Hans Franke (1882-1971)

[John Boyer]

...as far as I know, there's a complete database of Wilhelm Furtwängler's live performances available online.

Perhaps you could post the link in a separate Bill Furtwangler thread.  It would be interesting to see his repertory of unsung composers. 

[Ilja]

Mr. Boyer, we disagree - and that's fine.

Having said that, to discuss a case of musical plagiarism that (sofar as I can see now) took place entirely during the Nazi years and in which a semi-prominent Nazi cultural official played a role, and dismiss the possible influence of specific and well-known Nazi cultural politics and its proclivities beforehand, seems ... careless.

[Mark Thomas]

I'm inclined to agree with John that the Nazi angle is a red herring, although that's not to dismiss Ilja's point entirely. However, if we're moving to the view that it was Franke himself who perpetrated his frauds, not someone doing so to bolster his reputation posthumously, and that the Teplitz premieres were genuine then the Nazi era could simply have made it easier for him to get performances because it removed from the concert scene all that music banned by the Nazis. Even if his compositions weren't of a style that was actively promoted by the regime, neither were they anything which offended them. 

[Ilja]

That's very true. The removal of anything Jewish or otherwise "Entartet" and "Un-Völkisch" (and this went way beyond just Jewish influences) left a sizeable gap in the repertory - one that it has never entirely recovered from.

[Alan Howe]

I have received a reply from the Czech orchestra about the performance of Franke's 5th Symphony in Teplitz in June 1943. Unfortunately, they have no information about this particular concert. However, they have sent me a number of scans relating to the activities of conductor Bruno Schestak, so I'm now going to look through them and see whether there's anything of interest...

[Alan Howe]

Unfortunately, there's no sign of music by Franke in any of the concert advertisements they sent me scans of. Plenty of evidence of Bruno Schestak's work, though. He's a constant presence.

We still have only references to performances of Franke's music. The nearest we've got so far to an original source is the review of the concert in Teplitz in June 1943 which featured the 5th symphony, but that was copied from an as-yet unknown source for the programme notes for Golo Berg's concert back in 2006. I have, therfore, emailed him to find out whether he remembers what the source of the review was - and who supplied it.

[Alan Howe]

There is no reference to Franke in the list of concerts at the French Furtwängler website.

Can we now say that the reference in the CD (PC/Symphony) booklet to two performances with the Berlin Philhamonic under Furtwängler in 1941/2 is fake? If so, it throws into doubt all the claims to performances of 'his' music elsewhere. What makes the Furtwängler connection doubly suspicious is the lack of precise dates - 1941/2 is very vague. Wouldn't such a prestigious connection - i.e. to one of the most famous conductors on the planet - have been very carefully documented?

If the music is largely plagiarised, then maybe Franke's whole back story is fake too - or, at the very least, heavily embellished.

So: original sources, please! So far we have none, zero, zilch, nada, zip. Nichts!

[terry martyn]

By the way,Alan is perfectly correct that Teplitz  was part of Czechoslovakia until the Munich Agreement in late 1938 meant that it was annexed by Hitler. Ilya is also right,as from that date.

[Ilja]

True as that is, the cultural connections and exchanges between Teplitz (and the Sudetenland) and Germany go back much further. Particularly considering the activities of the Sudetendeutsche Partei, nazification of the area had been going on well before that date. Teplitz itself appears to have been a very NSDAP-friendly city throughout the 1930s.

[Alan Howe]

And it is a sad fact that the German population as a whole said and did very little in the wake of the demise of Nazism to distance themselves morally from the regime that most of them had silently supported or at least tolerated. The concept of 'war guilt' (or the lack of it) was the subject of the writings of many authors after WW2. I don't think we can rule out Franke's support for - or at the very least use of - the regime and its officials to further his career.

