Though greatly gifted and an indefatigable learner, Vincent d'Indy was not a prodigy. Born with a decided intellectual bent, he felt compelled to make a systematic assessment of the Romantic heritage which meant for him mainly Beethoven, Berlioz, Wagner, and his own mentor, César Franck. It's little wonder that the matching of matter to manner should have been problematic for him at all stages of his career, or that he was well into his thirties by the time he developed a characteristic style. The Symphony on a French Mountain Air (1886) is the first large step in the composer's angular gait toward a distinctive musical language. From childhood, d'Indy had spent his summers at the family estate at Chabret in the Cevennes. In the mid-1880s, he took a villa in nearby Faugs, from which he could glimpse Mont Blanc. He began to notate the folk songs he encountered on his rambles to the country; the melody upon which he based the Symphony is a shepherd's tune which he heard "in the distance from the top of Tortous, between Saint-Péyrau and Toulaud...." Given d'Indy's intense involvement in Parisian musical life, it is well to recall Martin Cooper's observation that "In spite of his conscious professionalism, one side of him remained a patriarchal countryman with something of the air of a visitor to Paris and a background of health and earthiness...." Begun as a Fantaisie for piano and orchestra, the Symphony eventually assumed its present three-movement structure—anticipating the symphonies of Franck and Chausson—while retaining a prominent role for the piano. D'Indy may have been inspired by Franck's Les djinns (1884) and Variations symphoniques (1885), in which rich webs of piano figuration accompany the orchestra; similarly, it may have been more than coincidence that the Symphony was composed in the same year as the premiere of Saint-Saëns' Symphony No. 3, a work notable for the grand integration of organ and piano into its orchestral texture. The use of a "cyclic" theme—in which melodic contour is preserved, though rhythm and character may vary drastically—as a unifying device throughout has an obvious antecedent in Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique (1830). Over an atmospheric string tremolo, the shepherd's air sounds wistfully on the cor anglais, spreading with an infectious lift to the other woodwinds and the strings and then to the piano, which emblazons it with soaring brilliance. The lambently descending second theme proves a worthy foil to the shepherd's melody; their blithely engaging dialogue provides a substantial development before the coda, which is ushered in by the cor anglais. In the Andante, the lilting form of the air smooths out into expansive lyrical flight. The melodic fragments alternate fleetingly—now brilliantly, now adumbrated—teasing the ear for the animé revelations of the Finale. Here, the air's lilting gestures return, at times with the mien of a rowdy rigaudon, interleaved with reminiscences that gradually recall the source of the work's multihued transformations. The Symphony is the freshest and most spontaneous manifestation of its creator's musical personality, and its enduring popularity is wholly deserved.

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