Prelude, Aria and Finale (1887)

Allegro moderato e maestoso – Lento – Allegro molto ed agitato

An organist rather than a pianist, César Franck was not naturally drawn to the piano as a medium for his own compositions – unlike his Parisian contemporaries Camille Saint-Saëns and Gabriel Fauré who, though trained as organists, were also expert pianists and great composers for the piano. Franck had written virtuoso piano pieces in his misspent youth but had then abandoned the instrument for forty years. What brought him back to it was the ambition he evidently cherished in the last decade of his life to come to terms with the major chamber and orchestral forms which he had hitherto neglected.

In spite of conspicuous success with the Piano Quintet in 1880, however, he was clearly reluctant to risk comparison with Beethoven by making his legacy to the solo piano repertoire in the form of a sonata. The answer to this problem probably came through his experience as an organist: he knew three-movement organ works like Bach’s Toccata, Adagio and Fugue in C major and, indeed, had written his own Prelude, Fugue and Variations for organ in 1862. Certainly, he enjoyed such success with the first of his late piano pieces, the Prelude, Chorale and Fugue, in 1884 that he wrote another in the same three-movement form three years later. Although the Prelude, Aria and Finale was not uniformly well received as on its first performance – by its dedicatee, Léontine Bordes-Pène, at the Société Nationale in 1888 – it deserves its status as one of the monuments of French piano music. If it is less frequently programmed than its companion it could be because, in coping with its sometimes organ-like textures, pianists feel the need for pedals and a second manual to help them out.

Avoiding sonata form, Franck shaped the Prelude as a rondo based on the solemn march tune first heard in the opening bars. That theme recurs twice – the first time after the introduction of more intimate lyrical material, the second time after a longer, sometimes fugal episode which begins quietly in bare octaves but generates considerable passion as it develops both of the new themes. On its last appearance the march makes way via a poetically conceived transition to the next movement. The expressive melody that opens the Aria is of such beauty that it sustains the whole of the central section, varied in shape from time to time, effectively coloured by frequent changes between soprano and bass and, until the tranquil closing section, set against increasingly animated figuration elsewhere in the piano texture.

Playing the Finale for a colleague at home one day, the composer’s wife burst into the room with the irate question, “How long is this noise going to go on?” It is true that the quietly rumbling semiquavers with which the movement begins do gradually assume positively thunderous quality. But this and the new themes that emerge, including one particularly joyous example, is just the background that Franck needed to complete the work in his way. A composer who had long subscribed to the cyclic principle, he is setting up the situation here for the recall of the main themes of the two previous movements – first the aria melody in the right hand accompanied by delicate arpeggios and then, after more development of Finale material, the march tune harmonised in four or five-note chords over heavily pacing left hand octaves. Although that is the climax of the work, it is not the end. One of the great inspirations of the Prelude, Aria and Finale is the quiet transfiguration of the march tune in the lingering closing section.

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