Organ Choral No. 3 in A Minor

In 1889, César Franck declared that he was minded to write some organ chorales after Bach’s example, but on “quite a different plan.” By September 1890, the resulting Trois Chorals were accomplished, and he was working on the proofs when, a month later, he succumbed to complications from a previous road accident. With conspicuous freedom, each Choral explores a compositional pillar of the organ repertoire. Having tackled variation form in Choral No. 1 and the passacaglia in Choral No. 2, Franck turned his attention to the toccata for the last of the set. Composed in under a fortnight, the A minor No. 3’s design is as spacious as the organization of its material is compact. The rugged toccata-like opening pairs nimble finger-work with magisterial declamatory ambushes, which reorient the harmonic direction of travel. A simply stated chorale paves the way to the central seraphic slow section in A major, whose malleable melody flirts with the chorale before everything is brought together—and capped by a coda of thunderous, harmonically arresting grandiloquence.