Скрытая символика в «Трёх хоралах для большого органа» Сезара Франка

Abstract

The article is devoted to one of the enigmatic compositions by French romantic composer Cesar Franck Three Chorales for Large Organ (1890). The traditional chorale arrangements are built on original church chants, which spread its connotation on all the parameters of the composition’s musical texture – tonality, musical-lexical units, rhythm, etc. The uniqueness of Franck’s chorales lies in the absence in them of direct quotations from liturgical practice, which provides a greater amount of complexity in the ways of interpreting this cycle. The main goal of the article is to find the semantic mechanisms based on an integrated approach, which includes the semiotic, hermeneutic, iconographic and iconological methods of analysis. Given Franck’s ability of drawing and his many years of working as a church organist of the Catholic church of St. Clotilde in Paris (Basilique Sainte-Clotilde), the author of the article notes the synesthesia quality of his musical thinking manifested in this work. The music of the chorales relies not on a textual-musical basis, but on spatial-visual iconography, which can be regarded as a manifestation of the synthesis of the arts, characteristic of the Romanticist composers of the 19th century. The author of the article puts forward the following assumption – that the cycle reflects the main doctrinal images of Christ, in terms of their spatial arrangement within the premises of the Catholic Church, according to the canon of the iconic scenario. The semantic structure of the work is based on the three-dimensional semantics of the premises of the church, symbolizing human beings’ path towards God.