VCÉSAR FRANCK
When we turn from the brilliant Parisian we have been studying to that obscure and saintly man, César Franck, the only French contemporary of Saint-Saëns who is worthy to be ranked with him as a great composer, we can hardly believe ourselves in the same country or epoch. It is as if we were suddenly transported from modern Paris into some mediæval monastery, to which the noise of the world never penetrates, where nothing breaks the silence save the songs of worship and the deep note of the organ. In the presence of this devout mystic the sounds of cities and peoples fade away, and we are alone with the soul and God. We have passed from the noonday glare of the intellect, in which objectsstand forth sharp and hard, into the soft cathedral twilight of religious emotion; and putting aside our ordinary thoughts we commune for a time with deeper intuitions. Or, again, it is like closing a volume of Taine and taking up Maeterlinck. From the streets and the drawing-room we pass into the cloister, where dwell no longer men and things, but all the intangible presences of thought and feeling. We close our eyes on the pageant of experience, to reopen them in the dim inner light of introspection, where, if we may believe the mystics, they will behold a truer reality. The temperament of Franck is thus at the opposite pole from that prehensile Gallic temperament so well exemplified in Saint-Saëns, and we should find the juxtaposition of the two men as the greatest French composers of their time highly perplexing did we not remember that, in spite of his almost lifelong residence in Paris, César Franck was by birth and blood, like Maeterlinck, with whom he has so much in common, a Belgian. Exactly how much the peculiar characters of these men were inherited from their race it is of course impossible to say; but any one who has seen the placid faces of the Belgian peasants,with their calm, almost bovine look of contentment, must recognize there a trait that needs only the power of articulation to produce a natural religion of feeling, or mysticism, like that of César Franck and Maeterlinck. It was the same sort of self-sufficient serenity, the antithesis of Saint-Saëns's busy worldliness, that determined the course of Franck's life, so obscure, so uneventful, so dominated by high spiritual purpose.
César-Auguste Franck (it was an inapt name for so pacific a being) was born in 1822, at Liége, Belgium. There he made his first musical studies, but went to Paris at fifteen to study in the Conservatory. Though without the precocity of «le petit Saint-Saëns,» he must have been a solid musician at sixteen, for in a test that took place in July, 1838, he transposed a piece at sight down a third, playing it «avec un brio remarquable,» and was awarded the first grand prize of honor at his graduation in 1842. Foregoing the career of a concert pianist, which his father wished him to pursue, «repudiating with horror and disgust,» as one of his biographers has it, «the brilliant noise-making that people long mistook formusic,» he turned for a livelihood to that laborious work of teaching which he pursued all the rest of his life with patient fidelity.
He seems to have been an almost ideal teacher, long-suffering with the dull pupils, painstaking and generous with the able ones, provoking enthusiasm in all by his contagious love for art and his receptivity to ideas. In a degree that is rare even among the best teachers, he combined endurance and vivacity. Giving, all his life, from eight to ten lessons a day, many of them, even after he had made his reputation, in girls' boarding-schools andpensionsof the usual wearisome sort, he yet retained vitality to impart to the best minds of the present generation of French composers. Though after teaching all day, often not returning home until supper-time, he would in the evening give correspondence lessons to pupils in the provinces, and though even the Sundays were filled with his duties as organist and choirmaster, still he often found time to assemble his favorite pupils, and to discuss with them, as if with perfect equals, their exercises and his own works. One of these pupils, M. Vincent d'Indy, has described how «père Franck,» asthey called him, would play them his choral compositions, singing all the vocal parts in «a terrible voice;» and how he would sit at the piano, fixing with troubled gaze some offending passage in an exercise, murmuring anxiously, «Je n'aime pas ... Je n'aime pas,» until perhaps it grew to seem permissible, and with his bright smile he could cry a «J'aime!» Thanks to his earnest desire to appreciate whatever was good, controlled as it was by a severely classical taste, he could make his students good workmen and stern critics without paralyzing their individual genius. He was thorough without being rigid, and respected learners as much as he revered the masters. Naturally, the learners, in their turn, felt for their «Pater seraphicus,» as they named him, an almost filial affection. Emmanuel Chabrier, speaking over Franck's grave, in Montrouge Cemetery, voiced the feelings of them all when he said that this was not merely an admirable artist, but «the dear regretted master, the most gentle, modest, and wise. He was the model, he was the example.»
