Prelude, Chorale and Fugue (1885)

Moderato - poco più lento- poco allegro

According to Vincent d’Indy, one of his more distinguished pupils, Franck originally intended to write only “a prelude and fugue, like Bach’s, but then had the idea of linking the two pieces with a chorale.” It could well be that as a long-term church organist, he recalled the exceptional and unusually rewarding three-part structure of Bach’s Toccata in C major, BWV 564, and used it as a model for his own work. The fact that it was written in 1885, Bach’s two-hundredth anniversary year, seems to bear out some such conjecture. When he came to write the even more ambitious Prelude, Aria and Finale two years later, incidentally, he retained the three-part structure while avoiding the overtly baroque allusions of the Prelude, Chorale and Fugue.

The B minor broken-chord figuration at the beginning of the Prelude of the present work has more in common with Bach’s toccata style than with the conventional virtuoso piano writing of the second half of the nineteenth century. It alternates with a less rigorous kind of texture characterised by its legato articulation and chromatic harmonies. According d’Indy again, the subject of the Fugue is anticipated in “somewhat rudimentary form” at the very beginning of the first of those contrasting sections. Certainly there is a deliberate anticipation of that theme in the second contrasting section, after the return of the toccata material, in a long chromatically descending melody in right-hand octaves.

The fugue subject is also anticipated at the start of the Chorale, and in less rudimentary form. The main chorale theme itself is introduced in C minor in rippling arpeggios covering four octaves, the left hand crossing the right to touch the melody note at the top of each chord. It makes three appearances in all, each one louder than the last, before the first definitive presentation of the fugue subject, which is a remarkable inspiration including nine degrees of the chromatic scale in its first eleven notes. Before the Fugue begins, however, the tonality must be brought back from E flat minor to the tonic B minor, which (in a manner not totally dissimilar to the transition between the Adagio and the fugue in Bach’s Toccato in C) is accomplished most dramatically with an acceleration over an ostinato rhythm in the left hand.

The Fuge is in four parts incorporating the usual free episodes, a particularly interesting entry of the subject in inversion, and a massive climax which suddenly breaks off on a dominant seventh. This is where Franck’s masterly cadenza, combining virtuoso indulgence with structural virtue, begins. The first three notes of the fugue subject are worked into the toccata figuration from the Prelude and so too, eventually, are the distinctive falling fourths and fifths of the chorale theme. Shortly before the end, when the main themes have been so impressively and thoroughly drawn together, the climax of the fugue is resumed at the point where it broke off in B minor, but only to sink quietly into B major. An fff toccata triumphantly confirms the change of mood.