It must have been some profound kinship with the neighboring people,
deeper even than that he bore his own countrymen, that sent the youth
Franck from Liege to Paris, held him fast in the city all his long and
obscure life, and made him flourish in the alien soil. For his music has
traits that are common to the representative French artists and have
come to identify the French genius. Once again, one caught sight in the
music of the French clarity and orderliness, logicality and conciseness.
Once again there were great, sonorous edifices in the grand style
temperate in tone. The very diffidence that makes it so difficult for
the race to express itself with ease in music was expressed in this
work. Moreover, along with the silveriness of Rameau, the simple
solidity of French prose, and some of the old jollity of the medieval
French artists, is in the music of Franck. Old modes revive in it, old
peasant rhythms beat the ground once more.
But, chiefest of all, it expressed the people described in the section
of "Jean-Christophe" significantly entitled "Dans la Maison." It
expressed the essential France hidden by the glare of the Third
Republic. The music of Cesar Franck is the music of the people driven
into themselves by the conditions of modern life.
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