“Florent Schmitt will not have left this earth without taking away, like a viaticum, the certainty of his genius.”

— Bernard Gavoty

This bronze medal of Bernard Gavoty was sculpted by Madeleine-Pierre Quérolle in 1976 and minted by Monnaie de Paris in 1977. The “Clarendon” notation on the left side of the medal is a reference to Gavoty’s nom de plume as music critic for Paris’ Le Figaro newspaper. Mme. Quérolle-Sylvain (1914-2014) was a noted French sculptor and painter. Born before the beginning of the First World War, she lived for a full century.

At the time Florent Schmitt passed away on August 17, 1958 at the age of nearly 88 years, he was considered by many to be the doyen of French composers. One of the most memorable epitaphs was penned by fellow-composer Henri Dutilleux, who famously wrote:

“Florent Schmitt was the last of that great family to which Ravel, Dukas and Roussel belonged. He remains one of them who, by a happy assimilation of German and Central European influences, recalled the French school to certain notions of grandeur.”

Composer Florent Schmitt (age 87) with Igor Stravinsky (age 75) and Vera de Bosset Sudeikin Stravinsky at a social gathering at the American Embassy in Paris. A much-younger Henri Dutilleux is pictured (back to camera) in between both men. (1957 photo)

Famed French organist Louis Vierne (l.) pictured with Bernard Gavoty, age 25, at the organ console at Église Notre-Dame du Sacré-Cœur de Malo-les-Bains in Dunkirk. Maestro Vierne was Gavoty’s first organ teacher, later entering Marcel Dupré’s class at the Paris Conservatoire. (Photo: Joseph Losfeld, 1933)

But beyond Dutilleux there were numerous other dignitaries who paid tribute to Florent Schmitt in the wake of his death. One of those was Bernard Georges-Marie Gavoty (1908-1981), a French music personality who was known for being a kind of arts polymath. Not only was Gavoty a talented organist, he was also a musicologist, a critic, an author and speaker — and even a talk-show host.

A photo of the organ at Saint-Louis des Invalides taken about the time Bernard Gavoty was appointed titular organist. Under Gavoty’s direction, the organ would be rebuilt by Beuchet-Debierre in 1955-57.

Gavoty’s early years in music were spent as a pupil of the great French organist-composer Louis Vierne, after whose death in the late 1930s Gavoty entered the Paris Conservatoire to become a student in the organ class of Marcel Dupré.

In 1942 Gavoty was appointed titular organist at the Cathedral of Saint-Louis des Invalides, located within the Army Museum in the 7^th arr. of Paris, where he was the driving force behind the rebuilding of the organ by Beuchet-Debierre in 1955-57.

Bernard Gavoty’s best-known organ recording features him performing with the ORTF under Jean Martinon in Saint-Saens’ Third Symphony. Recorded in 1975 at the Cathedral of Saint-Louis des Invalides where Gavoty was titular organist, the recording has been in the catalogue nearly continuously ever since. In its most recent CD incarnation, issued in Japan, the recording is coupled with Martinon’s 1972 ORTF rendition of Florent Schmitt’s ballet La Tragédie de Salomé.

Among Gavoty’s recordings, probably the most internationally famous is his last one:  a 1975 EMI recording of Saint-Saëns’ Symphony No. 3, made at the Cathedral of Saint-Louis des Invalides with the Orchestre National de l’ORTF under the direction of Jean Martinon.

This india ink caricature of Bernard Gavoty was drawn by the dessinateur Pierre Rollat (1914-2005). The cartoonist, who signed his work as “SIRO,” sketched countless French personalities in the arts, politics and sports over many decades. He was famed for being able to capture the “essence” of each subject’s persona in just a few simple pen strokes.

But to many music-lovers in France, Bernard Gavoty was better known as a brilliant speaker and writer on classical music topics than he was for his organ virtuosity. Gavoty had succeeded Reynaldo Hahn in writing music criticism for the Parisian daily newspaper Le Figaro, where his articles were published under the pseudonym “Clarendon” — the name of the main male character in Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais’ 1767 play Eugénie.

Gavoty was also a regular presence on television, where he was empaneled to talk on various classical music topics. His exemplary public speaking skills gave him opportunities to make many appearances as a lecturer as well — notably at conferences of the Jeunesses musicales de Frannce where he interviewed composers and other musical personalities during the 1950s and 1960s, including Florent Schmitt in 1956.

Audio documentation of that 1956 JMF interview has been preserved.  Conducted in the presence of a lively audience of young people that clearly found the discussion highly interesting — and, judging from the amount of laughter and applause, thoroughly engaging — Gavoty and Schmitt are quite entertaining in their repartee.

As French conductor Fabien Gabel puts it, “Schmitt has no barriers; he had a good sense of humor!”

Reirha Khalfoun-Mesloub, a faithful reader of the Florent Schmitt Website + Blog, has the distinction of attending several of Bernard Gavoty’s Jeunesses musicales “Meet the Composer” interviews decades ago — events that remain fresh memories even to this day, she reports.

As a cap on a notable professional career, in 1976 Bernard Gavoty was elected a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, succeeding former BnF managing director Julien Cain. Rounding out the portrait of this true renaissance man, Gavoty was also an agricultural engineer who earned a degree from the Institut national agronomique, and who cultivated vineyard lands in the Provence region of France.

Bernard Gavoty’s tribute to Florent Schmitt was published in Le Figaro in early September 1958, shortly after the death of the composer, where it appeared as the lead story in his column Mon carnet de notes (My Notebook). That tribute is reproduced here. (For those who do not read French, an English translation follows immediately below it.)

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

My Notebook

—  by Bernard Gavoty, Le Figaro, September 1958

Volumes will be written on Florent Schmitt. Confidences and memories of him will be published — his anecdotes will be told and his greatest works will be analyzed from a hundred different points of view — without penetrating the mystery of the man’s indecipherable nature.

I frequented this nature a great deal — observed it, interrogated it — but in vain. He wore a mask on his face — or rather a series of masks — changing according to the days and the circumstances. Brutality in words was one of those masks; unbridled verve was another.

Deep down, I’ve always thought that this great lyricist, so given to effusions in front of his ruled paper, suffered from a curious shyness when he found himself in the presence of humans — and even more so, in front of a crowd. Like a soldier surrounded on all sides by the enemy, he would then rush to free himself, but the violence of his thrusts did not prevent him from trembling at the thought of his own audacity.

The fact that he frequently contradicted his best “words” a day after he uttered them buttresses the hypothesis. The neat, clean and somewhat innocuous appearance of this in-actuality voluptuous man — for whom musical chords were never succulent enough, harmonic sequences rich enough, nor the orchestration sumptuous enough — was also a kind of alibi for his personality. 

Florent Schmitt in 1957 (Photo: René Pari)

A splendiferous sultan set among coffers of precious stones — lavish as a prince of the Orient — Schmitt lived under the disguise of a bureaucrat.

How poor he must have found them, the ill-gifted people around him! At the age of eighty-seven, gold streamed from his hands as he was building a luxuriant symphony — even as some of his juniors were exhausting themselves in crafting puny pieces resembling artificial thistles. 

For a man so rich, the mask was required; otherwise they would have wanted him banished to death. 

A single day, a single evening, I saw his face unmasked. It was last June in Strasbourg, where his Symphony was premiered. The endless homage of the euphoric hall, where youth dominated, rose like incense to the nostrils of the dying old master. He greeted them simply, gravely — without a smile and without sarcasm. Florent Schmitt will not have left this earth without taking away, like a viaticum, the certainty of his genius.

Florent Schmitt and Felix Aprahamian at the world premiere performance of Schmitt’s Symphony No. 2 in Strasbourg, France in June 1958, several months before the composer’s death. Also pictured are composer-critic Gustave Samazeuilh, pianist Frank Mannheimer and musicologist Marc Pincherle. 

“Nuremberg” from Florent Schmitt’s Reflets d’Allemagne, presented by Dances We Dance in the original 1914 Isadora Duncan choreography as updated by Francesca Todesco (New York City, June 2022). (Photo: ©Steve Pisano)

Francesca Todesco

Florent Schmitt’s Reflets d’Allemagne, Op. 28, inspired by his travels throughout Central Europe during his Prix de Rome period (1900-04), is a suite of eight waltzes originally written for piano duet — and music that fairly cries out for ballet treatment. By turns the pieces are whimsical and elegant, but also shot through with notable flashes of originality that hint at the composer who would produce strikingly inventive works just a few years hence.

Notably, the first public performances of the complete set of waltzes in Paris and elsewhere in France were presented by Florent Schmitt and his friend and fellow-composer, Maurice Ravel, in 1907.

This June 1934 playbill for the 15th performance of Florent Schmitt’s ballet Reflets at the Paris Opéra-Comique also included two other ballets set to the music of Ottorino Respighi (Marie l’Egyptienne) and Jacques Ibert (Angélique).

Schmitt himself was given the opportunity to orchestrate several of numbers from the set of piano pieces for a new ballet, title Reflets, that was presented at the Théâtre National de l’Opéra-Comique in 1932. But a full two decades before that, the music – or at least a portion of it — had already been given dance treatment by none other than Isadora Duncan, the American-born woman famous for her pathfinding approach to dance movement — freeing it from the formality and constraints of “grand ballet” and moving it firmly in the direction of “modern dance.”

Isadora Duncan (1877-1927). The pioneering American-born, internationally acclaimed modern dance pioneer lived — and died — for her art.

When Isadora Duncan arrived in Paris in the years before World War I, Florent Schmitt and other French composers were busily carving out a distinctly “French” style of music in contradistinction to the Austro-German tradition that had dominated orchestral music in France up until the late 1800s. No doubt this new French music came to Duncan’s attention as she developed her own unique style of fluid, liberating choreography.

Duncan’s staging of Reflets d’Allemagne was presented during the 1910s and 1920s, but the work appears to have been forgotten following the death of the dancer in 1927. That neglect would continue for some seven dacades, until the early 1990s when the choreography was reconstructed, and then in 2011 when the Duncanesque dances to Schmitt’s music were presented in performance in New York City.

And then … a decade later choreography for the entire set of Schmitt waltzes was prepared by dancer and choreographer Francesca Todesco, and premiered by the Dances We Dance troupe in three performances in New York City in 2022.

Arts critic Barney Yates wrote these words in New York Theatre Wire following a 2021 program that featured various works choreographed by Isadora Duncan and her acolytes:

“Praise [to] all of these artists for undertaking the practice of conservatorship and for offering audiences these faithful reproductions of classic dances. The study of classical dance forms is a gateway to the practice of what we now call Modern Dance — not only in the sense of the Duncanesque genre we call by that name, but also with respect to nearly all the disparate genres that we enjoy today.  It is interdisciplinary by nature, involving the study of some of the greatest and most influential forms of performance and art, along with 20th century history and the study of social issues …

Artists who study these modern classics are motivated by the desire to understand their cultures, and [they] also find that this study leads to an examination of questions that are relevant to all human cultures — the nature and limits of human nature … the place of literature and myth in civilization, and so on.  Thanks to work like this, our understanding of dance, and indeed all modern performance, can have a ballast it would not have without it.”

The original printing of the piano duet version of Florent Schmitt’s Reflets d’Allemagne was published by Mathot in 1912. The composer also prepared a version of the score for solo piano, as well as orchestrated three of the eight numbers (Werder Island, Dresden, Munich) for a ballet production at the Paris Opéra-Comique in the early 1930s.

I was introduced to Francesca Todesco by the French pianist Bruno Belthoise, who has worked with the dancer to present new repertoire. A native of Switzerland, Ms. Todesco has been based in the United States since the mid-1990s, including working with the Sokolow Theatre/Dance Ensemble and Dances by Isadora. My contact with her resulted in an interview about the Florent Schmitt work she produced in 2022. Highlights of our very interesting discussion are presented below.

PLN:  How did you came to know of Isadora Duncan and her artistry?  What drew you to her pioneering work in dance?

FT:  My introduction to the technique and repertoire of Isadora Duncan was by happenstance; it was in 1999, a year after I had moved to New York City, when I was asked to learn a new contemporary piece in exchange for Duncan classes. Catherine Gallant, who became my primary teacher, was crucial in my learning and development of this style, which I found fascinating and have studied passionately ever since.

I was immediately struck by the musicality of Isadora’s work and the way my body fell easily into the movement; the connection just made sense to me. I loved the challenge of making difficult movements seem easy. 

As with many of the Duncan dances, the apparent simplicity of the movement gives the audience the sense that the dances can be performed by almost anyone. With this technique, the use of relatively uncomplicated movements such as waltzing, running steps, skips and others, focuses the dancer’s attention on fully incorporating the Duncan technique and making the dance appear, to the audience, almost effortless. 

In reality, the importance of the musical phrasing, the lightness of the upper body strength in contrast with the grounded and rhythmical lower body, and the focused connection of all the elements all combine make her dances more complex than one might suppose from simply observing the movements. 

Beyond the physical dancing aspects, I also enjoyed learning about Isadora Duncan’s life and the scope of her work. My training in the Duncan style has been mainly through physically learning her choreography — and although I’ve also read extensively about her life, I’m not a scholar on the subject.

