V

The drift of romanticism toward realism is easy to trace in all the arts. There were, however, artists of all kinds who were caught up, so to speak, from the current into a life of the spirit, who championed neither the glory of the senses, as Wagner, nor the indomitable power of reason, as Brahms, but preserved a serenity and calm, a sort of confident, nearly ascetic rapture, elevated above the turmoil of the world, standing not with nor against, but floating above. Such an artist in music was César Franck, growing up almost unnoticed between Wagner and Brahms, now to be ranked as one of the greatest composers of the second half of the century. He is as different from them as they are from each other. Liszt, the omniscient, knew of him, had heard him play the organ in the church of Ste. Clotilde, where in almost monastic seclusion the greater part of his life flowed on, had likened him to the great Sebastian Bach, had gone away marvelling; but only a small band of pupils knew him intimately and the depth of his genius as a composer.

His life was retired. He was indifferent to lack of appreciation. When, through the efforts of his devoted disciples, his works were at rare intervals brought to public performance, he was quite forgetful of the cold, often hostile, audience, intent only to compare the sound of his music as he heard it with the thought he had had in his soul, happy if the sound were what he had conceived it would be. Of envy, meanness, jealousy, of all the darker side of life, in fact, he seems to have taken no account. Nor by imagination could he picture it, nor express it in his music, which is unfailingly luminous and exalted. Most striking in his nature was a gentle, unwavering, confident candor, and in his music there is scarcely a hint of doubt, of inquiring, or of struggle. It suggests inevitably the cathedral, the joyous calm of religious faith, spiritual exaltation, even radiance.

His life, though not free in early years from hardship, was relatively calm and uneventful. He was born in Liège in December, 1822, eleven years after Wagner, eleven years before Brahms, and from the start was directed to music by his father. In the course of his early training at Liège he acquired remarkable skill as a virtuoso, and his father had hopes of exploiting his gifts in wide concert tours. In 1835 he moved with his family to Paris and remained there seven years; at the end of which, having amazed his instructors and judges at the Conservatoire, among whom, be it noted, the venerable Cherubini, and won a special prize, he was called from further study by the dictates of his father and went back to Liège to take up his career as a concert pianist. For some reason this project was abandoned at the end of two years, and he returned to Paris, there to pass the remainder of his life.

At first he was organist at the church of Notre Dame de Lorette, later at Ste. Clotilde, and in 1872 he was appointed professor of the organ at the Conservatoire. To the end of his life he gave lessons in organ and pianoforte playing, here and there, and in composition to a few chosen pupils. He was elected member of the Legion of Honor in 1885; not, however, in recognition of his gifts as a composer, but only of his work as professor of organ at the Conservatoire. He died on the 8th of November, 1890. At the time of his marriage, in 1848, he resolved to save from the pressure of work to gain a livelihood an hour or two of every day for composition—time, as he himself expressed it, to think. The hours chosen were preferably in the early morning and to the custom, never broken in his lifetime, we owe his great compositions, penned in those few moments of rest from a busy life. He wrote in all forms, operas, oratorios, cantatas, works for piano, for string quartet, concertos, sonatas, and symphonies.

