César Franck His Life and Times - (Chapter 2 Franck S Childhood)

CHAPTER
TWO
Franck’s Childhood
Two fairly prominent composers named Franck lived in the seventeenth century: Melchior
(1579?–1639), who dwelt mainly in Coburg, Bavaria; and Johann Wolfgang (1644–1710?),
who murdered a fellow musician at the court of Ansbach (also in Bavaria), and fled to
Hamburg as a consequence. Neither bore any relation to César. The connections of the surname
with music do not end there; another German composer, Eduard Franck (pupil of Mendelssohn
in Leipzig, and praised on occasion by Schumann), was famous enough during the early
nineteenth century that the young César would be in danger of being confused with him.
César Franck’s national origins eventually became a battleground. D’Indy spoke of a painter
named Jérôme Franck, employed by France’s King Henri III, as one of César’s ancestors. 1
Contrariwise, Léon Vallas, in his book on Franck, insisted that the Franck family originated in
sixteenth-century Austria. Wilhelm Mohr’s 1942 study, Cäsar Franck: Ein deutscher Musiker
2
—something of a pan-German propaganda exercise, as might be determined from its subtitle

and from its spelling of the composer’s Christian name—calls d’Indy’s account of Franck’s
descent from Jérôme “the fairytale [das Märchen].” (Mohr actually insisted on junking his 3
subject’s French titles in favor of his own Teutonic coinages, turning Franck’s Pièce Héroïque,
for example, into Heroische Fantasie.) More detail came with the 1966 monograph by French
4
musicologist Jean Gallois, which claimed a certain Léonard Franck—whom Mohr also
mentions briefly—as an ancestor of the composer. Léonard’s descendant, Jan Franck, born in 5
1550, is known to have been director of the Holy Roman Empire’s mines at La Calamine,
southwest of Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle). From the elaborate family tree supplied in the 1999
biography by the world’s chief living Franck scholar, Joël-Marie Fauquet, we find that mining
management occurred on a dynastic basis. Jan’s own son, Lambert Franck (1579–1623), held
the job of Contrôleur des Mines, as did his son Johann Franck (1597–1680), and Johann’s son
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Lambert II (dates unknown). 6
No such job description occurs alongside the name of Lambert II’s son, Etienne-Joseph I
(1656–1732), or the latter’s son, Etienne-Joseph II (1701–1770). Etienne-Joseph II became
mayor of Gemmenich, a town approximately four miles to La Calamine’s northwest. This
office too stayed in the family: Etienne-Joseph II’s son Barthélemy (1745–1796) also served as
Gemmenich’s mayor. In 1773, Barthélemy married Isabelle Randaxhe, a Dutchwoman three
years younger than himself. By her, he had nine children, one of whom was Nicolas-Joseph, 7
born on May 29 or May 30, 1794. With Nicolas-Joseph (who studied for a while at Aachen’s
8
Jesuit college), the family fortunes took a downward turn. There seems never to have been a
9
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question of him following his father and grandfather into active municipal politics. Eventually,
he accepted a clerical job in the Fresart Bank of Liège. On August 24, 1820, he married 10
Marie-Catherine-Barbe Frings, born on December 4, 1788, the daughter of an Aachen cloth

merchant. The couple’s first child, César-Hubert-Auguste, died (as mentioned in the previous
11
chapter) extremely young, being only fourteen months old when he perished on September 9,
1822.
As for the second son’s birth on the following December 10, Liège officialdom noted it as
follows two days later (the capitalization and punctuation appear here exactly as they are given
on the original certificate):
The year 1822, on December 12, at midday, before us, Frédéric Rouveroy, burgomaster of the city of Liège, civil servant,
appeared Nicolas-Joseph Franck, aged twenty-nine [this is anaccurate; he was twenty-eight in December 1822], of
independent means, domiciled in this city at Rue Saint-Pierre 13, in the western quarter, who presented to us a child of the
male sex, born on the 10th of the present month, around seven in the morning, of the above and of Marie-Catherine-Barbe
Frings, aged thirty-four, his spouse, to which child he declared he wanted to give the names of César-Auguste-Jean-
Guillaume-Hubert. The said declaration and presentation carried out in the presence of Charles Verdin, aged thirty-nine
years, office worker, living in Rue Devant Sainte Croix 867 in the above-mentioned quarter and of Pierre Joseph Lecharlier,
aged forty-seven years, employed at Rue Degrez Saint-Pierre 17 same quarter and who have with the father and witnesses
signed with us the present birth certificate, after they had read it.
Town Clerk Ns Jos Franck Charles Verdin

