Sunday Night Special 6… Cesar Franck’s Symphony in D minor

Hello Everyone, my name is Peter Cudlipp. Welcome to another in the occasional series of extra episodes of the Classical For Everyone podcast. Episodes which I am calling Sunday Night Specials. The name comes from the night of the week when for some of us, the demon of insomnia hits the hardest… and for me, and I hope for you, getting lost in some music is a much better thing to do than stare at the ceiling or at a phone screen.

Now I’m not choosing the music with the hope that it will send you to sleep, though it’s fine if it does… this is music to keep you company.  And course this series is for everyone… but it is perhaps intended a little more for those of you whose sleep has been troubled.

The idea of the special is to play you just one piece, uninterrupted and in its entirety… with a few minutes of background explained at the end of the episode… if you’re interested. But the main thing is to get straight into the music.

Here now is Cesar Franck’s Symphony in D minor. It is in three parts and is about 38 minutes in total and in this recording the Boston Symphony Orchestra is conducted by Seiji Ozawa

A

I hope you enjoyed that performance of Cesar Franck’s Symphony in D minor. The Boston Symphony Orchestra was conducted in this recording by Seiji Ozawa

And now here are a few minutes of background for you. And I have to thank Wikipedia and my AI pal Claude for the legwork that I am basing this on. And also a recent episode of Joshua Weilerstein’s excellent podcast ‘Sticky Notes’.

César Franck was born in Liège (now in Belgium, then part of the Netherlands)  in 1822 but spent most of his professional life in Paris, where he became one of the most influential figures in French music of the late 19th century. Unlike many of his contemporaries who focused on opera, Franck devoted himself primarily to instrumental and sacred music, serving as organist at the Church of Sainte-Clotilde in Paris for over thirty years. He was also a beloved teacher at the Paris Conservatoire.

Franck's career is a study in late-blooming genius. For most of his life he was known primarily as a church organist and teacher rather than as a composer, and much of his most important music was written in the final decade of his life. His modest, self-effacing personality kept him somewhat outside the mainstream of Parisian musical life, dominated as it was by opera and salon music. Yet this very outsider status allowed him to develop a distinctive voice that blended German Romantic harmonic language (particularly that of Wagner and Liszt) with French clarity and elegance.

What makes Franck particularly interesting is how he bridged different musical worlds: he brought the contrapuntal rigor of his Belgian training and his deep knowledge of Bach (from his work as an organist) together with the Romantic harmonies and large-scale forms of his German contemporaries, all while working within French musical culture.

This synthesis created something genuinely new - a French symphonic tradition that could stand alongside the German one without simply imitating it. His influence on French music in the generation after his death was enormous, establishing a lineage of French composers who took instrumental music as seriously as opera.

Franck completed his Symphony in D minor in 1888, when he was 66 years old - just two years before his death. It was his only symphony, though he had been composing for decades. The work received a hostile reception at its premiere by the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra in February 1889, with some critics and musicians finding it too Germanic, too Wagnerian, too chromatic - in short, not French enough.

The composer Charles Gounod reportedly dismissed it with "That's the affirmation of incompetence pushed to dogmatic lengths," and even some orchestra members were sceptical. Yet the work found champions, particularly among Franck's devoted students, and it gradually won a place as one of the cornerstones of the French symphonic repertoire.

The symphony is built in three movements rather than the traditional four, and employs what's called "cyclic form" - themes from the first movement return and are transformed in later movements, creating an overall unity across the whole work.

What's remarkable about the symphony is how it manages to sound both intensely Romantic and somehow restrained, passionate yet never bombastic. The orchestration is rich but never overwhelming - Franck uses an English horn prominently in the second movement, giving it an almost vocal quality. The harmonic language is chromatic and adventurous, constantly modulating and exploring unexpected key relationships, yet the structure underneath is solid and the melodies are genuinely memorable.

It's a work that rewards repeated listening - the more you hear it, the more you appreciate how Franck weaves his themes together and how the three movements form a single emotional and musical journey from darkness to light.

My name is Peter Cudlipp and I hope you enjoyed this Sunday Night Special of the ‘Classical For Everyone’ podcast. There will be a regular episode in the next few days and another Sunday Night Special in perhaps a few weeks. Thanks for listening.