2026 started as a renaissance year for composer Florence Price. Then came controversy

2026 looked to be a renaissance year for the composer Florence Price, a Black woman who made music in Chicago that is now being championed by the classical music world more than 70 years after her death.

Minnesota Opera premiered a new work in February about her life, and Cambridge University Press just released a scholarly companion to her music. Concerts featuring her compositions are scheduled everywhere from Baltimore to New York City this year.

But a New Year’s Concert in Vienna featuring her music — one of the most lauded events of the classical world in one of the genre’s most lauded venues, the Musikverein — has kicked up controversy for, arguably, not featuring her music at all.

Her 1939 piece “Rainbow Waltz,” originally written for piano, was arranged for orchestra and conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin in the performance. But the piece that was played that day was so heavily stylized and reharmonized that online commentators erupted in criticism that has not ebbed in the months since the concert.

Scholar Alexandra Kori Hill, who co-edited the new Cambridge companion on Price’s music, describes “Rainbow Waltz” as rooted in 20th-century “Afro-American pastoralism.” That atmosphere, she says, is lost in the arrangement played in Vienna.

“In the classical tradition, there’s an expectation of performing the original of something, particularly with arrangements of music by a person whom we’re still starting to understand stylistically,” Hill said. “It becomes even more urgent when it is music by a person that comes from an underrepresented or systemically marginalized group of people.”

Price biographer Douglas Shadle says Price’s life was full of ambivalent victories. Her 1933 Chicago Symphony debut is often hailed as a breakthrough for her and Margaret Bonds, another Black Chicago composer who soloed on the same program. Less mentioned is the overture by John Powell, an avowed white supremacist, which opened the program.

“It feels like a very Price situation,” Shadle said of the New Year’s episode. “The positive, again, has this strange counterweight to it.”

A rearranged “Rainbow Waltz”

Born in Little Rock, Ark. and a longtime resident of Chicago’s South Side, Price surged to prominence when a tranche of previously unknown scores were recovered from her summer home outside Kankakee, Illinois in 2009.

Most of those rediscovered works were not registered with the United States Copyright Office prior to their discovery, meaning many — including “Rainbow Waltz" — are now public domain.

Price never heard her music performed abroad. She was planning a trip to Europe the year she died, in 1953. Posthumously, she became the first composer of color and, indeed, the first non-European composer ever featured in the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s Concert, one of the biggest events in classical music.

The concert reaches around 50 million viewers in more than 150 countries every year, via TV broadcasts, public radio and online streams.

This isn’t your average classical concert. Since the New Year’s Concert began in 1939 — as a Nazi-era fundraiser, as the Vienna Philharmonic has more openly acknowledged in recent years — waltzes and other Viennese light music have been the evening fare. “The Blue Danube,” by “waltz king” Johann Strauss Jr. (1825–1899), is one such famous staple. So is the clapalong “Radetzky March” by the composer’s father, Johann Strauss Sr. (1804–1849). Besides Price’s “Rainbow Waltz,” this year’s program featured works by exclusively Austrian composers, including both Strausses.

Both Price’s original and the Philharmonic’s version — by its favored arranger, Wolfgang Dörner — are in the same key: D-flat major, with a shared excursion to G-flat major. But as online commentators soon noted, what the Vienna Philharmonic performed was a world apart from Price’s “Rainbow Waltz."

Price’s version is introspective, with harmonic suspensions and bluesy modulations giving it a nostalgic twinge. By contrast, Dörner’s arrangement — the score to which the Vienna Philharmonic provided, upon request — turned the piece’s overall mood triumphant. He heavily stylized the main melody and reharmonized it so it resembled a textbook Viennese waltz.

The structure was different, too: An original introduction was added, as was a concluding coda that ratchets the key of the main melody up a half-step, to D major. (This is a popular trick in pop music, too: think of the middle of Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody.”)

After hearing “Rainbow Waltz” on Austrian television, among those who joined a chorus of prominent critical voices was Johannes Glück, a Vienna-based musical theater composer and actor. At first, he didn’t know who Florence Price was. But when he sought out more information about “Rainbow Waltz” the following day, the music he found didn’t resemble what he’d heard.

“Whenever I have a feeling the work of a fellow composer is treated with disrespect, it makes me angry,” Glück said. “I feel this kind of solidarity.”

