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Contents:
DDD - Recorded by Michael Ponder at Lincoln Cathedral, 3, 4 and 10 March 2008
Despite having been born in the Belgian city of Liège in 1822 to Walloon parents, César Franck is often counted, however erroneously, as a French composer. In some respects this is understandable, for his family moved to Paris in 1836, where the young teenager continued his studies in composition with the Bohemian-born Anton Reicha. The influence of Reicha, however, was not Gallic but most decidedly Austro-Germanic. In addition to Franck’s later structural innovations, in terms of his even later absorption, and continuing development, of a greater degree of chromaticism in his music, essentially deriving from Liszt, and his genius in transmuting the emotional expression of the powerful development in the 19th-century Romantic movement of that chromaticism, together with a greater tonal freedom in the relationship of certain keys to the tonic, it was only to be expected that Franck himself, based in Paris for virtually the rest of his life, should in time come to exert a profound and indeed long-lasting influence upon succeeding generations of French composers – particularly composers of organ music. The mature, simply-led, life of César Franck, spent almost entirely in a spirit of detachment from day-to-day practicalities, of disinterestedness even in such mundane matters – as we may well expect from a deeply religious man in the mid-nineteenth century - appears to some music-lovers as having been one in which decades of quiet creativity were over-shadowed by the brilliant careers of his younger contemporaries, only for him, at last in his 60s, to achieve something of the recognition which was clearly his due as a magnificent composer, organist and teacher. If such a view is essentially correct, Franck was never bitter or resentful at his comparative neglect, and, so it would appear, he was genuinely moved by the large degree of success which eventually came his way in his orchestral concert music and in his chamber-music compositions. None the less, this deserved – if late – success was the result of decades of quiet development, at the heart, despite the originality of his Symphony in D minor and his Symphonic Variations for piano and orchestra (his two most famous orchestral scores), of his Violin Sonata (his most famous chamber work), and of his Prelude, Chorale and Fugue for solo piano, stands his organ music, the most significant body of work for the instrument since that of Mendelssohn. Indeed, it is in Franck’s organ music that we can divine his long-term developmental arrival at the essentially spiritual nature of his genius. For the last almost forty years of his life, the organ lay at the heart of his musical expression – in 1851 he was appointed organist of St Jean Saint-François, and, seven years later, to a similar post at St Clotilde. In 1872, he was named professor of organ at the Paris Conservatoire, where he remained until his death in September 1890, and it was during these final decades that Franck’s genius deepened, his fame spreading far wider than the environs of Paris, to the extent that in 1866 Liszt himself left the church in some amazement, having heard Franck improvise in a manner such as to cause Liszt to invoke JS Bach’s name ‘in an inevitable comparison’, as Vincent d’Indy – the most illustrious of Franck’s pupils - recalled. Although Franck in total composed more than one hundred individual pieces for organ, most of them were quite short, intended for liturgical use as preludes or postludes for the church services. His more significant organ compositions, which number a dozen in total, were published in three groups: chronologically, the Six Pièces (1859-62); the Trois Pièces (1878), and the Trois Chorales (1890). It is perhaps in the final set of Trois Chorales, which come from the last months of Franck’s life, that his genius in writing for the instrument which lay at the heart of his life’s-work can be most readily discerned. Frankly, they constitute uniquely original masterpieces in every sense, and surely reveal something of his qualities in improvisation in the organ-loft. They are not fantasias upon chorale-themes explicitly stated at or near the outset of the piece (as, for example, as occurs\ in virtually every one of Bach’s Chorale-Preludes), but are profoundly spiritual meditations upon the nature of the Chorales in question, to the extent that the chorale-theme is only gradually revealed long after the mood and character of the fantasia has been established - having been there all along as it were, silently observing events - yet revealing itself, individually, as it emerges from the profound musical thought which its inherent character has already engendered. Thus, in each of the Trois Chorales, the contemplation and spiritual other-worldliness which they all, in varying degrees, inhabit, is not only there from the beginning of course, but also, in the depth of utterance of the music and in what it has revealed, Franck gradually widens the intimacy of his world to embrace that of his listeners, now being given the inspiration of the work at last. In such a manner is the sheer inventive genius of this composer shown at its most unique and profound. Clearly, Franck’s was a new world – not suddenly bursting upon the scene, but disclosed in the manner of an evolving revelation, the musical personification of the depth of belief which sustained this deeply religious man throughout his life. From the Trois Pièces of 1878 and the earlier Six Pièces, composed between 1859-62, we can trace something of the musical journey that culminated in Franck’s final masterpieces, but it must not be thought that these earlier works are in any way less impressive in terms of individual style or expression; their scale may be smaller, but the composer’s mastery is not at all in question. The second and third of the Trois Pièces are amongst the most well-known of all of Franck’s shorter organ works. The Cantabile is a relatively short wordless song, no doubt with religious meditative connotations, inhabiting something of the character of Franck’s even more well-known song Panis Angelicus of 1872, and the Pièce Héroïque, clearly a far more dramatic creation (not unlike, in character, parts of Franck’s later symphonic poem Le Chasseur Maudit), became so popular at the dawn of the twentieth-century – and not just amongst organists – that several orchestrations of the work were published and were relatively frequently heard in concert. Based upon two themes, the piece finely demonstrates Franck’s unique contributions to symphonic development, not least in his evolution of organic cyclical composition. Still earlier in his career, the collection of Six Pièces is more widely cast, but contains two absolute gems in Franck’s output of organ music. The Pastorale is a beautifully spiritual, indeed meditative, landscape, and the sturdy Final assuredly reveals the inner strength of this quiet, undemonstrative, but extraordinarily original genius, as he contemplates the uplifting ecstasy of his beliefs in his faith and his own abilities. Robert Matthew-Walker
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