César Franck (10 December 1822 – 8 November 1890) was a Belgian composer, pianist, organist and music teacher. After a break of nearly twenty years, Franck returned to composition for the piano in 1884. Composed that very year, his masterwork, the Prélude, Choral et Fugue was dedicated to Marie Poitevin, who gave the first performance of the piece in 1885.
Like many of Franck’s later works, he employs the use of cyclic form with movements linked by recurrent themes and motifs to achieve a sense of unity. The piece begins with a Prélude in B minor with the main theme incorporated amongst the cascading arpeggios and chordal passages. Without any break, the work leads into the Choral, which is characterised by its largely chordal texture and organ-like sonority – reminiscent of the Gothic cathedrals in Belgium. The Choral which is interspersed with passages of recitativo eventually picks up the pace before rapidly leading into the final Fugue. The fugue, which is comprised of a descending subject is developed throughout the movement, including an inversion. The movement reaches a dramatic climax in a cadenza where the main theme of the Prélude returns and the final culmination of the fugal subject is heard before the piece ends in a flourish of chords in B major.
For more information on the piece and its background, here is some commentary by the pianist, Stephen Hough:
“Franck’s original plan, according to his pupil Vincent d’Indy, was to write a plain Prelude and Fugue, the venerable form made immortal by Bach and neglected since Mendelssohn, a visibly serious alternative to the plethora of virtuoso pieces which were so popular at the time. After almost forty years writing mainly organ music and works inspired by sacred texts, the example of Bach was an affirmation that secular music could still retain a spiritual identity in an abstract form. In fact it is significant that the further Franck moved away from specifically sacred music (his liturgical works are particularly lifeless) the clearer and more pure his spiritual vision seemed to become.
The decision to include a central section, separate from, yet linking, the Prelude and Fugue, came later (again according to d’Indy). Perhaps Bach was the influence with the poignant slow interludes of his Clavier Toccatas to say nothing of the very word ‘chorale’ which was eventually used. In the event, however, this central section became the emotional core of the work, its ‘motto’ theme (Example 2) used as a symbol of redemption and as a unifying principle at the climax of the Fugue.
When Saint-Saëns made his tart observation about the piece that the ‘chorale is not a chorale and the fugue is not a fugue’ (in his pamphlet ‘Les Idées de M. Vincent d’Indy’), he was completely missing the point. The forms here have become symbolic, the apotheosis of their academic counterparts; and, furthermore, Alfred Cortot described the Fugue in the context of the whole work as ‘emanating from a psychological necessity rather than from a principle of musical composition’ (La musique française de piano; PUF, 1930). It is as if a ‘fugue’, as a symbol of intellectual rigour, was the only way Franck could find a voice to express fully the hesitant, truncated sobs of the Prelude and the anguished, syncopated lament of the Chorale. Not that the Fugue solves the problem—this is the function of the ‘motto’ theme; but the rules of counterpoint have given the speaker a format in which the unspeakable can be spoken.
There are two motivic ideas on which the whole work is based: one, a falling, appoggiatura motif used in all three sections and generally chromatic in tonality (Example 1); the other a criss-crossing motif in fourths (the ‘motto’ theme, Example 2) which appears first in the Chorale section and then again as a balm at the point where the Fugue reaches its emotional crisis. The first motivic idea is clearly related to the Bach Cantata ‘Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen’, and also to the ‘Crucifixus’ from the B minor Mass; the other idea appears as the ‘bell motif’ in Wagner’s Parsifal.”