César Franck
Symphony in D minor
César Franck était un homme sans malice auquel d’avoir
trouvé une belle harmonie suffisait à sa joie d’un jour.1
(“César Franck was a man without malice, and finding a beautiful
harmony was sufficient to make him joyful for the rest of the day...”)
Claude Debussy, 1903
Constrained by a highly precarious financial situation following his scandalous
divorce and new marriage with his disinherited lover, Claude Debussy had
to seek recourse in writing music reviews during the last 15 years of his
life: and this he did with staggering success. Despite the ironic quote in
the epigraph, as well as his insistence in qualifying César Franck
(1822-1890) as a “Belgian composer”, Debussy held him in high
esteem, and often teased him by opposing the “self-assured ingenuousness” of
the latter to the “slyness” of
Richard Wagner, whom the chauvinistic Debussy treated as a true whipping
boy.
Although born in Liège, César Franck moved to Paris with his
family at the age of 13, where he completed all his advanced musical studies:
first as a virtuoso pianist, then as an organist, with equal skill. Only
during the last 12 years of his life did Franck truly dedicate himself to
composition, and this was only thanks to his harmony and organ students,
who were as devoted as they were gifted, in particular Vincent d’Indy,
Edouard Lalo and Henri Duparc. They and their fellow students, baptised “la
bande à Franck” by their contemporaries, made up an unofficial
composition class at the Jesuit College in the rue Vaugirard, and later at
the Paris Conservatoire, and were continually promoting the oeuvre of their
dearly beloved “Pater Seraphicus”.
Dedicated to Duparc, the Symphony in D minor seems all the more remarkable
when taking into consideration that Franck had only a handful of recent models
in French repertoire when he started working on the score in 1886. The Organ
Symphony No. 3 by Saint-Saëns dates from the same year, but his first
two symphonies date back to 1855, as do the symphonies by Bizet and Gounod.
Moreover, Franck had never before tackled the genre of the symphony proper,
although he had come close to it with his symphonic poems such as the Eolides
(1876) and the Djinns (1884), or his Variations symphoniques (1885), which
is in fact a piano concerto, although not categorized as such. Nevertheless,
when one is aware of the reciprocal emulation which reigned between master
and pupils, and realizes that d’Indy and Lalo wrote their first symphonies
in 1886, one is less surprised by Franck’s decision.
Essentially written between September 1887 and August 1888, the critics gave
the Symphony in D minor a disdainful, indeed at times aggressive reception
following its première at the Concerts du Conservatoire in February
1889. Franck had become used to this a long time ago, as, apart from unusual
successes such as the small symphonic poem Le chasseur maudit (1883) and
his Variations symphoniques, his works had never enjoyed the favour of the
Parisian musical scene. Furthermore, when the Symphony was first performed,
still under the influence of the triumph which he had achieved with his Quintet
for Piano and Strings, the composer interpreted the glacial silence of the
public as a token of respectful reverence. One must mention that the work
had its revenge after his death, and has remained up to our days a fixed
standard in the concert repertoire.
“It is a classical symphony”, 2 Franck stated with regard to
his score, which he nevertheless wished to be considered as a new and personal
definition of the genre. While remaining true to the cyclical principle held
dear by the composer, the Symphony in D minor in fact presents several innovations
in form, of which the three-part structure is not the least. Although the
introduction (Lento), based on a motif which can also be found at the very
beginning of Liszt’s symphonic poem Les Préludes as well as
in Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 16, contains all that is most typical
of the symphonies by Mozart or Haydn, this is hardly the case with the obligatory
recapitulation, as it returns a minor third higher. By doing this, Franck
believed he could fix the themes more firmly in the minds of the listeners,
but the audience at the première considered it only a perversion of
the most scandalous and unpardonable kind.
Formed by two phrases briefly played by the flutes and the oboes in the introduction,
the principal subject of the initial Allegro non troppo is more successful
at achieving the goal of the composer, with the incessant and very “Franckian” repetition
of its “pivotal note” (the beginning of a motif) – however,
this is indeed a risky procedure if the interpretation is colourless or lacking
in nuance, like that given by Jules Garçin during the première.
The development – magnificent – which contains a pronounced chromatism,
represents the audacious and successful mixture of all preceding thematic
material. The recapitulation is no less remarkable, with the transformation
of the basic motif in a canon in the manner of a chorale – another
procedure widely used by Franck in his music.
Typical for Franck, the central movement (Allegretto) is not just a single
movement, but two, linked to one another, in which “each beat of the
andante equals one whole bar of the scherzo”. 3 The motifs of the “andante” – a
rather ponderous episode, rather like a funeral march, entrusted to the harp
and the pizzicato strings, with a melody played by the cor anglais – are
followed in the “scherzo” by two themes which are strongly contrasted
as far as harmony is concerned, one of which is characterized by the string
tremolos, the other by the clarinet, in marked rhythms.
As is obligatory in the cyclical form, the finale again takes up both the
name (Allegro non troppo) and the thematic material of the first movement,
as well as the principal motifs of the Allegretto. Nevertheless, as the composer
made clear, “they do not appear as quotes, I make something of them,
their role is that of new elements.”4 Franck could have mentioned that
he had added two new ideas to the finale. The first one, which can be heard
during the first bars in the cellos and the bassoons, consists of a joyous
and heroic march. The second one is presented in two stages, first by the
trumpets, to which the violins respond, whereby this double subject forms
a chorale. The melody of the cor anglais from the Allegretto signals the
beginning of the development, in which the orchestra reviews the other themes – at
times in the form of a chorale – before the triumphant return of the
heroic march. To those who accused Franck’s Symphony of being too long,
Debussy replied as follows by way of tribute: “With Franck, it is a
case of constant devotion to the music, and you can take it or leave it;
no power on earth could make him interrupt the period of time he considers
rightful and necessary.
Ernest ChaussonSymphony in
B flat, Op. 20
L’émotion que sa musique me donne s’augmente douloureusement
du sentiment qu’il n’est plus parmi nous, qu’on ne reverra
non plus la bonté accueillante et sûre de son sourire. 6
(“The emotion I feel upon hearing his music increases painfully when
I realize that he is no longer among us, that we will never again enjoy the
welcoming and steady kindness of his smile.”)
Claude Debussy, 1903
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