Witness[es] P. J. Lecharlier Rouveroy 12
The boy’s baptism took place on the same day as his birth’s registration; his godparents were
his maternal grandmother, Anna Maria Breuer, and a man identified only as Guillaume
Florkin. As the registration document reveals, Nicolas-Joseph Franck gave Rouveroy to
13
understand that he was “of independent means” (not, as has been claimed, “unemployed”; the
phrase for that in French is en chômage, rather than sans profession).
Marie-Catherine-Barbe Franck later bore two more short-lived children: Arnold-Marie-
Hubert-Joseph (who died on November 23, 1824, when little more than a month old) and
Rosalie-Aldegonde-Hubertine (who died on January 11, 1831, aged only two-and-a-half). A
third child, born on October 31, 1825 and christened Jean-Joseph-Hubert, turned out to be
much healthier, and attained adulthood, during which he always went by the name “Joseph.” 14
Of Mme. Franck, little has been recorded, save that she distinguished herself by “sweetness
and goodwill,” which, nevertheless, could not ameliorate the character—“egoistic,
pretentious, of a ferocious authoritarianism” —of her husband. Actually, both parents look
15
decidedly grim in photographs, even allowing for the strained facial expressions that the
nineteenth century’s daguerreotype portraiture inevitably convey. Perhaps the very fact that we
know so little about Mme. Franck, whereas her spouse saturates every page on which
historians have described him, tells its own tale. From his father, César inherited two
discernible traits: huge hands (clearly visible in Nicolas-Joseph’s portrait) and what can only
be called an anti-Midas touch in business affairs.
At home, thanks to César’s mother, German was spoken. Mme. Franck taught her sons to pray
in German. During adult life, César retained the habit of saying the Lord’s Prayer each night as
Vater unser, rather than its French equivalent. Debussy, who would briefly and stormily take 16
lessons from Franck in the 1880s, concluded that Franck must be Flemish; another student, 17
Paul de Wailly, ascribed northern French origins to Franck, referring to him as “a bit Picard.” 18
Both pupils presumably based their differently erroneous assessments on the sheer
unfamiliarity, to Parisian ears, of Franck’s accent.
Both César and Joseph demonstrated an early aptitude for music, though neither boy devoted
himself to it exclusively. At first it looked as if the elder brother might prefer the visual arts.
There survives from his hand an impressive portrait of the opera composer Etienne-Nicolas
Méhul, bearing the inscription “drawn on March 28, 1834 by César-Auguste Franck, in Liège,
aged eleven years.” (The sheer merit of this likeness makes one wonder whether d’Indy was
19
altogether wrong when he insisted that there had been painters in César’s family tree.)
Nicolas-Joseph had already decided on other plans, though, and had enrolled César in May
1831 at the city’s École Royale de Musique. During the very year of César’s arrival, the
20
school—founded in 1826—changed its name to the Conservatoire Royal. This upgrading was a
small reminder of how the Belgian Revolution of 1830 had dismantled the existing polity in
Liège, as elsewhere.
Today’s Belgians explain the history and culture of their capital by the proverb “When it
rains in Paris, it drizzles in Brussels.” Yet what Brussels experienced in 1830 was not a mere
drizzling, but a political deluge. Two events prompted it: first, King Charles X’s expulsion
from France in July, and his cousin’s enthronement as “Citizen-King” Louis-Philippe; second,
the choice of repertoire at Brussels’ opera house, the Théâtre de la Monnaie. On the night of
August 25, the opera being given there was Daniel Auber’s La Muette de Portici, which
explicitly dealt with Naples’ 1647 uprising against Spanish rule, and implicitly praised
rebellion in general. Auber himself had no sort of revolutionary impulse; unlike Verdi (whom
his choice of subject in this opera anticipates), he lacked all patriotic emotion. This made no
difference to the inflammatory character of La Muette itself, against which King Charles had
warned (“it should not be played too frequently”). The main aria of the opera’s hero, 21
Masaniello, always earned cheers in performance, but on this summer night at Brussels’ opera
theater it was met with delirious enthusiasm:
Plutôt mourir que rester misérable,
Pour un esclave est-il quelque danger?
Tombe le joug qui nous accable,
Et sous nos coups périsse l’étranger.
Amour sacré de la patrie,

