Franck

Download here : Prélude, Choral et Fugue

Born: December 10, 1822 Liège Belgium

Died: November 8, 1890 Paris 

Notable Works: Les Béatitudes, Variations Symphoniques, Sonata for Violin and Piano in A, Prélude, Choral et Fugue

César-Auguste Jean-Guillaume Hubert Franck, Belgian-French Romantic composer and organist who was the chief figure in a movement to give French music an emotional engagement, technical solidity, and seriousness comparable to that of German composers.

Franck was born of a Walloon father and a mother of German descent. He showed unmistakable musical gifts that enabled him to enter the Liège conservatory at the age of eight, and his progress as a pianist was so astonishing that in 1834 his father took him on tour and a year later dispatched him to Paris, where he worked with the Bohemian composer Anton Reicha, then professor at the Paris Conservatory. In 1836 the whole family, including the younger son Joseph, who played the violin, moved to Paris, and in 1837 César Franck entered the Paris Conservatory. Within a year he had won a Grand Prix d’Honneur by a feat of transposition in the sight-reading test, and this honour was followed by a first prize for fugue (1840) and second prize for organ (1841). Although the boy should now normally have prepared to compete for the Prix de Rome, a prize offered yearly in Paris for study in Rome, his father was determined on a virtuoso’s career for him and his violinist brother, with whom he gave concerts, and therefore removed him prematurely from the conservatory.

In order to please his father and earn much-needed money, Franck gave concerts, the programmes of which were largely devoted to performing his own showy fantasias and operatic potpourris, popular at that time. After 1840, when he turned his attention increasingly to the organ, his compositions became noticeably more serious, and three trios written at this time were to impress favourably the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt. A more ambitious work was the cantata Ruth, which had its first performance at the conservatory on Jan. 4, 1846.

Unwilling concert giving, a number of bad press notices, and the teaching needed to supplement his income took a physical toll of his powers. Only when he had finally asserted himself against what amounted to the unscrupulous exploitation of his gifts by his father could he achieve maturity and peace of mind. Franck fell in love with an actress with the professional name of Desmousseaux, whose real name was Félicité Saillot, but because both her parents also worked in the theatre, the family was regarded as unsuitable by the elder Franck, and his son was obliged to leave home some time before marrying her in 1848. After his marriage Franck’s way of life changed little for his remaining 42 years. He earned his livelihood as an organist and teacher and led a simple, almost ascetic life.

In 1851 he was appointed organist to the Church of Saint-Jean-Saint-François and in 1858 to that of Sainte-Clotilde, where he was already choirmaster. From the organ loft of Sainte-Clotilde came the improvisations for which he was to become famous and also their elaboration in organ and choral works. This music is all marked by the taste of the day, which was for a facile tenderness and saccharine sweetness in ecclesiastical music.

More important to Franck’s career as a composer was his appointment as organ professor at the Paris Conservatory in 1872, which came to him as a surprise because he had indulged in none of the preliminary intrigue customary in such cases. His open-heartedness and lack of sophistication were to make him enemies among his colleagues as well as friends among his pupils. This enmity was increased by the fact that his organ classes soon became classes of composition, and his pupils not infrequently proved superior to those of the conventional composition professors.

The nucleus of a school of disciples had already begun to form around Franck, but only after the founding of the National Society of Music (Feb. 25, 1871) was a real future assured for the type of music that he was interested in writing and communicating to his pupils. When Vincent d’Indy, a French composer, joined the group of Franck’s pupils in 1872, he brought an enthusiasm, a propagandist zeal, and an exclusive personal devotion that played a large place in restoring Franck’s confidence in his powers. With Ernest Chausson, Pierre de Bréville, Charles Bordes, and Guy Ropartz the Franck circle was complete in the early ’80s, and subsequently d’Indy’s very high claims (in his biography, César Franck, 1906) led for a time to the suspicion that Franck was “a creation of his own pupils.”

The music that he went on to write makes it clear that this is not true. As a composer Franck fulfilled his potential only in the last 10 years (1880–90) of his life. His Symphony in D Minor (1888), Variations symphoniques (1885), Piano Quintet in F Minor (1879), String Quartet in D Major (1889), Sonata in A Major for Violin and Piano (1886), and several organ pieces mark him as one of the most powerful French composers in the second half of the 19th century. His music is marked by soaring, almost improvisatory melodic flights.

Certainly his early years as performer and composer of virtuoso music left an indelible mark on his musical taste, as can be heard unmistakably in the last movement of the Prélude, aria et final for piano (completed 1887) and even momentarily in the Variations symphoniques for piano and orchestra. On the other hand, some of his weaker music represents an almost excessive reaction against superficiality and aspires to emotional intensity at all costs, drawing for the purpose on the examples of Liszt, Wagner, and, more remotely, Beethoven.

