Few composers,
certainly, have invented music more divinely sweet than that of the
third movement of the quartet, more ecstatic and luminous than the ideas
scattered all through his work, that seem like records of some moment
when the heavens opened over his head and the empyrean resounded with
the hallelujahs of the angelic host. And, certainly, no composer, Mozart
alone excepted, has discovered such naively and innocently joyous themes
as those that fill the close of the sonata and the symphonic variations
with delicious vernal sunshine.
The career of one fated to serve the art of music in the Paris of
Franck's lifetime, and to wait thirty years for the flowering of his
genius, was of necessity obscure and sad. The
"yeux menteurs, l'hypocrisie
Des serrements de mains,
La masque d'amitie cachant la jalousie,
Les pales lendemains
De ces jours de triomphe"...
of which M. Saint-Saens in his little volume of verse complains somewhat
pompously, were unknown to Cesar Franck. For this man, even in the years
of his prime, there were only the humiliations, the disappointments that
are the lot of uncomprehended genius. He had rich pupils, among them the
Vicomte Vincent d'Indy, but not one of them seems to have come forward
to help him, to secure him greater time for composition, to save him
from wasting his precious days in instructing a few amateurs.
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