Cesar Franck

Some composers are remembered popularly by one work only. Bruch's Violin Concerto comes to mind; Dukas' "Sorcerer's Apprentice" also; and Litolff's one movement from one of his Concerto Symphoniques, Barber's "Adagio for Strings", Lyadov's "Enchanted Lake", Albinoni's Adagio.
It's as if they didn't write anything else. Most of them wrote vast quantities of works but none now remembered (except by students of music maybe).
Cesar Franck almost falls within this "one work only" group, though forty odd years ago you often heard three pieces by him quite regularly: his Symphony, his Symphonic Variations for piano and orchestra, and his violin sonata.
Robin Holloway, in The Spectator this week, writes that "Cesar Franck appears nowadays to be almost universally reviled."
I used to love his Symphony. I was in good company then: it was one of John Barbirolli's favourites which he performed with his Halle orchestra regularly. I haven't heard it - or heard of a performance of it - for many, many years. Also, the Symphonic Variations, a highly entertaining piece, is never played now; nor the violin sonata.
Why is this? We'll let's allow Robin Holloway to explain the reason: "The present consensus is that Franck is merely thick, cloying, glutinous, too sequential, too chromatic, stiff in rhythm and phrasing, mechanised in form and process - especially in the 'motto' idea, laboriously applied, whereby all of a work's themes transfer and transform across all its movements."
Well, I suppose you could say that about his music!
What I would like to say is that there's a great slow movement in The Symphony, a wonderfully exciting finale to the Symphonic Variations and a beautifully executed last movement in the violin sonata.