Franck died, partly as the result of a street accident, in 1890. The new seriousness of French music in the last quarter of the 19th century derived entirely from Franck and his pupils. Much has been made of his angelic sweetness and simplicity of character, his selflessness and innocence in the ways of the world. These traits are reflected in a blandness of manner, and they proved a handicap when Franck was faced with the necessity of producing strongly contrasting musical ideas, as in the oratorio Les Béatitudes (written during the 1870s and performed posthumously) and the symphonic poems Le Chasseur maudit (1882; The Accursed Hunter) and Les Djinns (1884). On the other hand, the Sonata in A for Violin and Piano and the Variations symphoniques remain as all but perfect monuments of a warm and noble musical nature and a strong, thorough craftsmanship that have survived all changes of taste and emotional attitudes.

Cooper, Martin Du Pré. “César Franck”. Encyclopaedia Britannica

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Cesar-Franck.

He was born in Liège (which at the time of his birth was part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands). He gave his first concerts there in 1834 and studied privately in Paris from 1835, where his teachers included Anton Reicha. After a brief return to Belgium, and a disastrous reception of an early oratorio Ruth, he moved to Paris, where he married and embarked on a career as teacher and organist. He gained a reputation as a formidable musical improviser, and travelled widely within France to demonstrate new instruments built by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll.

In 1858, he became organist at the Basilica of St. Clotilde, Paris, a position he retained for the rest of his life. He became professor at the Paris Conservatoire in 1872; he took French nationality, a requirement of the appointment. After acquiring the professorship, Franck wrote several pieces that have entered the standard classical repertoire, including symphonic, chamber, and keyboard works for pipe organ and piano. As a teacher and composer he had a vast following of composers and other musicians. His pupils included Ernest Chausson, Vincent d’Indy, Henri Duparc, Guillaume Lekeu, Albert Renaud, Charles Tournemire and Louis Vierne. 

Many of Franck’s works employ “cyclic form“, a method aspiring to achieve unity across multiple movements. This may be achieved by reminiscence, or recall, of an earlier thematic material into a later movement, or as in Franck’s output where all of the principal themes of the work are generated from a germinal motif. The main melodic subjects, thus interrelated, are then recapitulated in the final movement. Franck’s use of “cyclic form” is best illustrated by his Symphony in D minor (1888).

His music is often contrapuntally complex, using a harmonic language that is prototypically late Romantic, showing a great deal of influence from Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner. In his compositions, Franck showed a talent and a penchant for frequent, graceful modulations of key. Often these modulatory sequences, achieved through a pivot chord or through inflection of a melodic phrase, arrive at harmonically remote keys. Indeed, Franck’s students reported that his most frequent admonition was to always “modulate, modulate.” Franck’s modulatory style and his idiomatic method of inflecting melodic phrases are among his most recognisable traits. 

Franck had huge hands (evinced by the famous photo of him at the Ste-Clotilde organ), capable of spanning the interval of a 12th on the keyboard. This allowed him unusual flexibility in voice-leading between internal parts in fugal composition, and in the wide chords and stretches featured in much of his keyboard music (e.g., his Prière and Troisième Choral for organ). Of the Violin Sonata’s writing it has been said: “Franck, blissfully apt to forget that not every musician’s hands were as enormous as his own, littered the piano part (the last movement in particular) with major-tenth chords… most mere pianistic mortals ever since have been obligated to spread them in order to play them at all.” 

It took a Belgian composer to convince France of the value of German musical ideas. Before César Franck arrived in Paris, French Romantic music had been primarily a tradition of dazzling orchestral colour and seductive harmonies. Franck was interested in the structural and expressive innovations of Beethoven, Liszt and Wagner. His music combines the best of the two approaches, its Gallic lyricism and harmonic colour shaped through German structural ideas into powerful dramatic forms. Franck began his musical career as a keyboard prodigy. His father was keenly ambitious to see César’s name up in lights. So in 1830 he enrolled his gifted eight-year-old son at the Liège Conservatoire followed, seven years later, by the Paris Conservatoire. Franck received a thorough training. His wide-ranging abilities were such that he won first prize in virtually every contest he entered, whatever the musical activity. But all his father was interested in was exploiting his son’s potential as a performer. For a while he got his way. Franck’s performances were acclaimed wherever he played. He rubbed shoulders with the great Franz Liszt during a tour of Belgium in 1843. The family moved to Paris, and Franck dutifully continued touring. Finally, to his father’s disbelief, César rebelled and departed the family home in July 1846. Franck wrote relatively few works over the following quarter of a century. In 1858 he was appointed organist at the Basilica of Saint Clotilde in Paris where he composed a handful of sacred choral works and a Mass in three voices. In 1862 he wrote a set of Six Pièces for organ that Liszt hailed as worthy of ‘a place beside the masterpieces of Bach’. Yet his duties as an organist, which included performing, improvising and teaching, delayed any major composing activity for another decade. His only works of this period were two short cantatas, some organ miniatures and the Schumannesque piano piece Les plaints d’une poupée (‘A Doll’s Lament’). His big break finally came in 1871, when he was granted membership of the Société Nationale de Musique, acknowledging his leading status as a composer. As if by magic, his creative imagination went into overdrive. The works he produced in the following years fused the chromatic sensuality of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde with the cyclical structural ideas pioneered by Liszt. There were songs, large-scale sacred works, symphonic poems, piano pieces, a Symphony, a Sonata for Violin and Piano and the Variations symphoniques for piano and orchestra. Just as Franck’s creative light was in the ascendant, in 1890 he was tragically struck by a horse-drawn omnibus. He never fully recovered and died on 8 November following a bout of pleurisy. His legacy to French music was complex and varied. Parisian organists took inspiration from his phenomenal improvisation skills. He also pioneered extended compositions for the organ, which would lead to even grander works by Widor and Vierne. His advocacy of Liszt’s cyclic forms would later influence Debussy and Ravel. But for audiences around the world, Franck will be best remembered for his exhilarating orchestral works. Although few in number, their character marks them out as the work of a master equally at home in both German and French musical traditions.