Rends nous l’audace et la fierté,
A mon pays je dois la vie,
Il me devra sa liberté.
(Better to die than to remain oppressed.

What danger is there for a slave?
May the yoke collapse which overwhelms us,
and may the foreigner perish under our blows.
Sacred love of the fatherland,
give us courage and pride.
To my country I owe my life,
it will owe me its liberty.)
Those in the audience rose as one man and sang the aria themselves in an ecstatic chorus.
They then poured out of the theater, yelling “Down with the Dutch! Down with the Ministers!” 22
and pillaged the homes of the government officials whom they most hated. From Brussels the
revolt spread like a forest fire. Liège was only too happy to see Dutch rule go, and a
detachment of Liègeois descended on Brussels under the leadership of the lawyer, politician,
and journalist Charles Rogier (who is commemorated in the name of one of Brussels’ biggest
plazas). Before the end of September, a provisional government had been established, with
Rogier as a leading member; it demanded Belgium’s complete severance from the Netherlands,
and in October it formally announced Belgium’s independence. Yet France wanted to see its
own candidate, the Duc de Nemours (a son of Louis-Philippe), as King of Belgium. In
February 1831, the Belgian National Congress acquiesced in Nemours’ candidacy, but Britain
and Austria refused to tolerate it, dreading revived French military ambitions. The choice
eventually fell on Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, son-in-law of England’s George IV; and Belgium’s
new sovereign took the title Leopold I.
Amid these stirring times, César stood out by his diligence at what must henceforward be
called the Conservatoire Royal de Liège, the director of which was Louis Joseph Daussoigne.
A nephew of Méhul, Daussoigne ultimately added his uncle’s surname after his own. He stood
out as a rarity among nineteenth-century teachers, because whilst conventional pedagogic
practice in his day (and for well over a century afterward) viewed harmony and counterpoint
as wholly disjunct fields, he himself adopted the more sensible course of teaching the former
through increasingly difficult exercises in the latter. The other teachers of both the Franck boys
—Joseph entered the Conservatoire in 1833—were Dieudonné Duguet, a blind organist who,
as well as giving Conservatoire instruction in solfège, played regularly at one of the city’s
churches (Saint-Denis); Eustache Delavaux; Antoine Jalheau; and Étienne Ledent. From 23
Duguet, César might have had his first organ lessons, though this has never been definitely
confirmed. 24
César’s student efforts appear to have inspired almost universal commendation from his
instructors: “Good disposition,” “Good work,” “Gives the happiest hope,” and “Zeal and
application in studying.” In 1832, César succeeded in winning first prize for solfège. At sight-
25
reading, he would always excel. His reward, given to him on August 25, was a huge book
consisting of Johann Nepomuk Hummel’s piano music. Between December 2, 1833 and
January 29, 1835, Daussoigne-Méhul made the boy do 238 pages’ worth of harmony
exercises, which with duller students were spread out over three years, rather than being
26
crammed into fewer than fourteen months. Ultimately, the book containing these came into the
possession of Victor Balbreck, the viola player in the 1890 première of Franck’s String
Quartet. Young César’s handwriting possessed a great clarity; in his adult life it scarcely
27
changed.
Concurrently, César excelled at the keyboard. His pianism—unlike his other attainments—
had incurred some censorious verdicts from his teachers, one of whom complained that the boy
showed “a tendency to warmth which degenerates into daubing.” Another, rather surprisingly, 28
considered César to be “less intelligent than one would have thought him to be from listening
to one of his prepared pieces.” Notwithstanding those criticisms, César received, on February
29
22, 1834, the Conservatoire’s first prize in piano. The authorities marked the occasion by
awarding him a full score, its cover decorated with appropriate gold lettering, of Meyerbeer’s
fantastically popular opera, Robert le Diable. Jalheau noted that César “fully deserves the
success that he has obtained.” This was a triumph that Nicolas-Joseph found much more to his
30
taste than his son’s more recondite achievements in theoretical spheres. Nicolas-Joseph hoped
more than anything else that his offspring (César, at any rate, and preferably Joseph as well)
would achieve acclaim as prodigies.
Virtuoso compositions, either for solo piano or for piano combined with other instruments,
already teemed in César’s brain. Even when they did not have the phrase variations brillantes
in their titles, their flashy nature was evident. One such variation set of 1834 (designated Opus
5) had as its basis a melody from the opera Pré-aux-Clercs, by Ferdinand Hérold of Zampa
fame. A second (Op. 8) rang the changes on a theme from another opera, Auber’s Gustav III,
the plot of which anticipated Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera by almost half a century. These
two productions César afterward disowned, as he did all of his other prentice works except
for a Fantaisie (Op. 12), which he wrote at thirteen and consented to play a few times in
adulthood. He never sought publication for these efforts (most of which his pupil Pierre de
Bréville gave to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France after World War II), and his 1949
biographer Norman Demuth dismissed them out of hand, maintaining that “none of these works
could possibly be played today, even in a concert of historical or curious music.” Their 31
occasional recent appearance on CD confirms their most notable feature: how completely they
lack any suggestion of their creator’s mature style. Whereas the earliest pieces of Mozart and
Mendelssohn point the way ahead to subsequent outpourings of genius, Franck’s do no more
than deal—very fluently, it must be said—in the platitudes of his era, although most children
who compose at all leave behind them far less technically proficient writing than his. A partial
exception to this general statement is a motet (dated February 10, 1835) entitled O Salutaris,
for four-part choir and piano, which in its general expressiveness suggests something more
than mere routine; these particular liturgical words bore a special significance for the
32
composer, since he would set them again later in life.

