"Mister Franck! Time to do your symphony!"

I protest! It seems to me that it was only last week--which means some time within the last decade--that I was having to find something interesting to say about C. Franck and his symphony, which at that time was being commit­ted to organ by Calvin Hampton. Now here I've to do it all over again. Is there that much to say about Franck? Is his symphony that interesting? (If you want a play-by-play of what to expect, complete with little excerpts every two or three lines, I again refer you to The Symphony edited by Robert Simpson, published in a handy pocket-size paperback by Penguin.) Otherwise, the facts are that it is in three movements, is cyclic in organization, was finished in 1888, contains a lot of slow-fast stop-and-go stuff, was first played in February 1889 by the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, and was not a great success.

Someone inquires why Franck wait­ed to the end of his life to produce all the works by which he is known. One fancies him year after year sitting up there in the organ-loft at Ste. Clothilde, noodling around at the keyboard, the dust piling up on his knees and shoulders, the sexton occasionally shifting him in order to polish the bench and vacuum under the pedals. It has been speculated that the Franco­-Prussian war may have aroused him to a sense of mission or something, but if so, it was a decidedly delayed reaction. What makes a man suddenly feel that a symphony is coming on? Since we think largely in metaphors and anal­ogies, I seem simply to sense some­thing like an alarm-clock sounding and a faint voice, as if off in the narthex, calling "Mister Franck! Time to do your symphony!"

Oh well! Who cares? It is (or was) a tremendously popular work. I grant you, it does not seem to turn up at concerts with the maddening frequen­cy it once did, but new recordings continue to pour off the presses. There was a time when Vincent d'lndy argued that the whole idea of the D minor was derived directly from Beethoven and was the first step in a whole new approach to music, which has pretty much of an exaggeration, since Liszt and others had had the hang of cyclic structure for years. Others complained that the cyclicism was a gimmick and that Franck was no better than Bruckner when it came to packaging the music. Still others said in reverent tones that Franck was a mystic, which was supposed to put an end to all criticism. In fact, there have been very few serious critics who consider it an out-and-out masterpiece. For me, a little marshmallow cream goes a long way; but I am notoriously puritan when it comes to sugar, which the world, by and large, can't seem to get enough of.

I've been thumbing through back reviews of other recordings to see if I can find any rules to observe. Germans should, by and large, avoid the work, especially if they are Furtwangler, but exceptions can be made for Karajan and Klemperer ("noble"). Too much attention to structure makes Franck sound like a modulating machine. The sound should be bright, because Franck was French, but never pomp­ous. Care should be taken to avoid ''the excesses of grandiose sentiment and vulgarity" that disfigure the finale. On the other hand, one needs ''that peculiarly inoffensive brand of French vulgarity that can take pleasure in braying out the chromatic descents of the 'faith' theme without being afraid of sounding sanctimonious or noisy".