Symphony guide: Franck's D minor

César Franck's only symphony has all but disappeared from our concert halls. That's a great shame, says Tom Service. This is a remarkable and radical work.

When was the last time you heard César Franck's Symphony in D Minor on an orchestral programme? I'm prepared to be proved wrong, but it's my hunch that it's been many years since Franck's only symphony (probably the only work by a Belgian that will appear in this series, although I'm braced for a further riposte about the great Belgian symphonists as well!) has been performed recently your favourite orchestra, in the UK at least.

This neglect would have come as a major surprise for audiences, orchestras, and conductors even a generation ago, when Franck's work was one of the fixtures of the symphonic canon, a piece that every conductor, from Furtwängler to Karajan, from Klemperer to Bernstein, had to prove themselves in, and which audiences loved to hear. What's happened? Why has Franck's last major work fallen so sharply out of fashion? A piece that is arguably the summation of his life in music, a piece that attempts an ambitious fusion of French and German musical traditions at a time when to do so was politically and aesthetically controversial - anything that smacked of rapprochement with German sensibilities was seen as unpatriotic in the wake of the Franco-Prussian war.

The currently fashionable criticism of the 1888 work is summed up by its early detractors such as Charles Gounod, who called it "incompetence pushed to dogmatic lengths", and Maurice Ravel, who criticised the work's stodgy orchestration. Charles Lamoreux rejected it for performance in his concert series, the most important in Paris, and so the premiere had to be given by students of the Conservatoire where Franck was professor. Factionalism and feuding defined the reaction to that 1889 performance: Franck's pupils, Vincent D'Indy among them, were in raptures, while others censured the symphony because it "outraged the formalist rules and habits of the stricter professionals and amateurs".

The problem nowadays is that we can't, or don't, hear the implicit radicalism of Franck's symphony, instead imagining that the work is the acme of late-19th century lugubriousness; a symphony that's worthily crafted and finely wrought, but expressively inert; the equivalent in sound of a mediocre lump of Gothic revival architecture.

But listen to the piece (which apparently outraged his irredeemably conservative wife, who railed against its morally compromising sensuality and passion!) without those preconceptions. I think you'll discover in Franck's music a convincing answer to how the streams of French imagination and clarity might be aligned with a German, post-Wagnerian harmonic language. The result, alongside Saint-Saëns's Organ Symphony, is French music's most significant late-19th century symphony.

And yet Franck's symphony starts with a veiled - or actually pretty obvious - homage to German music, to Beethoven's last quartet. Franck's opening theme is a rewrite of the questioning phrase to which Beethoven appended the words, "Muss es sein?" ("Must it be?") in the last movement of his final string quartet. Franck's theme, marvellously mobile in its modulatory potential, sets out, in its slow tempo, much of the material that the whole huge first movement will be based on. Transposed into an Allegro, you hear the same motto idea of the very opening, before the slow music is repeated in a new key. After its stormy beginning, the allegro proper climaxes in two radiant themes, both in F major, the first gently lyrical, and the second radiantly joyous. It's a feature of this symphony that while Franck is an inveterate modulator - his harmonies often shift like quicksand, something you hear particularly in the central development section of this movement, which starts with a startling move from F major to B major, achieved in just a few bars - his tunes are remarkably stable, like this joyous melody that's the reward for all that symphonic sound and fury. The lugubrious intensity of that slow introduction isn't easily forgotten, however, and it returns to catalyse the reprise of the movement's main themes, and after another appearance of that radiant tune, the movement ends with a vision of the slow motto theme, now in a major key.

But we're not through yet: the central movement of the symphony is a hybrid of slow movement and scherzo, which starts with a gentle thrumming of pizzicato strings and harp before another of Franck's best tunes, this time for cor anglais. (This caused a bit of a stushie at the premiere, when some wag, criticising Franck for his colouristic adventure, apparently asked whether Haydn and Beethoven had ever used a cor anglais in their symphonies - forgetting that Haydn's 22nd symphony has prominent parts for two cor anglais.) This is a melody whose chord progressions sound to my ears like an unconscious memory of the ancient hymn Veni, Veni, Emmanuel, which Franck, one of the world's greatest ever organists and improvisers, would have known. (It's also, incidentally, a melody that subconsciously influenced Thomas Adès in the second movement of his Asyla.) Through metrical magic, turning slow music into fast and back again, Franck elegantly elides scherzoid music with this haunting tune, just another candidate in this symphony for an irrepressibly infectious ear-worm.

But the memory of even that cor anglais tune is erased by the melody Franck gives us at the start of the finale, an outpouring of genuine joyousness that dynamises the whole piece. Franck uses this tune as the start of a process that subtly reviews the progress of the entire symphony, since melodies from the previous movements return throughout the fabric of this Allegro non troppo. As Franck said, "The finale takes up all the themes again, as in [Beethoven's] Ninth. They do not return as quotations, however; I have elaborated them and given them the role of new elements". He's right, too; and those transformations mean that the journey to the final coronation of the finale's main melody isn't simply about creating a piece that will work as a barnstorming symphonic finale, it's also about both clinching and transcending the melodies and drama of the preceding two movements, making the final coda a blaze of D major an authentic prize of a magnificently compelling symphonic struggle. And one that I want to hear in the concert hall more often!

Five key recordings

Chicago Symphony Orchestra/Pierre Monteux: with only the most subtle moments of interpretative intervention, Monteux lets Franck's symphony speak as its composer wanted it to; as he told one of his students, as "nothing but pure music".

Montréal Symphony Orchestra/Charles Dutoit: Dutoit's performance, recorded in immaculate sound, makes Franck's music dazzle and shimmer.

Boston Symphony Orchestra/Charles Munch: Munch's driving tempos and innate feeling for Franck's symphonic drama make this one of the most satisfying performances available.

Hilversum Radio Philharmonic Orchestra/Leopold Stokowski: ... and Stokowski's is one of the weirdest. His comparatively slow tempos and the way he pulls the pulse around give another view of the piece that you'll either feel reveals new sides to this score - or distorts its fundamental drama.

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra/Wilhlem Furtwängler: Furtwängler's live January 1945 recording is the last he made before exiling himself in Switzerland, and it sears with imagination - and terror. This is the performance that sums up another of Franck's accounts of the symphony.“I risked a great deal [in it], but the next time I shall risk even more". The next time never came since he died the year after the symphony's premiere, but you hear the knife-edge of danger in Furtwängler's performance.

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