Page 141 - HandbookMarch1

16 Nineteenth Century Musical Renaissance in France

atmosphere of the Franck cdnacle was a thing apart. The
spokesman of the group and Franck's subsequent biographer,
Vincent d'Indy-whom Duparc had introduced to Franck
during the Prussian War-described it and only the
original French will faithfully reproduce the old school-
girl quality of the sentiment:
Une telle atmosphere d'amour rignait autour de cette pure figure
que ses d&ves s'aimaient les uns les autres en lui et par lui.
You see, this was emphatically not a French movement;
and in fact only the toughest of Franck's disciples-d'Indy
-survived intact this hothouse atmosphere. Of the others
Henri Duparc, for one reason or another, wrote no more
than a handful of songs containing perhaps half a dozen
masterpieces, but still only a handful. Ernest Chausson
and the Belgian Guillaume Lekeu both died young and the
music of both, for all its nobility of feeling and scrupulous
sincerity, often seems to be half strangled by its own
emotionalism. We even find Chausson complaining half
guiltily, to his younger friend Debussy that he cannot ' find
himself. . . free himself of a heap of opinions adopted no
one quite knows why-because they once seemed fascinating
or because they were put to one by somebody one loved and
admired-opinions which do not correspond at all to one's
real self.' That, I feel sure, refers to Franck.
But, however that may be, during the i88os Franck's
example and encouragement inspired some of the most
gifted and individual of the younger generation. Criticism
was not his forte; he was too uncritical of his own music and
too kindly by nature to be very critical of his pupils. But
he grounded them in Bach and Beethoven, he made palatable
in a plausibly French form the solid structure, the four-
square rhythm and the harmonic adventurousness of
German music, which formed a wholesome counterpart to
the predominately operatic interest and the comparative
flimsiness of what had hitherto passed for French music.
His own pupils, intoxicated by the atmosphere of artistic
idealism, were blind to the musical faults of Franck's music.
Debussy, the revolutionary who only spent a short time in
his organ class at the Conservatoire, could speak irrever-
ently of Franck as the 'modulation machine'; but d'Indy,
Chausson and Lekeu were only aware of the rich chromatic
colouring, the grandiloquence and above all the emotional
aspiration of Franck's music. This, they felt, was modern
music, neither German nor unintelligible, music in the
direct line from Beethoven, which spoke 'from the heart
to the heart.'

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