Some of the boy’s display-pieces appeared—the word Grande paternally inserted into their
names, to make them seem more striking —on the programs of a brief but significant tour that
33
his father organized for him. Here there are shades of Leopold Mozart touring with the very
young Wolfgang, although how much (if at all) Nicolas-Joseph deliberately imitated Leopold’s
example is still uncertain. At this stage, Nicolas-Joseph intended to launch his elder son’s
career both as composer and as pianist. He arranged for the lad to take part in concerts during
1834 at Aachen, Louvain, Antwerp, and Malines, as well as Liège itself. According to some
accounts, César even appeared at Brussels’ royal palace before King Leopold, although he 34
induced nothing like the monarchical rapture that Mozart the Wunderkind had done seventy
years before. Early in 1835, both César and Joseph (the latter by this time showing great
promise in his violin studies) played on stage together at Aachen, in a concerto by the highly
influential French violinist-composer Pierre Rode, whose pedagogical publications continue to
be used nowadays. Joseph delivered the solo part from memory, to his hearers’ astonishment. 35
Neither Nicolas-Joseph nor César had in mind a tour consisting of solo recitals. That type of
event lay still in the future, when Liszt—having recently achieved hero status—consciously
echoed Louis XIV’s absolutism by proclaiming “le concert, c’est moi.” César shared each 36
occasion with singers, with other instrumentalists, and with orchestras. One soloist involved
would join the ranks of opera’s supreme divas, although no one guessed as much then: Pauline
Garcia, the future Pauline Viardot (eventual object of Turgenev’s adoration), and the younger
sister of the even more legendary Maria Malibran. Pauline persuaded both Mme. Malibran and
the latter’s future husband, Charles de Bériot, to hear her and César perform. Only two years 37
later Mme. Malibran, while visiting Manchester, died from injuries sustained in a riding
accident. It was in Brussels that her funeral occurred, and that her tomb (designed by Bériot,
who—in addition to gifts as a violinist and composer—also had substantial ability as a
sculptor) can still be seen.
By this time, Franck père had concluded that Belgium would be neither big enough nor
glamorous enough to realize his dreams. He wanted the best for César, at least; and the best
meant Paris. Daussoigne-Méhul, before becoming the Liège Conservatoire’s director, had
taught harmony, piano and solfège (as well as composing for the theater) in France’s capital.
For this reason Nicolas-Joseph sought out Daussoigne-Méhul, and asked him to provide some
recommendations. This Daussoigne-Méhul did. Happily, one of César’s fellow participants at 38
some of the recent concerts had been the eighteen-year-old pianist Antoine-François
Marmontel. The teacher of Marmontel, namely Pierre Zimmermann, ranked among the leading
lights of Paris’ music; and César’s unsought connection with a Zimmermann pupil smoothed his
career path in a manner that simple ability might never have achieved. Events were to reveal
that César’s path needed all the smoothing it could get.
Notes
1. Vincent d’Indy, César Franck (Paris: Alcan, 1906), 2.
2. Léon Vallas, La véritable histoire de César Franck (Paris: Flammarion, 1955), 8.
3. Wilhelm Mohr, Cäsar Franck: Ein deutscher Musiker (Stuttgart: J.G. Cotta, 1942), 5.
4. Daniel Harrison, Harmonic Function in Chromatic Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 167. As late as
his 1969 book about Franck, Mohr insisted on retaining Teutonic titles for his subject’s music: Wilhelm Mohr, Cäsar Franck
(Tützing, Germany: Schneider, 1969), 6, 74, 118.
5. Jean Gallois, Franck (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966), 8.
6. Joël-Marie Fauquet, César Franck (Paris: Fayard, 1999), 936–937.

