César Franck was a Belgian by birth who lived and taught most of his life in France. He was one of the most influential music teachers of the period and a famous organist. Although he enrolled in the Paris Conservatoire at age 15, his maturation as a composer was late in life—he wrote his most lasting compositions while in his fifties and sixties. He was a quiet, easygoing, and unassuming person who never knew how to promote his works. As a result, much of his music was either derided by the doctrinaire academicians or ignored during his lifetime, gaining recognition only in the last century. But his students adored him, calling him “Pater seraphicus,” and his influence on the future of French music was immense. He was appointed in 1871 as professor of organ at the Conservatoire, but his classes evolved into de facto composition classes for the next generation of French composers such as Vincent d’Indy, Henri Duparc, Ernest Chausson, and Paul Dukas.

Franck seems to have composed the Quintet in 1879 as a passionate love offering to one of his composition students, the Irish composer Augusta Holmès, characterized by Rimsky-Korsakov on a visit to Paris as “A very décolletée person” (many of Fauré’s students fell in love with her as well). To judge from Mme. Franck’s attitude to this composition—the only one of her husband’s works she hated—the infatuation must have been serious. Saint-Saëns, to whom Franck dedicated the work and who was the pianist at the premiere, did not like it either. He insulted the composer by abandoning the dedicated manuscript on the piano and walking off in a huff.

The Quintet is an intensely dramatic and stormy work, with enough pianissimos and fortissimos to parallel the roller-coaster of a love affair. It has only three movements, and its structure is cyclical in that a theme from the first movement reappears in the second and third movements, a method widely used by Franz Liszt, one of Franck’s models. There is no relief from the emotional intensity throughout the Quintet and, given its history, one is tempted to label this recurring theme a “love motive.” But since Franck uses the same device in the Violin Sonata, it is dangerous to interpret too much autobiography in the music.

The Quintet opens with a long introduction, Molto moderato quasi lento, full of unresolved dissonance and wandering tonality. The recurring motive occurs as the second theme of the following Allegro. Franck develops his themes in fragmentary motives, except for the recurring one, which stands out in its completeness and acquires the nature of a refrain. The movement in expanded sonata form includes a recapitulation of the introduction at the end, part of Franck’s cyclical style.

The second movement, Andante, is just as intense as the first, just slower. Franck reintroduces his recurring motive towards the middle of the movement. In the stormy finale, Allegro non troppo, ma con fuoco (not too fast, but fiery), the motive reappears in the coda in counterpoint with the movement’s main theme, its importance emphasized by its placement at the end.