CAMA's Masterseries Presents Benjamin Grosvenor, piano ⫽ Friday, March 18, 2022 ⫽ Lobero Theatre, Santa Barbara ⫽ 7:30PM

NOTES ON THE PROGRAM
By Howard Posner
César Franck was raised to be a concertizing
piano virtuoso by a relentlessly pushy
father who was determined to make him
the next Liszt, and nearly succeeded.
Franck’s early compositions consist largely
of piano music written to show off his own
ability. But when he reached his mid‐twenties,
Franck broke with his father, moved
out of his parents’ house, married a woman
they disapproved of, and took a job as
a church organist, a musical profession at
the opposite end of the universe from that
of the touring piano virtuoso, and one he
would maintain the rest of his life. The piano
scarcely appears in the music he wrote
between 1846 and 1883: he may have
doubted whether he could make the piano
a medium for serious music, or associated
it with being under his father’s thumb.
But by 1884, when Franck had been a
professor of organ at the Paris Conservatory
for 12 years and his father had been dead
for 13, Franck turned back to the piano like
someone reconnecting with an old flame
many years after a bad breakup.
The Prelude, Chorale and Fugue from
that year is often cited as an example of
Franck’s use of “cyclical” elements, which
César Franck, ©New York Public Library
Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication
is a way of saying he used themes from a
work’s earlier movements in its later movements.
It may be just as useful to think of
the Prelude, Chorale and Fugue as a work
in one movement (it has four sections
that are played without a break) in which
themes get developed and recapitulated in
quasi‐sonata style.
CAMA AT THE LOBERO THEATRE • BENJAMIN GROSVENOR
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