Music: An Art and a Language

among his notable pupils being d’Indy, Chausson, Duparc, Ropartz,
and the gifted but short-lived Lekeu. In Franck’s music, fully as
remarkable as the content—the worthy expression of his poetic
nature—is its organic structure. He was the first composer of the
French School to use adequately the great forms of symphonic
and chamber music which had been worked out hitherto by the
Germans: Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven,etc. If during the
last thirty years, composers of the modern French School have
put forth a number of instrumental works of large dimensions
(chamber music, symphonies, symphonic poems and pianoforte
sonatas), it is to Franck more than to any other man, by rea-
son of his own achievements in these fields and his stimulating
influence on others, that this significant fact is due. A striking
feature of Franck’s music is the individual harmonic scheme,
fascinating because so elusive. He was a daring innovator in
modulations and in chromatic effect; and has, perhaps, added
more genuinely new words to our vocabulary than any one since
Wagner. The basis of Franck’s harmony is the novel use of the
so-called augmented harmonies which, in their derivation, are
chromatically altered chords. These are resolved by Franck in
a manner remarkably free, and are often submitted to still fur-
ther chromatic change. In revealing new possibilities he has, in
fact, done for these chords what Wagner did for the chord of
the ninth. Any page of Franck’s music will exemplify this state-
ment, and as an illustration we have cited, in the Supplement,
the first part of the Prelude in E major. A life-long student of
Bach and Beethoven, Franck believed—as a cardinal principle—
that great ideas were not enough; they must be welded together
with inexorable logic. And so his chief glory as a musical archi-
tect is the free use he makes of such organic forms as the Canon,
the Fugue and the Varied Air. Franck was likewise a pioneer in
establishing in a sonata or symphony a new conception as to
the relationship of the movements. This he effected by the use
of what may be called “generative motives” which, announced
in the first movement of a work, are found with organic growth,
modulatory and rhythmic, in all the succeeding portions. Such
a method of gaining unity had been hinted at by Beethoven in
his Fifth Symphony, was further developed by Schumann and
Liszt and, since the example of Franck, has become a recog-
nized principle in all large cyclic works. The following estimate
of his music by F. Baldensperger is worthy of citation. “The
contemplative character of Franck’s music which explains his