With the exception of a few early pieces for piano all his work bears the stamp of his personality. Like Brahms, he has pronounced idiosyncrasies, among which his fondness for shifting harmonies is the most constantly obvious. The ceaseless alteration of chords, the almost unbroken gliding by half-steps, the lithe sinuousness of all the inner voices seem to wrap his music in a veil, to render it intangible and mystical. Diatonic passages are rare, all is chromatic. Parallel to this is his use of short phrases, which alone are capable of being treated in this shifting manner. His melodies are almost invariably dissected, they seldom are built up in broad design. They are resolved into their finest motifs and as such are woven and twisted into the close iridescent harmonic fabric with bewildering skill. All is in subtle movement. Yet there is a complete absence of sensuousness, even, for the most part, of dramatic fire. The overpowering climaxes to which he builds are never a frenzy of emotion, they are superbly calm and exalted. The structure of his music is strangely inorganic. His material does not develop. He adds phrase upon phrase, detail upon detail with astonishing power to knit and weave closely what comes with what went before. His extraordinary polyphonic skill seems inborn, native to the man. Arthur Coquard said of him that he thought the most complicated things in music quite naturally. Imitation, canon, augmentation, and diminution, the most complex problems of the science of music, he solves without effort. The perfect canon in the last movement of the violin sonata sounds simple and spontaneous. The shifting, intangible harmonies, the minute melodies, the fine fabric as of a goldsmith’s carving, are all the work of a mystic, indescribably pure and radiant. Agitating, complex rhythms are rare. The second movement of the violin sonata and the last movement of the ‘Prelude, Aria, and Finale’ are exceptional. The heat of passion is seldom felt. Faith and serene light prevail, a music, it has been said, at once the sister of prayer and of poetry. His music, in short, wrote Gustave Derepas, ‘leads us from egoism to love, by the path of the true mysticism of Christianity; from the world to the soul, from the soul to God.’

His form, as has been said, is not organic, but he gives to all his music a unity and compactness by using the same thematic material throughout the movements of a given composition. For example, in the first movement of the ‘Prelude, Chorale, and Fugue’ for piano, the theme of the fugue which constitutes the last movement is plainly suggested, and the climax of the last movement is built up out of this fugue theme woven with the great movement of the chorale. In the first movement of the ‘Prelude, Aria, and Finale,’ likewise for piano, the theme of the Finale is used as counterpoint; in the Aria again the same use is made of it; in the Finale the Aria theme is reintroduced, and the coda at the end is built up of the principal theme of the Prelude and a theme taken from the closing section of the Aria. The four movements of the violin sonata are most closely related thematically; the symphony, too, is dominated by one theme, and the theme which opens the string quartet closes it as well. This uniting of the several movements of a work on a large scale by employing throughout the same material was more consistently cultivated by Franck than by any other composer. The concerto for piano and orchestra in E-flat by Liszt is constructed on the same principle; the D minor symphony of Schumann also, and it is suggested in the first symphony of Brahms, but these are exceptions. Germs of such a relationship between movements in the cyclic forms were in the last works of Beethoven. In Franck they developed to great proportion.

The fugue in the ‘Prelude, Chorale and Fugue’ and the canon in the last movement of the violin sonata are superbly built, and his restoration of strict forms to works in several movements finds a precedent only in Beethoven and once in Mozart. The treatment of the variation form in the Variations Symphoniques for piano and orchestra is no less masterly than his treatment of fugue and canon, but it can hardly be said that he excelled either Schumann or Brahms in this branch of composition.

Franck was a great organist and all his work is as clearly influenced by organ technique as the works of Sebastian Bach were before him. ‘His orchestra,’ Julien Tiersot wrote in an article published in Le Ménéstrel for October 23, 1904, ‘is sonorous and compact, the orchestra of an organist. He employs especially the two contrasting elements of strings (eight-foot stops) and brass (great-organ). The wood-wind is in the background. This observation encloses a criticism, and his method could not be given as a model; it robs the orchestra of much variety of coloring, which is the richness of the modern art. But we ought to consider it as characteristic of the manner of César Franck, which alone suffices to make such use legitimate.’ Undeniably the sensuous coloring of the Wagnerian school is lacking, though Franck devoted himself almost passionately at one time to the study of Wagner’s scores; yet, as in the case of Brahms, Franck’s scoring, peculiarly his own, is fitting to the quality of his inspiration. There is no suggestion of the warmth of the senses in any of his music. Complete mastery of the art of vivid warm tone-coloring belongs only to those descended from Weber, and preëminently to Wagner.

