Franz Joseph Philipp (August 24, 1890 – June 2, 1972) was a German church musician and composer.
During World War I, Philipp was sent to the Vosges Mountains, where he suffered irreversible damage to his hearing.
In 1916, his Deutschlands Stunde ("Germany's Hour"), a cantata full of enthusiasm for the war effort, was performed by the Berlin Philharmonic.
From 1919 to 1924 Philipp was active as a church musician in the St. Martin (Freiburg-Altstadt) [de] in Freiburg, and from 1923 he taught organ, song, theory, and music history at the teacher's college.
[2] Philipp was highly rated by those in power, and his orchestral work Heldische Feier, Opus 35, was celebrated in the Völkischer Beobachter as an "exemplary national-socialist composition, while the spirit of our struggle and the expressive power of the music stand before us as two valid testimonials of the inner truth of this new world view".
[3] Despite his closeness to the Nazi regime, his strong roots in Catholic church music apparently caused him personal difficulty and professional conflicts, and in 1942 he stepped down as director of the Musikhochschule Karlsruhe.