“Vienne” from Florent Schmitt’s Reflets d’Allemagne, featuring new choreography by Francesca Todesco and presented by Dances We Dance in New York City. (Photo: ©Steve Pisano, 2022)

PLN:  When did Isadora Duncan come to Paris? Was she already famous before her arrival? What were her activities in Paris once there?

FT: In a nutshell, Isadora arrived in Paris around 1900 after living in London along with her family. I wouldn’t say that she was already famous, but I think London is where she started to fully develop her own philosophy and style of dance, which she expanded in later years, especially while living in and around Paris. 

This was an exciting time for artists of all kinds, especially in Paris. I imagine it wouldn’t have been hard to find a coterie of different artists all hanging out together at a salon performance, maybe attending a gallery or exhibit opening, or simply meeting in a bar. 

Illinois-born Loïe Fuller (1862-1928) developed her unique choreographic style by utilizing copious folds of draped fabrics punctuated by dramatic lighting effects. Her artistry becoming famous in Paris, in 1907 Miss Fuller premiered Florent Schmitt’s ballet La Tragédie de Salomé at the Théâtre des Arts (now Théâtre Hébertot). Schmitt revised the ballet score in 1910, and the new version was presented in Paris stagings in 1912 (Trouhanova) and 1913 (Karsavina with the Ballets-Russes) — productions Isadora Duncan may well have seen. (Isadora Duncan had also danced for a time with Loïe Fuller’s company prior to striking out on her own.) (1900 photo)

Isadora and her family spent most days in museums and parks researching, reading, learning, and thoroughly developing what would become her signature technique and style — the birth of a new way of moving and thinking about dance — which would eventually come to be known as “modern dance.” Both in London and Paris she made several important professional and personal acquaintances, some of which she kept up all her life. After a short tour with Loïe Fuller’s company, Isadora was invited to perform her own program. Her first full European performance in a theater with a full orchestra was actually held in Austria-Hungary rather than in France or England (in Budapest in 1902).

PLN: Turning to Isadora Duncan’s work in bringing Florent Schmitt’s Reflets d’Allemagne waltzes to the stage, is there any evidence of her working with the composer in preparing the pieces for her production?

FT: Unfortunately, I do not have any information about how Isadora discovered the music — or even if she knew Florent Schmitt. It is likely that she attended concerts or stage productions in Paris where his music was being performed, or they could possibly have met at one of the many parties or gatherings attended by Paris artistes. 

It’s also conceivable that one of her piano accompanists would have introduced her to his music — or even to the composer himself.

PLN: Which numbers from the eight-movement set did Isadora Duncan choreograph, and when and where were they first presented?

Irma Duncan (1897-1971). Born Irma Erich-Grimme in Schleswig-Holstein province, she was one of six German foster children of Isadora Duncan who gained fame by touring as the “Isadorables” shortly before and after World War I. Irma Duncan accompanied her mentor to Moscow in 1921 to establish the Duncan school that existed there until 1948. In 1928-30, Irma Duncan led several international tours of the Soviet school dancers. Eventually settling in New York City, she met and married an attorney, Sherman S. Rogers, as well as operated artistically in the U.S. with her own company (the Isadora Duncan Dancers). Her last stage appearance was in Ode to Peace, performed in 1933 at Madison Square Garden that featured the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Reportedly, an audience of some 15,000 spectators witnessed not only the dancers, but also musical forces of 100+ players and 100+ voices — all under the direction of Walter Damrosch.

FT: It’s important to realize that we have no film footage of any of the original dances by Isadora, nor any specific notations from that time. Most choreography was “passed down” by her students — specifically her six pupils called the “Isadorables” — simply by teaching the dances they had learned themselves, and then their students to others, and so on. 

Some dances were recreated from memory or from someone’s recollection of having seen them on stage. Sometimes we have copies of programs, or writings of first-person recollections of the dances. And in some cases, we have drawings that give an idea of the movement. 

That said, we know of three movements from the set of waltzes (Lübeck, Dresden and Nuremberg) that Isadora choreographed. She may well have choreographed all eight, but they are either lost or otherwise impossible to trace.

The Isadora Duncan Dancers presented Florent Schmitt’s Reflets d’Allemagne as a “suite of waltzes” at the Columbia Theatre in San Francisco on December 30, 1919, as part of the troupe’s 1919-20 international tour. Schmitt’s music opened the third (post-intermission) portion of the San Francisco program. Noted pianist George Copeland accompanied the dancers in works by a range of composers including Gluck, Mendelssohn, MacDowell, Albeniz, and Rachmaninov, in addition to Schmitt.

I’m not aware of where these dances were premiered and if they were danced to piano or orchestral accompaniment at the premiere, but based on information given to me by Katharina Van Dyk, a French dancer and scholar who is researching and writing a dissertation on Isadora Duncan, we do know that these dances were prepared during the time Isadora started to work at Bellevue outside Paris (beginning in 1912). 

Frederika Blair’s book on Isadora Duncan, published in 1987.

There is a brief reference to the work in Frederika Blair’s book Isadora: Portrait of the Artist as a Woman, mentioning a Florent Schmitt waltz dance titled “Ballets d’Allemagne” on her first American tour with her dancers, the Isadorables, in a performance at Carnegie Hall in November 1914. 

Julia Levien (1911-2006). A child of Russian-Jewish intellectuals and writers, Levien was a painter and sculptor in addition to her stage career. The second-generation Duncan Dancer began performing in 1925, later joining the American Isadora Duncan School and Company. Levien toured internationally with the troupe in the 1930s and 1940s. Critic John Martin of the New York Times wrote of her artistry, “Few dancers can manage to make sustained lyrical movement so engrossing simply as movement.” In 1977 Levien was instrumental in forming a new company in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of Isadora Duncan’s birth. Late in her long life, she recreated some of the original Duncan choreography based on her first-hand knowledge and memories — most notably resurrecting the choreography created by Isadora Duncan for Florent Schmitt’s Reflets d’Allemagne.

It was not until 1992 that Julia Levien (a second-generation Duncan dancer) reconstructed these three sections. Levien was a student of Irma Duncan, who had been one of the Isadorables. She would have been too young to see the premiere in 1914, but she might have learned it later with Irma Duncan. Her reconstruction premiered at Dance at Holy Trinity in NYC with the Duncan Dance Continuum directed by Judy Landon and produced by Lynn Parkerson. Among the dancers were Adrienne Ramm, Thea Keats, Catherine Gallant, Patricia Adams and Lynn Parkerson. 

The Dances by Isadora presentation of three numbers from Florent Schmitt’s Reflets d’Allemagne in 2011 at City Center Studio 4 in New York City included live music performed by pianists Alan Moverman and Mary Jo Pagano.

Catherine Gallant presented them again in 2011 with live piano accompaniment – this is when I learned the dances — and later I decided to choreograph and present all eight sections in 2022 with my company, Dances We Dance.

PLN:  Are you aware of music of other French composers besides Florent Schmitt that Isadora Duncan choreographed during her time in France?

FT:  There are several French composers mentioned in her repertoire history, including Berlioz, Godard, Gounod, Debussy and others in addition to Schmitt. But unfortunately, most of the dances have been lost.  It is possible that some of this music was used in classes or salon performances but never documented or revived later. Also, often Isadora would perform or improvise alone, and frequently those dances would not be taught, documented, or recreated by her dancers.

This March 1922 poster announces the appearance of Duncan Dancers at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. Three of Isadora’s protégés — Anna, Lisa and Erica — are given top billing.

PLN: From news reports I’ve read, Isadora Duncan brought Reflets d’Allemagne with her when she returned to the United States upon the outbreak of World War I, which were presented in December 1914.  I’ve also read several New York Times reports about stagings of the ballet in New York City in June 1919 prior to the Isadora Duncan Dancers’ international tour, and again in March 1920 following their return from the tour. Was the original Bellevue choreography used for these stagings, or were there alterations made — such as to accommodate either fewer or more dancers in the productions?

The return of the Duncan Dancers to Carnegie Hall was reported in the New York Times in this March 14, 1920 article. Florent Schmitt’s Reflets d’Allemagne was among the pieces presented by the troupe.

FT: Cast alteration was possible, but probably not in the first few performances. I can say that Julia Levien probably saw these dances staged as trios, presented by dancers of the original casts that toured the U.S. Perhaps she learned them later, and that’s likely why she taught them as trios. 

Unfortunately, we have little information about the Reflets dances, as they are not well-known and thus rarely performed in the Duncan world. This is one of the key reasons why I wanted to bring them back, in fact.

PLN: What particular aspects of the choreography for Reflets d’Allemagne make the work worthy of resurrecting and presenting today?  

FT: As I said, most Duncan pieces are well-known and performed frequently, but this is not the case with Reflets d’Allemagne. In general, dancers have tended to favor more famous composers or the more familiar musical compositions which Duncan augmented with her movement. 

Regarding Schmitt’s Reflets, despite their obscurity, the different waltz tempos and changing “feeling” in each piece make it fun to follow. In the Duncan style, the use of skipping and waltzing is very common; Isadora created many different combinations using these steps, and I believe that the Schmitt dances are a very good example of her clever use of them. 

“Werder Island” from Florent Schmitt’s Reflets d’Allemagne, featuring new choreography by Francesca Todesco and presented by Dances We Dance in New York City. (Photo: ©Alex Gramma, 2022)

Speaking personally, I enjoy the music and welcomed the challenge to complete the lost sections — not trying to “copy” the Duncan style but using my experience as a modern dancer to incorporate both my movement and hers. 

I’m not a musician, but I am an enthusiast and I can appreciate a good piece, which this one most certainly is. I also have ample knowledge of the Duncan repertoire and seek to revive or “re-imagine” pieces of choreography that are not well-known, as well as to shed light on lesser-known composers and pieces.

PLN:  How did you prepare your new choreography in a way that would be faithful to the original vision of the dances?

Francesca Todesco dressed in Duncanesque “tunic” garb. (Photo: ©Daniel Dugan)

FT:  Only three pieces survived, and we do not know if what has come down to us is exactly the original version. We do not have any original film or written notes from the time. Often in dance, steps and choreography have been altered to apply to new bodies or to fit different performance spaces or numbers of dancers. 

When I first learned of the three pieces in 2011, there were already modifications that had been made. I made some different choices as well — however small. Often in Duncan choreography we encounter extensive repetitions of the same movement, following the musical score. But to keep the dances a bit more interesting and less repetitive for today’s audiences, sometimes we modify each repetition slightly. 

Many Duncan dancers would attempt to remain completely faithful to the original piece of choreography (or what they originally learned). I agree with this perspective to a certain degree, but I think that in dance as in music, bodies and instruments change and so does the “realization” of the composition. 

In a way, it’s difficult to label the choreography of any of Isadora Duncan’s pieces as “original”; perhaps it’s best to view it “as close to the original interpretation as possible.” After Isadora’s death in 1927, her disciples went on to spread her choreography all over the world. As it happens, we can now see that dancers who learned the same dance from various sources differed in their interpretations of it.

“Dresden” from Florent Schmitt’s Reflets d’Allemagne, featuring Isadora Duncan’s 1914 choreography as presented by Dances We Dance in New York City. (Photo: ©Steve Pisano, 2022)

PLN: As for the additions to the Reflets waltzes choreographed by Isadora Duncan, what was your approach to choreographing these new items?

FT: I have added three dances to the three originally choreographed by Isadora. I purposely presented it with live music (four-hand piano duet) to shine a light on the music itself. I used one of the pieces to introduce the dancers and another for piano only, thereby making up the entire set of eight pieces as composed by Schmitt. 

However, I chose not to stage the pieces in their original published order, but rather to complement the choreography and to give a moment of rest to the dancers. Here is the order that the eight waltzes are presented in our production: 

1. Heidelberg – piano and dancers’ improvisation
2. Dresden – choreography by Isadora Duncan (ca. 1914) – trio of dancers
3. Koblenz – choreography by Francesca Todesco (2022) – quartet of dancers
4. Werder Island – choreography by Francesca Todesco (2022) – trio
5. Vienne – choreography by Francesca Todesco (2021) – quartet
6. Munich – piano only
7. Lübeck – choreography by Isadora Duncan (ca. 1914) – trio
8. Nuremberg – choreography by Isadora Duncan (ca. 1914) – trio into final quartet

The Dances We Dance production of Reflets d’Allemagne, set to music of Florent Schmitt, was presented in New York City in June 2022. Choreography was by Isadora Duncan (1914) and Francesca Todesco (2021-22).

As a side note, I did some reading on how Florent Schmitt came to write this music, followed by researching the towns that gave the titles to his pieces. Apart from Vienna, I found all the other places fairly unremarkable aside from their uncomplicated beauty and natural surroundings. (I would have loved to visit them to get more of a feeling of the places.) 

An advertisement for the Duncan Dancers’ appearance at the Columbia Theatre in San Francisco in 1919. San Francisco Examiner music critic J. Redfern Mason wrote after the first performance: “Not to see them is a misfortune; carelessly to miss them would be a crime.” The program also featured George Copeland as collaborative pianist. Copeland toured the United States with the troupe, but broke his contract in 1920 and went to Europe. He would later admit to one of his students (the composer, visual artist and writer Ramón Sender Barayón), that breaking the Duncan contract had fatal consequences for his career trajectory in the United States — and that when he returned to America more than a decade later, “no reputable manager would touch me.” In later stage presentations led by Isadora’s foster daughter and protégé Irma Duncan, the noted collaborative pianist Emmanuel Bay would be retained to provide the music.

