César Franck

French composer

• Born: December 10, 1822
• Birthplace: Liège, Netherlands (now in Belgium)
• Died: November 8, 1890
• Place of death: Paris, France

Franck’s mastery of the principles of orchestration and the harmonic theories of the nineteenth century made him the acknowledged leader of French music of his era and one of the world’s great composers.

Early Life

César Auguste Franck was the firstborn son of a minor bank official who had come from Aix to settle in Liège in 1817 and had married a German woman in 1820. His father, Nicholas-Joseph, was an ambitious, frustrated man; a lover of music and amateur musician, he curried the favor of the writers and artists of Liège and transferred his thwarted ambition for fame and fortune onto César, who early displayed musical ability. Nicholas-Joseph arranged a strict schedule for the boy, forcing him to rigorous study of the piano and composition. By the time César was eight years old, the elder Franck enrolled him at the local conservatory, where his musical aptitude gained for him the notice of his teachers.

In 1835, when Franck was thirteen, his father sent him to Paris to study counterpoint and harmony under the most notable music masters of the day. Eager to succeed through the merits of his son, Nicholas-Joseph arranged a number of public concerts at which his young son performed as a prodigy, along with such established musicians as Franz Liszt. At these concerts, Franck played some of his own compositions. Though competent, they were undistinguished.

Realizing that a foreigner had little chance to make his way into the musical establishment of Paris, Nicholas-Joseph became a naturalized French citizen and won for Franck the right to enroll in the prestigious Paris Conservatory in 1837. Franck’s talents were so extraordinary that by the end of the first year he had taken a special first prize for playing a difficult piano piece, astonishing his examiners by transposing the work into another key while sight reading.

For four years the young Franck pursued his studies, especially of the organ, an instrument that was to be a crucial factor in his career. Then—probably at his father’s perverse insistence—Franck resigned from the conservatory in 1842. His father had arranged a series of weekly concerts to be held in his own home, and Franck obligingly performed, playing some of his own pieces—fantasias, adaptations of tunes from popular light operas, and other theatrical music. He also composed a set of four piano trios (1843), works that brought him some serious attention, but by and large the music of this concert period was more attuned to public taste and personal profit than to serious artistic concerns.

Gradually, Franck grew restive under the despotism of his father. Though he had made a number of artistic friendships through his father’s contrivances—people such as Franz Liszt and Hector Berlioz—Franck bridled under his father’s overbearing control, which forced him to produce the kind of music that the old man thought would advance his son’s, and his own, career.

One such composition was Ruth (1846), an oratorio composed from earlier musical jottings. Based on the Old Testament story of Ruth and Boaz, the work comprised fifteen numbers, and when first performed it drew a number of serious reviews. Critics noted its simplicity, its almost childlike directness, and though the work was a failure, it remains Franck’s first major achievement, one that he would come back to and revise some thirty years later.

Meanwhile, Franck had met and fallen in love with one of his piano pupils, Félicité Saillot-Desmousseaux, whose parents were actors in the Comédie Française. Franck married Saillot in February, 1848. The marriage signaled a formal break with his father; Franck was now on his own.

Retiring from public music, Franck began making his living primarily as a teacher, as accompanist at a conservatory in Orléans, and, significantly, as organist at the Church of Saint-Jean-Saint-François-au-Marais and, more important, at the Church of Sainte-Clotilde. These were key stages in his artistic career. The modern organ of Franck’s time, especially the wonderful instrument at Sainte-Clotilde, was capable of producing a wide range of tones and orchestral coloring, and it presented Franck with the opportunity of developing a musical technique based on this symphonic capability. For the rest of his life, Franck was to dedicate himself to the mastery of the organ, though his duties as church organist kept him, for almost two decades, from creating any music more significant than improvisational pieces and routine liturgical works. Thus, from the late 1840’s to the beginning of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Franck lived and worked in virtual obscurity.

Life’s Work

In retrospect, this obscurity was a period of creative gestation during which Franck worked out his musical ideas. Six Pièces (1862) were short, improvisational experiments filled with a majestic tonality and a melodiousness that were to characterize his later masterpieces. Liszt, who was one of Franck’s earliest and most important friends, regarded these pieces as worthy of comparison to those of Johann Sebastian Bach.

