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Hail, Cesar - composer Cesar Franck
National Review, Dec 3, 1990 by R.J. Stove
Stove's articles on music and literature have appeared in The American Spectator, the Australian journal Quadrant, and various Australian national newspapers.
ON THE night of October 12, Liege, Belgium, exploded into what looked like about twenty fairgrounds at once: one would have to be a combination of Swinburne and Hieronymus Bosch to conjure up the resultant son et lumiere of bacchic dementia. Liege is normally a somewhat dour place, a steel-producing and formerly) coal-mining city whose back-streets remain crammed with the sort of shabby apartment-blocks where the panic-stricken anti-heroes created by Georges Simenon (a native son) regularly hanged themselves. But this particular night, all was jubilation: the Gazette de Liege, one of Europe's great newspapers, was celebrating its 150th birthday, while simultaneously at the Royal Conservatory the centenary of Cesar Franck's death was being marked by a nationally televised performance (royalty present, black ties worn, your correspondent the sole imbecile clad in an ordinary suit) of Franck's oratorio The Beatitudes.
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Franck was Belgium's greatest composer: born at Liege, with a sense of appropriate career timing that he never displayed again, on the very day Beethoven finished his Missa Solemnis (December 10, 1822). He studied at the Royal Conservatory until 1835, when with his family he moved to France. Once enrolled at the Paris Conservatoire he proceeded to show that in a century of sight-reading freaks, he himself was a sight-reading superfreak. At age 15, during his final piano exam, he sight-read the passage he was given with complete accuracy: but he insisted on transposing it down a third. Though that whim cost him the first prize, Franck did receive uniquely among conservatory students) a Grand Prix d'Honneur. Three years later he underwent his final organ-improvisation exam: infuriating his examiners by commingling and making a perfectly consonant piece from-two proffered themes, although the examiners' idea was that he should improvise on each theme separately. When Franck managed to surpass even this display of hubris by dedicating his Opus 1 to Belgium's king, his father withdrew him from the conservatory altogether. The paternal hope was that Cesar should become a peripatetic piano virtuoso; for all his executant skill, he never did, and never wanted to.
We can shamelessly condense the next thirty-odd years (1842-71) of Franck's life, a tale of drudgery and under-achievement on an awesome scale. He scraped along as an organist, mostly at the Parisian church of Sainte-Clothilde: where in fact he often played for the rest of his life. Liszt once heard him perform there, and was stupefied with admiration, comparing Franck's organistic prowess to Bach's. In 1848, Franck acquired a wife in the same fashion Macaulay alleged that Britain acquired its empire: in a fit of absentmindedness. He continued to compose, mostly liturgical music and secular songs; but these items-while already suggesting the distinctive ardent, long-breathed, hyperchromatic, rhythmically swaying style that would subsequently be a Franck patent-were few in number, limited in importance, and nonexistent in public impact. Unsurprisingly he suffered, during the early 1850s, a nervous breakdown: from which only the recrudescence of his serene, uncomplicated Catholic faith eventually rescued him. ("Serene" is hardly an adequte adjective for the Franck of later years. At his most abstracted, which he nearly always was, he made Father Brown look like a yuppie.)
Around 1871, by a process that no one has explained-the Franco-Prussian War? Intimations of mortality? Steroids?-Franck suddenly effected a miracle of belated compositional flourishing. His earliest fully mature piece (1871-72) was called, fittingly, Redemption. Also in 1872, he beguiled his way into the hearts of parishioners throughout the world with his motet Panis Angelicus. At last he obtained some official acknowledgment, accepting (and being required to renounce Belgian citizenship for) the professorship of organ at the very institution he had had to leave in 1842: the Paris Conservatory. Remarkable symphonic poems poured forth, including one (The Djinns) with a quasi-continuo piano role that adumbrates much twentieth-century musical thinking. The darkly splendid Piano Quartet dates from 1879; after its premier the pianist Saint-Sadns) ostentatiously left his copy sitting on his instrument's music-stand, so much did he resent Franck. A feat of unsurpassed lyricism, the Violin Sonata received its initial rendition at night in a museum where all artificial lighting was forbidden. Franck's slightly earlier and equally delightful Symphonic Variations were ludicrously under-rehearsed: in concert they came to a shuddering halt well before their intended ending. A Franck first performance, then, was not for the fainthearted.
As for Franck's D-minor symphony, the conservatory's orchestra hated his writing enough to make it a total mess: Charles Gounod dubbed the music (not, he made clear, the playing) "an affirmation of incompetence carried to the length of a dogma." The final brick in this creative arc de triomphe was set in place when, in 1890, Franck-temperamentally incapable of looking both ways before he crossed a street-was knocked down by a typically homicidal Paris bus. He could scarcely bother to notice his own dreadful injuries; everyone around him did, however, and from those injuries-on November 8-he died.