George Copeland (1882-1991) was an American pianist who is remembered today for his artistic relationship with the composer Achille-Claude Debussy, with whom he studied in 1904, as well as for his interpretations of modern Spanish piano works, to which he was introduced by the painter John Singer Sargent. From 1904 until his final recital six decades later, Copeland was reputed to include at least one work by Debussy on each of his programs. In his highly sought-after performances in the United States during the initial years of his career, Copeland’s stage demeaner presaged that of Liberace in the 1960s; he delighted in wearing exotic jewelry and perfumes, explaining his reasoning in an unpublished memoir as follows: “Jewels are a manifestation of beauty, and certainly perfume smells better than perspiration. I love to look at them myself, and because I hope they give pleasure to others. They are not unrelated to music, for all music has color — the deep greens of forests, the limpidness of water, the passionate flash of rubies and diamonds.” Copeland was also open about his sexuality, telling a reporter for the Cleveland Leader in 1913, “I don’t care what people think of my morals [and] I never think anything about other people’s morals. Morals have nothing to do with me.” But problems regarding just such a morals charge in one South American country may have led Copeland to elect to spend much of the 1920s and 1930s in Europe — only returning to the United States from Mallorca upon the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.

The idea of changing costumes for each dance was something I also considered, but I also wanted the eight sections to proceed smoothly without long breaks in between them, so I ended up going with minimum costume changes. 

I also didn’t want to diverge too much from Duncan movement. Instead, I tried to develop off of that and focus more on the choreography and staging aspects — not relying too much on repetitive movement as Duncan did, but more of a progression of movement. 

I was also able to set various lights on the stage, creating a slightly different atmosphere for each section.

PLN: Does your most recent New York City staging differ from the one done in 2011?

FT: The biggest difference is that in 2011 we presented only the three Isadora Duncan dances that had been reconstructed and recreated from past recollections. In 2022 with my company, I presented all eight sections. Both the 2011 and 2022 performances were presented with live music (four-hands piano).

PLN: What has been the reaction to Reflets d’Allemagne among your fellow dancers, and with audiences?

FT: Everyone has enjoyed the dances and the staging with live music, costumes, and lighting. The best compliment choreographically speaking, is seeing the progression of the Duncan movement into the new pieces. I think people (dancers especially) who had already been exposed to many Duncan pieces were happy to see something new and different.

A poster for the June 2023 program presented by Dances We Dance, in which Florent Schmitt’s complete Reflets d’Allemagne was a featured offering.

PLN: Do you have future plans to present Reflets in other venues – either in the United States or abroad?

FT: Reflets d’Allemagne is not a well-known piece in the Duncan world. So far, we’ve only performed it during one season (three performances in 2022). There are no firm plans yet to present it again but we look forward to that opportunity. It was extensive work to put it together, and now it’s in the repertory and available to us.

I’m also hoping that other companies or dancers will become interested in learning it, including being able to present it overseas — perhaps in Paris or, even better, on a tour of Germany and Austria, dancing in every town included in Reflets!

PLN: Are there other points you would like to share about the music or the choreography – as well as the importance of Isadora Duncan in the history of dance more generally?

An early 1930s 78-rpm Pathé recording of the orchestrated version of the “Munich” movement from Florent Schmitt’s Reflets d’allemagne. The recording included a unique “vocal autograph” of the composer’s voice at the end of the music. Note also Florent Schmitt’s signature on this copy of the record.

FT: I must acknowledge that there is a challenge teaching Reflets d’Allemagne in that the piece contains both Duncan and more complex choreography; not many dancers can do both well. Many Duncan dancers aren’t trained beyond the Duncan technique, and most well-trained dancers are not familiar with the details and nuances of the Duncan style. But this is a particular attribute of my own company and the dance companies I was part of previously — the ability to dance different techniques and styles. 

Isadora Duncan, who is considered by many the “mother of modern dance,” was extremely important in the development of dance both in Europe and the U.S. She had a profound impact on many lives and in many aspects of life. Most importantly, Isadora elevated dance to a high art and inspired the generations of dancers and choreographers who came along later. 

Isadora Duncan (1877-1927)

Notably, she changed the way dancers present themselves onstage: barefoot and without corsets or other constraints. Artistically, her use of gravity and her connection to nature was particularly innovative, liberating dance from the restraints of ballet. 

Lastly, Isadora was the first person to choreograph to music not originally written for dance, including works of Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms and Scriabin. She stepped away from choreographing to music written expressly for ballet and fairy tales, moving beyond to explore and expand on themes ranging the gamut from literature and poetry, the liturgical world, mythology and philosophy to real-life matters. As dancers and artists, we are all indebted to her. 

________________

Nathaniel LaNasa

Similarly, we are indebted to Francesca Todesco for bringing Florent Schmitt’s music to vibrant life on the stage, augmenting the potential that Isadora Duncan saw in Reflets d’Allemagne by adding new choreography to encompass the entire set of eight waltzes — and in the process creating an integrated whole bridging more than a century’s time.

Isidora Vladic

For those who wish to view the inspired result, one of the June 2022 Dances We Dance performances in New York City was filmed and has been uploaded to YouTube.

Collaborative pianists Nathaniel LaNasa and Isidora Vladic supply the live music in dramatic playing that complements the Duncanesque dance movements in highly effective fashion.

“At the crossroads of dance, poetry and music”:  Les Apaches’ December 2021 live presentation at the Théâtre de l’Athénée in Paris was commercially recorded and has now been released on the b●records label.

La Tragédie de Salomé is French composer Florent Schmitt’s most famous work – and it has been so ever since it first appeared. And yet, the “big orchestra” version of the score that the world knows best is not the way the ballet was first presented.

A poster from 1907 featuring Loïe Fuller and her lead role in Florent Schmitt’s ballet La Tragédie de Salomé, premiered at the Théâtre des Arts in Paris.

Instead, the original version was scored for a small ensemble of only about twenty players – a concession to the severely limited space that was available in the orchestra pit of the Théâtre des Arts in Paris where the ballet was premiered in 1907 and enjoyed a run of more than 40 performances.

Another intriguing aspect of the original 1907 version of Schmitt’s La Tragédie de Salomé is that it contained twice the amount of music that made it into the  composer’s 1910 version, which that was first performed as a symphonic suite in 1911 and subsequently staged as a ballet in 1913, 1919 and beyond.

Florent Schmitt dedicated the 1910 revision of his ballet score La Tragédie de Salomé to Igor Stravinsky.

The 1910 version of the score, published by Durand as Schmitt’s Opus 50, carries a dedication to Igor Stravinsky, the Russian composer then living in Paris who was Schmitt’s close friend and a fellow-member of the Les Apaches.

Meanwhile, the nearly hour-long 1907 score remained in manuscript form for decades, coming to light only in the early 1990s when it was recorded by the Belgian conductor Patrick Davin leading the Rhineland-Pfalz Philharmonic and released on NAXOS’ Marco Polo label.

The 1992 Patrick Davin recording on Marco Polo was the first commercial release of the original version of La Tragédie de Salomé.

The Davin recording served to fill a gap in the Florent Schmitt discography, and in subsequent years the original version of the score has also been presented in concert a number of times – including in France (2002 and 2017), Switzerland (2008), Japan (2015 and 2021) and Germany (2021).

Théâtre de l’Athénée-Louis Jouvet, 9th arr., Paris (Photo: Arthur Weidmann, 2022)

And now, some 30 years after the Davin recording, we have an impressive new recording of the original version that has just been released on the b●records label.

Featuring the chamber-sized ensemble Les Apaches led by its director, Julien Masmondet, it is a beautifully realized recording taken from two live performances that were given at the Théâtre de l’Athénée-Louis Jouvet in Paris on December 10 and 11, 2021.

The Athénée performances were the culmination of a series of presentations of this piece by Les Apaches held in Rungis, Rochefort and Avignon prior to the ones done in Paris.

The program cover for the Les Apaches production led by Julien Masmondet at the Théâtre a l’Athénée in Paris (December 2021).

The b●records release (February 2023).

The handsomely-packaged new recording was officially unveiled at a roundtable presentation and reception held at the Grande-Fleuret Library in Paris on February 16, 2023 – an event that included commentary from Maestro Masmondet, generous audio excerpts from the new recording along with live musical contributions from pianist Philippe Hattat (playing on a 1907 Steinway grand) and flautist Marie Laforge.

The CD back cover, providing detailed music track information.

The new recording of the 1907 version of the score has been met with flattering press coverage – including receiving Diapason magazine’s prestigious Diapason d’Or award.

MusicWeb International‘s John Quinn summed up the success of the new recording as follows:

“This is an expert and fascinating exposition of the full version of Florent Schmitt’s ballet score. The performance is excellent; the playing is razor sharp, but also sensitive when the music calls for that approach. The performers have been well recorded in clear, immediate sound.”

And in a laudatory review of the new recording published by Crescendo magazine, music critic Jean Lacroix notes:

“The instrumentalists of Les Apaches and their musical director, Julien Masmondet, serve Schmitt’s score with the aim of giving each intervention the quality that suits it in terms of finesse and liveliness. They give new life to this writing which preceded the well-known [1910] symphonic suite.”

Expanding on this same point, a review published on the Europadisc website states:

“Even more obviously than in the symphonic suite, the visionary opulence of Schmitt’s work shines through. Indeed, it’s perhaps precisely because of the smaller performing forces that the work’s expansively exotic breadths seem so remarkable. And while the string section may be small (two players per part plus a single double bass), its combination with the mainly single-wind component creates tuttis that combine power with textural transparency … 

Conductor Julien Masmondet and Les Apaches present the original version of Florent Schmitt’s La Tragédie de Salomé in a mixed-media production (Rungis, Rochefort, Avignon, Paris, Nov.-Dec. 2021).

At times you have to pinch yourself to remember that this is a smaller-than-usual lineup, and the full-length ballet also sets in glorious context Schmitt’s generous nods to Debussy and Richard Strauss — as well as, in the work’s climactic dances, his anticipation of Stravinsky. Masmondet paces the extended score superbly well; you can tell that this recording took place after a series of live performances — such is the command of nuance and transitions. 

Anyone who thinks they already know Schmitt’s Tragédie de Salomé – and indeed anyone with the slightest interest in French music at the turn of the last century – needs to hear this disc as a matter of urgency. It brilliantly encapsulates the composer’s unique fusion of impressionist and modernist elements with both Gallic flair and Germanic discipline and rigor — and simply gets better and better on repeated listening.”

Lastly, writing at the Premiere Loge website, music critic Stéphane Lelièvre notes:

“While the Paris presentation of the opera Salome by [Richard] Strauss had just taken place at the Châtelet (May 8, 1907), Schmitt offered his vision of the biblical legend a few months later, on November 9^th, at the Théâtre des Arts in Paris.

The interior of the intimate Théâtre des Arts (now named Théâtre Hébertot), where the original version of Florent Schmitt’s ballet La Tragédie de Salomé was mounted in 1907.

Compared to the brilliance and tragedy of the Strauss operatic version, Schmitt presents his own personal language and dramatism – certainly rooted in the Debussyème movement so popular at the time but without ever giving way to sterile homage or, even worse,  plagiarism. Alternatively sensual, dark, refined, luminous and dramatic, his orchestra carries the drama and ensures the narration … the soprano singing only a long and magnificent vocalise, whose melismas imbued with mystery are superbly rendered by the fresh and sensual voice of Sandrine Buendia.”

Participants in the b●records CD release roundtable discussion (Paris, February 16, 2023). (Photo: Francis Gorgé)

I was unable to attend the February 16^th CD release roundtable and reception in Paris, but composer and arranger Francis Gorgé, a faithful reader of the Florent Schmitt Website + Blog, was present at the event and provided an eyewitness report of the proceedings along with photos. His report whetted my appetite to learn more about the artistic project and how it had all come together.

Julien Masmondet

Subsequently, I was able to get in touch with Julien Masmondet who generously shared more of those details with me. Highlights of our discussion are presented below. (Note: Maestro Masmondet’s remarks have been translated from French to English.)

PLN:  How did you first become acquainted with the composer Florent Schmitt, and with his ballet La Tragédie de Salomé in particular?

French naval officer and novelist Pierre Loti (1850-1923) — an endlessly fascinating personality who was the inspiration behind the creation of the annual Festival Musiques au Pays de Pierre Loti held in Pays Marennes-Oléron and Pays Rochefortais, France. The music festival was founded and led for 18 seasons by Julien Masmondet; in 2023 the festival welcomed a new director, Victor Sicard.

JUM:  I have been interested in early 20th century French music for a long time, and have been fascinated by the genius of Florent Schmitt and other less-performed French composers such as Charles Koechlin, Gabriel Pierné and Albert Roussel. I have programmed their works as part of the Festival Musiques au Pays de Pierre Loti that I founded and organized for 18 years in the southwest region of France, and I continue to advocate for this sort of French repertoire with my ensemble Les Apaches, alongside presenting new creations.

PLN:  What in particular drew you to Schmitt’s music?

JUM:  I consider Florent Schmitt to be one of the greatest orchestrators of the 20^th century. I’m very impressed by the different color palettes he uses in his works, as well as his remarkable harmonic and rhythmic audacity!

