Franck: Symphony in D minor
It is curious that Franck would turn to the symphony as one of his last works. While a smattering of symphonies did emerge from such 19th century French voices as Saint-Saëns and Lalo, the genre was still decidedly a fixture of Germanic music. Moreover, Franck’s abstract brand of form may have been better described by the looser “symphonic poem” designation; his treatment of the first movement structure seems at once to acknowledge the procedure of sonata form while ignoring some of its core tenets. Franck’s unorthodox double alternation in this movement of the Lento introductory material with the Allegro recasting of that motive offended contemporary critics for its strain on the pace of the movement, in contrast to the structural economy of sonata form. It is ironic, then, that the musicologist Donald Tovey should liken this same device to the B-flat major Quartet, Op. 130 of Beethoven, the master symphonist himself.
Beethoven’s influence infects other areas of this rogue symphony as well. Franck’s resurrection in his finale of themes from earlier movements and his layering them atop a tireless bass ostinato undeniably recalls the ubiquitous Ninth Symphony, also in D minor. But Franck’s musical language in his symphony, with its tertian key relationships and heavy chromaticism, its lush textures and web of recurring motives, points unabashedly to Wagner.
Perhaps it is the symphony’s peculiar positionality in the context of the symphonic tradition of the 19th century that provoked such mixed reactions in its early performances. It occupies an awkward, neither-here-nor-there space between Beethoven and Wagner, two titans of artistic influence who loomed large in the venerable Germanic musical legacy that ostensibly did not include Franck. The symphony’s premiere in February of 1889 was met with with cold condemnation, the purists offended by Franck’s departure from the harmonic and formal processes of Haydn and Beethoven, and other critics bemoaning a dogmatic German style present in the work. This delicate paradox seems to be the symphony’s handicap and its lifeblood. It was only a few years later, when public opinion turned overwhelmingly in the symphony’s favor, that Vincent D’Indy declared Franck, the French proprietor of this contorted symphony, the first worthy heir to Beethoven’s symphonic legacy.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Yale School of Music
It is curious that Franck would turn to the symphony as one of his last works. While a smattering of symphonies did emerge from such 19th century French voices as Saint-Saëns and Lalo, the genre was still decidedly a fixture of Germanic music. Moreover, Franck’s abstract brand of form may have been better described by the looser “symphonic poem” designation; his treatment of the first movement structure seems at once to acknowledge the procedure of sonata form while ignoring some of its core tenets. Franck’s unorthodox double alternation in this movement of the Lento introductory material with the Allegro recasting of that motive offended contemporary critics for its strain on the pace of the movement, in contrast to the structural economy of sonata form. It is ironic, then, that the musicologist Donald Tovey should liken this same device to the B-flat major Quartet, Op. 130 of Beethoven, the master symphonist himself.
Beethoven’s influence infects other areas of this rogue symphony as well. Franck’s resurrection in his finale of themes from earlier movements and his layering them atop a tireless bass ostinato undeniably recalls the ubiquitous Ninth Symphony, also in D minor. But Franck’s musical language in his symphony, with its tertian key relationships and heavy chromaticism, its lush textures and web of recurring motives, points unabashedly to Wagner.
Perhaps it is the symphony’s peculiar positionality in the context of the symphonic tradition of the 19th century that provoked such mixed reactions in its early performances. It occupies an awkward, neither-here-nor-there space between Beethoven and Wagner, two titans of artistic influence who loomed large in the venerable Germanic musical legacy that ostensibly did not include Franck. The symphony’s premiere in February of 1889 was met with with cold condemnation, the purists offended by Franck’s departure from the harmonic and formal processes of Haydn and Beethoven, and other critics bemoaning a dogmatic German style present in the work. This delicate paradox seems to be the symphony’s handicap and its lifeblood. It was only a few years later, when public opinion turned overwhelmingly in the symphony’s favor, that Vincent D’Indy declared Franck, the French proprietor of this contorted symphony, the first worthy heir to Beethoven’s symphonic legacy.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Yale School of Music