Franck: Piano Quintet in F minor (1879)
Molto moderato quasi lento – AllegroLento, con molto sentimento
Allegro non troppo, ma con fuoco
A few of Franck’s compositions – for example, the Variations Symphoniques (for piano and orchestra) and the Symphony in D minor – have become popular favourites in the concert hall and on the gramophone. Yet the man himself is hardly less obscure to the concert public than most of the other fine works he produced. At the same time, it would not seem unfair to suggest that the essentially benign and undramatic Symphonic Variations hardly suggest the dynamic personality of a Beethoven or a Berlioz, and Franck’s life was undoubtedly not as eventful as that of either of those two masters. But for about twenty years he was certainly the most influential – and possibly the greatest – composer living in France, despite being French neither by birth nor heritage. He was in fact born in Belgium (although his native city of Liège was situated in the Walloon district of the Netherlands until 1830), of predominantly German parents. So his Teutonic ancestry means that he was not a French composer in temperament either; yet, despite its origins, much of his music still manages to be peculiarly French in character, with its faintly scented atmosphere smelling distinctly of the fashionable and sensual city of Marcel Proust and the Impressionist painters.
It was with this piano quintet that Franck, at the age of 55, became a “great composer”. The pious organist at St. Clotilde’s, the respected professor of composition, the composer of sanctimonious oratorios and impressive organ music – this unlikely man suddenly flowered into a daringly original genius. Of course, the process wasn’t quite so sudden as it might appear: the seeds of Franck’s musical style were already apparent in the first of a set of Trios Concertantes, composed when he was 20, and these seeds had slowly been germinating in his church music, un-noticed behind the religious façade. Nevertheless, the quintet did surprise most people, not least the composer’s own wife (“César, I don’t approve of that music you are playing”!); and Saint-Saëns, whom Franck had respectfully invited to take part in the first performance. Presumably because of his familiarity with Franck’s earlier pieces the younger composer may not have expected the quintet to require much preparation, so that at the performance (on 17 January the following year) he was quite unable to come to terms with this strange music he was struggling to play. At the end he stormed off the platform, leaving behind on the piano the score which Franck had humbly offered him.
It is possible that in writing a chamber work Franck felt liberated from the strictures of the church; it is also highly likely that the intensely passionate nature of the work reflected his current infatuation for one of his pupils, Augusta Holmès. Be that as it may, all feelings and passions which may previously have been suppressed were now given full expression in the magnificent series of works which he created during the final years of his life. His highly developed chromatic harmony was exploited to the full; his flowing melodic style, which often involves the use of one note as a pivot (vide the motto theme in the quintet, or in the D minor symphony), became increasingly personalized; and his evolution of cyclic form grew ever more masterly and subtle. All these attributes can be heard to full effect in what is surely a masterpiece of erotic art. The piano quintet undoubtedly crossed the boundaries of what at that time was considered “good taste” in chamber music; but to its eternal credit it possessed a tautly argued formal structure to support it, such that the crucial balance between form and content remained proudly unviolated.
© Alan George
