César Franck (1822 – 1890) was a Belgian-French Romantic composer and organist who was the chief figure in a movement to give French music an emotional engagement, technical solidity, and seriousness comparable to that of German composers.

Franck was born of a Walloon father and a mother of German descent. He showed unmistakable musical gifts that enabled him to enter the Liège conservatory at the age of eight, and his progress as a pianist was so astonishing that in 1834 his father took him on tour and a year later dispatched him to Paris, where he worked with the Bohemian composer Anton Reicha, then professor at the Paris Conservatory. In 1836 the whole family, including the younger son Joseph, who played the violin, moved to Paris, and in 1837 César Franck entered the Paris Conservatory. Within a year he had won a Grand Prix d’Honneur by a feat of transposition in the sight-reading test, and this honour was followed by a first prize for fugue (1840) and second prize for organ (1841). Although the boy should now normally have prepared to compete for the Prix de Rome, a prize offered yearly in Paris for study in Rome, his father was determined on a virtuoso’s career for him and his violinist brother, with whom he gave concerts, and therefore removed him prematurely from the conservatory.

In order to please his father and earn much-needed money, Franck gave concerts, the programs of which were largely devoted to performing his own showy fantasias and operatic potpourris, popular at that time. After 1840, when he turned his attention increasingly to the organ, his compositions became noticeably more serious, and three trios written at this time were to impress favourably the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt. A more ambitious work was the cantata Ruth, which had its first performance at the conservatory on Jan. 4, 1846.

Unwilling concert giving, a number of bad press notices, and the teaching needed to supplement his income took a physical toll of his powers. Only when he had finally asserted himself against what amounted to the unscrupulous exploitation of his gifts by his father could he achieve maturity and peace of mind. Franck fell in love with an actress with the professional name of Desmousseaux, whose real name was Félicité Saillot, but because both her parents also worked in the theatre, the family was regarded as unsuitable by the elder Franck, and his son was obliged to leave home some time before marrying her in 1848. After his marriage Franck’s way of life changed little for his remaining 42 years. He earned his livelihood as an organist and teacher and led a simple, almost ascetic life.

In 1851 he was appointed organist to the Church of Saint-Jean-Saint-François and in 1858 to that of Sainte-Clotilde, where he was already choirmaster. From the organ loft of Sainte-Clotilde came the improvisations for which he was to become famous and also their elaboration in organ and choral works. This music is all marked by the taste of the day, which was for a facile tenderness and saccharine sweetness in ecclesiastical music.

More important to Franck’s career as a composer was his appointment as organ professor at the Paris Conservatory in 1872, which came to him as a surprise because he had indulged in none of the preliminary intrigue customary in such cases. His open-heartedness and lack of sophistication were to make him enemies among his colleagues as well as friends among his pupils. This enmity was increased by the fact that his organ classes soon became classes of composition, and his pupils not infrequently proved superior to those of the conventional composition professors.
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The nucleus of a school of disciples had already begun to form around Franck, but only after the founding of the National Society of Music (Feb. 25, 1871) was a real future assured for the type of music that he was interested in writing and communicating to his pupils. When Vincent d’Indy, a French composer, joined the group of Franck’s pupils in 1872, he brought an enthusiasm, a propagandist zeal, and an exclusive personal devotion that played a large place in restoring Franck’s confidence in his powers. With Ernest Chausson, Pierre de Bréville, Charles Bordes, and Guy Ropartz the Franck circle was complete in the early ’80s, and subsequently d’Indy’s very high claims (in his biography, César Franck, 1906) led for a time to the suspicion that Franck was “a creation of his own pupils.”

The music that he went on to write makes it clear that this is not true. As a composer Franck fulfilled his potential only in the last 10 years (1880–90) of his life. His Symphony in D Minor (1888), Variations symphoniques (1885), Piano Quintet in F Minor (1879), String Quartet in D Major (1889), Sonata in A Major for Violin and Piano (1886), and several organ pieces mark him as one of the most powerful French composers in the second half of the 19th century. His music is marked by soaring, almost improvisatory melodic flights.

Certainly his early years as performer and composer of virtuoso music left an indelible mark on his musical taste, as can be heard unmistakably in the last movement of the Prélude, aria et final for piano (completed 1887) and even momentarily in the Variations symphoniques for piano and orchestra. On the other hand, some of his weaker music represents an almost excessive reaction against superficiality and aspires to emotional intensity at all costs, drawing for the purpose on the examples of Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner, and, more remotely, Beethoven.

Franck died, partly as the result of a street accident, in 1890. The new seriousness of French music in the last quarter of the 19th century derived entirely from Franck and his pupils. Much has been made of his angelic sweetness and simplicity of character, his selflessness and innocence in the ways of the world. These traits are reflected in a blandness of manner, and they proved a handicap when Franck was faced with the necessity of producing strongly contrasting musical ideas, as in the oratorio Les Béatitudes (written during the 1870s and performed posthumously) and the symphonic poems Le Chasseur maudit (1882; The Accursed Hunter) and Les Djinns (1884). On the other hand, the Sonata in A Major for Violin and Piano and the Variations symphoniques remain as all but perfect monuments of a warm and noble musical nature and a strong, thorough craftsmanship that have survived all changes of taste and emotional attitudes.