Faà di Bruno, Giovanni Matteo [Horatio, Orazio] Fabbri, Anna Maria

1. Life.

What might have proved a serious setback to a career in composition was mitigated in part by the encouraging subscription to Franck’s Trios op.1, written over the previous three years, which appeared in spring 1843; the purchasers included Meyerbeer, Liszt, Donizetti, Halévy, Chopin, Thomas and Auber. On Liszt’s advice, Franck transferred the finale of his trio op.1 no.3 to his trio op.2 no.4. Although probably conceived in the summer of 1843, his first large-scale work, the biblical oratorio Ruth was not completed until 1845 for during this time the pressure of engagements had resulted in a serious illness. His career as a virtuoso was already markedly declining and this, added to the poor reception accorded the first performance of Ruth on 4 January 1846 (even though the recent success of David’s Le désert, with which Ruth was unfavourably compared, augured well for a work of oriental character), undoubtedly led to a worsening of his already strained relations with his disappointed father. During the summer of 1846 he formally quitted his parents’ house. To support himself, in addition to taking on private pupils, he taught at various public schools and religious institutions in the city and further supplemented his income by obtaining the post of organist at the church of Notre Dame de Lorette in 1847.

Thereafter much of Franck’s time was spent at the house of his fiancée, Félicité Saillot Desmousseaux, whose parents were actors at the Comédie-Française. His tyrannical father was opposed to the engagement, though he and Franck’s mother grudgingly appeared at the marriage service which took place at Notre Dame de Lorette amid the preliminary fusillades of the 1848 June days. During the idyllic period of his betrothal Franck had written a symphonic poem entitled Ce qu’on entend sur la montagne. Another large-scale unpublished composition, the opera Le valet de ferme, dates from the early years of his marriage; however, no more works of any consequence appeared for ten years. In 1851 he was appointed organist of St Jean-St François in the Marais, which possessed an early organ by the brilliant builder Cavaillé-Coll, to whose firm Franck was then attached as an ‘artistic representative’. Having been inspired by the playing of the Belgian Lemmens he was probably determined during this period to extend his technique, particularly at the pedal-board, and to develop his already prodigious improvisatory skill.

The start of a new phase of Franck’s career has rightly been attributed to his appointment, early in 1858, as organist of the newly completed basilica of Ste Clotilde where, assisted by the aging Lefébure-Wély, he inaugurated one of Cavaillé-Coll’s finest instruments on 19 December 1859. Although at first he may have been chiefly concerned to provide suitable service music, including the mass for three voices to which he later added the famous setting of Panis angelicus, it was his after-service extemporizations that quickly became a public attraction; they appeared in tangible form as his first major work, the Six pièces, completed over the following two years. Considered in comparison with contemporary French organ music the Six pièces indeed represent a remarkable achievement. Liszt, Franck’s friend and champion, proclaimed them worthy of a ‘place beside the masterpieces of Bach’. Their accomplishment was not followed up, however, and the ensuing decade proved no more productive than the previous one, apart from a number of short organ pieces (published posthumously) and several motets, together with three curious cantatas, the Cantique de Moïse, the Plainte des israélites and La tour de Babel, and the oratorio Les sept paroles du Christ, which all remained in manuscript. It was during this creatively fallow period that he was unwittingly laying the foundations of a remarkable phenomenon of 19th-century French culture: the cluster of pupil-disciples known as the bande à Franck. One of his part-time teaching posts was at the Jesuit college in the rue Vaurigard, where his pupils included Henri Duparc and Arthur Coquard. Although the latter received instruction in harmony from 1865 to 1866 he was then intent on a career in law and did not resume contact with the group until after the Franco-Prussian War. Meanwhile Duparc had established himself as the leader of the embryonic brotherhood (augmented by Albert Cahen) and in 1868 took the decisive step of introducing Franck, their beloved ‘Pater seraphicus’, to Alexis de Castillon, who was later to become the first secretary of the Société Nationale de Musique. The society loyally included Franck’s Trio de salon op.1 no.2 in the programme of its first concert on 25 November 1871, and subsequently gave first performances of many of his important works. But belated recognition had already begun a month earlier with a favourably received performance of the revised version of Ruth, and the end of Franck’s obscurity was signalled by his nomination to succeed Benoist as professor of organ at the Conservatoire. For this appointment he found it necessary to apply for French citizenship.

In October 1872 Vincent d’Indy became a student in Franck’s organ class, which was by then assuming the status of an unofficial composition seminar, and in the following month the first version of a new oratorio, Rédemption, was completed. According to d’Indy this was the first work in which Franck applied his principles of ‘tonal architecture’; there are passages in the first symphonic interlude (later discarded) which suggest his mature harmonic idiom (ex.1). The first performance took place on 10 April 1873; unfortunately, owing less to its own obvious defects than to badly copied parts and unusually inept conducting on the part of Colonne, the work, given without the interlude, was a miserable failure. Franck’s disappointment was bitter, and his initial reaffirmation of confidence in his score only gradually gave way to persuasion by Duparc and d’Indy of the need to remodel it. (The revised work eventually achieved a real success with the public and critics, but not until six years after the composer’s death.) In November 1874 he heard the prelude to Act 1 of Tristan und Isolde, the direct influence of which is reflected in his subsequent organ and orchestral music, especially in the opening of the fifth Béatitude, completed in 1875, and most strikingly of all in Les Eolides, completed in the following year (ex.2).

Franck was entering upon a creative phase of tremendous intensity which lasted unabated until his death, although most of his composition had to be fitted into the summer holidays. Except for writing the Trois pièces for the inauguration of the Cavaillé-Coll organ at the Palais du Trocadéro (1878), he worked on almost nothing else but the monumental oratorio Les béatitudes (begun in 1869) from 1875 until its completion in July 1879. By then he had already begun the Piano Quintet and soon after its successful première, he began another oratorio, Rébecca, and later the ill-fated Hulda. Two more symphonic poems soon followed, Le chasseur maudit and Les Djinns; the latter, along with the Quintet, signalled the reawakening of his interest in the piano, which found further expression in the Prélude, choral et fugue and the Variations symphoniques. On 6 August 1885 he was awarded the cross of the Légion d’Honneur; a year later his election as president of the Société Nationale set off an odious confrontation between the majority party of his own lieutenants (recently joined by Chausson) and the disillusioned, reactionary Saint-Saëns. But these conflicts were not reflected in his important compositions of that summer of 1886: the sunny Violin Sonata and the sensual, at times frankly erotic, symphonic poem Psyché.

The year 1887 opened with an ambitious Franck festival concert in the Cirque d’Hiver, conducted jointly by the composer and the unsympathetic Pasdeloup. Characteristically, the disastrous performances embarrassed all but the undaunted Franck himself, who, in addition to writing a second triptych for piano, was making the first sketches for the Symphony. One more abortive operatic scheme occupied him for a further year, but soon after abandoning the orchestration of Ghiselle to his pupils he began the String Quartet, a masterly distillation of his harmonic-contrapuntal idiom, whose hyper-intensity he passed on to his last pupil, Guillaume Lekeu. His final works written during summer 1890 were the complex Trois chorals and a collection of pieces (for harmonium) of which only 59 of a projected 91 (seven pieces for each of the 13 chromatic keys from C to C) were finished. He was working on them when he died on 8 November, a chill which he had contracted a few weeks earlier having developed into pleurisy. Among those present at his funeral service two days later were Fauré, Bruneau, Widor, Lalo and, delivering the oration, Chabrier. The Conservatoire was represented by Delibes; the Ministry of Fine Arts neglected to send a delegate.

Franck, César