- Franck composed his Symphony in 1886–8. It premiered at the Concerts du Conservatoire on February 17, 1889.1
- Franck composed a this, his only mature symphony, partly at the encouragement of his students at the Paris Conservatory.2
- Franck was a devoted teacher of composition at the Paris Conservatory, and his pedagogy emphasized a rigorous study of traditional classical and Romantic genres like symphony and string quartet. Franck’s own compositions tended to be late-Romantic in nature, rather than using the strict forms he taught his students to analyze. His students felt that Franck could write a traditional symphony to stand with the classics of the repertoire, so they asked him to write a symphony “worthy of this name.”
- Franck dedicated the symphony to one of his students and supporters, the composer Henri Duparc. The dedication reads, “À mon ami Henri Duparc” (To my friend Henri Duparc).3
Sources
- John Trevitt and Joël-Marie Fauquet. “Franck, César(-Auguste-Jean-Guillaume-Hubert),” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed February 26, 2021, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000010121.
- Andrew Deruchie, The French Symphony at the Fin de Sièle: Style, Culture, and the Symphonic Tradition (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press: 2013), 55.
- “Symphony in D minor (Franck, César),” IMSLP, accessed February 26, 2021, https://imslp.org/wiki/Symphony_in_D_minor_(Franck%2C_C%C3%A9sar).
Cut IDs
15948 19736 21301 40430 41804