1822–1890 · Belgium, France · Romantic
César Franck (1822–1890) was born in Liège and lived and worked in Paris, where he was organist of the church of Sainte-Clotilde and a professor at the Conservatoire. His works include organ pieces, a piano quintet, the Violin Sonata and his Symphony in D minor. The site offers his Prélude for organ.
César Franck was born in Liège on 10 December 1822. His father, Nicolas-Joseph, worked as a bank clerk; the family came from the Belgian village of Gemmenich, while his mother was a native of Aachen. The boy drew and made music, yet his father pictured a young prodigy of the keyboard and composition, in the manner of Liszt or Thalberg, who would win the family renown and money.
In 1830 his father enrolled him at the Liège Conservatoire. His main teacher there was the director, Joseph Daussoigne-Méhul, with whom Franck also took private harmony lessons in 1833–1835. In 1834 he graduated with distinction in solfège and piano and gave his first concerts, one of them before King Leopold I. In the spring of 1835 his father arranged a series of concerts in Aachen, Liège and Brussels.
In 1835 his father took César and Joseph, the younger brother, to Paris. The boys studied privately: Anton Reicha taught César harmony and counterpoint, and Pierre Zimmerman taught him piano. The Paris Conservatoire did not accept foreigners, so his father had to seek French citizenship. In the meantime he promoted concerts in Paris in which one or both brothers played.
After entering the Conservatoire, Franck continued piano with Zimmerman and began studying composition. In 1838, after his first year, he won the first prize in piano. Organ studies with François Benoist followed, covering both performance and improvisation, and in 1841 Franck won a prize in the organ class. He meant to enter the following year's Prix de Rome contest, in composition.
But in 1842 Franck left the Conservatoire. His father demanded that he also give private lessons and concerts, and critics grew increasingly hostile to the way the father promoted his sons. Franck's skill as a pianist was recognised, while his compositions at that stage were felt to be weak. Perhaps for this reason his father decided to return to Belgium, and his son went with him.
In Belgium Franck performed as a pianist and organist, then found himself back in Paris, again giving lessons and family concerts. In these years his first compositions appeared, the ones he himself regarded as the start of his lasting work: trios for piano, violin and cello. Franz Liszt got to know them, offered advice and encouragement, and a few years later performed them in Weimar.
In 1843 Franck began the oratorio Ruth, his first work for forces other than a chamber ensemble. In 1845 it had a private hearing for Liszt, Meyerbeer and other musicians, who gave it moderate approval and advice. The public performance in early 1846 left the audience indifferent, and critics faulted the work for its artlessness and simplicity. Ruth returned only in 1872, once it had been heavily revised.
His failure left Franck largely out of public view, working as a teacher and accompanist, a path his father reluctantly allowed. He took commissions in Paris and in Orléans and wrote songs and small pieces. Meanwhile something else shaped his life: he grew fond of one of his private pupils, Félicité Saillot, and later fell in love with her. Her parents belonged to the Comédie-Française company and used the stage name Desmousseaux, and their house offered him shelter from a domineering father.
In 1846 his father came across a piece dedicated to Félicité among his son's papers and ripped it up before his eyes. Franck went to the Desmousseaux house, wrote the piece out again from memory and gave it to her. His father would not hear of a marriage, and one day the son left his parents' home carrying only what he could take with him and settled with the Desmousseaux family. After that he signed his works and papers simply as César Franck or C. Franck.
In 1847, as soon as he was 25, Franck announced to his father that he meant to marry. The wedding was held on 22 February 1848, in the very month of the Paris uprising, and to reach the church the wedding party had to scramble over barricades. His parents came to the service and signed the register of the parish church of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette.
In 1847 Franck became assistant organist at Notre-Dame-de-Lorette; he wanted such a post, not least for a steady income. In 1853 Abbé Dancel, who had moved to Saint-Jean-Saint-François du Marais, invited him to be principal organist. The church had a new organ of 1846 by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, and Franck compared its sound to an orchestra.
Services of the time required the organist to build music out of the plainsong sung at Mass and Office, fitting it into the pauses between what the choir and clergy sang or said, so Franck's gift for improvisation was much sought after. He travelled through France with Cavaillé-Coll, showing off older organs and giving opening recitals on new ones. French organ technique was changing too: in 1844 Adolf Hesse demonstrated in Paris a pedal technique that opened up Bach's works, and in 1852 and 1854 his pupil Jacques-Nicolas Lemmens, a professor at the Brussels Conservatoire, visited Paris. In 1854 Franck shared a concert programme with Lemmens, admired the evenness of his pedalling and set out to master the new methods.
In 1859 Franck became organist of the church of Sainte-Clotilde and held the post until his death. The church had a new Cavaillé-Coll organ with three manuals. To master its capabilities he bought a practice pedalboard from Pleyel for use at home. He wrote for organ and for choir: the Messe op. 12 appeared in 1860, and the six organ pieces written in 1856–1864 include the Grande Pièce Symphonique op. 17 (1863), a forerunner of the organ symphony genre.
Franck was increasingly in demand for the opening of Cavaillé-Coll organs: at Saint-Sulpice in 1862, and later at Notre-Dame and other churches. At his own church people came to hear his improvisations at Mass. In April 1866 Liszt attended a Sunday Mass there and afterwards organised a concert at the church to promote Franck's organ works, which was well received. In 1869 Franck heard Anton Bruckner at Notre-Dame, and this sharpened his grasp of German organ music. A regular circle of pupils formed around him; they came for organ lessons but grew more interested in his methods of composition.
