Obituary: Dorothea Franchi

By WILLIAM DART

February 17, 1920 - August 22, 2003

If composers have it tough in this country, then Dorothea Franchi had it tougher than most.

As a young woman, she fought to study at Auckland University when her father wanted her to work in a dressmaking factory. Graduating BMus in 1939, she built up an impressive music department at Epsom Girls Grammar and in 1948 went to London. A grainy photograph of Franchi, ticket in hand, on the Hobsonville tarmac is a classic study in Kiwi determination.

There were rewards. In 1951, she carried off the Lionel Tertis Prize for a Rhapsody for Viola and Orchestra, and other works were performed, but she returned to New Zealand.

During five loyal years as pianist for the New Zealand Ballet from 1952-57, Franchi became as celebrated for her skill at doing a quick fix-it on rural pianos as she was for her one-woman Petrouchka - no mean feat, this.

It was her association with the company that led to her 1956 Do-Wack-a-Do, an elegant piece of 20s frippery the Royal New Zealand Ballet revived in the 90s. An orchestral suite from the ballet gets an occasional airing, most recently by the Auckland Philharmonia, and Franchi herself famously conducted it with the NZBC Symphony Orchestra in the 1960s.

Unlike her more privileged male colleagues, Dorothea Franchi never had the security of a university position to support her as a composer. And yet she wrote concertos and suites as well as a number of song cycles.

Her 1949 Four Pioneer Portraits, settings of poems by Robin Hyde, Eileen Duggan and Louis Esson, is unequalled within the context of New Zealand music of the time. And it was, emphatically, New Zealand music. As she told me back in 1993, the songs "express New Zealand, my New Zealandness and say something for women". Although the definitive performance is Honor McKellar's, recorded in 1960, with the composer at the piano, Four Pioneer Portraits is also commercially available on Margaret Medlyn's Kiwi-Pacific Burning Bright CD.

In the past few years, Franchi's music had at last been making some impact on concert programmes. She was shamefully overlooked for the first Composing Women's Festival in 1993 although the Four Pioneer Portraits were on the bill at the second, two years later.

A Suite for flute, viola and harp has long been championed by Catherine Bowie, Christine Bowie and Helen Webby.

As a harpist, Franchi was a loyal supporter of the younger New Zealand composers, playing in important works by Jack Body and Jenny McLeod, including the 1970 Mercury Theatre production of Earth and Sky.

To many, the woman was inseparable from her harp. It was Harpo Marx who inspired her to take it up and, later in life, Franchi was a tireless enthusiast for the beautiful instruments of Whangarei harp-maker Kim Webby.

When I visited her in Warkworth 10 years ago, she charmed me with fresh scones and a delicate Carolan air played on a Webby minstrel harp.

Above all, there were the many wonderful stories, which often revealed a sardonic sense of humour.

Commenting on how she played everything from piano and harp to anvil for the NZBC Concert Orchestra in the 50s and 60s, Franchi quipped that, of all her fellow-musicians, she was "the best equipped for the hereafter, with my harp for heaven and an anvil for the other place".

I am sure the anvil can remain firmly in the foundry.

A Requiem Mass will be celebrated at Holy Name Catholic Church, Alnwick St, Warkworth, today at 11am, followed by a private cremation.