“Any one who had encountered this being in the street,” said Vincent d’Indy of his friend and mentor, César Franck, “with his coat too large, his trousers too short, his grimacing and preoccupied face framed in his somewhat gray whiskers, would not have believed in the transformation that took place when, at the piano, he explained and commented on some beautiful work of art, or when, at the organ, he put forth his inspired improvisations.” The study of César Franck is the study of such apparent contradictions.

Franck was among the most individualistic of the great composers, and, at the same time, perhaps the one most susceptible to bad influences and outside pressures. To a large extent, this duality is responsible for the enormous gulf which separates his best compositions from his worst, and equally so, for the great preponderance of the latter. Franck’s almost inherent sophistication in musical procedures was overbalanced by an incredible, almost unbelievable, naïveté in personal relations, and his life was spent only partially in the maturation of his own genius and personal approach to music, and much more in the effort to satisfy, and eventually to escape from, the wishes of others. It is significant to note that, with few execptions, everything whorthwhile in his music stems from the last fifteen years of his life. At least one critic (Wilfred Mellers) has suggested that Franck was lacking in native intelligence. It is a nicely concise and comprehensive explanation - if somewhat deflating to our mental image of a great composer.

César Auguste Jean Guillaume Hubert Franck was born at Liége on December 10, 1822, of Flemish and German parents. His father had predestined for him the career of a piano virtuoso, and from an early age he was systematically trained in that direction and exhibited as a wunderkind. Enrolled in the Paris Conservatoire, he gained a Grand Prix d’Honneur in piano (at the age of sixteen), a first prize in fugue, and a second in organ. In the latter case, the judges were so bewildered by the complexity of his improvisation that they at first planned to award him nothing. The young Franck’s compositional talents were encouraged by his father only in so far as they were directed towards the production of salon pieces for virtuosic display (in the Thalberg manner). When the boy showed an interest in composition of a deeper nature, he was quickly withdrawn from the Conservatoire and set to practicing and teaching. Because of a gradually increased opposition on his part, the concert career never really materialized. Nevertheless, Franck remained very much under the influence of his father until, at the age of twenty-four, he escaped into marriage, and a career as a church organist and teacher.

The influence of Mine. Franck on her husband was, if less obvious than his father’s, for thirty years no less invidious. Her taste and manner tended towards a kind of prudish piety, and under her influence Franck produced little but a quantity of devotional music of the most saccharine type. Teaching, both privately and at the Conservatoire, occupied the greatest part of his time, and only the establishment of a routine, the setting aside of a two-hour period each morning for, as he put it so accurately, “my own work,” eventually led him out of the morass, and into the composition of those masterpieces on which his entire reputation today stands. His first public success occurred in his sixty-ninth year, and he died shortly afterwards from complications of an injury received while hurrying to a lesson.

A good deal of more or less sentimental nonsense has been written about the music of César Franck from the point of view of 1) his “religious mysticism,” and 2) his “architectural formalism.” In both cases, the erroneous impressions (and they are erroneous) arise from interpreting his titles and texts, rather than his music, and in confusing techniques evolved from the peculiarities of the organ with religious inspiration.

Debussy was among the first to point out that the value of such a piece as Les Béatitudes did not stem in the least from its devotional aspects, but from purely musical qualities. Certainly, Franck was not the kind of man, as Bruckner was, to dedicate a symphony “to God,” and those who profess to see, in the magnificent Prélude, Choral et Fugue or the Piano Quintet, the hand of a religious mystic, are deluding themselves. Much rhapsodizing of this ilk arises from Saint-Saëns’ description of Franck’s compositions as “musique cathédralesque.” Saint-Saëns, had he not been a friend, would have been recognized (by anyone but Franck) as an enemy, and his remark was almost certainly meant to be derogatory.

Nor was Franck the purveyor of Classical form that some writers have made him out to be. The much discussed “cyclic form” is not a form at all, but a device, imposed from outside the composition (rather than, for example, the internal flowering of a Beethoven motif), and, moreover, common to almost anyone familiar with organ improvisations. Neither is the derivation of thematic material from a single source, by itself, a demonstration of “form.” What holds a composition together is not thematic unity, but the balance of its parts - or every competently written theme and variations would be a masterpiece.

The balance of Franck’s finest compositions is not held rigidly in the forms implied by his titles. His works, more often than not, are put together with “scotch-tape and sealing wax,” but they do hold. About the Prélude, Choral et Fugue, Saint-Saëns petulantly said, “the fugue is not a fugue.” To this, pianist Alfred Cortot agreed, but added an illuminating explanation. The exposition and successive entries of the four parts, and the following development, are very much in the correct and traditional manner. “Nevertheless,” wrote Cortot, “one feels that the very subject of the fugue does not contain within itself its own distinctive end and climax, that it moves in such an atmosphere of longing that some kind of intervention will be needed to release it from its torment.” And this is precisely the mode of procedure that Franck uses. It is not, then, that Franck is not a Bach in formal technique, but that Franck is not a Bach in personality. His music is superbly viable not because of its formal aspects, its thematic interrelationships, its lyricism, or its harmony, but because of a pragmatic application of any or all of these to sustain the emotional level and balance of each individual work at each of its crucial points. Herein lies the reason for the individuality of Franck’s style (and the unique quality of each work), and the explanation for his occasional lapses in the context of an otherwise great composition.

To get back to the Fugue: what happens is that at its emotional climax, the theme of the Choral enters and brings the relaxation and culmination of the enormous tensions built through the latter half of the work. Themes re-enter and the music approaches the conclusion to the sound of “jubilant bells.” “This,” as “Cortot wrote, is a consequence foreseen neither by treatises on counter―point nor by too punctilious musicians.”

The Prélude, Choral et Fugue was composed in 1884 and dedicated to Mlle. Marie Poitevin, who gave it its premiere at a concert of the Societé Nationale de Musique on January 24, 1885.