, many of us can’t help but hear this situation as whitewashing Price’s voice on the global stage, particularly when the Neujahrskonzert is one of the precious few which escape the classical-music echo chamber and enter mainstream culture and media. The message many of us receive is that Price’s music was never deemed worthy of that stage to begin with, whether or not that’s the message the VPO intended.
Unanswered questions remain. As a result of this episode, will the VPO get rattled and never touch Price’s music again, or revert to an arch-conservative New Year’s program next year? Why was the percussion of the Juba the main sticking point for the VPO, if stylistic continuity was a concern from the beginning? What’s the story behind Valerie Coleman’s forthcoming “Rainbow Waltz” arrangement, which ends the Philadelphia Orchestra’s 2026/27 season? (Coleman’s reps said she was on deadline and unable to speak to me for the article.) And why wouldn’t Nézet-Séguin — someone who dwells in both Price’s world and the VPO’s, and thus well-positioned to embrace the nuances of this episode — speak directly to me and my press colleagues?
Ultimately, I think Dr. Hill, the Price scholar, said it best. As she points out in the WBEZ/Sun-Times piece, we are still at the tip of the iceberg with Price — stylistically, biographically. All the high-profile concerts in the world don’t change that major facets of Price’s life and legacy remain overlooked, little understood, and sometimes outright neglected. Another influential composer in Price’s circle, Margaret Bonds, is only just now receiving a headstone. Until recently, Price didn’t have one, either. There is so much more work to be done, and greater inequities to conquer.
If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading. And watch this space for more Price reporting and updates in the coming weeks.
Special thanks to: Scholars Samantha Ege, Alexandra Kori Hill, Doug Shadle, Michael Clark, and John Michael Cooper, all of whom offered their expertise via interview or email, and especially Stephen Spinelli, who sourced the score of Geiger’s “Ferdinanzus-Walzer” for me and made the recording excerpt you hear above; Johannes Glück, who first sniffed out and publicized the discrepancy on New Year’s Day; Casiday Jones of the University of Arkansas’s Special Collections, who provided “Rainbow Waltz” manuscripts and other primary source materials; Daniel Froschauer of the Vienna Philharmonic, for sitting for an interview in a hectic pre-tour window for the orchestra; the Vienna Philharmonic and Musikverein’s comprehensive online performance archives, which make it a breeze to confirm performance history from afar; Silvia Kargl, former Vienna Philharmonic archivist, for confirming performance details from the above; Dr. Eduard Strauss of the Wiener Institut für Strauss-Forschung for keeping the family flame and reminding us that legacies are not always lucrative; former Chicagoan William Garfield Walker for continuing to champion Price’s music in Vienna; Ryan Speedo Green for kindly answering my cold-call to confirm the Musikverein recital moments before he headed into Tristan rehearsals; Glendower Jones, who has been doing yeoman’s work to make the music of Black composers more available for decades, and who provided valuable leads; musicologist Sevin Yaraman, who offered helpful context on the cultural history of the Viennese waltz; Anne Midgette, for her constant encouragement, often while I was mid-crashout; Katherine Needleman, for bringing this to wider attention in the first place; and my dear friend Moses Chan, who first pointed me to Katherine’s post in January.
This link to stream the 2026 Neujahrskonzert will remain active for US viewers until June 30, 2026.
I covered that performance for the Chicago Tribune; I still can’t hear the Juba without remembering dozens of white-haired heads bobbing along to the music in the Musikverein.
The Guardian and Philadelphia Inquirer stories have made much of the fact that AKM, the Austrian music licensing registry which logged Dörner’s “Rainbow Waltz” arrangement, lists the composer simply as “public domain.” Candidly, I don’t know what to make of this detail, given the discrepancies I’ve noted digging around in various musical associations’ databases about the same pieces. As Glück pointed out to me over email some months ago, SACEM, the French equivalent of AKM, also lists the composer of the “Ferdinandus-Walzer” as “domaine public oeuvre,” while AKM lists Geiger by name. Bizarre, yes. Malicious? I’m not sure.
Note that this work is also public domain, and can be easily found on IMSLP.
For more on this, I recommend this interesting 2018 interview with Dr. Strauss by Austrian public broadcaster ORF.
Of course, the average VPO subscription concert is, to say the least, also very aesthetically conservative.
Excellent essay, Hannah. Thanks so much for making it available!
I always learn so much from reading your in-depth, investigative stories. Thanks to you and all the others you credit in your article for bringing recognition and voice to those who cannot speak for themselves.