How furious a battle the man had to wage to bring such a musical sense
to fruition in the Paris of Ambroise Thomas and Gounod and Massenet may
be gauged from the fact that the compositions that assure Franck his
position were almost all produced during the last ten years of his life,
after his fifty-eighth year had been passed. For thirty years the man
had to struggle with his medium and his environment before he was even
able to do his genius justice. Indeed, up to the year 1850, he produced
little of importance at all. The trios recall Meyerbeer; the cantata
"Ruth," with which this his first period of composition closes, has a
sweetness of the sort afterward identified with the name of Massenet.
The works of the second period, which ends around 1875 with the
re-editing of the recently composed oratorio "Redemption," reveal him
still in search of power and a personal manner. No doubt a great
improvement over the works of the first period is visible. From this
time there date the seraphic "Panis angelicus," and the noble and
delicate "Prelude, fugue and variation" for harmonium and piano. But it
was only with the composition of his oratorio "Les Beatitudes,"
completed in 1879, that Franck's great period commences. The man had
finally been formed.
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