What Happened to One of Classical Music’s Most Popular Pieces?
César Franck’s only symphony was a pillar of the repertory for decades. But it’s now a rarity.
...Quiet, sincere and more famous in his lifetime as an organist and teacher than as a composer, Franck celebrates the bicentenary of his birth this year. But it’s unlikely that American orchestras will bring to the celebration the fervor with which they once performed his sole symphony. In one of the stranger stories in the history of the canon, the work — which from the 1920s until the ’60s was such a hit that the New York Philharmonic thought it a solid bet to fill Lewisohn Stadium on a hot summer’s night — is now all but absent from concert halls.
“There is a lot of music that at one time was very popular and then disappeared,” the conductor Riccardo Muti said in an interview. Muti recorded the Franck with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1981 and was the last person to lead it at Carnegie Hall, with his Chicago Symphony Orchestra, in 2012.
“But in the case of this symphony,” Muti went on, “I don’t understand.”
In high school I only knew of it because my dad had an "album" of it on 78s that you listened to it in 6 minute chunks over eight sides. But it must have been popular, since he would normally buy only religiously-connected music.
