César Franck

(1822-1890)

Le Chasseur maudit (The Accursed Huntsman) – Symphonic poem after a ballad of Bürger

If we find it hard to be stirred by the story Franck outlined as the preface in words to this symphonic poem, that’s because the time of its Romanticism has past, and some of its most thrilling things, especially, have lost their power to make us shiver, so that only the stage-trappings remain. The ballad by Gottfried August Bürger which Franck summarised as his inspiration, Der Wilde Jäger (1778), concerns a Count from the Rhineland, who, forgetful of his religious duty, goes hunting on a Sunday morning. He defies the pious churchgoers who try to restrain him. In the middle of the forest, he suddenly finds himself alone, his horse refuses to go further. He blows into his horn, but now it will not sound. An other-worldly voice curses him. ‘Sacrilegious man’, it cries, ‘be forever hunted by the evil one!’ Then flames surround him on every side. To escape, he begins his endless wild ride, pursued by demons, ‘by day across the abysses, by night through the air.’ Bürger’s poem was one of the most influential of the ballads in which he breathed new life into the genre: it draws on folk elements, and heightens the eerie, ghostly atmosphere. This implied rejection of the rationalism of the Enlightenment appealed to the generation of the ‘Storm and Stress’ of the 1770’s, and later to the Romantics. But why did it appeal to César Franck? On the face of it, his whole artistic imagination was drawn to more spiritualised subjects, and his sense of drama was musical rather than pictorial.

Yet Le Chasseur maudit brought Franck the first, and just about the only unqualified public success of his career. The première of the symphonic poem, conducted by the composer at a concert of the Société Nationale on March 31, 1883, was greeted by a long ovation. It is quite amusing to notice how Franck’s worshipful disciples, notably Vincent d’Indy, seem almost embarrassed by this success. A respectable composer, and especially their revered ‘Father’, even if he couldn’t avoid dabbling in the Lisztian tone-poem, should have chosen a loftier subject, and avoided following a literary program so closely. Or so his admirers spun his posthumous legend. It may in fact have been d’Indy himself, more likely Henri Duparc, who drew Franck’s attention to Bürger in the first place. Duparc had composed his Lenore (1875) on Bürger’s most famous ballad, about a young woman who, when her lover failed to return from the war, blasphemed against heaven. Her punishment was to be carried away by her lover on a wild midnight ride, during which he turned into a ghostly skeleton, leaping with Lenore and his steed into an open grave. Franck was probably tempted to rivalry with the tone-poems of his younger friends and pupils, especially as his own subtle Les Eolides (1877) had recently been coolly received at a Lamoureux concert.

Franck’s biographer Jean Gallois suggests there was a deeper reason for Franck’s attraction to Bürger’s ballad. Noting the obvious, highly-strung Romanticism of the music, he suspects the disquiet of a soul haunted by passion and struggling with itself. It is well known that Franck’s Piano Quintet of 1878-9 betrays, in its often-unbridled emotionality, the susceptibility of the devout and upright Franck to the talent and other attractions of his youthful pupil the pianist and composer Augusta Holmès - a suspicion aroused in Mme. Franck by the dedication of the Quintet, which seemed confirmed by its music. The tone-poem, Gallois thinks, is an after-effect of the crisis revealed by the Quintet. It is noteworthy that whereas Bürger’s title Der Wilde Jäger puts the accent on the Count’s wildness, and Sir Walter Scott called his English version The Chase, Franck’s title emphasises the curse, and the Count’s flouting of his religious duty. Did Franck partly identify, guiltily, with the hero of the poem? At any rate, as Gallois observes, The Accursed Huntsman gives the lie to those who want to see in Franck only a man fixed in his meditations or lost in a seraphic complacency.

‘Sunday morning’. The hunting horns sound their call, and the cellos, in response, amidst church bells, intone a religious melody. ‘What desecration! the wild count of the Rhine winds his hunting horn…’ The second of the four parts into which the symphonic poem falls depicts the chase, the music now in an ominous G minor. Complaints of peasants are heard ‘Stop Count, I beg you, Take care – No!’ but the chase goes hurtling on its way through them, like a whirlwind. All of a sudden, the Count is alone. Tremolos suggest the shudder of the Count’s encounter with the implacable voice. His anxious waiting, his vain attempt to sound his horn, are vividly depicted. The curse is stated, growing in menace, amidst fitful and futile attempts to revive the chase. The flames begin to flicker in truly Wagnerian tones, and as the wild chase begins in earnest, the curse is underlined by the tuba. The ending pans away in truly cinematic fashion – it ends, as even eternal curses must if music is to have its effect, which this did.

First published, 2006