For thirty-two years, that is to say, from 1858 until his death, Franck was organist of the Église Ste. Clotilde, where his playing musthave been an endless inspiration to all who heard him, though his modesty kept him personally inconspicuous. One likes to think of this quiet, devout musician, animated by the purest religious enthusiasm, advancing year by year in mastery of his art, producing without ostentation works of a novel and radical beauty. Few of his listeners could have conceived that one so benignant and courteous, but so easily forgotten, was making himself a force that modern music could not forget. They, who saw only the husk of the man, could not guess what treasures of humanity and genius it concealed. M. d'Indy well describes the two aspects. «Any one,» he says, «who had encountered this being in the street, with his coat too large, his trousers too short, his grimacing and preoccupied face framed in his somewhat gray whiskers, would not have believed in the transformation that took place when, at the piano, he explained and commented on some beautiful work of art, or when, at the organ, he put forth his inspired improvisations. Then the music enveloped him like an aureole; then one could not fail to be struck by the conscious will expressed in the mouth and chin, by thealmost superhuman knowledge in his glance; then only would one observe the nearly perfect likeness of his large forehead to that of Beethoven.» And M. Derepas has the following paragraph in the same tenor: «It was there, before the keyboards, his agile and powerful feet upon the pedals, that it was necessary to see César Franck. His beautiful head with its finely developed brow crowned with naturally curling hair, his profound and contemplative expression, his features marked without exaggeration, his full, well-cut mouth breathing health, ... all wearing the aureole of genius and of faith—it was like a vision of another age in strong contrast with the turbulences of the day.» If one is sometimes sorry that Franck had to spend so much time teaching, one cannot, in the face of such descriptions as these, regret the hours he passed in the Église Ste. Clotilde. Its atmosphere was native to his genius, which was not only religious, but even ecclesiastical. In hearing his «musique cathédralesque,» as Saint-Saëns well called it, one can almost see the pillars and arches, the pure candle-flames and the bowed peasants at prayer.
It was in the spare moments of this full lifethat Franck found time to write his extraordinary music. Every morning, winter and summer, rising at six, he set aside two hours for what he expressively called «his own work.» Then, after breakfast, came the day's teaching, in the course of which he would jot down ideas that occurred to him, recording perhaps eight measures, and turning again to the pupil. In the evenings, when there were not correspondence-lessons to write, or rehearsals, he often got out his manuscripts once more; and his short summer vacations were given entirely to composition. All the more remarkable is this indomitability when we remember that he lacked not only the stimulus of public success, but for a long while even the impetus of having definitely succeeded in his own eyes, so new were his ideas and so difficult the technique they required. Very few composers have matured so late. Though he wrote in his youth some trios, and later a Mass, his first really individual work, «Ruth,» was written when he was nearly fifty; «Les Éolides,» his earliest orchestral composition, was produced in 1877, when he was fifty-five; «Les Beatitudes,» in some respects his masterpiece, was not finished until 1880, thoughbegun more than ten years before; and all his most characteristic work in pure music, as, for example, the Prelude, Choral, and Fugue and the Prelude, Aria, and Finale for piano, the three wonderful Chorals for organ, the Violin Sonata, the Quartet, the Quintet, and the Symphony, date from the last decade of his life. In a day when every harmony-student itches to give the world a symphony, it is hard to admire too much the artistic self-respect that kept Franck a nonentity for years, to make him at last a master.