Meanwhile, the contacts he had made during a thirty-year career as musician, teacher, and minor composer began to bear fruit. Liszt had been playing Franck’s 1843 trios in Germany and had gained for the composer some small measure of fame. Additionally, Franck’s mastery of the organ now brought him into contact with French musicians who specialized in that instrument. The Franco-Prussian War raised French nationalistic sentiment, so that by late 1871 a group of French composers and musicians organized the National Society of Music. Its purpose was to promote, through concerts, the music of French composers. At fifty, Franck was the oldest in the group, but he was to become one of its most important artists.

The years immediately after Franck’s fiftieth birthday were central in his career as a composer. He was appointed professor of the organ at the conservatory in 1872, and though the position did little for him financially, it did establish his preeminence and brought his music more serious attention. Parts of his oratorio Ruth, which had laid in comparative neglect since the late 1840’s, were given fresh performances. Amid such renewed interest in his music, Franck determined to compose an ambitious work.

The work was Rédemption (1873), which Franck conceived as a symphonic poem for orchestra and voice. The text is in three parts. Part 1 tells of humankind’s paganism and its expectations of the coming of Christ. Part 2 records humanity’s Christian joy through the centuries, and part 3 laments the Fall of Man and contemplates a second redemption through prayer.

Though the obvious religiosity of the subject deeply appealed to Franck, the work was a resounding failure, not only because of poor copies of the orchestration and bad conducting but also because the piece lacked dramatic tension. Nevertheless, Rédemption is important in the Franck canon as a transitional work, particularly the section of symphonic interlude, bearing characteristics of harmony and tonality that distinguish the best of Franck’s music.

Despite this setback, however, Franck continued his duties as teacher, establishing a profound influence on the younger generation of French composers and musicians who embraced his ideas of harmony and the relationship of chords and keys. One of his pupils, Vincent d’Indy, a composer in his own right and one of Franck’s first biographers, records his famous impression of Franck at the organ, his flowing white hair and whiskers setting off his dark, piercing eyes.

In 1874, Franck first heard the prelude to Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and was reassured about his own harmonic techniques. The following year, Franck composed Les Éolides , first performed in Paris in 1876. A major orchestral work, this symphonic poem is the first composition that fully integrates structure and tonality, combining lyrical delicacy with structural grace. Les Éolides introduced the last phase of Franck’s achievement. The work ushered in a period of creative efflorescence that continued unabated until Franck’s death some fifteen years later. At the age of fifty-three, when most composers had already completed most of their best work, Franck was just beginning to produce his masterpieces.

Les Béatitudes was completed in 1879 and published the following year. A large-scale oratorio based on Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, the work is impressive in its structural integrity and its use of certain keys to denote psychological states. Also in 1879, Franck astonished the musical world with one of his greatest works, Quintet in F Minor for Piano and Strings. Filled with dramatic energy and passion, it still retains a formal structure that provides a balance and cohesiveness, making the quintet among Franck’s most popular works. Still another oratorio, Rebecca , appeared the following year, but it was the two symphonic poems, Le Chasseur maudit (1882) and Les Djinns (1884), and the Variations symphoniques (1885) that finally established Franck as one of France’s greatest composers. These works are characterized by a lush harmony within a tightly structured cyclical form, a technique of restating themes and chords as a principle of musical organization.

The awarding of the Legion of Honor to Franck in 1885 was a tribute no less to his achievement as a composer as to his standing as a professor and his character as a man. Such official recognition was thus the culmination of the public’s belated acknowledgment. With the Sonata in A Major for Violin and Piano (1886), he produced a masterpiece of chamber music—concise, eloquent, and finely structured. It is one of his most popular compositions.

At the height of his creative powers, Franck climaxed his career as a composer in the production of his only symphony, the magnificent Symphony in D Minor. For sheer expressiveness, controlled by classical form, and as an example of chromatic richness and harmonic beauty, the symphony ranks as Franck’s crowning work. Though it earned for him a mixed reception at its first performance—some of the criticism leveled particularly at the use of the English horn in the first movement—the symphony has never lost its appeal. It is regarded by many as one of the great symphonies of the world.