PLN:  Comparing the original 1907 version of the ballet with the composer’s 1910 revision, what qualities of the original version stand out as particularly noteworthy?

JUM:  In my opinion, it is in Schmitt’s original version from 1907 that it’s possible to revive the work in all its singularity and modernity. It had been created for a chamber-sized orchestra designed for the intimacy of the Théâtre des Arts, the place of its premiere, but had never been staged like that since. 

Jacques Rouché (1862-1957) got his start in arts managemet at the Théâtre des Arts (1910-13). His success there led to his being named director of the Paris Opéra — a position he would hold for more than 30 years until the end of World War II. (Photo: Agence de presse Meurisse)

I did important research work on the autograph manuscript of La Tragédie de Salomé plus other materials housed at the BNF and also at the library of the Paris Opéra Museum. Certain choreographic annotations on the manuscript, cross-checked against those of Jacques Rouché’s documents when the work was staged at the Paris Opéra, shed additional light on the creation of the work. 

Désiré Inghelbrecht (1880-1965), photographed in 1922 with his then-wife Carina Ari, a prominent dancer and choreographer who premiered another Florent Schmitt ballet — Danse d’Abisag — in 1925.

I also read the memoirs of Désiré-Emilie Inghelbrecht [the conductor at the 1907 premiere] and Loïe Fuller [who danced as Salomé in the prodection], which helped me confirm the number of musicians utilized as well as to understand the daring scenography and choreography created for the production. I think Florent Schmitt succeeded brilliantly in circumventing the constraints of the small pit that could accommodate few musicians, playing on the contrasts of timbres and obtaining an astonishing variety of sound effects from the reduced musical forces. 

Finally, the original version makes it possible to understand the dramaturgy of the work, and to follow the evolution of the protagonists and their interrelationships through the use of leitmotifs. Various scenes that aren’t included in the later 1910 version are of great beauty in the writing, helping us to understand better the psychology of the protagonists while building the tension in the work.

PLN:  Please tell us a little about the ensemble Les Apaches – how and when this musical group was founded, its mission, and so forth.

The “original” Les Apaches, pictured in Georges d’Espagnat’s painting from 1910. Florent Schmitt is at far left … Maurice Ravel on the right leaning on the piano. Among the other members pictured are Ricardo Viñes (seated at the piano) and Albert Roussel (standing to his left).

JUM:  I founded the ensemble Les Apaches in 2018 to promote fusion of the arts and create new forms of concerts. Like the revolutionary artists of the early 20th century who called themselves “Les Apaches” – in a Paris bubbling with artistic interactions and creativity where composers, dancers, poets and those in the decorative arts came together to invent a new world – my goal was to recreate this same kind of dynamic in the 21st century. 

Each concert of Les Apaches brings together a new creation from today coupled with a work from the repertoire of an earlier period in a multidisciplinary approach. I’m happy to undertake these projects that rediscover rarely performed works from the existing repertoire while also encouraging the writing of new works commissioned by the ensemble.

PLN:  What makes the original version of La Tragédie de Salomé a good repertoire choice for Les Apaches?

JUM:  This was one of the first works I wanted to program with the ensemble because it represents perfectly the “DNA” of Les Apaches. A headcount of around twenty musicians is currently the core of the group – a figure that aligns with Schmitt’s piece. The 1907 version relies on the contrasts of timbres and generates, using a minimal number of instruments, an exceptional variety of sound effects. Each of the musicians occupies a kind of “soloist” position within the course of the work, thereby increasing a feeling of responsibility on the part of each musician — a dynamic that I don’t think would be the same in performing the 1910 revised score. 

A multi-disciplinary production drawing on a team of creative talent …

But beyond that, “multi-disciplinarity” is at the heart of each of our projects, so we have also sought to rediscover the choreographic essence of the work. We have thus explored all the artistic cross-currents offered by La Tragédie de Salomé utilizing 21st century digital tools in order to best realize this intense, bewitching score, tinged as it is with sensuality and savagery. Video, dance and music form this hybrid creation, which is designed equally as a kind of symphonic poem that is danced and a symphony that can be seen.

The images illustrate the music from far or near and are a personal evocation — a visual poem — in an extension of Loïe Fuller’s revolutionary experimentation on the swirling of fabrics and the play of light.

Illinois-born Loïe Fuller (1862-1928) developed her unique choreographic style utilizing folds of draped fabrics and lighting effects. Gaining fame in Paris, in 1907 she premiered Florent Schmitt’s La Tragédie de Salomé at the Théâtre des Arts (now Théâtre Hébertot). Schmitt’s ballet was revised and revived in staged productions in Paris in 1912 (Trouhanova), 1913 (Karsavina), 1919 (Rubinstein) — and later still in the 1920s, 1940s and 1950s. The most recent mountings of the ballet — all employing the 1910 revised score — have been staged outside of France (in Germany, Italy and Russia).

PLN:  How did the program come together, including the inclusion of the new composition by Fabien Touchard on the topic of Loïe Fuller, who had danced the title role in the 1907 ballet production?

Royaumont Abbey, located 30 kms north of Paris, is a former Cistercian abbey built in the 13th century. In the early 1900s the abbey was acquired by the Goüin family, who in 1964 created the Royaumont Foundation, the first private French cultural foundation. Today the abbey is a popular tourist destination and also serves as an arts and cultural conference center and retreat.

JUM:  We undertook a concert tour of France in December 2021, culminating in two performances in Paris at the Théâtre de l’Athénée that were recorded for the b●records release. A few months before this we had organized a residency at the Abbaye de Royaumont. That session made it possible to bring together the entire artistic team in order to formulate the dramaturgy of the show plus plan the video creation, the scenographic approach, the choreographic creation and the score. 

Fabien Touchard

Following in the footsteps of Salomé portrayals created by Strauss, Pierné, Massenet, Schmitt and Mariotte, I also wanted to challenge a young French composer, Fabien Touchard, to write in his turn his own musical version of the legend of Salome. The Touchard commission aims to cast a new representation of this female figure who has inspired and fascinated artists over so many centuries. Composed in the form of an introductory diptych to Schmitt’s drama, the Touchard work presents an innovative new take on the legend.

PLN:  What has been the reaction of audiences to your program?

JUM:  Through its multimedia approach and the dramaturgy of the show, this program aimed to reach a wider audience beyond merely concert hall patrons by extending it to that of dance performances and plays. It turned out to be a successful bet because the program has been well-received by both the public and the press!

PLN:  How did the opportunity to record the Schmitt and Touchard scores come about with b●records?

The interior of the Théâtre de l’Athénée-Louis Jouvet, where Les Apaches’ live performances of Florent Schmitt’s 1907 original version of La Tragédie de Salomé were presented and recorded in December 1921. The current theatre building dates from the early 1990s. (Photo: Cyril Plante, March 2023)

JUM:  Prior to launching the project, I had discussed recording possibilities with Rémy Gassiat, general director for the label and Baptiste Chouquet, sound engineer and director of the classical collection — both of whom quickly became convinced that a recording of La Tragédie de Salomé in its original version would be important for rediscovering this composer and his consequential artistry.

Baptiste Chouquet

And it was only fitting to include the Touchard piece as well.  So we recorded the last two concerts of our tour at the Athénée in December 2021, followed by doing a few audio patches.

PLN:  What can you tell us about your own background in music, including your education and activities up to now?

JUM:  I started in classical music by playing percussion and piano. Then I turned to composition, orchestration and conducting. I came to realize that it was conducting that best suited my nature — the desire to work with others and to place collaboration at the heart of my activities.

The chamber ensemble Les Apaches, formed in 2018 by Julien Masmondet.

Following my studies at the École Normale de Musique in Paris, I began my career as a guest conductor and had the opportunity to conduct several prestigious ensembles in France and abroad. I was appointed to the Orchestre de Paris from 2011 to 2014 as assistant conductor to Paavo Järvi. In parallel with those activities and passionate about encounters and artistic exchanges, I founded the Festival Musiques au Pays de Pierre Loti in the southwest region of France, and later the ensemble Les Apaches in 2018.

PLN:  What is coming up for you – and Les Apaches — in 2023 and beyond?

JUM:  We hope that the success of the recording will enable us to undertake a new tour of La Tragédie de Salomé in France and abroad in the coming seasons.

The art of freerunning is expressing oneself in the environment. It is non-competitive continuous running through obstacles, in urban or natural areas. Freerunning originated in the U.K. in the early 2000s, and is related in some ways to Parkour, a French-origin urban-environment training discipline that utilizes movements to propel a person from one obstacle to the next (buildings, barriers, etc.).

As for our current activities, next month we are presenting our new Street Art program which combines musical creations from the 21st century with the practice of freerunning. The program encompasses the urban visions of three contemporary French composers and dialogues with the pioneer of minimalist music, Steve Reich, in combination with the participation of two famous French freerunners. 

Also, we are in the midst of preparing a new virtual reality project called Ça vous dérange ? [Do you mind?]. This project spurs from a new French law for the protection of the sensory heritage of the rural areas as enacted recently by the French Parliament. The legislation was in response to complaints against things like roosters crowing, the croaking of frogs, and other sounds of nature. 

In this project, we are creating an immersive device for musical creation around nature sounds that will be installed in cities and in the countryside. Our goal is to raise public awareness of musical creation by offering a journey to the heart of sound and the orchestra in an innovative manner in order to better “hear” the world around us.

PLN:  As we conclude, are there any additional observations you would like to share about Florent Schmitt and his artistic legacy?

JUM:  Just this: Thank you my dear Phillip for advocating for this great French composer with all the passion that you do!

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Julien Masmondet’s compliments are certainly appreciated … but the real praise belongs to musicians like him who continuously strive to make Florent Schmitt’s wealth of creation available to the public – both in the concert hall and on recordings. Music-lovers across the world are more than grateful!

For those who wish to purchase the new b●records release, it is available to purchase in physical or digital download formats from various online music vendors including Presto Music, Import CDs, Amazon France and others.

Jean-Joseph Émile Vuillermoz (1878-1960)

When Florent Schmitt died in August 1958 at the age of nearly 88 years, his fellow composer Henri Dutilleux penned this memorable epitaph:

“Florent Schmitt was the last of that great family to which Ravel, Dukas, and Roussel belonged. He remains one of them who, by a happy assimilation of German and Central European influences, recalled the French school to certain notions of grandeur.”

In the wake of Schmitt’s death, other composers, musicians and scholars weighed in with tributes of their own as well. Among them were insightful essays written by Schmitt’s biographers Yves Hucher and Madeleine Marceron as well as one by organist and music critic Bernard Gavoty. Those tributes have been translated from the original French into English and are published on the Florent Schmitt Website; you can view them here, here and here.

Another insightful essay was penned by Émile Vuillermoz, and it’s a particularly valuable one in that this musician, author and critic knew Florent Schmitt over a period of more than six decades – dating all the way back to the time when the two were fellow-students in Gabriel Fauré’s composition class at the Paris Conservatoire. This longstanding acquaintance and professional association between the two men gave Vuillermoz a special vantage point from which to assess not only the composer’s musical legacy, but also his personal characteristics.

This photo, taken in 1910 at a lecture sponsored by the Société musicale indépendante, shows Gabriel Fauré and Jean Roger-Ducasse at the piano. Émile Vuillermoz is pictured standing second from right. (Photo courtesy of Manuel Cornejo, Amis de Maurice Ravel.)

Antoine-Barthélémy Taudou (1846-1925)

With his multifaceted activities across various artistic fields, Émile Vuillermoz could be rightly characterized as a true “renaissance” person. Born in Lyon in 1878, he studied music (piano and organ) while pursuing law and literary studies in his home city. Eventually deciding to pursue a career in the arts, he entered the Paris Conservatoire, studying harmony with Antoine Taudou as well as composition with Fauré. Establishing consequential friendships with the important musicians of the day, Vuillermoz was a founding member of Les Apaches as well as the Société musicale indépendante – two organizations to which Florent Schmitt also belonged.

Beyond biographies:  A book on music authored by Émile Vuillermoz, published in 1949.

By this time, Vuillermoz had begun to focus his activities on writing about music rather than being a composer (he would eventually write books about Ravel, Fauré, Debussy and even Chopin). In 1911 he became the editor-in-chief of Revue musicale, the SMI’s official publication. He also served for a time as a ghostwriter for Henry Gauthier-Villars (aka “Willy”), a poet and author who is perhaps best-known for being the onetime husband of novelist Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette.

A comprehensive listing of Vuillermoz’s extensive writings — including books, newspaper and magazine articles — has been indexed and can be viewed here.

Vuillermoz was also instrumental in establishing the Grand Prix du Disque competition, an annual awards program recognizing classical music recordings of special merit. Later becoming part of the Académie Charles Cros, winning the coveted Grand Prix du Disque has long been considered among the highest achievements in the classical music recording industry.

The founding committee of the Grand Prix du Disque award competition, meeting in 1932. Pictured (l.-r.) are Louis Lumière, Gustave Charpentier, Maurice Yvain, Lucienne Breval, Maurice Emmanuel, Émile Vuillermoz and Dominique Sordet.

A wall poster featuring the 2019 Besançon International Competition for Young Conductors. Émile Vuillermoz founded the competition in 1951.