In a video call from Vienna, Vienna Philharmonic chair and longtime violinist Daniel Froschauer, said he first learned about Price when Riccardo Muti and the CSO toured her Symphony No. 3 at the Musikverein in 2024.

He told WBEZ he was “surprised” by the backlash about the Dörner’s arrangement, particularly the accusation that it was meant to fool audiences. He claimed he specifically requested that Dörner “have in mind the sound of Johann Strauss Vater [Sr.] and the ländler” — another triple-time dance — “of Schubert.” From there, the piece was expanded so that it fit the conventional Viennese waltz formula: an introduction, a series of waltzes, then ending with an exuberant coda.

In other words, the discrepancy listeners noted was intentional.

“[‘Rainbow Waltz’] was written in 1939, and you will not get an exact sound of an 1800, 1900 waltz. But that's the setting of the New Year’s Concert,” Froschauer said. “The thought of having [Price] with us was more important than to say, ‘No, we can't use it, because there is no introduction.’”

This was not the first time Price’s music had been performed in Vienna. American bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green included two of her songs on a 2015 recital at the Musikverein, the storied venue that also hosts the New Year’s Concert.

Mississippi-born, Chicago-educated conductor William Garfield Walker has also become an ambassador for Price’s music in Europe. His own string orchestra arrangement of her organ piece, “Adoration,” was live-streamed in 2020 as part of a G20 economic forum.

“After the first reading, the musicians fall in love with the music, and audiences have really enjoyed her works, as well,” said Walker, also a four-time award recipient from the Evanston-based Solti Foundation U.S.

But after the most widely viewed orchestral concert in the world put Price’s name — if not strictly her music — in front of countless audiences, some streams of Price recordings indeed went up, according to Walker, the conductor, and Michael Clark, a pianist who released a studio recording of “Rainbow Waltz” in 2024.

Through a representative, Nézet-Séguin declined an interview and follow-up questions. But in a written statement, the conductor touted his experience conducting Price’s music and said the arrangement intended to “introduce her music to a wider audience.”

“Different arrangements of her ‘Rainbow Waltz’ allow her music to reach different audiences and contexts: Wolfgang Dörner’s arrangement highlighted connections to the Viennese waltz tradition, and Valerie Coleman’s emphasizes an American sonority,” he wrote. “My hope is that these arrangements continue to promote the life and work of Price and bring her genius to audiences worldwide.”

Dörner also declined to comment for this story.

Lessons learned?

A musical “arrangement” can refer to vastly different treatments. Sometimes they match originals bar-to-bar. Other times, they are shuffled about, or extra stitching is added to piece them together.

And the same work can transform hugely in the hands of different arrangers. For example, Philadelphia audiences will hear another perspective on “Rainbow Waltz” in June, when Nézet-Séguin conducts a new arrangement of the work by award-winning composer and flutist Valerie Coleman.

Price’s work was arranged in her own lifetime, too — but not always in ways she approved or appreciated. A partial, undated complaint letter recovered from her summer home blasts a big-band arrangement that she felt wasn’t up to snuff.

“That really annoyed her,” said Samantha Ege, a scholar and pianist who co-edited the Cambridge companion with Hill. “We have her perspective on it, and we understand that this was something she encountered in her own time.”

Even the Strausses, whose music is at the heart of Vienna’s New Year’s Concert, may not be happy with how their music is being presented, were they alive today. Their descendant Eduard Strauss — who runs a research institute dedicated to his family’s music in Vienna — certainly isn’t. He says the New Year’s concert employs a far larger orchestra, and he objects to crowd-pleasing enhancements of some of his forebears’ music — like the bombastic percussion in the “Radetzky March.”

“I'm not invited, and I don't go there,” said Strauss of the New Year’s Concerts, which he says he hasn’t attended in decades. “I'm a purist. I want to have the music heard as it was composed.”

Froschauer, the Vienna Philharmonic chair, is conflicted over whether, in hindsight, the Philharmonic ought to have labeled Dörner’s creation as something other than an “arrangement.”

“Whatever we do seems to be at the center of attention. So, I'm just glad that Florence Price got to be the center of attention,” Froschauer said. “What I learned from this experience is to be, maybe, a little bit more careful.”

Today, Price has more advocates than ever. But as with any explosion of interest in a figure, Ege, the Price scholar and pianist, urges a deeper engagement from musicians and online commentators alike.

"I think that's how we ensure Price's legacy: by really spending time with her,” she says.