Having written about the great German Romantic composers last year, I thought I would turn to the French Impressionists next. Until the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), opera swept all before it in nineteenth century France. The prestige of the genre diverted composers away from instrumental music, and compromised proper recognition of their chamber works (consider, for example, the incomprehension that greeted Edouard Lalo's marvellous Op. 45 string quartet at its premiere in 1859). The piano also suffered relative neglect. It was by no means forgotten, but with exceptions such as the adventurous works of Charles-Valentin Alkan, little contribution was made to its evolution.

Daring Joviality

This is not to deny the existence of all fine craftsmanship, for instance in the early works of Camille Saint-Saëns. He displayed stunning virtuosity on both the piano and the organ, receiving praise from Liszt and Berlioz (who described him as a 'brilliant master pianist') amongst others. To his credit, Saint-Saëns pioneered the instrumental renaissance well before the turning-point marked by Napoleon III's defeat at Sedan. In 1871 he co-founded, with the poet Romaine Bussine, France's Société Nationale de Musique, a body that was to have a decisive influence on the country's musical development by promoting the creation and performance of numerous new works.

"We have just heard something extraordinary: music that links us to the time of Couperin and Rameau", declared César Franck in 1881, after a Société concert featuring the first performance of Emmanuel Chabrier's Pièces Pittoresques. The jovial humour that often characterises the scores of the "fat, soft-hearted man from the Auvergne" (as Chabrier was described by one reviewer) has perhaps sometimes led to an insufficient recognition of his importance. The clarity of his piano writing does indeed evoke the era of the French harpsichordists, but links with the past are counterbalanced by the daring of his musical language, notable for its brilliant colours.

Chabrier was a sensitive man, prone to weep on hearing a single chord of Wagner. Yet he cultivated a gaiety and a sense of joy, and his best works (notwithstanding the popularity of his evergreen orchestral rhapsody España) deserve to be better known.  He was employed in the Ministry of the Interior in Paris in 1861, and only devoted himself fully to music in 1880. His tiny output for piano is rarely encountered in the concert hall or on CD, and yet he is a delightful, self-contained original. His music, whose influence Ravel recognized in his own early piano writing, can be both graceful and clunky (take, for example, Menuet Pompeux, the ninth of the Pièces Pittoresques).

Poulenc decreed the Pièces Pittoresques "as important for French music as the preludes of Debussy". They are as inventive in harmony and melody as they are attractive in form, showing Chabrier at his happiest and wittiest and reflecting influences as diverse as Offenbach and Schumann. His own words attest to his exuberant state of mind: "I want beauty to be everywhere, and beauty can take thirty-six forms. In the Bon Marché catalogue you will find three hundred shades of pearl grey. How about the scarlet rather than the godly! Down with the wishy-washy! Never the same shade, we need variety, form and life. And naivety too, if possible – and that's the hardest of all!"

Chabrier's writing bears more than a passing resemblance to the Bizet of L'Arlésienne Suite (for example in Danse Villageoise, the seventh of the Pièces Pittoresques), and his harmonic invention (for example in the Bourrée Fantasque) creates a striking harmonic palette which no doubt owes a debt to the paintings of Manet, Monet, Renoir and Sisley. Chabrier was one of the first to admire the work of the French Impressionist painters, and was friends with some of the most important artists of the day. He had many of their paintings on his walls, and left an astonishing collection of artwork when he died in 1894. Manet's celebrated A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (above) hung above his piano.

Architect and Poet

It is perhaps lucky that César Franck recognised the qualities and the importance of Chabrier, for it would be hard to imagine two composers with more different personalities and careers. Chabrier was largely self-taught and remained somewhat on the sidelines of French musical life, while the Belgian-born Franck came to hold a place at its very heart. He became the figurehead of the French school, and influenced a devoted circle of followers. Originally intended for a career as a virtuoso pianist by his ruthlessly ambitious father, he failed to achieve the necessary distinction as a performer at the Paris Conservatoire and turned his attention to teaching, composing and the organ.

It's a strange paradox that while organists often say Franck wrote for their instrument like a pianist, pianists point out how 'organ-like' his piano music is! Both have a point. Franck first played the organ as a means of supplementing the meagre income he drew from teaching the piano. It was only in 1858, when he was appointed organist at Ste-Clotilde, with its magnificent Cavaillé-Coll organ, that he seriously studied the use of the feet. (He had a Pleyel practice pedalboard installed at home, to help him master the pedals.) His performances at Ste-Clotilde, and his skills as an improviser, drew listeners from far and wide. Liszt went so far as to liken his skills to JS Bach's.