Meanwhile, of course, he had to endure neglect. Probably most of his acquaintances shared the impression put into words by a Paris publisher to whom M. Servières offered an essay about him. «Oh, monsieur,» cried this gentleman, «I remember César Franck perfectly. A man who was always in a hurry, always soberly dressed in black, and who wore his trousers too short!... Organist at Sainte Clotilde. It seems that he was a great musician, little known to the public.» Rather harder to explain is the lack of appreciation which in 1880 led those in power at the Conservatory, where Franck was already organ professor, to give the chair ofcomposition then left vacant, not to him, but to Léo Delibes, the writer of ballet-music. But perhaps the most pathetic result of the general indifference to Franck was that his masterpiece could never be given a complete performance during his lifetime. «Les Beatitudes» was first given entire in 1893, three years after his death. When he received the Legion of Honor in 1886, he said sorrowfully to a friend, «Yes, my friend, they honor me—as a Professor.» That is the one repining word of his that is recorded.
It would, however, be a mistake to suppose that Franck's fellow-men noticed nothing but his short trousers, or that in his high artistic effort he was entirely without sympathy. Few men have been more fortunate in their friends. The love and veneration of his many pupils, and of such men as Chabrier, Pierné, and Fauré, made an atmosphere in which his heart expanded and his ambition grew. One of this group of admirers tells how they would surround him on his return to Paris in the autumn, to ask what he had done, what he had to show. «Vous verrez, repondait-il»—the French alone can render the endearing vanity andnaïvetéof his reply—«vous verrez, repondait-il en prenantun air mysterieux, vous verrez; je crois que vous serez content.... J'ai beaucoup travaillé et bien travaillé.» It was a similarly frank and guileless self-satisfaction that made him apparently unaware of the coldness of his audiences, who were generally puzzled or bored. Happy, as M. d'Indy records, in having given his friends the pleasure of hearing him play his own compositions, in spite of the scanty applause he never failed to bow profoundly. Thus untroubled by the indifference of the crowd, surrounded by a few men who gave him their warm and discriminating admiration, and inspired by a genius peculiarly exalted and disinterested, bent on beauty alone, and superior to petty jealousies, César Franck lived his quiet, fruitful, and happy life. He died at Paris in 1890. The last anecdote we have of him tells of his finding strength, four days before his death, to praise the «Samson et Dalila» of Saint-Saëns, then running at the Théâtre Lyrique. «I see him yet,» says M. Arthur Coquard, «turning towards me his poor suffering face to say vivaciously and even joyfully, in the vibrant tones that his friends know, 'tres beau, tres beau.'» The words, expressing that purelove of art which animated his whole career, lodge in the mind of one who studies it, together with those other words of his, which none ever had a better right to use, «J'ai beaucoup travaillé et bien travaillé.»
It has been necessary to dwell at some length on Franck's life and character because they throw so much light on his music. To an unusual degree it is the expression of himself, full of his peculiar contemplative emotion. The harmonic background is rich, somber, and vague, like the prevailing mood of a religious devotee; from it constantly emerge phrases of song, phrases of the most poignant aspiration, like passions in a dream, voicing those intense yet elusive feelings which irradiate none but introspective minds. They are like the cries of human lovers in a world of silence and mystery, or, better, they are the cries of a finite soul that yearns for God and finds him not. One feels always in Franck's music the tragedy of the finite and the infinite. Those groping, shifting harmonies, above which the pathetic fragments of melody constantly sound for a moment, somehow irresistibly suggest the great unknown universe in which men's little lives are acted.All is vague save the momentary feature, and that presses on towards a fulfillment that perpetually eludes it. All shifts and passes, save only that never-ceasing mood of aspiration, that restless striving of the fragment for completion. Spiritual unrest is the characteristic quality of this music—the unrest of a spirit pure and ardent but forever unsatisfied.
