Hail, Cesar - composer Cesar Franck

For most of the intervening hundred years, at least in Anglophone countries, expressing admiration for Cesar Franck has been like expressing admiration for the pre-Raphaelites: a thing never to be attempted in fashionable circles by anyone of less than Schwarzeneggeresque physique. (Constant Lambert, Britain's leading prewar music critic and a man of unusual acuteness overall, nonetheless dismissed Franck's symphony as "a musical Minotaur which fortunately has had no progeny.") Yet over the last decade, the standard bien-pensant denunciations of Victoriana" having died down from their erstwhile eardrum-splitting decibel level to no more than the occasional bloodcurdling squawk, Franck has started creeping into favor. His collected songs and orchestral compositions have just been released on commercial CDs by, respectively, the Belgian labels Disques Duchesne and Ricerear. Half-a-dozen organists have already recorded centennial surveys of Franck's large organ output. The artistic character traits of Franck that were once ritually scolded for their "mannerism" and sentimentality" ("organ-stop orchestration" used to be a particularly beloved and meaningless anti-Franck mantra of textbook writers) increasingly emerge as valid and highly original reworkings of Romanticism's basic structures.

Still, as if to reassure us that plus ca change, the tradition of shambolic Franck performance (or, indeed, nonperformance) continues intact. The first in Lidge's September-October recital series of Franck's organ ceuvre was canceled without notice because, it later transpired, the scheduled organist had broken his arm. This writer's enquiries about and payment for the commemorative Cesar Franck train were met (after two months) with a regretful letter from Liege's railway station claiming that the train had been canceled because of insufficient ticket sales. And the Franck statue which was to be unveiled (also in Liege) on November 8 of this year will not be unveiled after all: instead, lucky Liege will play host on that date to a Franck academic symposium. Anyhow: Hail, Cesar, and perhaps your birth's bicentenary in 2022 will be celebrated in a slightly less erratic manner.

COPYRIGHT 1990 National Review, Inc.
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