[Mark Thomas]

Alan and I have discussed how best to proceed, especially bearing in mind that we now have access to information given to us privately which we can't currently publish on UC, but which is very relevant to our investigations. Whilst most of the people involved in this case have passed away, others have not and so we hope that friends will understand why we've decided to lock this thread temporarily to allow us to pursue several lines of enquiry which lead on from this information. Rest assured that as soon as we can reopen the thread we will do just that. In the meantime, what we still lack is primary sources for the reported wartime concerts mentioned in this thread. Not a transcript of a newspaper report for example, but a scan of the actual story in the newspaper or a concert programme etc. If you do come across anything which gives substance to Franke's claims them please PM or email it to Alan or me. The same is true if you manage to identify the true composers of the D minor Piano Trio, the Piano Quintet or the Kleine Suite.

Many thanks for all your contributions so far, we hope to be able to unlock the thread soon.

[Mark Thomas]

A brief update on the progress of our investigation into the Franke affair:

We've now sourced Gabriele Schaller's Franke catalogue published in 1996 (25 years after Franke's death). This focuses on the 87 works (out of a total of 869) which supposedly survived the Dresden firestorm in February 1945 and provides incipits for many of them. As a result, one further "stolen" work has been identified: Hans Franke's "Symphony No.8  Op.797" is actually Eduard Franck's Symphony in A major Op.47. Several hours spent scouring scores at IMSLP have failed to identify the remaining extant Franke symphonies: Nos.4, the first three movements of No.5 and Nos.9 and 17 have so far escaped correct attribution, no doubt because of the obscurity of their composers. No attempt has yet been made to identify the symphonic poems, orchestral suites and overtures, concertos, chamber music, choral and vocal works also included in the survey, but we are widening the search and hope to be recruiting help to do so. Also, a visit will be made next month to the archive in Dresden where the manuscripts are held so that they can be examined and this will hopefully yield further clues as to the true authorship of some of them.

A separate line of enquiry has been to examine Franke's biography as set out in the catalogue and reprinted in the Signum chamber music CD of 2003. Although we've now seen primary evidence (scans of newspaper concert reviews) of wartime performances of Franke's works, we have so far failed to track down any evidence of Wilhelm Furtwängler's alleged performances of the A minor Symphony (the one actually by Fritz Kauffmann), of Franke being at the conservatory or other educational establishments he allegedly attended or of any of his activities as performer and musical administrator outlined in the biography, until after WWII. Similarly, so far we have found no genealogical evidence for Franke himself, his wife or children, although his daughter Erika Prokop was involved in setting up the Franke Foundation and was in contact with Vogt & Fritz, the publisher of Franke's scores and the CD of the 6th Symphony & Piano Concerto. This lack of evidence for anything in the published biography gives rise to the suspicion that Franke himself did not exist but that his biography, and the claims to authorship of works by earlier composers, was the creation of some other person, the most likely suspect so far being the Nazi music director of the Sudetenland, Bruno Schestak, whose reported death in 1950 has also so far proved unverifiable.

We are following a third strand of investigation but at present I'm afraid it wouldn't be prudent to publish details of that here. Rest assured as soon as there is more to report, and the thread can be unlocked, I'll do so.

[Alan Howe]

Important update:

Thanks to our expert US member and researcher, eschiss1, the Symphony No.4 in E major, Op.778 claimed as his own by Franke has been identified as the Symphony in E major by Alban Förster (1849-1916):
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alban_F%C3%B6rster
https://imslp.org/wiki/Category:F%C3%B6rster,_Alban

IMSLP has this entry (scroll down to the works without opus number):

Symphony [No.1] in E major for grosses Orchester (Halle (Saale): Richter & Hopf, 1888; Hannover: Lehne & Co., 1899).
See D-SHm Mus.C30:1 for incipit, instrumentation, etc.
https://imslp.org/wiki/List_of_works_by_Alban_F%C3%B6rster

At present this identification is based only on the incipit for the first movement, so further checks will be necessary with regard to the other movements.

Thank you, Eric!

Note: this now makes six composers plagiarised by Hans Franke: Kauffmann, Wölfl, Hill, Rheinberger, Franck (Eduard) and Förster.

