Belgian of Liège by birth, and Parisian only by adoption, César Franck
nevertheless precipitated modern French music. The group of musicians
that,--at the moment when the great line of composers that has descended
in Germany since the days of Bach dwindled in Strauss and Mahler and
Reger,--revived the high tradition of French music, created a fresh and
original musical art, and at present, by virtue of the influence it
exercises on the new talents of other nations, has come well-nigh to
dominate the international musical situation, could scarcely have
attained existence had it not been for him. He assured the artistic
success not only of the men like Magnard and d'Indy and Dukas, whose art
shows obvious signs of his influence. Composers like Debussy and Ravel,
who appear to have arrived at maturity independently of him, have
nevertheless benefited immeasurably by his work. It is possible that had
he not emigrated from Liège and labored in the heart of France, they
would not have achieved any of their fullness of expression. For what
Berlioz was perhaps too premature and too eccentric and radical to bring
about,--the dissipation of the torpor that had weighed upon the musical
sense of his countrymen for a century, the reawakening of the
peculiarly French impulse to make music, not alone in single and
solitary individuals, but in a large and representative group, the
revival of a truly musical life in France,--this man, by virtue of the
peculiarities of his art, and particularly by virtue of his timeliness,
succeeded in effecting.
For César Franck overcame a false musical culture in the land of his
adoption by showing it, at the moment it was prepared to perceive it,
the face of a true. The French are not an outstandingly musical race.
Music plays a comparatively insignificant rôle in their civilization.
The mass of the people does not demand it, has never demanded it as
insistently as do Germans and Russians, and as did the mass of Italians
during the Renaissance, the mass of English before the Revolution.
Something of a prejudice against its own musical impulse must exist in
the race. For though France has a very definite musical feeling, a thing
that varies little with the passing centuries and makes for the
surprising similarities between the work of Claude Le Jeune in the
sixteenth century, Rameau in the eighteenth and Debussy in the
twentieth, she has, during her thousand years of culture, and while
producing a flood of illustrious authors, and painters and sculptors,
borne not more than four or five composers of indisputably first rank.
Germany in the course of two centuries produced at least eight or nine;
Russia three within the last fifty years. In France centuries elapse
between the appearance of a Josquin des Prés in the fifteenth century, a
Rameau in the eighteenth, a Debussy in the early twentieth. And whenever
the French have been given a musical art of their own, whenever a
composer comparable to the Goujons and Montaignes, the Renoirs and the
Baudelaires has made his appearance among them, they generally have been
swift to turn from him and to prefer to him not only foreigners, which
would not necessarily be bad, but oftentimes the least respectable of
musicians. The triumph of Rameau was of the briefest. Scarcely had his
magnificent lyric tragedies established themselves when the _Guerre des
bouffons_ broke out, and popular taste, under the direction of Jean
Jacques Rousseau and the other Encyclopedists, discovered the light
Italian music of the day more "natural" and infinitely preferable to the
severe and noble forms of the greatest of French composers. The
appearance of Gluck gave Rameau's work a veritable _coup de grâce_, and
banished the master from the operatic stage. And for a century and a
quarter, French music, particularly the music of the theater, was
completely unfaithful to the racial spirit. During the greater part of
the nineteenth century, Rossini and Meyerbeer dominated the operatic
world. The native operatic composers, Auber and Boieldieu, Adam and
Halévy, combined the slacknesses of both without achieving anything at
all comparable to their flashy brilliance. As far as the accent of their
music went, they floated cheerfully somewhere between Germany and Italy.
And when something recognizably indigenous did put in its appearance in
the operas of Thomas and Gounod, it did but the veriest lip-service to
the racial genius, and was a thing that walked lightly, dexterously,
warily, and roused no sleeping dogs.
