Les Siècles

Franck, called “Pater Seraphicus” by his own students, was one of the most influential musical personalities of the latter half of the 19^th century, and as late as 1906 his former pupil Vincent d’Indy called him Beethoven’s true successor. Franck’s music did not look only to the past, however. He was also interested in the compositional innovations of Liszt and Wagner. He combined all of this into a remarkable whole. He composed his most mature works after 1880, when he was working as the professor of organ at the Paris Conservatoire. The orchestra Les Siècles has chosen three works from that period to put into perspective alongside Claude Debussy’s masterpiece La mer.

Franck composed the symphonic poem Le Chasseur maudit (The Accursed Hunter) in 1883 based on a ballad by the German Sturm und Drang poet Gottfried August Bürger. The orchestration of the tragic tale evokes darkness and the phantasmagorical atmosphere of a demonic hunt. Besides the characteristic sound of French horns, we hear the warning sound of bells. The work was premiered in March of 1883 at the Salle Érard in Paris under the baton of Édouard Colonne, and its instant success was one of the few in the composer’s career.

Franck dedicated his Symphonic Variations for piano and orchestra (1885) to the piano virtuoso Louis Diémer the year after the soloist premiered his symphonic poem Les Djinns. Diémer’s pupil Alfred Cortot fittingly described the work as “three different poetic states”, and we should add that this remarkably fine composition is a marvellous demonstration of Franck’s handling of cyclical form, in which he took late Beethoven and Liszt’s music as his point of departure. Here, piano and orchestra share absolutely equally in the development of the musical ideas, which flow from beginning to end without interruption. Diémer premiered the Symphonic Variations with the Société Nationale de Musique in May 1886 with the composer conducting.

Twenty years later, Claude Debussy (1862-1918) wrote one of his most famous works, La mer, an ambitious and innovative composition that was immensely progressive for its day. The description of “three symphonic sketches” is more fitting than “symphonic poem”. The music depicts the sea, which had fascinated Debussy since his childhood. It reflects all of his passion for the fine arts, and especially his love for the works of the artist Joseph Turner (1775 – 1851), who was thought by Debussy to give best expression to mysteriousness, and of Katsushika Hokusai (1760 – 1849); the composer chose the famous woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa from a cycle of 36 views of Mount Fuji for the cover of the score.

Debussy’s handling of rhythm, tempo, and especially instrumental colour is innovative with almost explosive tectonic changeability, harmonies that blur like the shadings of a painting on a large canvas, chords that often do not resolve, as if they have no resting place, and short motifs developed by solo passages derived from previous motifs. In the middle scherzo-like movement, the composer uses non-European modality, and the large percussion section includes a tam-tam and glockenspiel.

This masterpiece of musical impressionism was written under the dramatic circumstances of the composer’s divorce. Debussy finished the work in 1905 in Eastbourne, a town on the southern coast of England, by which time the composer had remarried, and the premiere took place that October in Paris with the Orchestre Lamoureux conducted by Camille Chevillard. The critics initially rejected the work, with some finding that the sea was unrecognisable in the music or that it lacked grandeur, but success came three years later in Paris and London.

The programme celebrating the 200^th anniversary of Franck’s birth will end with his only symphony, which is also his most frequently performed work, the Symphony in D minor. This innovative composition is an excellent example of the blending of French and German influences in a cyclical form where important themes appear in all parts of the symphony, which is in three movements, unusually for its day. The composer dedicated it to his famous pupil Henri Duparc. Because of anti-German sentiments in connection with the Franco-Prussian war of 1871, the premiere could not be given under the auspices of the Société nationale de musique, of which Franck was a member, so instead it was played in February 1889 by the Orchestra of the Paris Conservatoire with the conductor Jules Garcin. Although the initial reactions of the critics were divided, the symphony has since become a part of the standard repertoire, and it has been recorded countless times.

Emblematic recordings include those by Pierre Monteux with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Charles Dutoit with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, Semyon Bychkov with the Orchestre de Paris, and a live 1945 version with the Vienna Philharmonic and Wilhelm Furtwängler.