Und drängt sich ewig wieder auf zum Licht!"
For the likeness so many of the new men bear him has provided us with a wonderful instance of the eternal recurrence of things.
Franck
Belgian of Liège by birth, and Parisian only by adoption, César Franck nevertheless precipitated modern French music. The group of musicians that,—at the moment when the great line of composers that has descended in Germany since the days of Bach dwindled in Strauss and Mahler and Reger,—revived the high tradition of French music, created a fresh and original musical art, and at present, by virtue of the influence it exercises on the new talents of other nations, has come well-nigh to dominate the international musical situation, could scarcely have attained existence had it not been for him. He assured the artistic success not only of the men like Magnard and d'Indy and Dukas, whose art shows obvious signs of his influence. Composers like Debussy and Ravel, who appear to have arrived at maturity independently of him, have nevertheless benefited immeasurably by his work. It is possible that had he not emigrated from Liège and labored in the heart of France, they would not have achieved any of their fullness of expression. For what Berlioz was perhaps too premature and too eccentric and radical to bring about,—the dissipation of the torpor that had weighed upon the musical sense of his countrymen for a century, the reawakening of the peculiarly French impulse to make music, not alone in single and solitary individuals, but in a large and representative group, the revival of a truly musical life in France,—this man, by virtue of the peculiarities of his art, and particularly by virtue of his timeliness, succeeded in effecting.
For César Franck overcame a false musical culture in the land of his adoption by showing it, at the moment it was prepared to perceive it, the face of a true. The French are not an outstandingly musical race. Music plays a comparatively insignificant rôle in their civilization. The mass of the people does not demand it, has never demanded it as insistently as do Germans and Russians, and as did the mass of Italians during the Renaissance, the mass of English before the Revolution. Something of a prejudice against its own musical impulse must exist in the race. For though France has a very definite musical feeling, a thing that varies little with the passing centuries and makes for the surprising similarities between the work of Claude Le Jeune in the sixteenth century, Rameau in the eighteenth and Debussy in the twentieth, she has, during her thousand years of culture, and while producing a flood of illustrious authors, and painters and sculptors, borne not more than four or five composers of indisputably first rank. Germany in the course of two centuries produced at least eight or nine; Russia three within the last fifty years. In France centuries elapse between the appearance of a Josquin des Prés in the fifteenth century, a Rameau in the eighteenth, a Debussy in the early twentieth. And whenever the French have been given a musical art of their own, whenever a composer comparable to the Goujons and Montaignes, the Renoirs and the Baudelaires has made his appearance among them, they generally have been swift to turn from him and to prefer to him not only foreigners, which would not necessarily be bad, but oftentimes the least respectable of musicians. The triumph of Rameau was of the briefest. Scarcely had his magnificent lyric tragedies established themselves when the Guerre des bouffons broke out, and popular taste, under the direction of Jean Jacques Rousseau and the other Encyclopedists, discovered the light Italian music of the day more "natural" and infinitely preferable to the severe and noble forms of the greatest of French composers. The appearance of Gluck gave Rameau's work a veritable coup de grâce, and banished the master from the operatic stage. And for a century and a quarter, French music, particularly the music of the theater, was completely unfaithful to the racial spirit. During the greater part of the nineteenth century, Rossini and Meyerbeer dominated the operatic world. The native operatic composers, Auber and Boieldieu, Adam and Halévy, combined the slacknesses of both without achieving anything at all comparable to their flashy brilliance. As far as the accent of their music went, they floated cheerfully somewhere between Germany and Italy. And when something recognizably indigenous did put in its appearance in the operas of Thomas and Gounod, it did but the veriest lip-service to the racial genius, and was a thing that walked lightly, dexterously, warily, and roused no sleeping dogs.