What the cause of this diffidence is, what sort of rigidity it betokens,
one can only guess. But of its presence there can be no doubt. Were
there nothing else to demonstrate it, the survival among the French of
an institution named M. Camille Saint-Saëns would amply do so. For the
work of this extraordinary personality, or, more correctly,
impersonality, who for twenty-five years of the Third Republic dominated
the musical situation in his country, got himself acclaimed everywhere,
not only in Paris, but also in Berlin, the modern French master, and
to-day at the ripe age of one hundred and forty still persists in
writing string-quartets with the same frigid classicism that
distinguished his first efforts, is obviously a compromise resulting
from the conflict of two equally strong impulses--that of making music
and that of fending off musical expression. For years this man has been
going through all the gestures of the most serious sort of composition
without adding one iota to musical art. For years he has been writing
music apparently logical, clear, well-formed. His opus-numbers mount
well toward two hundred. He has written symphonies, concertos for piano
and violin, operas, cantatas, symphonic poems, suites, ballades,
fantasies, caprices. He has written large numbers of each. He has
written "impressions" of Naples, of Algiers, of the Canary Islands, of
every portion of the globe he has visited. But despite all this apparent
activity, M. Saint-Saëns has really succeeded in effecting nothing at
all. His compositions are pretty well outside the picture of musical
art. To-day they are already older than Mendelssohn's, of which pale art
they seem an even paler reflection. Mendelssohn, too, was a person
inwardly at war with himself, and perhaps Saint-Saëns may be another
example of the same conflict. Still, the latter has achieved a sort of
waxy coldness from which the amiable Félix was after all saved. Elegant,
finished, smooth, classicizing, the music of M. Camille Saint-Saëns
leaves us in the completest of objectivity. We are touched and moved not
at all by it. Something, we vaguely perceive, is supposed to be taking
place beneath our eyes. Faint frosty lights pass across the orchestra.
This, we guess, is supposed to be an inward and musing passage. This is
a finale, this a dramatic climax. But we are no more than languidly
pleased with the cleverness and urbanity of the orchestration, the
pleasant shapeliness of certain melodies, the neatness of composition.
In the end, the man bores us thoroughly. He has invented a new musical
ennui. It is that of being invariably pretty and impersonal and
insignificant.
Do you know the "Phaeton" of Saint-Saëns? Oh, never think that this
little symphonic poem recounts the history of brilliant youth and its
sun-chariot, the runaway steeds and the bleeding shattered frame! The
"Phaeton" of whom Saint-Saëns sings is not the arrogant son of
Phoebus. Whatever the composer may protest, it is the low,
open-wheeled carriage that he is describing. He shows it to us coursing
through the Bois de Boulogne on a bright spring morning. The new varnish
of the charming vehicle gleams smartly, the light, rubber-tired wheels
revolve swiftly, the silver-shod harnesses glisten in the sunny air.
But, alas, the ponies are frightened by something, doubtlessly the red
dress of a singer of the Opéra Comique. There is a runaway, and before
the steeds can be reined the phaeton is upset. No one is hurt, and in a
few minutes the equipage is restored. Nevertheless, the composer cannot
control in himself a few sighs for the new coat of varnish now so rudely
scratched.
Franck was of another temper. The impulse that drove him to make music
was not so weak and pliable. It could not be barbered and dapperly
dressed and taught to conduct a clouded cane elegantly in the _rue de
la Paix_ or the _allée des Acacias_. It was too hot and wild and shy a
thing, too passionately set in its course, too homesick for the white
fulgurant heights of Heaven to negate itself at the behest of French
society and conform to what the academicians declared to be "la vielle
tradition française." Franck was too much an artist in the spirit of La
Fontaine and Germaine Pillon and Poussin and the others who formed that
tradition, and who would be assailed in its name fiercely were they to
reappear to-day. Moreover, he was of the race of musicians who come to
make music largely to free themselves of besetting demons, of the
sinister brood of doubts and fears and woes, and win their way back
again into the bosom of God. He was the simple, heart-whole believer,
the poor little man lost in the shambles, shaken and wounded by the
"terrible doubt of appearances" and by the cruelty of things, yearning
to cry his despair and loneliness and grief to the ears of the God of
his childhood, and battling through long vigils for trust and belief and
reconciliation. Again and again his music re-echoes the cry, "I will not
let Thee go unless Thou bless me." Of modern composers Bruckner alone
had affair so steadily with the heights, and Franck is the gentler,
sweeter, tenderer of the two. He set himself, quite in the fashion of
the composers of the dying renaissance, to write an hundred hymns to the
Virgin. He sought in his piano compositions to recapture the lofty,
spiritual tone, the religious communion that informed the works of Bach.