Now, it is perhaps not too fantastic to find in the mingled vagueness and poignancy of this music the proper artistic expression of mysticism. Somusta mystic express himself. For it is characteristic of the mystical temperament to yearn for ideal satisfactions, but to find none in finite forms. Mysticism, in fact, is one of the ways of solving, or perhaps we should say of ignoring, that primal and protean mystery of human life, the conflict between ideal needs and actual facts. Realism meets it by denying the needs and exalting the facts; idealism attempts to mold the real into conformity with the ideal, of course with very partial success. The mystic, too earnest to follow the realistic method, too impatient to endure the plodding progress of idealism, cuts the Gordian knot by discarding the actual altogether. He pronounces it tooinelastic, too constricting, and dispenses with it. He hugs the ideal to his heart, but can see no virtue in the real. Actualities, objects, events, and forms which to the idealist are precious if only partial expressions of spiritual values, are to him wholly recalcitrant, wholly external and illusory. The really precious thing, he says, is something transcendent, something remote, something that cannot transpire in events or body itself in forms, because it is infinite and complete, while these are finite, broken, and limited. Henri-Frédéric Amiel, a man peculiarly dominated by this way of viewing things, wrote in his Journal, «Nothing finite is true, is interesting, is worthy to fix my attention. All that is particular is exclusive, and all that is exclusive repels me. There is nothing non-exclusive but the All; my end is communion with Being through the whole of Being.» Now, whatever may be the merits of this point of view, it obviously involves a certain degree of artistic failure. The mystic cannot be entirely successful in art. For art depends on organization in definite forms, and the mystic rejects all particular forms as finite. «Reality, the present, the irreparable, the necessary,» writes Amiel, «repeland even terrify me.... The life of thought alone seems to me to have enough elasticity and immensity, to be free enough from the irreparable; practical life makes me afraid.» Accordingly, men of this temperament are defeated in their search for beauty by an unconquerable shyness of all its incarnations. They fear that in defining their fancy they will vulgarize it. It is their fate to long for an all-inclusive form in a world where forms are mutually exclusive, to strive to utter truth in one great word, when even the shortest sentence must occupy time. Amiel himself is a pathetic example of the mystic's destiny in art. Haunted all his life by the vision of infinite beauty, the conception of absolute truth, he could never bring himself to accept the limitations of all human performance, and his talent was almost as unproductive as it was exalted. He never could embody his aspirations. Tantalizing him with the suggestion of supernal beauties, they resisted all his efforts to come up with and embrace them, because he denied himself the use of those definite forms in which alone, however inadequately, ideals can be realized.
In many respects César Franck is the analoguein music of Amiel in literature. That vague richness of his emotional tone, which like a dark background of night is constantly lighted up by meteoric outbursts of passion, is strangely like the somber moralizings and speculations, in the «Journal Intime,» among which Amiel's cries of spiritual pain, doubt, and longing stand out with such sudden, poignant pathos. Franck has in common with Amiel the mystic's longing for ideal satisfactions, and the mystic's distrust of all finite means of attaining them. He, too, is «afraid» of the forms of practical life, of the conventional devices of musical structure and the types evolved by tradition. He avoids always the obvious, the natural even, and gropes toward some unattainable ideal of expression. So great is his distrust of the understood, the accepted, the usual and intelligible, that he is always leaving the beaten track and roaming afield after some novel and untamed beauty. It will be worth while to get to closer quarters with this tendency, and to see exactly how it operates.
It is hard to make those unacquainted with musical technique understand how much of fixity there is in the musical idiom, how definiteare the types of musical form, how potent the requisitions of musical syntax. Yet, without a sense of this fixity in the material, it is impossible to estimate justly those impulses and motives which may lead a composer to violate usages and to disappoint expectations. In the matter of harmony, for instance, there are certain types of procedure, certain progressions and sequences of chords, that are as stable and uniform as the types of animal or vegetable form. A horse, a dog, or a man is not a more definite organism than the two chords in the «Amen» of a hymn tune. This group or cluster of two chords, linked together by a common tone held over from one to the other, yet made distinct by progression of the other voices, is typical of a kind of harmonic form that long usage has established as part of our mental furniture. We are used to thinking of chords thus welded by a common tone, and we demand this sort of coherence in our harmonic progressions, just as we demand that a horse's body shall be furnished with a horse's legs, or that a transitive verb shall have an object. To be sure, this particular sort of cluster, in which both chords are, as we say, consonant, is somewhatless determinate than another sort which we shall describe presently, because, since all the tones of the first chord are equally important, any one may be selected as the link, and there will be consequently some latitude in the choice of the second chord, which completes the group. But within these limits this sort of harmonic type is definite and fixed, and that it is deeply ingrained in our mode of thought is proved by our horror of «consecutive octaves» and «fifths,» those bugbears of harmony students, which are bad chiefly because they are not compatible with the retention of a common linking tone between the two members of the group.
