Another side to César Franck

Our preparations for the commemoration of the bicentenary of the birth of César Franck (1822-2022) provided an opportunity to delve into several little-known aspects of his catalogue. Among these, the corpus of mélodies and duets for voice and piano turned out to be one of the priorities of this bicentenary. These pieces – rarely recorded until now, almost always on esoteric labels and with no attempt at completeness – allow us to discover César Franck from another angle than that of the organist, the symphonist or the master of chamber music immortalised in ‘the Sonata’ and ‘the Quintet’. Settings of poetry for voice and piano, whether lighthearted or serious, brief or extended, accompanied Franck throughout his career, since he composed them from the mid-1840s – when he was barely twenty years old – until the last years of his life. They illustrate the evolution and all the variants of the French mélodie, from the amiable romance inherited from the Restoration to the cantata with orchestra that broke free from the salons; in these latter works, the piano presents a densely textured reduction of the orchestral parts.