César Franck

César Franck

Birth : 1822-12-10, Liège, Belgium

Death : 1890-11-08

History

César-Auguste-Jean-Guillaume-Hubert Franck was a composer, pianist, organist, and music teacher who worked in Paris during his adult life. Born in Liège, he gave his first concerts there in 1834 and studied privately in Paris from 1835, where his teachers included Anton Reicha. After a brief return to Belgium, and a disastrous reception for an early oratorio Ruth, he moved to Paris, where he married and embarked on a career as teacher and organist. He gained a reputation as a formidable musical improviser, and travelled widely within France to demonstrate new instruments built by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll. In 1858, he became organist at the Basilica of St. Clotilde, Paris, a position he retained for the rest of his life. He became professor at the Paris Conservatoire in 1872; he took French nationality, a requirement of the appointment. His pupils included Vincent d'Indy, Ernest Chausson, Louis Vierne, Charles Tournemire, Guillaume Lekeu and Henri Duparc. After acquiring the professorship, Franck wrote several pieces that have entered the standard classical repertoire, including symphonic, chamber, and keyboard works.

Profile

César Franck

Movies

The ROH Live: The Dream / Symphonic Variations / Marguerite and Armand
Music
The Dream: Frederick Ashton’s delightful interpretation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a classic of The Royal Ballet’s repertory. Symphonic Variations: Ashton was inspired to create a ballet on the four seasons – but as he began to choreograph he refined and purified until the ballet shook off its original meaning, emerging as an abstract celebration of movement and physicality. Marguerite and Armand: Marguerite, a Parisian courtesan, lies on her deathbed. She recalls her tragic love affair with Armand in a series of feverish flashbacks.
Martha Argerich & Mischa Maisky
Compositors
At one of her rare appearances with orchestra, Martha Argerich, the grande dame of the piano, joined forces with world-famous cellist Mischa Maisky and the fabulous Lucerne Symphony Orchestra for the world premiere of a newly commissioned work by Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin – “Romantic Offering”, a double concerto for piano, cello and orchestra dedicated to its very first soloists. The programme was rounded off by late-Romantic masterpieces by César Franck, Antonín Dvo?ák and Dmitri Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony under the baton of renowned maestro Neeme Järvi.
Proust ou les Intermittences du cœur
Music
Ballet en deux actes et treize tableaux du chorég. This is a live recording of a performance at Paris Garnier in 2007. Petit's earlier production for the Ballet de Marseille used more realistic stage sets, but the current Paris version has minimal stage sets. Also, the costumes were redesigned. Roland Petit created a ballet based on "In Search of Lost Time" for the Ballet de Marseille in the 1970s. Petit's intention was not to make a faithful adaptation of the novel, but to capture its flavour and convey, through a number of selected scenes, the narrator's incessant fluctuations between happiness and torment. The highlights are the series of poetical pas de deux.
Entre ciel et terre
Original Music Composer
Apprehension
Music
Inge Herold is in her mid-thirties. She is divorced and lives with her 15-year-old son. She works as a psychologist and social worker and is involved with a married man. Suddenly, Inge finds out she may have breast cancer, which would mean an operation the very next day. The 24 hours before the planned surgery puts her under enormous psychological pressure and she begins to reevaluate her life. With heightened awareness of matters of everyday life, she realizes that what she previously considered meaningful, was actually void of any real meaning.
Céleste
Music
In 1914, with men gone to war, Marcel Proust hired Céleste Albaret as his attendant. More than eight years later, she was at his side when he died. During this entire time, she only entered his room when he rang for her, sleeping from 9 AM to 3 PM to wait during the night while he wrote. Marcel uses her as more than a servant: she is his muse, telling stories of her childhood to stir his remembrance of things past; she's in cahoots with him as he manipulates those he wants to draw on for his writing; she listens appalled to his descriptions of the underside of Paris. Hers is a life of love and sweet devotion as he races time to finish his work before death.
Everything or Nothing
Music
A meditation on transience composed through juxtaposition of sun-bathed exteriors of Split and dark interiors, landscapes of the city and close-ups of human faces, movements and stillness, the material and the spiritual.
Sandra
Music
Sandra returns to her childhood village to take care of family business, but childhood memories and secrets soon overcome her.
Toscanini: The Television Concerts, Vol. 8: Franck, Sibelius, Debussy and Rossini
Original Music Composer
The historic Toscanini television concerts with the NBC Symphony Orchestra. Broadcast #8 was of a concert on March 15, 1952, at Carnegie Hall, featuring Sibelius's En Saga, two of Debussy's Nocturnes, and Franck's Redemption. (Concerts #8 and #9 were released on "Vol. 5" in the DVD series.)
Veinticuatro horas en la vida de una mujer
Music
An unusually intense and emotional day in the otherwise monotonous life of a woman.
La casa de los cuervos
Music
A soldier enrolled in the revolutionary ranks has an affair with a woman who turns out to have been married to a man whom the soldier had killed.