Here we have, then, one of those fundamental harmonic forms which are in music what idioms or phrases are in language. It is striking how sedulously César Franck, distrustful of the definite, the conventional, avoids them. Compared with the work of a keen rationalist like Saint-Saëns, his music is curiously incoherent, curiously loose-knit, groping, and indeterminate. His pages are studded with departures and evasions; he delights in going some other way than we expect, or in writing chords that do not give us even any basis of expectation.Consecutive octaves and fifths, so terrible to lovers of cogency and sequence, are an especial feature of his harmony, giving it that curious lapsing effect so characteristic and indescribable. His entire tone-mass has a trick of sliding bodily up or down, which disconcerts, even while it fascinates, one who is accustomed to harmonic stability. The student need only play over the opening of the Symphony or the first page of the String Quartet to feel that here is a man who treats traditions debonairly, and who thus suggests novel beauties without defining them.
Equally irresponsible is he in his treatment of another sort of harmonic form which is intrinsically even more definite than the clusters of consonant chords like the «Amen.» When there is a dissonant tone in the first chord, a tone which, having slight justification for being, presses urgently toward a neighboring tone in the next chord, into which it is said to «resolve,» then the cluster, as a whole, is even more determinate. The dissonance introduces a tension that must be relieved in one definite way. It involves its own resolution just as unstable equilibrium in a body involves its fallingin the direction of the greatest pull. The alien tone in the chord is got rid of by the path of least resistance; it is a foreign element that must be discharged. So potent is this tendency of dissonant tones to resolve that it is one of the chief means of vitalizing the entire musical fabric. Unless music constantly got out of harmony with itself it would no more progress than a man would walk unless before each step he lost his balance. It would stagnate. Consider, for example, the last phrase of that highly vitalized tune, «The Man that Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo.» No one could attribute stagnation to this phrase, whatever other faults he might find in it; and its impetus is largely due to the vigor with which it lands on the dissonant chord next before the last, and the consequent pull of this chord into the last. Try to conceive of ending without that last chord, that resolution in which the foreign element is discharged and all comes to rest. It is told of Mendelssohn that he rushed down-stairs in his night clothes early one morning to resolve a dominant seventh chord (such as we have on the syllable «Car») which some waggish friend struck and left uncompleted. Mendelssohnwas of course unusually sensitive to harmonic law, but it is not too much to draw from this incident the conclusion that a chord which can get a man out of bed in the morning to resolve it must pretty potently suggest resolution. Dissonant chords, in fact, are anything but inert elements in the chemistry of harmonic composition. They have strong affinities and combine powerfully.
Yet César Franck is inclined either to ignore these tendencies or to shift them into unexpected and circuitous channels. The dissonant chords, though they occur often in his work, seldom take their normal course. They are led into new dissonances, diverted to alien keys, subjected to ingenious modifications, and in all ways wrested from the realm of the obvious. Towards the end of the Introduction to the first movement of the String Quartet, for instance, the student will find dominant sevenths most interestingly unfaithful to their family tradition, and effecting modulation through distant keys. Similar treatment will be found on almost any page in this Quartet, in the Quintet, the Symphony, and the piano works. Thus, Franck not only goes counter to the less determinateharmonic types in which both chords are consonant, but he loves to disappoint our expectations when they are strongly established by dissonances. Nothing is more characteristic of him than the formal indefiniteness of his harmony. Full as it is of delicious and unwonted beauties, it lacks accurate organization, clarity and solidity of chord sequence. It is a web of shifting tones, without obvious interrelationship and inevitable progression.