In another significant initiative, in the early 1950s Vuillermoz was one of the leading lights in founding the Besançon International Competition for Young Conductors — a program which continues to the present day (and for which Florent Schmitt had served as the chairperson of the jury at the first competition held in 1951).

Another aspect of Vuillermoz’s life is perhaps less known but equally significant – his involvement in the field of film. Indeed, Vuillermoz is considered the founder of film criticism in France, where he published many articles in various Parisian newspapers (sometimes under the pseudonym “Gabriel Darcy” or “Claude Bonvin”) as well as serving on the editorial board of L’Impartial Français. In 1924 he helped organize the earliest important exhibition on film, “L’Exposition de l’art dans le cinéma français,” at the Musée Galliera.

The official poster of the 4th annual Venice International Film Festival, held in August 1936.

With his film industry reputation firmly established, in 1936 Vuillermoz served as a member of the jury at the 4^th Venice International Film Festival — a precursor of the Cannes Film Festival, which would be established by Vuillermoz in coordination with French actor, writer and cinema historian René Jeanne shortly after the end of World War II.

Perhaps most surprisingly of all, in the years prior to the Second World War Vuillermoz was a designer of cinéphonies – short films illustrating musical works. Among these cinéphonies are films set to the music of Schubert, Albéniz, Fauré, Debussy, Ravel, Mompou and Karol Szymanowski. The example below, depicting Szymanowski’s’ La Fontaine d’Aréthuse and featuring the famed violinist Jacques Thibaud, is one of the best of these creations:

Among the various artistic projects undertaken by Émile Vuillermoz over many years, this recording from the 1950s stemmed from his work with the Jeunesses musicales de France. Introducing the various instruments of the orchestra to young listeners, Vuillermoz enlisted the talents of a veritable “Who’s Who” of France’s leading classical musicians of the time, as can be seen on the back cover of the LP jacket pictured. Note that Serge Baudo, later to become a well-known conductor in France, Switzerland and the Czech Republic, is listed here as a percussionist. (Click or tap on the image to view it larger.)

With a lifetime spent at the nexus of the musical and visual arts in Paris and in France, it’s little surprise that Émile Vuillermoz was able to describe the persona of Florent Schmitt and his contribution to French music so insightfully in an essay that was published in the pages of the September 29, 1958 issue of the Jeunesses Musicales publication Journal musical français a month after the death of the composer. Vuillermoz’s piece, titled “The True Face of Florent Schmitt,” depicts the composer with a poignancy that fully lives up to the article’s headline.

JoAnn Falletta

Commenting on Vuillermoz’s portrayal of the composer, the American conductor JoAnn Falletta states that it is “a frank and revealing portrait of Florent Schmitt, showing the complex nature of his personality — with an interesting mixture of confidence and strength, and the insecurities of a great artist.”

The Vuillermoz essay is reproduced in its entirety below. (For readers who do not know the French language, an English translation follows immediately below it.)

The Émile Vuillermoz tribute to Florent Schmitt appeared in the September 29, 1958 edition of Journal musical français. (Click or tap on the article to view it larger.)

The True Face of Florent Schmitt

By Emile Vuillermoz, Journal musical français, September 29, 1958

Carried away by the sudden onset of an illness that does not forgive, the robust Lorrainer passed away at the age of 87, without having suffered the effects of lengthy physical decline. Until the end he had retained not only all of his lucidity and his cerebral faculties, but also a healthy professional curiosity which seemed to suggest we could keep him in our affection for a long time yet.

Death took him from us during the summer holidays, but until the end of the Paris musical season at the start of summer, we could still encounter him in the corridors of the concert halls and music theaters where new works were being presented. And during intermission, with the spontaneity, sincerity and somewhat laconic demeanor that characterized him, he would sum up his impressions for us in one of those colorful and pithy formulas which enchanted his friends with their mischievous clairvoyance.

I can still hear him comment to me, without malice but with pinpoint accuracy of touch, about a great lyrical work disproportionately flattered by worldly snobbery: “I’ll tell you this: This subject wasn’t meant to be set to music — and so, the music didn’t materialize!”

Included in the original Vuillermoz essay shown above is a photo of Florent Schmitt taken at a meeting of the Jeunesses musicales de France. At that JMF event, held on February 20, 1957, the elderly composer was interviewed by Bernard Gavoty in front of a lively and engaged audience of young people. A portion of that interview has been preserved on audio and can be heard here, courtesy of YouTube.

His quips and his paradoxes, which often took on the character of a frontal assault, long ago had earned him the nickname the “Wild Boar of the Ardennes.” But if this imagery could, in a phrase, evoke his fierce independence of spirit and his way of rushing towards an obstacle instead of circumventing it, it was very badly suited to the sensitivity and the natural benevolence which constituted the basis of Schmitt’s character — and which he hid, out of modesty, under a brusque countenance.

But those who knew him well were never mistaken. Since the beginning of this century, which brought me the joy of being his fellow-student in the composition class of Gabriel Fauré, I had witnessed continual examples of the kind of sarcastic camouflage that he used to dissimulate the true feelings which inspired him. Having had him as a companion in the fight — in this heroic period when the battles of aesthetics still fascinated musicians, when we fought fiercely for Debussy, for Ravel, and where the students of Fauré founded, under the courageous presidency of their master, the famous Société Musicale Indépendante, the combative SMI which aimed to react against the overly dogmatic and hidebound tendencies of the disciples of d’Indy — I had the opportunity to observe his qualities of heart daily, his enthusiasms and his indignations.

A gathering of members of Les Apaches, pictured in Georges d’Espagnat’s painting of 1910. Florent Schmitt is standing at far left … Maurice Ravel is at the opposite end, leaning on the piano.

He was also one of the first members of the legendary tribe of “Les Apaches” which we had created to surround Ravel with protection — a sort of guard of honor which became indispensable in repelling the assaults that the official musicians and the ignorant public directed at this young genius. It was from those distant times forward that I had been struck by the curious complexity that tormented this valiant fighter.

The Bird of Storms

Florent Schmitt’s stay at the Villa Medici in Rome (1900-04) was notable for the amount of time he wasn’t there — instead traveling extensively on three continents.

Florent Schmitt represented, among the young creators of his generation, a force whose explosive power had something worrying about it. Consider that this young Prix de Rome winner had delivered from the Villa Medici the monumental “cathedral” of sound that was his Psalm XLVII — whereas the laureates of the Institute had accustomed us to standard prefabricated maisonettes whose architecture was infinitely more timid. From his first composition attempts he thus affirmed his instinctive feeling for nobility and grandeur which contrasted with the collective tendencies of his comrades in arms, at a time when the transformation of vocabulary, grammar and harmonic syntax inclined young artists towards refinement of writing — fine carvings and delicate quintessences.

There was something vaguely anachronistic in this “will to power” which gave [Schmitt] a feeling of being isolated in the history of the music of his time, and I am convinced that he suffered as a result of it.

Admittedly, in our effervescent circle he was surrounded by sincere admiration, and no one dreamed of seeing in him a musician too attached to the traditions and disciplines of the past. But it was he who felt, without admitting it, a kind of embarrassment in being so different from his comrades — the embarrassment of a man “big for his britches” who tries to conceal his tall stature — the embarrassment of the bird of the storms whose giant wings prevent him from walking. We sensed this in a thousand details — in his way of making fun of himself, in his sarcastic humor, in the choice of some of his subjects, in his penchant for the slightly absurd puns that he imposed as titles on his works so that we wouldn’t accuse him of taking himself too seriously.

The coat of arms of the Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tastevin (Fraternity of Knights of the Wine-Tasters Cup), an invitation-only confraternity of connoisseurs of Burgundian wines. Founded in 1934, since 1944 the Confrérie’s international headquarters has been located at Clos de Vougeot castle. Membership includes businesspeople, politicians, military leaders, athletes, scholars, artists and musicians. New inductees are admitted to the confraternity upon the following proclamation: “Par Noé, Père de la Vigne, Par Bacchus, Dieu du Vin, Par Saint-Vincent, Patron des Vignerons, Nous vous armons Chevalier du Tastevin.” (“Through Noah, Father of Vines, Bacchus, God of Wine, Saint-Vincent, Patron of Winemakers, we admit you as a Knight of the Tastevin.”) As shown in the photo that was part of the Vuillermoz essay displayed above, Florent Schmitt was inducted into the confraternity in the 1950s, joining an august body of fellow-chevaliers whose numbers have grown today to more than 12,000 men and women worldwide, thanks to local chapters operating in numerous countries — including 33 chapters and ~2,300 members in the United States alone.

The magnificent stability and the solid balance of his genius became his secret torment. He told me one day, with an irony that couldn’t mask some bitterness: “I am disgusted to write music in an era like ours: The score I am starting is already out of date when I finish it! ” He was very attentive to all the experiences of his fellow-composers and, more than once, was tempted to give them proof that he wasn’t “dated” and that he could, as equally well as they, exploit the latest fashionable techniques. And it is quite obvious that, for a composer with such mastery of the pen and such a prodigious wealth of writing, such modest performances were child’s play.

Some of his works bear the mark of this childish preoccupation. And we know that two or three times in his life, in the presence of this or that eccentricity of naive avant-garde artists who were soon destined to sink forever into their own deserved mediocrity, the author of La Tragédie de Salomé would provoke indignation by declaring, in a tone of deep conviction: “I would give everything I wrote to have found this measure!”

An “Athlete” of Modern Music

This bust of Émile Vuillermoz was sculpted by Carina Ari (1897-1970), the Swedish artist and dancer (born Maria Karina Viktoria Jansson) who, while married to the French conductor Désiré Inghelbrecht, danced a number of “orientalist” roles in Paris in the years following World War I, including Florent Schmitt’s Danse d’Abisag. Mme. Ari’s career eventually took her to Buenos Aires.

Until the end of his career, this magnificent athlete of modern music, who should have lived in the climate of certainty and serenity that his herculean strength could legitimately assure him, was, at bottom, a modest and insecure man. He was never sure of the value of what he wrote — and it is in this, perhaps, that he differed most profoundly from other composers of his time who were rarely tormented by such scruples. This heir to the noblest German Romantics — this creator who “dreamed big,” this passionate lyrical artist, this dazzling orchestrator, this painter of violently colored frescoes – every day experienced around him attempts to discredit everything he loved, instead exalting intellectualism and cerebral “systems” of writing while attempting to excommunicate sensitivity, human emotion, palpitation and tenderness.

Without undermining his splendid ideal, this daily repetition of obsessive axioms which aimed to condemn his art could and did, with good reason, trouble him. He was unaware not only of the eternal nature of his masterpieces but also their incorporation into what is most solid and most durable in the true French musical tradition of our century.

Florent Schmitt’s Symphony No. 2 was published posthumously by Durand, which brought out most of the composer’s creations over his long career. (Collection Palazzetto Bru Zane)

And nothing could be more moving than the fidelity with which, on the eve of his death, he paid homage to his convictions by leaving us the musical testament of his magnificent and youthful Symphony, which testifies to his unshakably solid faith in the musical values that he had always adhered to in his [Piano] Quintet, his [String] Trio and his [String] Quartet.

The enthusiastic welcome that Strasbourg gave, in his presence, to this swan song was his last artistic joy. For his admirers, it is a great consolation and comfort to have the memory of this triumph that was extended to this dying man, who knew he was condemned to death — to see rise towards him the sincere fervor of the entire crowd, happy to show that his supreme message had found its way to their hearts.

Florent Schmitt on the arm of music scholar and impresario Felix Aprahamian at the world premiere performance of Schmitt’s Symphony No. 2 in Strasbourg, France in June 1958. Also pictured are composer-critic Gustave Samazeuilh, pianist Frank Mannheimer and musicologist Marc Pincherle. Schmitt would pass away less than two months later.

The Invencia Piano Duo’s 4-CD series of Florent Schmitt’s music for piano duet and duo. (NAXOS Grand Piano, 2012-13)

Over the past decade or more, Florent Schmitt’s music written for solo and duo-pianists has appeared on commercial recordings with ever-increasing frequency. Among them are several premiere recordings of the composer’s scores for two piano players as offered up by the Invencia Piano Duo (released in 2012-13 on a series of four CDs on NAXOS’ Grand Piano label). More recently, a 2021 Grand Piano release of  Schmitt’s solo piano music, performed by Biljana Urban, contains important recording premieres as well.

But one set of solo piano pieces by Florent Schmitt – the Trois préludes, Op. 3, has yet to receive its first complete commercial recording. These charming miniatures were penned in the years 1891-95 by a composer who was in his early-to-mid twenties – and who was still some years away from winning the coveted Prix de Rome first prize for competition (finally achieved by Schmitt in 1900 on his fifth attempt).

A very dapper Florent Schmitt, photographed at about the time he won the Prix de Rome first prize for composition in 1900. The Trois préludes for piano were composed a few years earlier.

The reason for the neglect of Trois préludes is easy to fathom. As compositions created so early in Schmitt’s life, they can’t help but be less “original” works — and consequently more apt to be “derivative” of other composers and musical influences. Still, I’ve long wondered how these preludes might sound, coming as they did from the pen of a very young Florent Schmitt who was continually absorbing, processing and evolving as a result of those influences.