The String Quartet in D Major (1889), his last major composition, is also one of his best. Typical of his greatest work, the quartet is masterfully structured and melodically rich, a superb example of the cyclical form at its most subtle and concise.

In October, 1890, still involved in several projects, Franck caught cold. By November, his condition worsened. Pleurisy developed, and he died on November 8.

Significance

Of the great composers, César Franck was among the least prolific. He contributed only one symphony to the orchestral repertory and only three major works in chamber music. However, the quality of these compositions assures for Franck a place as the foremost composer of absolute—that is, nonprogrammatic—music in France during the nineteenth century.

Though Franck wrote numerous choral works throughout his career, his genius was not as a composer for the voice. His oratorios, while creditable, lack the texture of harmonic fullness, even the drama, of his orchestral scores. His opera Hulda, written hastily between 1884 and 1886, was never produced during Franck’s lifetime; another, “Ghiselle,” was never completed. Neither is of any consequence.

In his symphonic poems, his chamber music, and his symphony, Franck led the way among all French composers of the nineteenth century. In a period when French music was dominated by theatrical forms, especially the opera and operetta, Franck looked back to the classical forms of Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven and created works of forceful and melodic character. As a teacher, Franck influenced a generation of French composers who carried their master’s dedication to well-designed harmonic structure into the twentieth century.

Bibliography

Abraham, Gerald, ed. Romanticism (1830-1890). Vol. 9 in New Oxford History of Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. This standard reference work on music includes an essay analyzing Franck’s life and music.

Archbold, Lawrence, and William J. Peterson, eds. French Organ Music: From the Revolution to Franck and Widor. Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 1995. Collection of essays analyzing organ compositions by Franck and other French composers. The essays place the music within its political and cultural context, describe how some compositions were created, and provide new information about organ technique.

Davies, Laurence. César Franck and His Circle. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970. A classic study not only of Franck but also of his influence on the lives and works of his pupils and musical descendants. Such composers as Ernest Chausson, Henri Duparc, and Vincent d’Indy brought to their music the principles of their master, who must thus be considered a precursor of modern music.

Demuth, Norman. César Franck. London: Dennis Dobson, 1949. A musical study of the composer with copious examples of notation and scoring. Suggests that Franck was a pioneer in the creation of the symphonic poem. A good biography, though rather technical for the lay reader.

Douglass, Fenner. Cavaille-Coll and the French Romantic Tradition. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999. A biography of Aristide Cavaille-Coll, the greatest French organ builder of the nineteenth century. Examines his relations with Franck and other composers and performers; describes how he built an organ for Franck at the Church of Sainte-Clotilde in Paris.

Indy, Vincent d’. César Franck. Translated by Rosa Newmarch. London: John Lane, 1910. An important early biography, representing the biased view of one of Franck’s pupils. Himself a composer, d’Indy writes reverently of Franck and his music, glorifying the composer in tones amounting almost to deification. Assessments aside, historical details are accurate.

Smith, Rollin. Toward an Authentic Interpretation of the Organ Works of César Franck. 2d ed., rev. and enlarged. Hillsdale, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 2002. An updated version of the doctoral thesis Smith wrote in 1983 when he was a student at the Juilliard School of Music. Smith discusses Franck, his music, and the organs on which he performed, and offers suggestions for organists wishing to perform Franck’s compositions.

Ulrich, Homer. Chamber Music. 2d ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1966. A good, brief examination of Franck’s chamber works, noting particularly their cyclical form. A basic knowledge of musical composition would help the lay reader to fully appreciate Franck’s structural methods.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Symphonic Music: Its Evolution Since the Renaissance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1952. Views Franck as a late Romanticist and notes his mastery of the cyclical form, with several examples of notation. Interesting reference to Franck’s skill as master organist and the effect of such on his orchestral writing.

Vallas, Léon. César Franck. Translated by Hubert Foss. Reprint. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973. The avowed purpose of this study is to demythologize the life and work of Franck as established by d’Indy and others. Though accurate, it devotes as much space to Franck’s choral music as to his more important orchestral works and is thus somewhat too detailed.