Faà di Bruno, Giovanni Matteo [Horatio, Orazio] 83

Frantz, Ferdinand

(b Kassel, 8 Feb 1906; d Munich, 26 May 1959). German bass-baritone. He studied privately and made his début in 1927 at Kassel as Ortel (Die Meistersinger); after engagements in Halle, Chemnitz and Hamburg, in 1943 he was engaged by the Staatsoper in Munich, of which he remained a member until his death. He established himself as a leading Heldenbariton, singing Wotan, Hans Sachs, Kurwenal and the Dutchman; such was the range of his voice that he also sang King Mark, Daland, the Landgrave, King Henry (Lohengrin), Méphistophélès and Galitsky (Prince Igor). He made guest appearances in Vienna, Milan, Paris and London where he sang Jupiter in the first performance in England of Die Liebe der Danae in 1953 (with the Bayerische Staatsoper), and Wotan in 1954. He made his Metropolitan début in 1949 as Wotan, and also appeared there as Pizarro. Frantz’s beautifully schooled voice, significant use of the text and sympathetic personality are well represented in his recording of Wotan in Furtwängler’s Ring with the Rome RAI SO (1953) and as Hans Sachs in Kempe’s notable recording of Die Meistersinger (1956). He was married to the soprano Helena Braun.

HAROLD ROSENTHAL/ALAN BLYTH

Frantz, Justus

(b Hohensalza, 18 May 1944). German pianist. He studied with Eliza Hansen at the Hamburg Hochschule für Musik und Theater and later with Wilhelm Kempff, an important musical influence, in Positano. His career received an important boost in 1969 when he performed a series of Mozart piano concertos with the Berlin PO under Karajan. He made his American début in 1975, playing Dvořák’s Piano Concerto with the New York PO under Bernstein, and he has also worked with conductors including Kempe, Giulini and Haitink. Frantz played frequently in duo recitals with Christoph Eschenbach, with whom he toured the USA, Japan and Europe and recorded Mozart and Schubert duets as well as Mozart’s concertos for two and three pianos. His other recordings include Bach concertos and (with Bernstein) the concertos of Dvořák and Schumann. Frantz’s reputation rests mainly on the Viennese classics, in which his sober, lucid pianism and sense of balance and proportion sometimes recall Kempff. He was made a professor at the Hamburg Hochschule für Musik und Theater in 1985 and a year later founded the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, a series of concerts and courses held in various venues which has become one of Germany’s best-known festivals.

JESSICA DUCHEN

Franz, Carl

(b Langenbielau, Silesia [now Bielawa, Poland], 1738; d Munich, 1802). German horn and baryton player. After studying the horn from the age of nine, he was in the Hofkapelle of the Prince-Archbishop of Olmütz from 1758 and spent nearly 14 years as Joseph Haydn’s principal horn player at the court of Prince Nicolaus Esterházy (1763–76), where he also learnt to play the baryton. He then played the horn in the orchestra of Cardinal Batthiany at Pressburg until it was disbanded (c1784). He made several concert tours as a baryton player, performing in Vienna and in England, Russia and elsewhere, before returning to orchestral playing in Vienna and finally in the Munich Hofkapelle led by Franz Danzi (1787).

As a horn player Franz perfected the use of the hand to sound semitones and anticipated modern horn technique by cultivating both the high and low registers until his range spanned five Cs. His abilities inspired Haydn to write the horn parts in his symphonies nos.13, 72, 31 and 51 and in the octets with baryton. However, he was most famous as one of the few virtuosos on the baryton, which he used with seven gut strings (bowed) and 16 wire strings (plucked). Haydn apparently intended some of his baryton works for Franz to play; it seems significant that he wrote no more after Franz’s departure in 1776. A review of 1786 praises Franz’s expressive baryton playing, and others describe his remarkable playing and singing of Er ist nicht mehr! Tön’ trauernd, Baryton! (hXXVIb:1), a cantata on the death of Frederick the Great which Haydn supposedly composed for Franz.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Choron-FayolleD

DlabacžKL

GerberL

J.N. Forkel: Musikalischer Almanach für Deutschland … 1783 (Leipzig, 1782/R)

J. Meusel: Museum für Künstler und Kunstliebhaber, iv (1788), 100–01

C.F. Pohl: Joseph Haydn, i (Leipzig, 2/1878/R), 267–8

H. Fitzpatrick: The Horn and Horn-Playing and the Austro-Bohemian Tradition from 1680 to 1830 (London, 1970)

P. Bryan: ‘Carl Franz, Eighteenth-Century Virtuoso: a Reappraisal’, Alta musica, iv (1979), 67–73

D. Heartz: ‘Leutgeb and the 1762 Horn Concertos of Joseph and Michael Haydn’, MJb 1987–8, 59–64

HORACE FITZPATRICK/PAUL R. BRYAN

Franz, J.H.

See Hochberg, hans heinrich.

Franz, Paul, [Gautier, François]

(b Paris, 30 Nov 1876; d Paris, 20 April 1950). French tenor. He studied with Louis Delaquerrière in Paris and joined the Opéra in 1909, making his début as Lohengrin, and singing there until his retirement in 1938. He was the first Paris Parsifal in 1914, and his many roles included Aeneas (Les Troyens), John the Baptist (Hérodiade), Rodrigue (Le Cid), Raoul (Les Huguenots), Reyer’s Sigurd, and Siegmund, Siegfried and Tristan. Franz made his Covent Garden début in 1910 as Samson, returning regularly until 1914. His London roles included Julien (Louise), Radames and Otello. In 1937 he joined the teaching staff of the Paris Conservatoire. Franz had a large, rich voice and a particularly aristocratic style of declamation. He made distinguished recordings of French repertory, most notably as Sigurd and Samson, and of Wagner.

HAROLD ROSENTHAL/ALAN BLYTH