Now we have the answer to that question – and it comes not in the form of a commercial recording, but instead in a YouTube upload made by an amateur pianist from Japan who has posted more than 600 videos of often-unusual piano music created by composers from all over the world.

The pseudonymous “Fumecri Himecri” (“Page Turner”) has uploaded more than 600 of his piano performances to his YouTube channel.

This “mystery pianist” posts his uploads under the pseudonym “Fumecri Himecri”, which translates into English as “Page Turner.”

… And a “page turner” he most assuredly is, with some 600+ uploads to his name. As the pianist himself explains on his YouTube landing page:

“Welcome to my channel. Here I present many pieces for the piano. I’m flipping through sheet music every day, and it’s like inviting friends over to my studio and telling them, ‘Hey, I just found a cool piece – have a look and a listen!’

As such, the performances aren’t perfected through extensive practicing — but in any case I hope that you’ll enjoy discovering the music with me.” 

Florent Schmitt’s Trois préludes, collectively lasting about ten minutes in duration, are titled as follows:

1. Prélude triste (composed in 1891 … dedicated to Mme. Jean Ballon)
2. Obsession (composed in 1895 … dedicated to Mme. Henri de la Myre)
3. Chant des cygnes (composed in 1895 … dedicated to Cesare Galeotti)

Thanks to “Page Turner” — whose performance admittedly isn’t that of a professional pianist but is nonetheless worthy of hearing — we now have the opportunity to assess these very early piano pieces for clues as to where the young composer was headed in his artistic development. Helpfully, in the YouTube upload the score is displayed in tandem with the performance, adding further to our understanding and enjoyment of the music:

To my ears, moving through the set reveals music that becomes increasingly more original — and more difficult to play. Prélude triste, composed in 1891 in Nancy, is the most straightforward of the three pieces, employing multiple repetitions of the main theme that renders the music somewhat less engaging than the other preludes.

That being said, there are similarities between this prelude and the set of ten “preludes-nocturnes” published a year later under the title Soirs, Op. 5, about which Florent Schmitt’s student and first biographer, the composer Pierre-Octave Ferroud, would later write, “It sums up a whole [pre-war] period where there is no trouble for the morrow — when life is easy and eventless and happy.”

The two Cortot volumes on French piano music, combined into one deluxe hardback edition.

In his landmark writings on French piano music, Alfred Cortot describes Schmitt’s model for his “early romantic and emotive works” as follows:

“They are, for the most part, short improvisations with a single subject, leading via an expressive progression to a moment of suspension in which the phrase is brought to a standstill. Then, following a brief pause, a slower repeat of the theme serves as a conclusion.”  

… And it’s quite clear that Prélude triste fits this model perfectly.

A view of the center city section of Angoulème, where Florent Schmitt was staying when he composed the piano prelude Obsession in 1895.

In the second prelude, titled Obsession, the mood is more plaintive. Composed by Florent Schmitt in Angoulème in 1895, the piece was dedicated to Mme. Henri de la Myre, a prominent resident of that city. One is left to wonder what connection, if any, might have existed between the “obsessive” subject of the piece and the relationship of the composer to his dedicatee …

A 1914 map showing the center city section of Angoulème, a picturesque city located in the Nouvelle Aquitaine region of France between La Rochelle and Limoges. Florent Schmitt was staying in Angoulème when he composed his piano prelude Obsession in 1895, dedicating the piece to Mme. Henri de la Myre, a prominent resident of the town. Mme. de la Myre (née Marthe Machenaud Rhodius) would later face personal tragedy in the death of her husband (Henri Marie Pierre Gabriel de la Myre) at the age of just 34 in 1905, followed by the loss of her young son René in 1912.

Cesare Galeotti (1872-1929) was an Italian-born composer, conductor and concert pianist. He is best-known for two operas — Anton (premiered at La Scala in 1900) and Dorisse (premiered at La Monnaie in Brussels in 1910 with Parisian mezzo-soprano Claire Croiza in the starring role).

The third prelude, Chant des cygnes, was written by Florent Schmitt in Paris in 1895 and was dedicated to the Italian-born Parisian opera composer, conductor and pianist Cesare Galeotti. Regarding this prelude, written in 6/16 time, the observations of “Page Turner” are interesting in that he asserts that Schmitt employs a “strangely difficult multi-note polyrhythm.” That description sounds more like the musical style of Florent Schmitt that would soon come to the fore — and we also have notations from the composer himself about Chant des cygnes where he points out that “the left hand is most discreet, as if ignorant of what the right hand is playing.”

Considering these characterizations, it isn’t surprising that Chant des cygnes turns out to be the most difficult of the three preludes for pianists to play.

What have been the fortunes of these early piano pieces in the decades since they were written? One thing we know is that Florent Schmitt felt highly enough of them to exclude the preludes from a folio of juvenilia created before 1895 which the composer had clearly marked “never to be published.” (The four secular cantatas that make up Schmitt’s earlier attempts to win the Prix de Rome composition prize are among the manuscripts included in this folder.)

Instead, the firm of E. Baudoux & Cie. published the Trois Préludes in 1896, and the Op. 3 piano score was reissued a decade later by Rouart Lerolle & Cie. Much later on, Kalmus reprinted the score for the Préludes in 1992. Interestingly the original Baudoux edition contains a number of dynamic, tempo and expressive markings that don’t appear in later editions of the score.

The logo of the Société nationale de musique. Note the Latin motto adopted by the organization: “Ars Gallica.”

As for performances of the pieces, records show that the first public presentation of the set happened at a Société nationale de musique event in Paris in 1897, when the music was played by the composer himself.

Biljana Urban’s recording of solo piano music by Florent Schmitt contains five world premiere performances. (NAXOS Grand Piano label, 2021)

From thence forward, it’s fair to surmise that performances of the preludes have been few and far between, as they have tended to be overshadowed by Schmitt’s later piano music. To wit, only the first of the Op. 3 preludes was selected by pianist Biljana Urban for her 2021 recording, whereas she opted for other recording premieres in her Grand Piano release of solo piano works by Florent Schmitt.

But now that people have the ability to “see and hear” all of the Trois préludes at long last, it may turn out that this music does have a performance future. At the very least, these early preludes seem to be tailor-made for students and others with moderate piano playing capabilities. Give them a listen and see if you don’t agree.

Tomoki Sakata, photographed backstage following his performance of Florent Schmitt’s Symphonie concertante with the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Yan-Pascal Tortelier (February 14, 2023).

This past Valentine’s Day (February 14, 2023), the young Japanese pianist Tomoki Sakata presented Florent Schmitt’s complex, über-brilliant Symphonie concertante, Op. 82 with the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra under the direction of veteran French conductor Yan-Pascal Tortelier.

The concert marked the first time this music had been performed anywhere in the world since the release of Huseyin Sermet’s recording made in 1993;  it was also the Symphonie concertante‘s Japanese concert premiere.

According to eyewitness reports from the concert, the Symphonie concertante was given a superlative presentation. Mario Ishiguro, a French music devotee and faithful reader of the Florent Schmitt Website + Blog, traveled 500 kms to attend the concert, after which he wrote about the Schmitt performance as follows:

“The piece was composed in a time when Ravel was still alive, and it is part avant-garde but with traces of romanticism in sight. In essence, it’s music that doesn’t fit well into any category. The piano ‘dwells’ in the orchestra’s sound, unlike what we typically encounter in concertante music. 

Florent Schmitt, photographed at his home in St-Cloud in July 1937, five years following the composition of his Symphonie concertante. (Photo: ©Boris Lipnitzki/Roger-Viollet)

When listening to the Symphonie concertante the tension keeps rising, with the orchestra and piano combining the musical elements in complex ways. There are many sparks, too! To put it another way, each movement has its own defining characteristics, but the elements and tension that underlie the music are consistent from top to bottom, beginning to end. 

I vigorously applaud pianist Tomoki Sakata who lobbied to perform this piece, as well as the adventuresome spirit of the TMSO musicians and Maestro Tortelier. It must have taken much effort and hard work to make this fine performance a reality; clearly, the rehearsing paid off in a miraculous, multidimensional performance. Despite the work’s technical difficulties, the result was a solid monument comprised of the ‘trinity’ of the orchestra, the pianist and the conductor. 

At the end of this fierce and fiery interpretation, I can say without shame that my cheeks were blushed and my chest was pounding – almost as if overwhelmed with fever. And I was not the only one convulsed with such feelings – both in the audience and on the stage. We saw the Maestro warmly embracing Tomoki Sakata and also giving heartfelt congratulations to the orchestra players.”

Putting a flourish on the final measures of Florent Schmitt’s Symphonie concertante: Pianist Tomoki Sakata and the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra conducted by Yan-Pascal Tortelier (February 14, 2023).

The complexity of Schmitt’s piece is mirrored in the words of Maestro Tortelier, who shared these comments with me following the concert:

Yan-Pascal Tortelier

“That this performance happened is a happy coincidence between Tomoki Sakata’s strong desire to play the piece with the TMSO and my wish to conduct more of Florent Schmitt’s music in view of a future recording.

I must say that I prepared myself as never before, considering the challenge of the phenomenal Symphonie concertante, assimilating each note of this musical flurry slowly but surely over the past 18 months. By hearing gradually all the incredible material of the score in my head, eventually I found my way in shaping this demanding music. I am happy to say that the Schmitt performance yesterday evening met with huge success … “

The program for the Sakata/Tortelier/TMSO concert (February 14, 2023).

A classic Paul Badura-Skoda recording featuring concertante works by Franck, Scriabin and Rimsky-Korsakov, released by Westminster in 1951. Tomoki Sakata has followed a similar path in championing both familiar and lesser-known repertoire.

Considering the technical and interpretive challenges of the Symphonie concertante, the choice of Tomoki Sakata to play the demanding solo part made complete sense. A remarkable talent, the 30-year-old pianist trained in Japan, Germany and Austria, including  extended studies with the legendary Paul Badura-Skoda.

Tomoki Sakata pictured with his teacher, 86-year-old Paul Badura-Skoda. (2013 photo)

He holds prizes from a variety of prestigious piano competitions – among them the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition (2013), Franz Liszt International Piano Competition (2016), and the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels (2021).

Moreover, Mr. Sakata has long had a special fondness for French music – particularly the piano works of Fauré, Debussy, Ravel and Schmitt. As an example of his affinity with the French idiom, this YouTube upload of a live performance of “Scarbo” from Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit, dates from when the pianist was just 22 years old:

… And from the 2021 Queen Elisabeth Competition, here he is playing French contemporary composer Bruno Montavani‘s D’un jardin féérique with the Belgian National Orchestra under the direction of Hugh Wolff:

Sakata’s deep interest in French music goes further, too — extending to piano transcriptions he has prepared of French vocal works including mélodies by Fauré and Reynaldo Hahn. Here are two examples:

With COVID-era concert restrictions now behind us, Tomoki Sakata has undertaken a busy schedule of concertizing in Asia and Europe, presenting solo recitals as well as performing with orchestras and chamber ensembles. He keeps nearly 50 concertante works in his active repertoire — including 20 that he is performing this season alone.

Recently I had the opportunity to interview the pianist about his musical journey with Florent Schmitt and the Symphonie concertante. Highlights of our discussion, which was conducted in English, are presented below.

PLN:  How did you first become aware of Florent Schmitt and his music?

Tomoki Sakata’s introduction to the music of Florent Schmitt was via this recording of Hasards, released on the Valois label.

TS:  My first exposure to Florent Schmitt’s music was hearing a recording of his chamber piece Hasards.  I was fascinated by the exotic and delicate harmonies, along with the interesting mixture of complexity and a certain sense of power which, as it turns out, is quite unique to the music of Florent Schmitt.

After that, I was naturally interested in exploring more of his music. First, two famous big orchestral works (La Tragédie de Salomé and Psaume 47), and later some less-performed orchestral and chamber works (Ombres, Symphonie concertante, Saxophone Quartet, String Quartet, Piano Quintet, Sonate libre, Trois Rapsodies, Habeyssée and others).

PLN:  Schmitt was a fine pianist himself, and he composed many pieces for piano. Which ones have you performed?

TS:  Apart from the Symphonie concertante, the only piece I have performed several times in public is the first Valse Nocturne from Schmitt’s Opus 31.  But I have collected plenty of sheet music by Schmitt and I would like to perform more pieces in the future. One great example is Mirages, which is a perfect composition for recitals.

PLN:  How did the opportunity to perform the Symphonie concertante come about?

TS:  I had gotten to know the piece some years ago — back in 2017, I think — and I was definitely hoping to perform this gigantic masterpiece someday. Of course, initially I had no opportunity to realize my dream to perform the work, but eventually I proposed it to the orchestra and to Maestro Tortelier. Thanks to him, I was lucky to realize this rare opportunity this year.

A poster announcing the TMSO’s concert of all-French music, including Florent Schmitt’s Symphonie concertante.

PLN:  What kind of technical or interpretive challenges did the Symphonie concertante present to you when learning the piece?

TS:  To perform this work, it is essential to have a refined technique and a good understanding of the structure. The piano part is full of notes continuously — as is always the case in Schmitt’s piano music – and the rhythmic patterns change constantly.

I started learning the piece about a year before the concert — slowly at first. It is indeed a very challenging composition from any point of view, but I must say that when I got to the ecstatic climax of performing the piece on stage, I nearly forgot about all the technical difficulties!