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Less generously inspired is the comment that Saint-Saëns devotes to Franck’s work in this unfortunate booklet that has its name: “The Ideas of Mr. Vincent ‘Indy”, and of which we have already quoted an excerpt while talking of the Djinns. Here’s what he says about the piece that concerns us: “Piece of a unsightly and inconvenient execution, where the Choral is not a choral, where the Fugue is not a fugue, because it loses courage as soon as its exposure is finished, and continues with endless digressions that do not resemble more to a runaway than a zoophyte to a mammal.

Liszt stated that the Prélude, Choral et Fugue was “uncouth and tiresome to play”, and similarly, Prélude Aria et Final was described by one reviewer as “long and tedious.” Many of Franck’s works suffered from disastrous premières, including that of the Variations Symphoniques, where the piano and orchestra were completely out of sync for the entire finale, but perhaps worse was the premiere of Franck’s Piano Quintet, in which the pianist Saint-Saëns sight-read the work then stormed offstage when Franck attempted to dedicate the score to him. In some of these instances it is fair to say Franck was unlucky; in others, the reviews reflect attributes we recognise in Franck’s music today.

In addition, there were some discords within the Société Nationale, where Saint-Saëns had put himself increasingly at odds with Franck and his pupils. How exactly all of this turmoil may have played out in the composer’s mind is uncertain. It is certain that a number of his more “advanced” works appeared in this time period: the symphonic poems Le Chasseur maudit (1882) and Les Djinns (1883–1884), the Prelude, Chorale, and Fugue for piano (1884), the Symphonic Variations (1885), and the opera Hulda (1879–85). Many met with indifferent success or none, at least on their first presentations during Franck’s lifetime; but the Quintet of 1879 (one of Saint-Saëns’s particular dislikes) had proven itself an attention-getting and thought-provoking work (critics described it as having “disturbing vitality” and an “almost theatrical grimness”). 

Surprisingly, the same reaction also befell the dedicatee of the work, the composer and pianist Camille Saint-Saëns. At the premiere performance held at the Société Nationale de Musique — an organisation founded to promote French Art — Saint-Saëns sight-read the piano part. Eyewitnesses report that he was getting highly emotional and enraged during the performance, apparently discovering some secret code or covert message in the score.  Once finished, César Franck went on stage to congratulate the performers, but Saint-Saëns angrily refused to shake hands and stormed off stage, leaving behind the manuscript score dedicated to him. Even more curious is the fact that he actively discouraged all further performances of the work. Given these rather severe reactions to a piece of music, it is hardly surprising to locate an extra-musical reason for such scorching responses. And that reason was a young and beautiful private organ and composition student of César Franck’s. Augusta Holmès, so the composer reports, “arouses me in the most unspiritual desires”. Félicité clearly understood that the pervasive emotionality and infatuation expressed musically was solely intended for this “impure and seductive student”. And Saint-Saëns, together with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and almost the entire male faculty of the Paris Conservatoire, was passionately in love with Augusta. In fact, Saint-Saëns had numerously proposed marriage to Holmès, but had always been sweetly ignored. 

Shortly after Franck’s death in 1890 the question of his influence was already being hotly debated. Whilst Saint-Saëns, as expected, described Franck’s effect on French music in 1898 as ‘not pleasing’, Debussy spoke of a ‘Flemish influence’ that, for instance, had harmed Chausson – naturally endowed with the original French characteristics of elegance and clarity. Others complained that Franck, in view of the chromatic voice leading constantly modulating into distant keys, was too strongly indebted to the German-music heritage – that is, to Richard Wagner. When Franck students such as d’Indy or Chausson openly took the Wagnerian style as a model in Franck’s spirit, such critics sounded the alarm and saw French music endangered to its very foundations. Yet Franck’s works, seemingly at first glance late Romantic owing to their modern harmonies within the framework of traditional genres, do indeed show avant-garde traits. These include unusual, individual formal solutions or the upsetting of actually functional harmony through constant modulation into a free colourfulness of sounds not so far removed from that of a Debussy. Franck’s music defies clear classification – sometimes seeming classicist, sometimes romantic, sometimes hypermodern, with the tone often alternating between extremes of static restraint and highly dramatic pathos. Considering the ‘expressive’ directives in instrumental music, such as ‘recitativo’, ‘con fantasia’, ‘passionato’ or drammatico’, the question also arises as to whether personal confessions are hidden here under cover of absolute music in sonata form. In short: a composer caught between two stools, so to speak….