Only once, in the "Variations Symphoniques," is he brilliant and
virtuosic, and then, with what disarming naïveté and joyousness!
Oftentimes it is the gray and lonely air of the organ-loft at St.
Clothilde, the church where he played so many melancholy years, that
breathes through his work. Alone with his instrument and the clouded
skies, he pours out his sadness, his bitterness, strives for
resignation. Or, his music is a bridge from the turmoiled present to
some rarer, larger, better plane. In symphony and quartet, in sonata and
oratorio, he attains it. The hellish brood is scattered; the great bells
of faith swing bravely out once more; the world is full of Sabbath
sunshine and pied with simple field-flowers. And he goes forth through
it released and blessed and joyous, and light and glad of heart.
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.
But, chiefest of all, it expressed the people described in the section
of "Jean-Christophe" significantly entitled "Dans la Maison." It
expressed the essential France hidden by the glare of the Third
Republic. The music of César Franck is the music of the people driven
into themselves by the conditions of modern life. It is the music of the
fine ones who stand hesitant on the threshold of the world, and have
incessantly to struggle for the power to act, for faith and hope. It is
the music of those who in the midst of millions feel themselves forsaken
and alone and powerless, and in whose obscure and laborious existence
Franck himself shared. It is a thing turned away from the market-place,
full of the quiet of the inner chamber. Through so much of Franck one
feels the steady glow of the lamp in the warm room. With its songs of
loneliness and doubt and ruth, its self-communings and vigils and
prayers, its struggle for the sunlight of perfect confidence and
healthiness and zest, it might come directly out of the lives of a
half-dozen of the eminent persons whom France produced during the
closing years of the nineteenth century. Romain Rolland himself is of
this sort. It was for these people, self-distrustful, disillusioned,
doubtful, that Charles Péguy wrote, bidding them remember the divine
origin of the life and the institutions that seemed so false to them,
bidding them remember that the Republic itself was the result of a
mystical impulse in the human heart, that the dead of a race live on in
the bodies of the breathing, and that the members of a folk are one. The
mysticism and Catholicism of Paul Claudel, the revulsion from the
scepticism of Renan and Anatole France that has become so general in
recent French thought, the traditionalism, nay, the intellectual
reaction, of the latest France, are all foreshadowed and outlined in the
music of César Franck. He must have pulsed with the very heart of his
adopted country.
Confronted with such a piece of expression, with such a modern standard,
the new generation could not but respond with all its forces, and throng
out of the aperture made in the Chinese Wall. And after Franck there
followed a generation of French musicians such as the world has not seen
since the days of the clavecinists. Within ten years, from one of the
most moribund, Paris had become the most important and vivid of musical
centers. Something that had been wanting in the air of Paris a long
while had swept largely into it again. The musical imagination had been
freed. After Franck it was impossible for a French musician not to have
the courage to express himself in his own idiom, to dare develop the
forms peculiarly French, to break with the foreign German and Italian
standards that had oppressed the national genius so long. For this man
had done so. And with the Debussys and Magnards and Ravels, the d'Indys
and Dukas and Schmitts, the Chaussons and Ropartz's and the Milhauds
that followed immediately on César Franck, an institution like the
Société Nationale de Musique came to have a meaning. Once again, French
music was.