César Auguste Jean Guillaume Hubert Franck (French: [sezaʁ oɡyst ʒɑ̃ ɡijom ybɛʁ fʁɑ̃k]; 10 December 1822 – 8 November 1890) was a French Romantic composer, pianist, organist, and music teacher born in present-day Belgium.
He was born in Liège (which at the time of his birth was part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands). He gave his first concerts there in 1834 and studied privately in Paris from 1835, where his teachers included Anton Reicha. After a brief return to Belgium, and a disastrous reception of an early oratorio Ruth, he moved to Paris, where he married and embarked on a career as teacher and organist. He gained a reputation as a formidable musical improviser, and travelled widely within France to demonstrate new instruments built by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll.
In 1859, he became titular organist at the church Sainte-Clotilde, a position he retained for the rest of his life. He became professor at the Paris Conservatoire in 1872; he took French nationality, a requirement of the appointment. After acquiring the professorship, Franck wrote several pieces that have entered the standard classical repertoire, including symphonic, chamber, and keyboard works for pipe organ and piano. As a teacher and composer he had a vast following of composers and other musicians. His pupils included Ernest Chausson, Vincent d'Indy, Henri Duparc, Guillaume Lekeu, Albert Renaud, Charles Tournemire, Gabriel Pierné and Louis Vierne.
His best known works include the Symphony in D minor, the Violin Sonata and a setting of the Panis angelicus.
Franck was born in Liège, then part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, to Nicolas-Joseph Franck (1794–1871), a bank clerk whose family came from the then German-Dutch border, and Marie-Catherine-Barbe Franck (née Frings, 1788–1860), who was from Aachen, Germany. Although young César-Auguste, as he was known in his early years, showed both drawing and musical skills, his father envisioned him as a young prodigy pianist-composer, after the manner of Franz Liszt or Sigismond Thalberg, who would bring fame and fortune to his family. His father entered Franck at the Royal Conservatory of Liège, studying solfège, piano, organ, and harmony with Joseph Daussoigne-Méhul and other faculty members. César-Auguste gave his first concerts in 1834, one before Leopold I of the newly formed Kingdom of Belgium.
In 1835, his father resolved that the time had come for wider audiences, and brought César-Auguste and his younger brother Joseph to Paris, to study privately: harmony and counterpoint with Anton Reicha, piano with Pierre Zimmerman, and solfège with Hippolyte-Raymond Colet. When Reicha died some ten months later, Nicolas-Joseph sought to enter both boys into the Paris Conservatoire. However, the Conservatoire would not accept foreigners; Nicolas-Joseph was obliged to seek French citizenship, which was granted in 1837. In the interval, Nicolas-Joseph promoted concerts and recitals in Paris featuring one or both boys playing popular music of the period, to mostly good reviews.
Young Franck and his brother entered the Conservatoire in October 1837, César-Auguste continuing his piano studies under Zimmerman and beginning composition with Aimé Leborn. He took the first prize in piano at the end of his first year (1838) and consistently maintained that level of performance. His work in counterpoint was less spectacular, taking successively third, second, and first prizes between 1838 and 1840. He added organ studies with François Benoist, which included both performance and improvisation, taking second prize in 1841, with the aim of competing for the Prix de Rome in composition in the following year. However, for reasons that are not explicit, he made a "voluntary" retirement from the Conservatoire on 22 April 1842.
His withdrawal may have been at his father's behest. While César-Auguste was pursuing his academic studies, he was, at his father's demand, also teaching privately and giving concerts. "It was a hard life for him, . . . and not made easier by the ill-tempered and even vindictive behavior of his father . . . ." Concerts performed by young Franck (some with his brother on the violin, some including Franck's own compositions) were at first received well, but increasingly Nicolas-Joseph's commercial promotion of his sons antagonized the Parisian musical journals and critics. César-Auguste's technical abilities as a pianist were acknowledged; his abilities as a composer were (probably justly at this point) felt to be wanting. The whole situation was aggravated by what in the end became a feud between Nicolas-Joseph and Henri Blanchard, the principal critic of the Revue et Gazette musicale, who lost no opportunity to castigate the aggressive pretensions of the father and to mock the "imperial" names of the elder son. This animosity, "undoubtedly personal", may well have caused Nicolas-Joseph to decide that a return to Belgium was in order, and in 1842 "a peremptory order" to young Franck compelled the latter to leave the Conservatoire and accompany him.
Teacher and organist (1842–1858)
The return to Belgium lasted less than two years. Profitable concerts did not arise; the critics were indifferent or scornful; patronage from the Belgian court was not forthcoming (although the King later sent César-Auguste a gold medal) and there was no money to be made. As far as Nicolas-Joseph was concerned, the excursion was a failure, and he brought his son back into a regime of teaching and family concerts in Paris, which Laurence Davies characterizes as rigorous and low-paying.
Yet there were long-term benefits for young Franck. For it was from this period, extending back into his last Conservatoire years and forward beyond his return to Paris, that his first mature compositions emerged, a set of Trios (piano, violin, cello); these are the first of what he regarded as his permanent work. Liszt saw them, offered encouragement and constructive criticism, and performed them some years later in Weimar. In 1843, Franck began work on his first non-chamber work, the oratorio Ruth. It was privately premiered in 1845 before Liszt, Meyerbeer, and other musical notables, who gave moderate approval and constructive criticism. However, a public performance in early 1846 met with public indifference and critical snubs for the oratorio's artlessness and simplicity. The work was not performed again until 1872, after considerable revision.
In reaction, César-Auguste essentially retired from public life to one of obscurity as a teacher and accompanist, in which his father reluctantly concurred. Young Franck had commissions both in Paris and in Orléans for these activities, and for the composition of songs and small works. He had offered some compositions to celebrate and strengthen the new Second Republic of 1848; the public received some of them with interest, but as the Republic gave way to the Second Empire under Louis-Napoléon, they dropped out of use. In 1851, he attempted an opera, Le Valet de Ferme, with a libretto of "abysmal literary quality" and a hastily sketched score. Franck himself was to say towards the end of his career that "it is not worth printing." All in all, however, this obscurity may have been restful for him after his previous life in the spotlight: "Franck was still very much in the dark as to what his vocation was." However, two crucial changes in these years were to shape the remainder of his life.
The first was an almost complete disruption of relations with his parents, especially his father. The main cause was his friendship with, and later, love for one of his private piano pupils, Eugénie-Félicité-Caroline Saillot (1824–1918), whose parents were members of the Comédie-Française company under the stage name of Desmousseaux. He had known Felicité from his years at the Conservatoire, and her family home had become something of a refuge for him from his overbearing father. When, in 1846, Nicolas-Joseph found a composition dedicated to "Mlle. F. Desmousseaux, in pleasant memories" among César-Auguste's papers, he tore it up in the latter's presence. César-Auguste went directly to the Desmousseauxs', wrote out the piece from memory, and presented it to Félicité with a dedicatory line. Relations worsened with his father, who forbade any thought of betrothal and marriage (French law required parental consent to marriage for a son younger than 25), accused César-Auguste of distressing his mother and shouted at him about a then notorious husband-wife poisoning case as being the most likely outcome of any match by his son. His mother's role in the dispute is unclear: she was either mildly supportive of her son or stayed out of the conflict. On one Sunday in July, César-Auguste walked out of his parents' house for the last time with nothing except what he could carry, and moved to the Desmousseauxs', where he was welcomed. From that time on, Franck termed himself and signed his papers and works as César Franck or plain C. Franck. "It was his intention to make a clean break with his father and to let it be known he had done so . . . . He was determined to become a new person, as different as possible from the other."