Of all the symphonies in the orchestral repertoire, French composers contributed only a few. But important symphonies by Saint-Saëns, Lalo, and d’Indy all appeared in 1887. Perhaps that’s why César Franck decided to start composing his Symphony in D Minor the following year.

Today’s audiences love Franck’s symphony so much that it’s hard to understand how universally the French musical establishment hated it. And hated all of Franck’s music except his organ music. Only a handful of students believed in his music during his lifetime. The wider public began to appreciate it soon after his death.

We think of César Franck as a quintessentially French composer. Actually, he had to be naturalized as a French citizen. He was born in 1822 in the now Belgian city of Liège. The Kingdom of Belgium was established in 1830. It had been part of the Austrian empire until the French annexed it in 1795. But France never considered it part of France or regarded its inhabitants as French citizens.

César Franck’s childhood and youth

César Franck was born to an unemployed French-speaking clerk and a German mother. When his musical talent became evident, his father tried to exploit him as a prodigy. César entered the Liège Conservatory in 1830 and quickly won first prizes in solfège and piano. So his father organized some concerts in the spring of 1835 and then moved the family to Paris.

There, Franck was refused admittance to the Paris Conservatory because he wasn’t considered a French citizen. But his father had already arranged for piano lessons with Pierre Zimmerman and harmony and counterpoint with Anton Reicha, teacher of Berlioz, Liszt, and Gounod.

Franck finally entered the Conservatory in 1837 after his father received naturalization papers. He won first prizes in piano and counterpoint and second prize in organ. Then his father withdrew him and returned to Belgium. That way he could make money for the family as a virtuoso pianist. It did not go well, even after the family returned permanently to Paris.

César soon broke off relations with his father and supported himself as a teacher and organist at a small church. His marriage didn’t turn out much happier. His wife disliked nearly all the music he ever composed.

Franck as musician

Franck worked hard to improve his pedal technique on the organ. Eventually, he became organist at a new basilica in Paris, Sainte Clothilde. He remained there for the rest of his life and began to gather students around him. He emerged from relative obscurity when he became organ professor at the Conservatory in 1871.

In all this time, Franck had dabbled in composition with occasional success. His organ class amounted to composition classes, but Franck himself didn’t become serious about composing until he was 50. His students included Vincent d’Indy, Ernest Chausson, Henri Duparc, and Guy de Ropartz.

Like Camille Saint-Saëns, the other leading French organist and symphonist of his generation, Franck never won much acceptance from the French musical establishment. Where Saint-Saëns became bitter and combative, Franck withdrew into himself and ignored the criticism.

At least one biographer has written that he never even noticed the backbiting he endured. He had much practice ignoring his father and wife. He serenely retreated to his organ loft. Emotionally, he occupied the eye of a hurricane. His students defended him from the criticism he barely noticed.

Also like Saint-Saëns, Franck’s works show the influence of Lizst and Wagner. In Franck’s case, Liszt’s technique of thematic transformation meshed with his own skill in improvising on the organ.

He is credited with developing the cyclical structure, although Beethoven pioneered the germ of it in his Fifth Symphony. In a cyclical form, the themes of early movements recur throughout and return, transformed, in the finale.

Franck the organist practically defines Franck the orchestral composer. He transferred his improvisational skills to his structures. Improvisation includes the need to coast occasionally to wait for fresh inspiration. So Franck’s works never display the tight structure of a Saint-Saëns. They do, however, exhibit a mastery of counterpoint, especially canon. And more than Saint-Saëns, he transferred the principles of organ registration to his orchestration.

The structure of the Symphony in D Minor

The symphony opens with the same theme that opens Liszt’s Les Preludes and the final movement of Beethoven’s last string quartet.

It seems at first like the movement will be a typical sonata form with a slow introduction, But when Franck has introduced his main theme, he repeats the entire introduction and fast theme in a new key before continuing with the movement.