The works for the pianoforte are thoroughly influenced by organ technique. The movement of the rich, solid basses, and the impracticably wide spaces call urgently for the supporting pedals of the organ. Yet they are by no means unsuited to the instrument for which they were written. If when played they suggest the organ to the listener, and the Chorale in the Prelude, Chorale and Fugue is especially suggestive, the reason is not be found in any solecism, but in the religious spirit that breathes from all Franck’s works and transports the listener to the shades of vast cathedral aisles. Among his most sublime works are three Chorale Fantasias for organ, written not long before he died. These, it may safely be assumed, are among the few contributions to the literature for the organ which approach the inimitable master-works of Sebastian Bach.

There are three oratorios, to use the term loosely, ‘Ruth,’ ‘The Redemption,’ and ‘The Beatitudes,’ belonging respectively in the three periods in which Franck’s life and musical development naturally fall. All were coldly received during his lifetime. ‘Ruth,’ written when he was but twenty-four years old, is in the style of the classical oratorios. ‘The Redemption,’ too, still partakes of the half dramatic, half epic character of the oratorio; but in ‘The Beatitudes,’ his masterpiece, if one must be chosen, the dramatic element is almost wholly lacking, and he has created almost a new art-form. To set Christ’s sermon on the mount to music was a tremendous undertaking, and the great length of the work will always stand in the way of its universal acceptance; but here more than anywhere else Franck’s peculiar gift of harmony has full force in the expression of religious rapture and the mysticism of the devout and childlike believer.

It is curious to note the inability of Franck’s genius to express wild and dramatic emotion. Among his works for orchestra and for orchestra and piano are several that may take rank as symphonic poems, Les Éolides, Le Chasseur maudit, and Les Djinns, the last two based upon gruesome poems, all three failing to strike the listener cold. The symphony with chorus, later rearranged as a suite, ‘Psyche,’ is an exquisitely pure conception, wholly spiritual. The operas Hulda and Grisèle were performed only after his death and failed to win a place in the repertory of opera houses.

It is this strange absence of genuinely dramatic and sensuous elements from Franck’s music which gives it its quite peculiar stamp, the quality which appeals to us as a sort of poetry of religion. And it is this same lack which leads one to say that he grows up with Wagner and Brahms and yet is not of a piece with either of them. He had an extraordinarily refined technique of composition, but it was perhaps more the technique of the goldsmith than that of the sculptor. His works impress by fineness of detail, not, for all their length and remarkable adherence of structure, by breadth of design. His is intensely an introspective art, which weaves about the simplest subject and through every measure most intricate garlands of chromatic harmony. It is a music which is apart from life, spiritual and exalted. It does not reflect the life of the body, nor that of the sovereign mind, but the life of the spirit. By so reading it we come to understand his own attitude in regard to it, which took no thought of how it impressed the public, but only of how it matched in performance, in sound, his soul’s image of it.

With Wagner, Brahms and César Franck the romantic movement in music comes to an end. The impulse which gave it life came to its ultimate forms in their music and was for ever gone. It has washed on only like a broken wave over the works of most of their successors down to the present day. Now new impulses are already at work leading us no one knows whither. It is safe to say that the old music has been written, that new is in the making. An epoch is closed in music, an epoch which was the seed time of harmony as we learned it in school, and as, strangely enough, the future generations seem likely to learn it no more.

Beethoven stood back of the movement. From him sprang the two great lines which we have characterized as the poets and painters in music, and from him, too, the third master, César Franck. It would indeed be hardihood to pronounce whether or not the promise for the future contained in the last works of Beethoven has been fulfilled.

L. H.

FOOTNOTES:

[118] Max Kalbeck: ‘Johannes Brahms,’ 3 vols. (1904-11).

[119] Walter Niemann: Die Musik seit Richard Wagner, Berlin, 1914.

CHAPTER XIII
VERDI AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES

Verdi’s mission in Italian opera—His early life and education—His first operas and their political significance—His second period: the maturing of his style—Crowning achievements of his third period—His contemporaries.