Symphonie Sonate Variations symphoniques

Description

Three different works in terms of forces, conception, and form: three works that, in a short time and a few years before his accidental death, secured César Franck the public success and official status he had long awaited. What does it matter if they no longer reign among the “warhorses” of Sunday concerts! The musician is at his peak here, putting three forms through their paces and magnifying and subverting them at the same time: “grand, personal, synthetic,” as his pupil Charles Tournemire would write. 1886: in just a few months, César Franck composes the Symphonic Variations for piano and orchestra, the Prelude, Chorale and Fugue and the Prelude, Aria and Finale for piano, and the Sonata for violin and piano. It is the great return to his original instrument, the piano. The Symphonic Variations, in about a quarter of an hour, do away with the concerto. The three-part form frames the actual “theme and variations” between a broad introduction and a brilliant finale which, in their own way, also keep varying the Liège popular “cramignon” theme, only recognizable at the end: variations on the variation. And the piano? Written for Louis Diémer, it is “symphonic” through its concertante virtuosity, recalling the sparks the young Franck displayed in his early trios and brilliant variations; but “symphonic” also because it is fully integrated into the orchestra, even becoming the loving accompanist of ecstatic or cavernous cellos and double basses. No less symphonic is the sonata whose fame was ensured by the Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe. In four movements — those of a symphony — the two instruments share the roles as if they were playing a reduction of it: in the piano, the sonic space covered in conquering arpeggios, the almost orchestral texture; in the violin, the unforgettable themes, both unified and contrasting, which draw an equally vast space through melodic power alone. Is it any surprise that the final canon, so haunting, was one of the models for the “little phrase” with which Proust signs Vinteuil’s sonata? And the symphony itself? Celebrated and then neglected, the power of this 1888 score is imposing, not without some didacticism. Saint-Saëns, who had anticipated many of the work’s inventions, sidestepped these repetitions on which Franck, for his part, builds from the outset: “such a process has the advantage of fixing the main idea in the most recalcitrant brains, and of treating us twice to the admirable passage where the theme rumbles softly (bassoon, horn and bass clarinet) beneath the strings’ tremolo,” argues, amused, the critic Willy. All this for a “work of a blacksmith rather than a sculptor, made of cold-hammered, welded and pressed-back pieces,” wrote René de Récy in 1893 in the Revue bleue, finding “the imperfections redeemed by sincerity, seriousness, depth, movement and energy” (Paul de Louit).