In the park facing the suburban Paris basilica of Sainte-Clotilde, where Franck was organist for 32 years, there is a memorial sculpture by Alfred Lenoir, which places the composer before the manuals, head bowed, rapt in meditation as an angel, shielding him with outspread wings, whispers. Indeed, Franck's best music often evokes the voices of angels, a sense of being suspended (as he was in the organ loft) between earth and heaven, the worldly and the divine. Hence, the "serene anxiety" which the critic, Georges-Jean Aubry, attributed to him. In the Trois Chorals, his final work, this mystical hovering attains its most richly compelling form.

At the suggestion of the publisher, Auguste Durand, Franck began the Chorals while on summer holiday at Nemours and completed them on his return to Paris -- the third and last choral is dated September 30, 1890. On October 2, he played them on a piano for his organ class at the Conservatoire -- which included Vierne and Tournemire -- with his last student, Guillaume Lekeu, taking the pedal part. An accident the preceding May, in which Franck had been struck in the chest by an omnibus, had left him weakened. A chill taken at the beginning of October soon turned to pleurisy, but he insisted on returning to the loft of Sainte-Clotilde on October 20 to determine the registration of the Chorals. He came home to take to his bed, his condition wavering, his mind deliriously occupied with a fugue, and died on the morning of November 8.

The formal plan of the first, E major Choral has been the subject of debate; the difficulty lies in attempting to equate what Franck has actually done with pre-existing models. Franck himself tried to explain to his students that "You will see, the Choral is not the thing itself -- the true choral becomes in the course of the work." It opens with a flood of melody which Vincent d'Indy analyzed into seven thematic cells, of which, only the last -- a six bar phrase -- resembles what J. S. Bach would have understood as "choral." The work proceeds through an ever more fantastic, chromatically saturated series of contrapuntal variations, in which one or another of the cells informs every voice, imparting a polyphonic incandescence, transcending mere punctus contra punctus cleverness, until the Bach-like fragment stands forth tutta forza and exultant.

This, the A Minor Choral introduces a proper four-voice choral which eventually subdues the coruscations before rising in great arpeggiated chords to a central dolce espressivo cantilena. This incantatory stream of liquid silver pours forth like ardent prayer, with growing modulatory and contrapuntal involvement until it attains a great, pedal-underlined slargando climax. The flickering scintillations of the opening return, surmounted by the choral and subdued again to a docile accompaniment. Wrought to a suspenseful coda, it ends on a triumphant A major tierce de Picardie.

Source: AllMusic (https://www.allmusic.com/composition/chorals-3-for-org an-m-38-40-mc0002494556).

Although originally written for Pipe Organ, I created this Arrangement of the Adagio from the Chorale in A Minor (FWV 40 No. 3 Mvt. 2) for String Quintet (2 Violins, Viola, Cello & Bass).