The Hidden Symbolism of Three Chorales for a Large Organ by Cesar Franck

Abstract

The article is devoted to one of the enigmatic compositions by French romantic
composer Cesar Franck Three Chorales for Large Organ (1890). The traditional chorale
arrangements are built on original church chants, which spread its connotation on all the
parameters of the composition’s musical texture – tonality, musical-lexical units, rhythm, etc. The
uniqueness of Franck’s chorales lies in the absence in them of direct quotations from liturgical
practice, which provides a greater amount of complexity in the ways of interpreting this cycle.
The main goal of the article is to find the semantic mechanisms based on an integrated approach,
which includes the semiotic, hermeneutic, iconographic and iconological methods of analysis.
Given Franck’s ability of drawing and his many years of working as a church organist of the
Catholic church of St. Clotilde in Paris (Basilique Sainte-Clotilde), the author of the article notes
the synesthesia quality of his musical thinking manifested in this work. The music of the chorales
relies not on a textual-musical basis, but on spatial-visual iconography, which can be regarded
as a manifestation of the synthesis of the arts, characteristic of the Romanticist composers of the
19th century. The author of the article puts forward the following assumption – that the cycle
reflects the main doctrinal images of Christ, in terms of their spatial arrangement within the
premises of the Catholic Church, according to the canon of the iconic scenario. The semantic
structure of the work is based on the three-dimensional semantics of the premises of the church,
symbolizing human beings’ path towards God.

Keywords: chorale, Cesar Franck, musical iconography, musical semiotics, musical
hermeneutics, choral processing, musical-rhetorical figures, the semantics of tonality