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 organisation 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.