PLN:  What was your experience working with Yan-Pascal Tortelier in rehearsing the music? How easy was it to blend your playing with that of the TMSO players during the rehearsals and in the concert?

Tomoki Sakata and Yan-Pascal Tortelier rehearse Florent Schmitt’s Symphonie concertante in advance of the February 14, 2023 TMSO concert in Tokyo.

TS:  Maestro Tortelier understands the composition so well, and this made the music-making smoother when preparing for the concert. Unlike in the Symphonie concertante of Karol Szymanowski, the piano solo part is often treated as an orchestral instrument. (Schmitt himself titled the piece «pour orchestre et piano» and not «pour piano et orchestre» !) So in some ways it was like playing a huge chamber work.

Broadly speaking, I think this music is so very different from other concertante works.

Tomoki Sakata notes that the score to Florent Schmitt’s Symphonie concertante is clearly marked “for orchestra and piano” instead of the other way around. Dedicated to Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the composer himself performed the challenging piano part at the world premiere in 1932 during his only visit to the United States.

At the very beginning of the rehearsals it was not so easy to play together with the orchestra, as all of the individual parts are technically and rhythmically demanding. But after intense rehearsing, on stage at the concert we were all able to concentrate solely on the music, and it became a very special performance. In the end, it was an enormous success and the audience went wild!

Tomoki Sakata and Yan-Pascal Tortelier gratefully acknowledge the accolades for their performance of Florent Schmitt’s Symphonie concertante with the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra (February 14, 2023).

PLN:  Your piano repertoire is quite varied, and within it you’ve focused in part on French music. What qualities do you appreciate in French piano music?

A Tomoki Sakata favorite French composer: Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924).

TS:  What I like most about French music is the rich harmony. Fauré, Debussy, Ravel — all the great French composers have their own harmonic language. I am particularly fond of the music of Fauré. The transparent beauty and meaningful harmony of his music always fascinate me. I particularly love his Requiem, the Nocturne No. 6 from Op. 63, and the Piano Quintet No. 2 from late in his life.

PLN:  Ever since winning in the Queen Elisabeth Piano Competition in 2021, you have been busy concertizing in Asia and Europe as a solo performer, with chamber musicians, and with orchestras. What are some of the biggest performing highlights for you?

TS:  I am very busy — this year I will be performing twenty different pieces with orchestra! Together with Maestro Tortelier and the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra, I performed the Symphonie concertante in February, and in March I performed four pieces by Liszt (his first and second piano concerti, Totentanz and Hungarian Fantasy) – all in one concert.

In September this year, I will be performing five concertante pieces by Rachmaninoff (the four piano concerti plus the Paganini Rhapsody) in a single concert celebrating the composer’s 150th birthday anniversary. And those are just a few of the big highlights.

Only commercial recording of the Symphonie concertante (so far) …

PLN:  Returning to Florent Schmitt’s Symphonie concertante, since the first commercial recording of this music made by Huseyïn Sermet more than 30 years ago, you are the only pianist in the world to put this piece into their repertoire.  What are the chances of playing it in more places, or possibly making a recording of this music?

TS:  I do not have any firm plans yet, but if there is ever a chance to play the piece in more concerts or to make a recording, I will be very happy to do so!

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Considering the artistic success and audience reception of Tomoki Sakata’s performance of Florent Schmitt’s Symphonie concertante in Tokyo, we hope that more opportunities will arise for him to present this consequential score to concert audiences around the world. Even better would be the chance for him to make a new recording of the piece – which would be only the second one ever.

Four compositions spanning Florent Schmitt’s seven-decade career as a composer are part of the 2023-24 symphony season. (Portrait: Pierrette Lambert, 1992)

For the upcoming 2023-24 concert season, the popularity of Florent Schmitt’s ballet La Tragédie de Salomé continues apace. Indeed, the composer’s best-known orchestral work has been been on an upward trajectory in popularity in the past decade — a trend that sees no sign of abating.

Gottfried Rabl

This coming season, not only will Salomé be  presented in the composer’s familiar 1910 reworking for large orchestra, Florent Schmitt’s original stage version written in 1907 for the American-born dancer Loïe Fuller will be presented at the Vienna Konzerthall by Ensemble Kontrapunkte under the direction of Austrian conductor Gottfried Rabl. Schmitt’s original ballet score contains nearly double the music of the version the world knows best, even as it was scored for an ensemble of just twenty musicians.

A poster from 1907 portraying Loïe Fuller and her lead role in Florent Schmitt’s ballet La Tragédie de Salomé, presented at the Théâtre des Arts (now Théâtre Hébertot) in Paris.

Also this season, three conductors who are  particular champions of Schmitt’s best-known orchestral work — Stéphane Denève, JoAnn Falletta and Fabien Gabel — will continue to advocate for Schmitt’s Salomé in concert performances in Europe and North America.

Belgian conductor Martijn Dendievel will direct the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra in Florent Schmitt’s early composition Soirs, a work originally written for piano and orchestrated by the composer shortly thereafter.

Beyond the Salomé, early works by Schmitt that are being programmed this season are Soirs and Musique sur l’eau, along with Schmitt’s late-career Suite en trois parties for trumpet and orchestra.

Thus, the upcoming concert season contains much to entice Schmittians around the world to make plans to attend the events. Listed below are details on the upcoming performances, including web links to additional information and to reserve tickets. (Note: More concerts are likely to be announced in the coming weeks, and this listing  will be updated accordingly.)

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September 18, 2023

Schmitt: Suite en trois parties Op. 133 (1955)

Jolivet: Concertino for Trumpet, Piano & Orchestra

Poulenc: Sinfonietta

Shostakovich: Piano Concerto No. 1 for Piano, Trumpet & String Orchestra

Orchestra della Svizzera italiana; Fabien Gabel, conductor

Håkan Hardenberger, trumpet

Bertrand Chamayou, piano

This commemorative medal of Florent Schmitt was created by Weysset and issued by the Monnaie de Paris at about the same time as the creation of Quatre monocantes.

In the latter part of his career as a composer, Florent Schmitt devoted a good portion of his energies to writing vocal music, both for solo voices and for chorus. These projects give him the opportunity to indulge his passion for writing for the human voice — a persistent trait we can see throughout his life beginning with his very first opus number (O Salutaris, composed in 1891). Moreover, it also enabled him to select poetic verses that inspired him  — particularly those created by contemporary writers.

The first page of Florent Schmitt’s Quatre monocantes score. The work was published by Durand in 1957, eight years following its composition.

The Quatre monocantes, Op. 115 is representative of this vocal music. In these four pieces, composed in 1949, Schmitt selected poetry from four different writers to create a set of pieces for voice and piano that are varied in their mood and color. The four numbers include:

I.    Prise aux réseaux d’or (Taken to Golden Nets)

II.  La Petite princesse (The Little Princess)

III.  Antennes (Antennas)

IV.  Le Cerisier (The Cherry Tree)

The poetry for Prise aux reseaux d’or was taken from a book of verses titled Les Crépuscules du matin (Morning Twilights) by the French-Colombian writer Hernando de Bengoechea, an artist whose life was tragically cut short during World War I. The symbolist poetry doesn’t translate easily from French; indeed, it’s nearly indecipherable even in its original language. Florent Schmitt’s music plays off of the mysterious meanings in weirdly unsettled sonorities.

Hernando de Bengoechea (1889-1915). The 26-year-old poet was one of numerous creative artists who became a casualty of World War I, being killed during the Artois offensive in May 1915. Born in Paris to Colombian parents, de Bengoechea had chosen to adopt Colombian citizenship, which made him a martyr in Colombia following his death. In 1948, a book of de Bengoechea’s poetry (pictured above) was published in a volume that  also contained a preface written by his friend and fellow-poet Léon-Paul Fargue. Florent Schmitt selected a verse from each men as part of his Quatre monocantes.

Marie Béronita is featured on this Azur CD featuring the 1949 premiere performance of Emile Goué’s Ballade on a Poem of Emily Brontë, conducted by Louis de Froment. The premiere happened three years after the premature death of Goué in 1946 at the age of just 42, shortly after being released from five years of German captivity as a prisoner of war during the Second World War.

This first piece in the set was dedicated to Marie Béronita, the soprano who introduced Quatre monocantes to Parisian audiences in 1950. A musician who was talented enough to perform at the Paris Opéra-Comique from 1942 onwards, Béronita is best-remembered today for her 1949 premiere performance of Émile Goué‘s Ballade on a Poem by Emily Brontë, a performance which has been released on CD and is currently in print. (In an ironic twist of fate, Goué was a casualty of war like Hernando de Bengoechea before him — but in Goué’s case it was the Second World War, during which the composer was held a prisoner-of-war by the Germans for five years, which destroyed his health and led to his premature death just a year after being freed.)

A gathering of artistic Paris at Florent Schmitt’s home in St-Cloud in about 1911 or 1912. Pictured with Schmitt’s family (at left) are Léon-Paul Fargue (center) and Maurice Ravel (far right). (Photo: Pierre Haour)

In the second number in the set, La Petite princesse, the verse chosen by Schmitt came from Tancrède, a volume of poetry authored by Léon-Paul Fargue and first published in 1911. Fargue was a longtime friend of Schmitt’s dating back well before World War I when the two men were fellow members of Les Apaches, the notorious anti-conformist group of artists, musicians and writers. (Another Fargue poem had been the inspiration for Schmitt’s hallucinatory orchestral piece Rêves, composed in 1915 in the midst of the First World War.)

In the verse for La Petite princesse, which is a beautifully rhyming poem in the original French, a young girl is alternatively enraptured by and afraid of her mysterious suitor, with the poem concluding, “He will pick flowers that die painlessly, and the little princess will be afraid.”

A page from the second of Florent Schmitt’s Quatre monocantes, set to verse by Léon-Paul Fargue.

Paul Landowski (1875-1961) (1932 photo)

Schmitt’s setting of La Petite princesse was dedicated to the French soprano Geneviève Moisant, who was active in opera and on the concert stage in Paris during the 1950s. Opinion appears to be divided about her vocal skills. A 1952 Le Monde newspaper review of her performance of Ravel’s Shéhérazade praises Moisant as singing “with as much intelligence and taste as vocal sureness.” On the other hand, the famed sculptor Paul Landowski (who was also the grandson of composer Henri Vieuxtemps and father of composer Marcel Landowski), wrote this less-than-flattering observation of Mlle. Moisant in his personal journal after seeing a February 1957 production of Gounod’s opera Faust:

“At the theatre, Faust with [Xavier] Depraz, an excellent Mephisto. I don’t like Geneviève Moisant — a voice with inexplicable sounds, akin to copper or zinc.”

The poetry for the third piece in Florent Schmitt’s set — Antennes — is intriguing in that the words were penned by Mireille Vincendon. Born Mireille Kramer in Cairo in 1910, she was the daughter of an Egyptian mother and a Russian father, and was educated in French schools. Upon her marriage to Jacques Vincendon, then-director of the Land Bank of Egypt, she divided her time between Egypt and France, eventually settling full-time in Paris in 1956. According to literary scholar Ferial Ghazoul, Vincendon’s poetry “revolves around existential concerns and the limits of language,” and her free verse is prone to contain violent metaphors.

The third of Florent Schmitt’s Quatre monocantes is set to verse by Mireille Vincendon, an Egyptian-born poet whose career was encouraged and supported by the composer.

Mireille Vincendon (1910-19??)

Vincendon, who began her literary activities in the 1940s, was encouraged early on by Florent Schmitt, for whom she would write poetry not only for Quatre monocantes, but also the fourth number (Enserée dans le port) of the set De vives voix, an a cappella work for female singers composed by Schmitt in 1955. The words to Antennes are nothing if not atmospheric:  “Unhurried white sails, vibrating waves, a world of memories …”

Reine Aubier, pictured at left in this 1947 promotional portrait of the Quatuor el-Tour vocal group. (Photo: Paul Koruna)

Florent Schmitt dedicated Antennes to Reine Aubier, a Belgian-born soprano whose actual name was Reine Duysburgh. During the late 1940s and early 1950s Aubier sang as part of the Quatuor el-Tour, a quartet of vocalists that also included Mireille Tournin, Raymonde Senecal and Isabelle Durtain.  Few other details are known about her career, which appears never to have blossomed into something substantial. (One can’t help but wonder if Schmitt might have been more enamored by her attractive physical attributes than by her vocal artistry …)

Maurice Carême (1899-1978)

For the final number in the set — Le Cerisier — Florent Schmitt selected a poem by Maurice Carême that appears in La Lanterne magique, a volume of children’s verses first published in 1947. A native of Walloon Brabant in Wavre, Belgium,  Carême wrote French-language poetry that is characterized by its simple writing style. In his early years he was a primary school teacher, but by 1943 Carême had become a full-time writer, in addition to translating the works of Dutch poets into French. He is perhaps best-remembered today as a writer of children’s poetry.

Maurice Carême, photographed in Metz, France in 1969.

The French composer Henri Sauguet once remarked that Maurice Carême “is and shall be the most musical poet who will ever live.” Many other composers would seem to agree with Sauguet’s claim, since — incredibly — over the decades more than 300 composers and singers have set over 2,700 of the poet’s texts to music.