In 1869 Franck set out on a large choral work, Les Béatitudes, and it kept him busy for over a decade. The Franco-Prussian War broke the thread: pupils scattered or were killed or disabled, income shrank, food and fuel ran short, and the Conservatoire stayed shut for the year 1870–1871. Once the war was over, French musicians wanted music with a clearly French character. Franck joined the new Société Nationale de Musique and became its oldest member, and his music was on its first programme in November 1871.
When François Benoist gave up the organ class at the Paris Conservatoire, the place was offered to Franck. It required French citizenship. It turned out that on coming of age Franck had unknowingly reverted to Belgian nationality, because his father's naturalisation counted for the sons only until the age of twenty-one. He went through naturalisation at once and officially took over the class in February 1872.
His pupils included Vincent d'Indy, Ernest Chausson, Guy Ropartz, Henri Duparc, Louis Vierne and Augusta Holmès. Every new student began to call him Père Franck, "Father Franck". He did not teach by fixed rules, taught composition as much as organ and improvisation, and his popularity with students provoked jealousy among fellow professors. His legacy was kept above all by d'Indy, who founded the Paris Schola Cantorum in 1894; Franck's pupils then set up the École César Franck in 1935.
Franck produced a long list of works across many genres. Among them are the Piano Quintet (1879), the oratorio Rédemption (1871–1874), two orchestral poems, Le Chasseur maudit (1882) and Les Djinns (1884), the Symphonic Variations (1885), Les Éolides (1876) and the solo piano Prelude, Chorale and Fugue (1884). Les Béatitudes was first heard in 1879, without an orchestra, so the parts that were given went with piano. In 1885 Franck was made a Knight of the Legion of Honour, and a year later he became president of the Société Nationale de Musique.
In 1886 Franck composed his Violin Sonata for Eugène Ysaÿe, a Belgian violinist, as a wedding present, and it was a great success. In 1886–1888 he also worked on his only symphony, in D minor, which fared badly: the Conservatoire's orchestra resisted it, the public stayed cool and critics did not know what to make of it. In 1888 he turned to opera once more with Ghiselle, but that was little more than sketches and he never finished it. By contrast, the String Quartet performed in April 1890 won over both audience and critics.
In July 1890 Franck's cab collided with a horse-drawn trolley; he hit his head and blacked out for a moment. No effects showed at first, but walking grew painful, so he began to miss concerts and rehearsals and finally stopped teaching at the Conservatoire. He spent his holiday in Nemours, where he started on organ pieces, the Trois Chorals, which he completed in August and September 1890.
In October Franck began the autumn term at the Conservatoire, yet by mid-month he had caught a cold. It developed into pleurisy, his state declined fast, and he died in Paris on 8 November 1890. The funeral service took place at Sainte-Clotilde, with Léo Delibes, Camille Saint-Saëns, Gabriel Fauré, Charles-Marie Widor and other musicians among those present. The first grave was at Montrouge; the body was later moved to Montparnasse Cemetery. A group of his pupils headed by Augusta Holmès ordered a bronze medallion with Franck's bust from Auguste Rodin, set on the tomb in 1893, and in 1904 a monument by Alfred Lenoir went up opposite Sainte-Clotilde.
Many of Franck's works use "through development", called cyclic form in English: several themes grow out of one, run through every movement and come together in the finale, which gives the piece a firm structure. The Symphony in D minor shows this best.
Organ works are an integral part of Franck's legacy; he knew the instrument superbly. His organ music is in a typical late-Romantic style, with many modulations and elements of improvisation. It includes the Six Pièces (1856–1864), among them the Grande Pièce Symphonique op. 17 and, in a separate piece, the Prélude, Fugue et Variation op. 18, as well as the Trois Chorals written in the last months of his life, which remain part of the organ repertory today. His organ compositions were forerunners of the large-scale works of Charles Widor, Louis Vierne and Marcel Dupré.
Apart from the organ, Franck wrote oratorios, chamber ensembles and piano works. The works named most often are the Violin Sonata, the Symphony in D minor and his setting of the Panis angelicus. The chamber and piano music includes the Piano Quintet (1879), the Symphonic Variations for piano and orchestra (1885) and, for solo piano, the Prelude, Chorale and Fugue (1884).
The site currently offers one edition of his music, the Prélude (FWV 30) for organ, at the level "Intermediate+". It is a way to begin getting to know the composer through the site's sheet music.
Franck wrote for choir as well. A major work of this kind is Les Béatitudes (1869–1879), which kept him occupied for over a decade. It was preceded by the oratorio Ruth and the Messe op. 12 (1860), and in the 1870s came the oratorio Rédemption (1871–1874). His church music followed the fashion of the day; as with others schooled at the Conservatoire, the polyphony of earlier centuries was foreign to him.
For orchestra he wrote the symphonic poems Les Éolides (1876), Le Chasseur maudit (1882), Les Djinns (1884) and Psyché (1887–1888, based on a Greek myth), as well as the Symphony in D minor (1886–1888) and the Symphonic Variations for piano and orchestra (1885). For the stage he composed the opera Hulda (1882–1885); the opera Ghiselle was left unfinished.
Franck's work influenced the next generation of French composers, among them Ernest Chausson, Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. Among his early works are the trios for piano, violin and cello, which Liszt encouraged.