It is difficult not to use the term Wagnerian to describe Franck’s D-Minor Symphony, with its opening motto so like the Fate motive in the Ring and its subsequent obsession with rising four-note chromatics, so like Tristan.But in fact, the melange of references in this curious work from the very end of the composer’s career includes hints of the Mendelssohnian scherzo, the improvisational practice of nineteenth-century organists, and a couple of direct references to late Beethoven as well.The thick textures, which can seem grossly over doubled unless carefully handled by the performers, arein equal measure descended from mid-century grand opera styles and a function of the way organs work. The D-Minor Symphony is Franck’s only effort in the genre.

What you remember, once you get beyond the titillation of its bigness, is Franck’s wide-eyed frolic through the tonal system. The strong chromaticism of both the melodies and the chords that support them invites sudden blossom into some unthought-of but bright new tonal center, usually upward, and the violent wrenching of things back down into their proper key for a new theme group or for recapitulation. Franck speaks in long phrases that beg reiteration in varying guises.

The troubled three-note motto in the first bar, repeated in the second on a higher scale degree, is the germ from which Franck derives much of his subsequent melodic material. (Compare this motive to the very similar one at the beginning of Liszt’s Les Preludes) The slow introduction, dominated by eerie instrumentation –low strings, horns, bassoons, and then tuba –portends the stormy eruption of an Allegro, which begins with the same motive. This  is scarcely under way before you have a full repetition of all that has come so far, transposed up from D minor to F minor. When the sonata gets moving again –when you finally sense a structure in the making –it yields up a second theme in the strings, cantabile, and an unmistakably significant closing theme stated by the entire orchestra, now under full steam.

The recapitulation puts the motto opening in canon, with trumpets answering. Toward the end, Franck makes abundantly clear that the motto and the big closing theme are to be remembered, and the movement closes with that familiar Baroque inflection called a Picardy third –raising the minor mode into major.

This is cunning stuff, so far as it goes, but to my way of thinking rather prolix. The second movement, by contrast, seems a real conceptual triumph. Here Franck elides the two middle movements common to a symphony of the time—slow movement and scherzo—into one, such that in due course three “bars” of the scherzo equal one of the Allegretto. (This is accomplished by notating the scherzo figure in triplets in 3/4.) It begins, in minor, as a slow march in triple meter over a repeating bass pattern, again neo-Baroque in manner. In the first of a series of variation over the bass, the English horn solo embraces suggestions of the motto from the first movement. (Here there are many parallels with passages from the Variations symphoniques for piano and orchestra, describe below.) At the center of the movement appears the minor-mode scherzo with major-mode trio, from which grows a synthesis of all these elements and themes.

The third movement is one of those resolution-of-stress affairs, its melodies largely transformations of what has come before. The brass choir has a field day, especially in the tuba-dominated chorale which serves as the second subject. Reference to the main theme and scherzo of the second movement presage a series of triple-verses-duple ploys and the recollection of the other themes that you have probably been expecting to occur. The harp arpeggios at the end announce a last reminiscence of the various motives, now in their tamed state.

The premiere of Franck’s D-Minor Symphony was for some weeks the talk of Paris. The Conservatory Orchestra disliked the work, and Vincent d’Indy reported the bon mot of one listener: “That was a symphony? Who ever heard of an English horn in a symphony?” Franck, for his part, said it sounded like he thought it would.