César Franck

Many of César Franck’s works in the concert repertoire were written late in his life. Born at Liège in 1822 and moved to Paris by a father who wanted a piano virtuoso, he set that career aside for the organ loft and the classroom, and became organist of Sainte-Clotilde, whose new Cavaillé-Coll instrument shaped the Six Pièces, the Trois Pièces and the Trois Chorals finished in the last year of his life. Then, late, came the Piano Quintet, the Symphonic Variations, the Violin Sonata written as a wedding present for Eugène Ysaÿe, the String Quartet and the Symphony in D minor — most of them held together by cyclic form, themes carried from movement to movement until the finale can gather them. As professor of organ at the Conservatoire, where his classes were understood by his pupils to be composition lessons in disguise, he taught d'Indy, Chausson, Duparc and Vierne, and through them left a French school that outlived him. He was eight when he entered the conservatoire in his native Liège, and in Paris he studied with Antonín Reicha from 1835 before entering the Conservatoire in 1837, taking diplomas in piano, organ and counterpoint. The organ professorship came in 1872, and the late works fall in a tight sequence: Les Béatitudes and the Piano Quintet both finished in 1879, Prélude, Choral et Fugue in 1884, the Symphonic Variations in 1885 and the Violin Sonata in 1886, the Symphony in 1888, and the three organ chorales, his last opus, in 1890, the year he died in Paris on 8 November. Beside the pieces that are played stand four operas, four oratorios, five symphonic poems and some hundred and thirty works for organ.