[Alan Howe]

Further important updates:

1. Franke's String Quartet No.5, Op.793 seems, from the incipits, to be the String Quartet No.3 in A major by Alexander Kopylov (1854-1911), but with the inner movements reversed. (Note: this isn't the first time that such a calculated manoeuvre has been uncovered!)
https://www.earsense.org/article/Alexander-Kopylov-String-Quartet-No3-in-A-Major-Op32/

2. Franke's Serenade, Op.814 for Horn and Orchestra may be the Abendgesang (i.e. Serenade), Op.10 by Karl Daniel Lorenz (1816-1866), published in 1855 by Bachmann for horn and piano (orchestrated by Lorenz, we assume):
https://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Lorenz,_Karl_Daniel
Request: This needs to be double-checked - please PM either myself or Mark Thomas. Here's the incipit from the Franke Catalogue:


3. We also need to check whether Franke's Der Spielmann Op.261 is the same as the score of the version by Eugen Hildach, Op.15 No.1 found at IMSLP:
https://imslp.org/wiki/2_Lieder%2C_Op.15_(Hildach%2C_Eugen)
Checked: no match found.

Commentary: The text seems to be the same but I don't see any other similarities with the work in Franke's catalog, even if Hildach's opening cadenza is ignored (and the fact that Hildach's is 6/4 and "Franke's" is in common time.)
   Other "Spielmann"s to Schmidt's text that are at IMSLP or at least in collections at IMSLP even if not currently uploaded there include the first of Heuberger's 3 Op.23 Lieder (we only have no.2 at present, but maybe someone could find no.1 and compare), and possibly Jadassohn's Op.110 No.1 (Volkslieder, "Das Spielmann" "Du mit deiner Fiedel")?
Checks currently taking place.


With many thanks to the forum members who have communicated their findings!

[Mark Thomas]

A further update:

Now that Ilja has completed his promised visit to the Franke Foundation archive in Dresden, it's a good time to post an update on our investigations into the Franke fraud, as it has clarified a number of issues:

Firstly, it's clear that, despite our earlier suspicions and the lack of evidence for the pre-war biography quoted in reviews, articles and recordings, Hans Franke did actually exist and wasn't the creation of someone else. He was a jobbing musical administrator in Dresden and the surrounding Saxony area of Germany and it seems likely that he began his plagiarisms of 19th century compositions after suffering continued rejections of his own, poor quality, works. The "premieres" of those fraudulent works began in the war years as Franke no doubt took advantage of the Nazis' policy of removing Jewish and other "degenerate" music from the repertoire, thereby creating a gap which he could fill, although even then these performances were in secondary venues and given by spa or resort town orchestras. There is no evidence, despite his claims, that the Concertgebouw or Berlin Philharmonic ever played any of his symphonies. We are still investigating the role in all this of the Nazi music director of the Sudetenland, Bruno Schestak.

Secondly, there is no evidence for Franke's claim to have composed 800+ works and it's likely that the surviving 87 are his compete catalogue. Although he was living in Dresden at the time of the February 1945 fire storm air raids, his house was not in a part of the city which was bombed and it has survived, making it unlikely that the remaining works were destroyed.

The manuscripts of the 87 works are all impeccably written in the same unvarying hand and are largely free of corrections, implying that they were copied out over a comparatively short span of time - a decade perhaps, rather than over a composer's adult life.

Finally, we have now contacted both the publisher of Franke's compositions and the principal of the Archive with an outline of our discoveries in the hope that they will appreciate that getting to as near the truth as we can is in their interests and that they'll co-operate in our investigation as it continues.

Since the last update no new plagiarised works have been identified but UC members eschiss1 and Reverie have kindly agreed to join the investigation and their skills in identifying plagiarised scores and making digital reconstructions of samples of Franke's works will be great assets.

The thread is now unlocked but we ask members to restrict their posts to concrete evidence about Hans Franke's and Bruno Schestak's lives and identification of Franke's plagiarised compositions.