Analysis of the great works is reserved for later volumes. The ‘Requiem,’ the quintet for piano and strings, the ‘Song of Destiny,’ the overwhelmingly beautiful concerto for violin and orchestra, the songs, the songs for women’s voices with horn and harp, the ‘Academic Festival Overture,’ and the ‘Tragic Overture,’ the works for pianoforte, the trios, quartets and quintets for various instruments, the four mighty symphonies—all bear the stamp of the man and of his genius in ways which have been hinted at. No matter how small the form, there is suggestion of poise and of great breadth of opinion. It is this spirit of expanse that will ever make his music akin to that of Bach and Beethoven. Schumann’s prophecy was bold. Some believe that it has been fulfilled, that Brahms is in truth the successor of Beethoven. Whether or not Brahms will stand with Bach and Beethoven as one of the three greatest composers it is far too early to say. The limitations of his character and of his temperament are obvious and his music has not escaped them. On the other hand, the depth and grandeur, the heroic strength, the power over rhythm, over melody, and over harmony belong only to the highest in music. He was of the line of poets descended from Schubert through Schumann, but he had a firmer grasp than they. His music is more strongly built, is both deeper and higher. Its sombreness has been unjustly aggravated by comparison with Wagner, but the time has come when the two men are no longer judged in relation to each other, when they are found to be of stuff too different to be compared any more than fire and water can be compared. They are sprung of radically different stock. It might almost be said that they are made up of different elements. If with any composers, he can only be compared with Bach and Beethoven. His perfect workmanship nearly matches that of the former; but Bach, for all the huge proportions of his great works, is a subtle composer, and Brahms is not subtle. The harmonies of Bach are chromatic, those of Brahms, as we have seen, are diatonic. His forms are near those of Beethoven, and his rugged spirit as well. His symphonies, in spite of the lyrical side of his genius which is evident in them, can stand beside those of the master of Bonn and lose none of their stature. But he lacks the comic spirit which sparkles ever and again irrepressibly in the music of Beethoven. He is indubitably a product of the movement which, for lack of a more definite name, we must call romantic; and, though it has been said with truth that some of the music of Beethoven and much of Bach is romantic, it cannot be denied that the romantic movement brought to music qualities which are not evident in the works of the earlier masters. The romanticists in every art took themselves extremely seriously as individuals. From their relationship to life as a whole, to the state, and to man they often rebelled, even when making a great show of patriotism. A reaction was inevitable, tending to realism, cynicism, even pessimism. Brahms stood upon the outer edge of romanticism, on the threshold of the movement to come. He took himself seriously, not however with enjoyment in individual liberty, with conscious indulgence in mood and reverie, but with grim determination to shape himself and his music to an ideal, which, were it only that of perfect law, was fixed above the attainment of the race. If, as it has been often written, Beethoven’s music expresses the triumph of man over destiny, Brahms may well speak of a triumph in spite of destiny. That over which Beethoven triumphed was the destiny which touches man; that in spite of which and amid which the music of Brahms stands firm and secure is the destiny of the universe, of the stars and planets whirling through the soundless, unfathomable night of space, not man’s soul exultant but man’s reason unafraid, unshaken by the cry of the heart which finds no consolation.
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.