Art imitates art
Franck and Beethoven
Partly impelled by Victor Hugo’s
1864 statement – ‘In art Germany is represented by a sublime man… That man is Beethoven. Beethoven is the German soul’ – the great composer’s star rose in France through the following decades to be the touchstone of musical worth. César Franck was to be no exception in having his music affected by the German genius’s pervading influence.
Two examples from Franck’s output in the 1880s show this Beethovenian influence at its clearest. One of his favourite ploys was to oppose two differing emotions. In the Variations symphoniques for piano and orchestra, the opening bars pit an angry challenge in octaves on the strings against a plaintive, espressivo reply from the piano. Then, gradually, the piano’s expressivity begins to tell: the strings’ anger abates, the plaintive reply flowers into Chopinesque lyricism. The model for this opening is undoubtedly the slow movement of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto in which the strings’ loud octaves, if rather more obstinate, are similarly charmed into quiescence – a process memorably described by an early Beethoven biographer as ‘Orpheus taming the Furies’.
The second example, equally explicit, is the structure of Franck’s Violin
Sonata – movement I (A major, ternary rhythm, short); II (one flat, developed, two themes); III (no key signature); IV (A major, imitative texture) – which is all copied from Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 28, Op 101.