Martin Loeser: César Francks Oratorium Les Béatitudes:

Werkintention und -gestaltung

Although César Franck considered Les Béatitudes to be his most significant work, its reception promptly met with fierce criticism. The oratorio’s libretto, to which the composer contributed, was deemed inept and of questionable literary quality, the compositional design monotonous and oddly lacking in drama. Music historians have customarily dismissed it as merely a testimony of Franck’s religious convictions. When examining the work’s intent within the socio-cultural context of the sixth and seventh decades of nineteenth-century France (Béatitudes was composed between 1869 and 1879), Franck apparently aimed to saddle the work with a political agenda, one openly communicating and propagating Christian values during that particularly restive era when the virulent clash between the conservative Christian citizenry and secular republicans over the direction of French society reached its peak. Franck found a historical model for his somewhat zealous usage of the genre in the tradition of the mystery play, which musicians and the concert-going public had again come to appreciate since the 1830s. He incorporated both the mystery play’s allegorical figures and its overtly didactic tone; this becomes particularly evident in the wearisome conflict between good and evil in each movement: evil is consistently vanquished, although Franck paradoxically avoids every dramatic struggle, reverting instead to commentary to enunciate their diametrical dispositions.

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