What the cause of this diffidence is, what sort of rigidity it betokens, one can only guess. But of its presence there can be no doubt. Were there nothing else to demonstrate it, the survival among the French of an institution named M. Camille Saint-Saëns would amply do so. For the work of this extraordinary personality, or, more correctly, impersonality, who for twenty-five years of the Third Republic dominated the musical situation in his country, got himself acclaimed everywhere, not only in Paris, but also in Berlin, the modern French master, and to-day at the ripe age of one hundred and forty still persists in writing string-quartets with the same frigid classicism that distinguished his first efforts, is obviously a compromise resulting from the conflict of two equally strong impulses—that of making music and that of fending off musical expression. For years this man has been going through all the gestures of the most serious sort of composition without adding one iota to musical art. For years he has been writing music apparently logical, clear, well-formed. His opus-numbers mount well toward two hundred. He has written symphonies, concertos for piano and violin, operas, cantatas, symphonic poems, suites, ballades, fantasies, caprices. He has written large numbers of each. He has written "impressions" of Naples, of Algiers, of the Canary Islands, of every portion of the globe he has visited. But despite all this apparent activity, M. Saint-Saëns has really succeeded in effecting nothing at all. His compositions are pretty well outside the picture of musical art. To-day they are already older than Mendelssohn's, of which pale art they seem an even paler reflection. Mendelssohn, too, was a person inwardly at war with himself, and perhaps Saint-Saëns may be another example of the same conflict. Still, the latter has achieved a sort of waxy coldness from which the amiable Félix was after all saved. Elegant, finished, smooth, classicizing, the music of M. Camille Saint-Saëns leaves us in the completest of objectivity. We are touched and moved not at all by it. Something, we vaguely perceive, is supposed to be taking place beneath our eyes. Faint frosty lights pass across the orchestra. This, we guess, is supposed to be an inward and musing passage. This is a finale, this a dramatic climax. But we are no more than languidly pleased with the cleverness and urbanity of the orchestration, the pleasant shapeliness of certain melodies, the neatness of composition. In the end, the man bores us thoroughly. He has invented a new musical ennui. It is that of being invariably pretty and impersonal and insignificant.
Do you know the "Phaeton" of Saint-Saëns? Oh, never think that this little symphonic poem recounts the history of brilliant youth and its sun-chariot, the runaway steeds and the bleeding shattered frame! The "Phaeton" of whom Saint-Saëns sings is not the arrogant son of Phœbus. Whatever the composer may protest, it is the low, open-wheeled carriage that he is describing. He shows it to us coursing through the Bois de Boulogne on a bright spring morning. The new varnish of the charming vehicle gleams smartly, the light, rubber-tired wheels revolve swiftly, the silver-shod harnesses glisten in the sunny air. But, alas, the ponies are frightened by something, doubtlessly the red dress of a singer of the Opéra Comique. There is a runaway, and before the steeds can be reined the phaeton is upset. No one is hurt, and in a few minutes the equipage is restored. Nevertheless, the composer cannot control in himself a few sighs for the new coat of varnish now so rudely scratched.
Franck was of another temper. The impulse that drove him to make music was not so weak and pliable. It could not be barbered and dapperly dressed and taught to conduct a clouded cane elegantly in the rue de la Paix or the allée des Acacias. It was too hot and wild and shy a thing, too passionately set in its course, too homesick for the white fulgurant heights of Heaven to negate itself at the behest of French society and conform to what the academicians declared to be "la vielle tradition française." Franck was too much an artist in the spirit of La Fontaine and Germaine Pillon and Poussin and the others who formed that tradition, and who would be assailed in its name fiercely were they to reappear to-day. Moreover, he was of the race of musicians who come to make music largely to free themselves of besetting demons, of the sinister brood of doubts and fears and woes, and win their way back again into the bosom of God. He was the simple, heart-whole believer, the poor little man lost in the shambles, shaken and wounded by the "terrible doubt of appearances" and by the cruelty of things, yearning to cry his despair and loneliness and grief to the ears of the God of his childhood, and battling through long vigils for trust and belief and reconciliation. Again and again his music re-echoes the cry, "I will not let Thee go unless Thou bless me." Of modern composers Bruckner alone had affair so steadily with the heights, and Franck is the gentler, sweeter, tenderer of the two. He set himself, quite in the fashion of the composers of the dying renaissance, to write an hundred hymns to the Virgin. He sought in his piano compositions to recapture the lofty, spiritual tone, the religious communion that informed the works of Bach. Only once, in the "Variations Symphoniques," is he brilliant and virtuosic, and then, with what disarming naïveté and joyousness! Oftentimes it is the gray and lonely air of the organ-loft at St. Clothilde, the church where he played so many melancholy years, that breathes through his work. Alone with his instrument and the clouded skies, he pours out his sadness, his bitterness, strives for resignation. Or, his music is a bridge from the turmoiled present to some rarer, larger, better plane. In symphony and quartet, in sonata and oratorio, he attains it. The hellish brood is scattered; the great bells of faith swing bravely out once more; the world is full of Sabbath sunshine and pied with simple field-flowers. And he goes forth through it released and blessed and joyous, and light and glad of heart.