LDV113-4

27 MICHEL BOUVARD Do you see parallels between Franck’s writing for organ and his piano and orchestral works? Yes, of course. You find the same stylistic devices, sometimes the same contrasts, in the Violin Sonata, the Piano Quintet, the Symphony in D minor and so on. It’s been said that Franck made the organ sound like an orchestra, and the orchestra like an organ. While he was a magnificent pianist, Franck was probably not a born orchestrator like Saint-Saëns, or Ravel in a completely different kind of music. But that doesn’t bother me. His aesthetic is characterised above all by profundity and interiority, and ‘effects’ can’t have been his primary concern. On the other hand, his oeuvre is impressive in the way it merges two complementary cultures: his rigorous training in the Austro-German tradition and a certain ‘French spirit’ of improvisation acquired after he settled in the French capital early in his career. 2 Who in the Paris of the 1860s was capable of composing an organ piece on the level of the Prière ? And even when he wrote in the more ‘pompous’ style – a term I do not consider pejorative – of the Louis-Philippe era, as in the Final , the Grande Pièce symphonique and the Pièce héroïque , his genius, inspired by Beethoven, Liszt and Schumann among others, still sets him above the other French organ composers. 2 Franck was born in Liège, Belgium, and took French nationality in 1870.