His music is romantic and expansive in style, influenced to some extent by Wagner but always individual thanks to his contrapuntally complex structures and religious inspiration. Franck wrote very little for the organ, though the Trois Pièces pour Grand Orgue of 1878 and the three Chorals of 1890 are cornerstones of the repertoire. Almost symphonic in scale, they are closer to Beethoven's late quartets than Bach's chorale preludes. My favourite is the third, in A minor, I think one of the organ's noblest works. A successful performance of Franck's piano pieces requires an understanding of their imposing architecture, in light of his reputation as a supreme organist.

His early compositions were largely misunderstood or ignored by the opera-minded Paris public. As a young virtuoso he composed many piano pieces (for example the showy Grand Caprice of 1843) that, to my mind, fail to convince. It was only much later that he produced his best works for the piano, the Prélude, Choral & Fugue of 1884 and the Prélude, Aria & Final of 1887. They employ his characteristic cyclical structure, but in using forms such as the prelude, chorale or fugue he was not looking back to the past. In his hands they became the starting point for a musical discourse that favours the incense and icons of the Church over the perfume and pearls of the salon.

For me the greatest of Franck's piano compositions is the Prélude, Choral et Fugue, a masterpiece of imposing breadth that requires complete pianism, superb legato and a well-developed sense of polyphony. The grandiose culmination of the Fugue, when the three themes sound simultaneously, is one of the great moments in all piano literature. Franck had in fact originally intended to write just a prelude and fugue, as an alternative to the plethora of virtuoso pieces which were so popular at the time. The decision to include a central section came later; for me it is the emotional core of the work, both a symbol of redemption and a unifying principle at the climax of the Fugue.

The Verlaine of the Piano

The use of easy effects was also foreign to Gabriel Fauré. He too was both a pianist and an organist, although his musical language is very different to Franck's. In the rigid musical establishment of Paris in the nineteenth century, he won acceptance with difficulty. The musicologist and critic Paul Landormy said that Fauré represented "the most intimate and secret aspects of French genius", while the composer followed the poet Paul Verlaine's injunction to "take eloquence, and wring its neck." The depth of his art has often been overlooked: rather than refinement, commentators have seen the blandness of salon music, and his intense restraint has been misinterpreted as a lack of feeling.

Fauré studied at the École Niedermeyer, a newly established school of religious music in Paris. He remained there for eleven years, becoming such a good pianist that he was excluded from competition after coming first two years running! Saint-Saëns was one of his teachers, and the two men established a life-long friendship. After serving as a messenger in the Franco-Prussian War, Fauré returned to Paris to become second organist at the church of St. Suplice, where he worked closely with the brilliant Charles-Marie Widor. In 1877 he was appointed maître de chappelle at the Madeleine, and in 1897 he obtained a teaching position at the Paris Conservatoire.

Despite being very active as a teacher, Fauré had no direct musical heirs: his many pupils included Enescu, Koechlin and Ravel, but they developed very different aesthetics. Fauré's rhythms are subtle and repetitive, but his harmonic structures (which can be traced back to Gustave Lefèvre, another of his teachers at the École Niedermeyer) are far removed from Couperin or Rameau. Vincent d'Indy was perceptive in his comments: "Fauré's musical invention has a very special character, which could perhaps be described as melodic-harmonic: the melody seems inseparably linked to the subtle harmonies. The effect is eminently appealing, rather like certain shimmering colours."

The piano traces Fauré's entire career, from the Op. 19 Ballade of 1881 to the desperate confidences of his final Nocturne (Op. 119), written in 1921 after he had become deaf. There are five Impromptus, four Valses-Caprices, nine Preludes, thirteen Barcarolles, thirteen Nocturnes, the Op. 73 Theme et Variations and the eight Pieces Breves (Op. 84). His piano quartets and quintets are masterpieces, and some of his exquisite songs (particularly Après un Rêve and Clair de Lune) have gained huge popularity. His only piano duet, Dolly Suite, was written for Hélène, the daughter of Emma Bardac. (Emma later married Debussy, and for her Fauré wrote La Bonne Chanson.)

The Op. 103 Preludes are particular favourites of mine, beautiful miniatures which are sadly only rarely performed now. Each one is quite different, but together they paint a very personal picture of Fauré and his music. The Barcarolles, which imitate a Venetian gondolier's song, are charming too. To many people Fauré remains a mystery, inhabiting the no-man's-land between a radical and conservative idiom. I think his complex world is best approached via the thirteen Nocturnes (which I wrote about last year). They are the finest examples of the genre since Chopin's, and mirror both his harmonic evolution and the unfailing individuality of his musical language.

UPDATE:

On June 10th Sotheby's auctioned a previously-unknown piano duet by Fauré, thought to date from around 1870. The manuscript sold for £20,000. You can hear a short extract of the work here, performed by Ashley Wass and Hamish Milne.