Classical Music | Piano Music

Recorded on 02/13/2007, uploaded on 01/20/2009

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Prélude, Choral et Fugue          César Franck

Intended by his ambitious Belgian father for a career as a piano virtuoso, César Franck later found his true vocation through organ appointments in Paris, chiefly that of Ste. Clotilde (from 1858), and through teaching.  As a composer, Franck's improvisatory skills and creative powers never ceased to intensify throughout his lifetime.  His Prélude, choral et fugue for piano, written in 1884, is one of the great masterpieces in the literature.  On full display are Franck's inspired emotionalism; richly colored chromaticism matched by equally rich counterpoint; complex, mosaic-like phrase structures which are often built from one or two motifs; and the tripartite, cyclically oriented large-scale structure which he favored.  The ethereal, searching prelude, the hauntingly mystical chorale, and the intricate fugue not only form the three major sections of this work, but they are also in three subsections, thus mirroring the larger tripartite structure.  The fugue brings the work to its climax in an organ-like, improvisatory explosion from which the main theme of the chorale quietly emerges embedded in the ethereal texture of the prelude.  As this builds, the final entrance of the fugue subject appears together with the chorale theme in cascading arpeggios derived from the prelude.  The work culminates in triumphant ecstasy, concluding with the chorale theme in the key of B Major.    Heidi Louise Williams

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.