Books, Arts & Manners: Hail, César

ON THE night of October 12, Liège, Belgium, exploded into what looked like about twenty fairgrounds at once: one would have to be a combination of Swinburne and Hieronymus Bosch to conjure up the resultant son et lumière of bacchic dementia. Liège is normally a somewhat dour place, a steel-producing and (formerly) coal-mining city whose back-streets remain crammed with the sort of shabby apartment-blocks where the panic-stricken anti-heroes created by Georges Simenon (a native son) regularly hanged themselves. But this particular night, all was jubilation: the Gazette de Liège, one of Europe’s great newspapers, was celebrating its 150th birthday, while simultaneously at the Royal Conservatory the centenary ofCésar Franck’s death was being marked by a nationally televised performance (royalty present, black ties worn, your correspondent the sole imbecile clad in an ordinary suit) of Franck’s oratorio The Beatitudes.

Franck was Belgium’s greatest composer: born at Liège, with a sense of appropriate career timing that he never displayed again, on the very day Beethoven finished his Missa Solem-nis (December 10, 1822). He studied at the Royal Conservatory until 1835, when with his family he moved to France. Once enrolled at the Paris Conservatoire he proceeded to show that in a century of sight-reading freaks, he himself was a sight-reading superfreak. At age 15, during his final piano exam, he sight-read the passage he was given with complete accuracy: but he insisted on transposing it down a third. Though that whim cost him the first prize, Franck did receive (uniquely among conservatory students) a Grand Prix d’Honneur. Three years later he underwent his final organ-improvisation exam: infuriating his examiners by commingling-and making a perfectly consonant piece from—two proffered themes, although the examiners’ idea was that he should improvise on each theme separately. When Franck managed to surpass even this display of hubris by dedicating his Opus 1 to Belgium’s king, his father withdrew him from the conservatory altogether. The paternal hope was that César should become a peripatetic piano virtuoso; for all his executant skill, he never did, and never wanted to.

RS

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R. J. Stove

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ON THE night of October 12, Liège, Belgium, exploded into what looked like about twenty fairgrounds at once: one would have to be a combination of Swinburne and Hieronymus Bosch to conjure up the resultant son et lumière of bacchic dementia. Liège is normally a somewhat dour place, a steel-producing and (formerly) coal-mining city whose back-streets remain crammed with the sort of shabby apartment-blocks where the panic-stricken anti-heroes created by Georges Simenon (a native son) regularly hanged themselves. But this particular night, all was jubilation: the Gazette de Liège, one of Europe’s great newspapers, was celebrating its 150th birthday, while simultaneously at the Royal Conservatory the centenary ofCésar Franck’s death was being marked by a nationally televised performance (royalty present, black ties worn, your correspondent the sole imbecile clad in an ordinary suit) of Franck’s oratorio The Beatitudes.

Franck was Belgium’s greatest composer: born at Liège, with a sense of appropriate career timing that he never displayed again, on the very day Beethoven finished his Missa Solem-nis (December 10, 1822). He studied at the Royal Conservatory until 1835, when with his family he moved to France. Once enrolled at the Paris Conservatoire he proceeded to show that in a century of sight-reading freaks, he himself was a sight-reading superfreak. At age 15, during his final piano exam, he sight-read the passage he was given with complete accuracy: but he insisted on transposing it down a third. Though that whim cost him the first prize, Franck did receive (uniquely among conservatory students) a Grand Prix d’Honneur. Three years later he underwent his final organ-improvisation exam: infuriating his examiners by commingling-and making a perfectly consonant piece from—two proffered themes, although the examiners’ idea was that he should improvise on each theme separately. When Franck managed to surpass even this display of hubris by dedicating his Opus 1 to Belgium’s king, his father withdrew him from the conservatory altogether. The paternal hope was that César should become a peripatetic piano virtuoso; for all his executant skill, he never did, and never wanted to.