A classical symphony has an opening movement, slow movement, minuet or scherzo, and finale. Franck’s symphony has only three movements, because he combined the slow movement and scherzo to form the second. It starts off with a pizzicato section that morphs into a lovely English horn melody with pizzicato accompaniment.

Franck was very proud that every beat of the slow section coincided with one measure of the scherzo. That enabled him to have the two themes play at the same time later in the movement. But the entire movement feels like the leisurely triple meter of the slow tune. Most of it has the same pizzicato background. Something resembling the first theme of the first movement appears at the end.

The finale, in D major, amounts to an extended picardy third. The exuberant principal theme starts with an almost ragtime feel. After another new theme, the English horn melody and the first theme of the first movement return.

The initial failure of the symphony

Franck wanted Charles Lamoureux’s concert series to present the premiere of his symphony. But Lamoureux had played one of his earlier works, which failed. He didn’t want to take another chance.

Grudgingly, the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire gave the premiere. Most of the personnel of that orchestra were on the conservatory faculty and took a dim view of Franck as a composer. The orchestra’s conductor insisted, so the orchestra gave the symphony a lackluster reading.

Vincent d’Indy later wrote

The performance was quite against the wish of most members of the famous Société des Concerts du Conservatoire and was only pushed through thanks to the benevolent obstinacy of the conductor, Jules Garcin. The subscribers could make neither head nor tail of it, and the musical authorities were much in the same position.

I inquired of one of them—a professor at the Conservatoire, and a kind of factotum on the committee—what he thought of the work.

“That, a symphony?” he replied in a contemptuous tone. “But my dear sir, who ever heard of writing for the English horn in a symphony? Just mention a single symphony by Haydn or Beethoven introducing the English horn. There, well, you see—your Franck’s music may be whatever you please, but it will certainly never be a symphony!”

It’s appalling how many critics and academics of the 19^thcentury criticized any innovation on the ground that the great masters never did it that way. The great masters never slavishly limited themselves to what earlier great masters had done!

Saint-Saëns had already used English horn in his Organ Symphony, but it, too, made little impression in France at first. And, in fact, that professor lacked a thorough knowledge of the repertoire. Haydn replaced the usual two oboes with two English horns in his Symphony no. 22.

D’Indy further noted that Charles Gounod “fulminated a kind of papal decree to the effect that this symphony was the affirmation of incompetency pushed to dogmatic lengths.” Franck himself either didn’t notice the criticism or refused to acknowledge it. He simply said, “Oh, it sounded well, just as I thought it would.”

The eventual success of the symphony

Guy de Ropartz, another of Franck’s students, noted

Franck’s symphony is a continual ascent towards pure gladness and life-giving light, because its workmanship is solid and its themes are manifestations of ideal beauty. What is there more joyous, more sanely vital, than the principal subject of the Finale, around with all the other themes in the work cluster and crystallize”?

Ropartz called the two principal themes of the first movement “hope” and “faith.” The second, he said, was “declaimed like a great Credo.”

Franck died in 1890 when he absent-mindedly wandered in the path of a horse-drawn carriage. His colleagues at the Conservatory didn’t even attend his funeral. But in 1893, Lamoureux decided to perform the symphony. Both the orchestra and the audience loved it.  From that concert on, it has been a beloved staple in the symphonic repertoire.

Sources:

Sources:
Cesar Franck Symphony in D Minor / Peter Gutmann, Classical Notes. 2010
“Franck, César (-Auguste-Jean-Guillaume-Hubert)” / John Trevitt. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (Washington, DC: Grove’s Dictionaries of Music, 1980)
The Symphony Concerts / Carlo Fischer, Western Magazine 20, no. 4 (October 1922): 116-17

Photo credits:
Franck photo. Public domain from Wikimedia Commons
Franck at the organ. Public domain from Wikimedia Commons
Ste. Clothilde organ. Public domain from Wikimedia Commons
English horn player. US Marine Corps photo.
Franck’s tomb. Public domain from Wikimedia Commons