7. Norbert Dufourcq, César Franck (Paris: Columbe, 1949), 14.
8. Fauquet, Franck, 987.
9. Gallois, Franck, 10–11.
10. Vallas, Véritable histoire, 10.
11. Dufourcq, Franck, 14.
14. Fauquet, Franck, 937. For some reason, Winton Dean, Franck (London: Novello, 1950), 7, mistakenly refers to Joseph as
César’s elder brother.
15. Vallas, Véritable histoire, 10–11.
17. Gallois, Franck, 8.
19. Gallois, Franck, 12, 14.
21. Demetrius C. Boulger, History of Belgium, 2 vols. (London: Boulger, 1909), Vol. 1, 73.
22. Boulger, Belgium, Vol. 1, 74.
23. Peter Jost (ed.), César Franck: Werk und Rezeption (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2004), 9, gives Jalheau’s first name
as Jules.
24. Orpha Ochse, Organists and Organ-Playing in Nineteenth-Century France and Belgium (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 1994), 173; Rollin Smith, Playing the Organ Works of César Franck (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press,
1997), 2.
31. Norman Demuth, César Franck (London: Dobson, 1949), 61.
34. Dufourcq, Franck, 15; Vallas, Véritable histoire, 13–14.
36. Alan Walker, Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years, 1811–1847 (London: Faber & Faber, 1983), 343.
37. Laurence Davies, César Franck and His Circle (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1970), 45; Vallas, Véritable histoire, 14.

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CHAPTER

—something of a pan-German propaganda exercise, as might be determined from its subtitle

Lambert II (dates unknown). 6

Marie-Catherine-Barbe Frings, born on December 4, 1788, the daughter of an Aachen cloth

Town Clerk Ns Jos Franck Charles Verdin

Amour sacré de la patrie,

(Better to die than to remain oppressed.

composer, since he would set them again later in life.

6. Joël-Marie Fauquet, César Franck (Paris: Fayard, 1999), 936–937.

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