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).