How furious a battle the man had to wage to bring such a musical sense to fruition in the Paris of Ambroise Thomas and Gounod and Massenet may be gauged from the fact that the compositions that assure Franck his position were almost all produced during the last ten years of his life, after his fifty-eighth year had been passed. For thirty years the man had to struggle with his medium and his environment before he was even able to do his genius justice. Indeed, up to the year 1850, he produced little of importance at all. The trios recall Meyerbeer; the cantata "Ruth," with which this his first period of composition closes, has a sweetness of the sort afterward identified with the name of Massenet. The works of the second period, which ends around 1875 with the re-editing of the recently composed oratorio "Redemption," reveal him still in search of power and a personal manner. No doubt a great improvement over the works of the first period is visible. From this time there date the seraphic "Panis angelicus," and the noble and delicate "Prélude, fugue and variation" for harmonium and piano. But it was only with the composition of his oratorio "Les Béatitudes," completed in 1879, that Franck's great period commences. The man had finally been formed. And, in swift succession, there came from his worktable the series of compositions, the "Prélude, chorale et fugue" for piano, the sonata, the symphonic poem "Psyche," the symphony, the quartet and the three chorales for organ that fully disclose his genius. There is scarcely another example in all musical history of so long retarded a flowering.
And it was a music almost the antithesis of Saint-Saëns' that finally disclosed itself through Franck. In it everything is felt and necessary and expressive. It is unadorned. None of the light musical frosting that conceals the poverty and vulgarity of so many of the other's ideas is to be found here. The designs themselves are noble and significant. Franck possessed a rare gift of sensing exactly what was to his purpose. He had the artistic courage necessary to suppressing everything superfluous and insignificant. His music says something with each note, and when it has no more to say, is silent. He is concise and direct. The Symphony, for instance, is an unbroken curve, an orderly progression by gentle and scarcely perceptible stages from the darkness of an aching, gnawing introduction into the clarity of a healthy, exuberant close. And whereas Saint-Saëns' style is over-smooth and glacial, a sort of musical counterpart of the sculpture of a Canova or a Thorwaldsen, Franck's is subtle, mottled, rich, full of the play of light and shadow. The chromatic style that Wagner has developed in "Tristan" and in "Parsifal" is built upon and further developed into a style almost characterized by its rich and subtle and incessant modulations. Old and mixed modes make their appearance in it. The thematic material is originally turned, oftentimes broad and churchly and magnificent; the movement of the Franckian themes being a distinct invention. The harmony is full and varied and brilliant. But it is pre-eminently the seraphic sweetness of Franck's style that distinguishes his music and sets it over against this other that is so hard of edge and thin of substance. Over it there plays a light and luminous tenderness, an almost naïve and reticent and virginal quality. The music of "Psyche" is executed with the lightest of musical brushes. It is as sweet and lucent and gracious as a fresco of Raphael's. The lightest, the silkiest of veils floats in the section marked "Le Sommeil de Psyche"; the gentlest of zephyrs carries the maiden to her lord. Small wonder that devout commentators have discovered in this music, so uncorporeal and diaphanous, a Christian intention, and pretend that in Franck's mind Psyche was the believing soul and Eros the divine lover! Tenderness, seraphic sweetness were the man's characteristic, permeating everything he touched. Few composers, certainly, have invented music more divinely sweet than that of the third movement of the quartet, more ecstatic and luminous than the ideas scattered all through his work, that seem like records of some moment when the heavens opened over his head and the empyrean resounded with the hallelujahs of the angelic host. And, certainly, no composer, Mozart alone excepted, has discovered such naïvely and innocently joyous themes as those that fill the close of the sonata and the symphonic variations with delicious vernal sunshine.
The career of one fated to serve the art of music in the Paris of Franck's lifetime, and to wait thirty years for the flowering of his genius, was of necessity obscure and sad. The
"yeux menteurs, l'hypocrisie
Des serrements de mains,
La masque d'amitié cachant la jalousie,
Les pâles lendemains
De ces jours de triomphe"...
of which M. Saint-Saëns in his little volume of verse complains somewhat pompously, were unknown to César Franck. For this man, even in the years of his prime, there were only the humiliations, the disappointments that are the lot of uncomprehended genius. He had rich pupils, among them the Vicomte Vincent d'Indy, but not one of them seems to have come forward to help him, to secure him greater time for composition, to save him from wasting his precious days in instructing a few amateurs. All his life, until the very last of his seventy years, César Franck was obliged to arise every morning at five o'clock in order to have a couple of hours in which to be free to compose before the waxing day obliged him to begin trotting from one end of Paris to the other giving lessons. During his lifetime he had to content himself with half-prepared performances of his works, had to resign himself to having composers of operettas preferred to him when chairs at the Conservatoire became vacant, to receiving practically no recognition from a government pretending with hue and cry to protect and encourage the arts. Had it not been for the fervor and faithfulness with which Ysaye labored to spread his renown, practically cramming down the throats of an unwilling public the violin sonata and the quartet, the man would not have known any success at all even during the very last years of his career. As it was, his reputation spread only after he was dead. Then, of course, the inevitable monument was erected to him.
Still, the future was with César Franck as it has been with few artists. The timeliness of his art was almost miraculous. Without a doubt, during the years of his labor, the French were most ready for a musical renaissance. The defeat of 1870 had, after all, braced the nation, summoned its dormant energies. It had not been severe enough to destroy, and only fierce enough to force folk to shake off the torpor that had lain upon them during the two previous régimes. People began to work again, bellies were somewhat emptier and heads somewhat fuller than they had been under Louis-Philippe and Louis-Napoleon. Above all, the vapid and superficial life of the Second Empire was ended. People were more sober and inward and realistic than they had been. There was an unusual activity in all the arts. Painting, fiction, poetry, sculpture had or were having new births. A single creative spark was sure to set the very recalcitrant musicians ablaze. Vast talents such as those of Bizet and Chabrier were making themselves felt. But given a single powerful and constructive influence, a single classic expression of the French musical feeling, and a score of gifted musicians were ready to spring into life. And that example was set by Franck. For, Belgian in part though his music indubitably is, Belgian of Antwerp and Brussels as well as of Liège and the Walloon country, Flemish almost in its broad and gorgeous passages, it is what the work of the superficially Parisian Saint-Saëns never attains to being. It is representative of the great classical tradition of France, deeply expressive of the French spirit. It must have been some profound kinship with the neighboring people, deeper even than that he bore his own countrymen, that sent the youth Franck from Liège to Paris, held him fast in the city all his long and obscure life, and made him flourish in the alien soil. For his music has traits that are common to the representative French artists and have come to identify the French genius. Once again, one caught sight in the music of the French clarity and orderliness, logicality and conciseness. Once again there were great, sonorous edifices in the grand style temperate in tone. The very diffidence that makes it so difficult for the race to express itself with ease in music was expressed in this work. Moreover, along with the silveriness of Rameau, the simple solidity of French prose, and some of the old jollity of the medieval French artists, is in the music of Franck. Old modes revive in it, old peasant rhythms beat the ground once more.