When we turn to Franck's treatment of meter and rhythm, we get some new side-lights on the way his mysticism affects his music. He is, in the first place, noticeably lacking in that vigor of pulse, that strong accentuation, which is the delight of active temperaments. He sings constantly, almost never dances. After a while the intensity of the song-like phrases, so packed with emotion, becomes cloying, and we long for a little of the headlong, thoughtless progress of Grieg and Dvořák. We need the relaxation of muscular activity. It would be a relief to stop feeling for a moment and be borne along on a wave of perfectly unemotional «passage-work.» But Franck never relieves himself and his hearer by passages of briskmotion in which the interest is entirely active; he is, so to speak, a very sedentary composer. And so the rare beauties that stud the page lose something by being set so thickly. The richness of Franck's emotional impulse is a disadvantage to his metrical structure. The same thing, again, is true of his rhythm or phraseology. We saw in the Introduction how elementary metrical groups—measures—were built up into phrases and tunes, and how the strongest synthetic minds got the greatest variety and breadth of phrase. Now Franck's phrasing, like Grieg's, is of the primitive kind that reveals lack of mental concentration, inability to build up wide and complex forms. Draw a line across his staff at every breathing-point, and your lines will fall pretty regularly after the measures whose numbers are multiples of four. Try the same thing with Beethoven, and there will be no telling where the lines will come, so varied is the phraseology. In comparison, Franck's themes seem hardly more than bundles of motifs, loosely tied together. And of course this effect is unfortunately reinforced by the peculiarities of his harmony. How could a theme hold itself together in such a kaleidoscope?How could it sustain itself on such a tonal quicksand? Thus his tunes, rich as they are in single phrases of poignant beauty, seldom develop much breadth. They start out well, but soon lose themselves in the web or fall into poorly welded segments. In the larger structural arrangement of his material as well as in his primary metrical order he falls short of the perfect organization of more powerful minds.
Franck illustrates, then, in many ways, in his erratic treatment of harmony, in his metrical monotony, and in his «shortness of breath,» the mystic's failure to master form. And yet, so beautiful are his effects, so arresting is his personality, one feels instinctively that there is in him something which destructive criticism cannot assail. The very inarticulateness of the mystic is, in fact, a sort of eloquence, perhaps all the more persuasive because it hints at beauties rather than defines them. However beyond his reach his aspirations may be, so long as they are genuine and ardent he will have his unique artistic message. His work will gain a pathetic appeal from the very fact that it suggests feelings it cannot embody, and his inarticulateness may even open up ways tonew modes of utterance by reminding men that there are truths other than those their formulas so smugly stereotype. Thus a writer like Amiel, ineffective as he seems from one point of view, is not without his liberalizing influence in literature. In the same way, César Franck, the mystic among musicians, thanks to his profound insight and emotion, combined though they be with the characteristic shortcomings of the seer, will widen the scope of future musical technique and expression.
BIBLIOGRAPHICALNOTE.—The Prelude, Choral, and Fugue for Piano are to be had in the Collection Litolff. The Prelude, Aria, and Finale are published by J. Hamelle, Paris. These are the only piano pieces of Franck that are easily obtainable. The house of Hamelle also issues a four-hand arrangement of the Symphony, and Durand, of Paris, publishes a four-hand arrangement of the three masterly Chorals for organ, as well as the original edition of these, and of two sets of organ pieces, one of six and the other of three. The «Beatitudes» has been reprinted, with English words, by G. Schirmer. A few of Franck's songs, particularly «La Procession,» «Panis Angelicus,» and «Le Mariage des Roses,» will be found in the portfolios of most large music dealers.
BIBLIOGRAPHICALNOTE.—The Prelude, Choral, and Fugue for Piano are to be had in the Collection Litolff. The Prelude, Aria, and Finale are published by J. Hamelle, Paris. These are the only piano pieces of Franck that are easily obtainable. The house of Hamelle also issues a four-hand arrangement of the Symphony, and Durand, of Paris, publishes a four-hand arrangement of the three masterly Chorals for organ, as well as the original edition of these, and of two sets of organ pieces, one of six and the other of three. The «Beatitudes» has been reprinted, with English words, by G. Schirmer. A few of Franck's songs, particularly «La Procession,» «Panis Angelicus,» and «Le Mariage des Roses,» will be found in the portfolios of most large music dealers.