Florent Schmitt was one of the composers who turned to the poet’s writings for inspireation multiple times. In addition to Le Cerisier, Schmitt set two other Carême poems to music — the second and third pieces in his Cinq refrains, Op. 132, a 1955 compositon for female voices (Chanson de route and L’Orphelin).

Unlike the almost fathomless nature of several of the poems set to music by Schmitt in Quatre monocantes, La Cerisier is much more straightforward. It is a fable in which a cherry tree begins to laugh “for no reason at all,” and its infectious laughter soon has birds and other creature laughing along. Soon the whole world is doing so, such that the laughter reaches the heavens where even God must hide his face while laughing, lest the angels and saints think that the deity has gone completely bonkers.

This plaque in Paris honors the artistry of Maurice Carême.

Florent Schmitt appears to have quite enjoyed creating Le Cerisier — so much so that he included it as the first number in his Cinq choeurs en vingt minutes, composed in 1951 as his Opus 117. It is exactly the same piece of music, except this time it was scored for four-part mixed chorus.

Second time around: Florent Schmitt created a choral version of Le Cerisier, the final number of Quatre monocantes, as the opening piece in his Cinq choeurs en vingt minutes, his Opus 117, in 1951.

Jean-Louis Petit, French composer, conductor and organist.

Unfortunately, neither version of Le Cerisier — nor the entire Monocantes set for that matter — has gained a foothold in the repertoire, which is a shame since it is certainly a creation of special merit. Moreover, I am not aware of any commercial recording that exists of the Monocantes, and live performances are rare as well. One that was broadcast over French Radio in 1986 featured Jean-Louis Petit leading soprano soloist Evelyne Razimovski and an ensemble of instrumentalists — part of an all-Schmitt chamber music concert from the Festival de Musique Française Ville d’Avray. (Other works by Schmitt presented at the same concert included the Sonatine en trio, the quartet Pour presque tous les temps, the Andantino [Vocalise] for clarinet and piano, and Lucioles from the early piano set Nuits romaines.)

Ville d’Avray is the site of the Festival de Musique Française de Ville d’Avray, founded in 1979 by Jean-Louis Petit. Located just four kilometers from Florent Schmitt’s longtime home in St-Cloud, the Villa was the venue for a presentation of the composer’s Quatre monocantes in June 1986 — a performance that was broadcast over French Radio.

Interestingly, the 1986 Ville d’Avray presentation of Quatre monocantes didn’t involve the usual piano along with the soprano soloist, but rather Florent Schmitt’s own chamber arrangement of the piece for flute, solo strings and harp that he prepared for the February 1950 premiere performance of the piece in Paris featuring soprano Marie Béronita and the Lily Laskine Quintet. As it turns out, Schmitt’s chamber music version adds wonderful additional elements of color, as can be heard in this upload of the Ville d’Avray performance presented in conjunction with the piano score, courtesy of Jean-Marie van Bronkhorst’s invaluable YouTube music channel:

Hopefully a first=ever commercial recording of this fascinating vocal composition will be made before long.

Jean de la Fontaine (1621-1695). The poet and author, best-known for penning nearly 250 fables, is considered one of France’s most prominent literary figures. He was elected to the Académie Française in 1683.

The French author and playwright Jean de la Fontaine is best-known for his fables, which are considered masterpieces of French literature. The fables of the ancient Greek author Aesop may be better known across the world, but La Fontaine deserves an equivalent place in the spotlight considering that he produced no fewer than 240 of his own stories that were published in twelve books between 1668 and 1694.

One similarity between the fables of Aesop and La Fontaine is the frequent use the animal kingdom to portray human traits in all of their manifestations — good, bad and ugly. Likewise, the fables of both authors were intended for adult readers as much as for children.

Where the two sets differ is in style — Jean de la Fontaine’s writing being more poetic whereas Aesop’s is more formal and straightforward. Related to this, “irony” is a particular characteristic in La Fontaine’s fables.

As befits La Fontaine’s noteworthy position in literature, it isn’t surprising that numerous composers have set his texts to music. Because the fables were written in the French language, musical treatments have been created mainly by French composers including Saint-Saëns, Offenbach, Gounod, Charles Lecocq, Théodore Dubois, Pauline Viardot, André Caplet, Maurice Delage, Marie-Madeleine Duruflé-Chevalier and Michel Bosc, among others.

Eighty-three year-old Florent Schmitt seated at the doorway of his study at his home in St-Cloud, France. This photograph dates from 1953, the same year that he composed Fables sans morales.  (Photo: ©Lipnitzki/Roger-Viollet)

Additionally, a number of non-French composers have also set La Fontaine fables to music, including Isaac Albéniz, Joseph Jongen, Paul Hindemith, Heitor Villa-Lobos and Dimitri Mitropoulos.

Florent Schmitt was yet another composer who was inspired by the fables of Jean de la Fontaine. In all, Schmitt set five of them to music — including four that make up his Fables sans morales, Op. 130, composed in 1953 for four-part a cappella chorus (or alternatively for four individual voices).

Jacques Chailley (1910-1999)

[The other La Fontaine fable set to music by Schmitt was Conseil tenu par les rats, Op. 123, a men’s choral setting composed several years earlier.]

This mid-1950s recording of Jacques Chailley’s Messe breve de angelis features L’Alauda, a choral group led by Chailley between 1946 and 1961. (Studio SM label)

Fables sans morales was written for the composer, director and musicologist Jacques Chailley to perform with his choral ensemble, L’Alauda — and it was this group that gave the premiere presentation of the piece in the early 1950s.

There has been some speculation as to why Florent Schmitt chose to title his composition “Fables Without a Moral,” because by definition a fable contains a “moral of the story.” But irrespective of Schmitt’s title, one can easily see that each story does have a particular point to make, as described below:

Gustave Doré’s 1880 illustration of the Jean de la Fontaine fable La Femme noyée.

I.   La Femme noyée (The Drowned Woman and her Husband): A man searches for his wife who has drowned in the river. Noticing that the husband is moving upstream in his search, people call out from the banks of the river, wondering why he isn’t searching downstream of the current.  He replies, “She was always a contrarian during her life – difficult, swimming against the ways of others — so why should she behave any differently now?”

The fable of Le Lion devenu vieux by Jean de la Fontaine, as illustrated by Charles Pinot in 1860.

II.   Le Lion devenu vieux (The Lion Grown Old): Confronting a decrepit lion in its old age, other animals – a horse, a bull and a wolf — now take their revenge for past attacks by kicking and biting him. But when those beasts are joined by an ass, the lion laments that suffering injury from such a base creature as a donkey is the worst insult of all — like enduring a second death.

III.  Parole de Socrate (The Word of Socrates):  The wise sage Socrates has a new house built for himself, but it fails to please the public’s taste. Some find the house’s plain interior unworthy of such a notable figure, while others note that the rooms are so small, people can barely turn around in them. How could Socrates possibly entertain his friends in such an inhospitable abode? He replies, “This is actually the perfect house, because it is just the right size for my true friends and me.” Indeed, while nothing may be more common than the word “friendship,” nothing is rarer than the real thing.

Jean de la Fontaine’s fable Parole de Socrate, as illustrated by Benjamin Rabier in 1906.

La Lice et sa compagne (Squatters), a fable by Jean de la Fontaine, as illustrated by Jean-Ignace Gérard Granville in 1840.

IV.  Squatters – La Lice et sa compagne (Squatters – The Bitch and her Brood): A breeder dog is lent a shelter to give birth to her puppies. The bitch successfully begs to remain at the shelter a little while longer, whereupon the puppies become grown and she and her brood, snarling and baring their teeth, refuse to relinquish their lodging. “What we give to the wicked we always regret. Give them an inch, and they’ll soon take a mile.”

Given his predilection for irony and the sarcastic remark, one can easily understand how Florent Schmitt would be attracted to these particular fables of Jean de la Fontaine — and this is also reflected in the musical treatments he gave to them. As Yves Hucher, Schmitt’s biographer, wrote in 1961:

“Florent Schmitt expresses the irony and humor of La Fontaine with a freedom, a sense of unequal meter, and a wit that the fabulist himself would have thoroughly enjoyed.”

The first page of the music score for Florent Schmitt’s Fables sans morales. Composed in 1953, the work was published by Durand the following year.

Jean-Paul Kreder

… Not that this makes for easy music-making on the part of the performers. Despite being notated on just four staffs, the vocal writing is exceedingly polytonal and polyrhythmic in character. Doubtless it creates numerous landmines for the singers, but the end-result is a composition that sounds incredibly rich and full-bodied.

To see and hear proof of this, a 1960 live performance of Fables sans morales, presented by the Chamber Choir of the ORTF under the direction of Jean-Paul Kreder, has been uploaded to YouTube along with the score, courtesy of George ‘Nick’ Gianopoulos’ excellent music channel:

The French musician René Alix (1907-1966),  pictured on the front cover of a 1949 issue of La Semaine radiophonique magazine. The René Alix Chorus was featured in many contemporary French compositions, in addition to performing the operatic canon. Alix was also a composer whose works included a piano concerto plus choral works, published by Herelle. He also authored the book Grammaire musicale, published by Durand in 1953.

Fables sans morales is quite the rarity; since its premiere performance in the early 1950s, the piece has failed to enter the repertoire in any meaningful way (nor has the work ever been commercially recorded).

Subsequent to the aforementioned 1960 Kreder/ORTF Chamber Choir performance, I am aware of just a handful of other outings for the piece in the ensuing decades. One is a 1963 performance by the René Alix Chorus that was broadcast over French Radio.

More recently, the Budapest-based ensemble Capella Silentium presented the piece in 2017 as part of an interesting and varied program of a cappella choral music that also included works by Hugo Distler and Sofia Gubaidulina.

The 2017 Capella Silentium program.

Founded in 2009 by its artistic director Tamás Várkonyi, the Capella Silentium ensemble focuses on performing “forgotten beauties” of the vocal literature, ranging from early renaissance music to the contemporary era. Its talented vocalists are drawn from the current and former student roster of the Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest.

To date, Capella Silentium has presented more than 200 choral works as part of carefully curated thematic programs. Florent Schmitt has been featured in several such programs; in addition to Fables sans morales, the ensemble has also performed Schmitt’s 1944 a cappella choral work A contre-voix.

Members of Capella Silentium, with music director Tamás Várkonyi standing at right. The ensemble has won awards in several international choral competitions (Rimini and Vienna).

As a representative example of Florent Schmitt’s late-career choral style, Fables sans morales certainly deserves more champions — and it’s also overdue for its first-ever commercial recording. Hopefully we won’t have to wait much longer for that to happen.

This bust of Manuel de Falla y Matheu (1876-1946) stands on the grounds of the composer’s final residence in Alta Gracia, Córdoba province, Argentina. (Photo: Javier Oviedo, August 2023)

Throughout nearly all of Florent Schmitt’s long career as a composer, he was at the heart of artistic life in Paris. Not only was he well-acquainted with all the notable French composers, writers and painters of the day, he was quick to make friends with numerous composers from foreign lands who  made the artistic pilgrimage to Paris in the early years of the twentieth century.

Igor Stravinsky and Florent Schmitt, photographed in about 1910.

Among the most notable of these musical expatriates were Frederick Delius, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Heitor Villa-Lobos,  Igor Stravinsky, Georges Enescu and Alfredo Casella.

To this musical “Who’s Who” we can also add Manuel de Falla, the Spanish-born composer who arrived in Paris in 1907, thanks to a grant from the Spanish government arranged for by the famed Spanish composer (and then-French resident) Isaac Albéniz.

A photograph of Manuel de Falla, taken in Paris during the time he was a resident there. The city was Falla’s home from 1907 until the outbreak of World War I in late 1914.

Paris is where Falla would live for the next seven years, departing only upon the outbreak of World War I. Those years were consequential ones for the young Spanish composer, who was 31 years old when he arrived in the city. Although Falla had already created a number of compositions prior to his move to Paris, only two of them were significant enough to have been published.

As it turned out, Falla’s time in Paris was one of tremendous artistic growth – a period during which he would develop his mature compositional style.

Unlike some of the more outgoing and gregarious “expat” composers living in Paris during those times – the aforementioned ones in particular – Falla was a more introverted character who was described in 1910 by the French music critic and impresario G. Jean-Aubry as “a nervous little man … at once resolute and thoughtful, eager and uncommunicative.”

This photograph of the Spanish pianist Ricardo Viñes (1875-1943) was inscribed to Manuel de Falla in 1913. As a fellow Spanish-born musician who was nearly the same age, Viñes was instrumental in introducing Falla to many Parisian composers, artists and writers in the years leading up to World War I. He also played the premiere performances of Falla’s Pièces espagnoles and Nocturnes (Nights in the Gardens of Spain). In addition to being a noted piano talent, Viñes was a respected teacher; among his best-known students were Marcelle Meyer, Joaquín Nin-Culmell and Francis Poulenc. (Photo: Archivo Manuel de Falla)

No matter, as it turned out. When introduced to artistic Paris by his fellow-countryman, the pianist Ricardo Viñes, it didn’t take long for Falla’s raw musical talent to be recognized. Any sort of awkward social shyness on the part of Falla mattered little.

From historical notes and correspondence as investigated by Christopher Guy Collins in preparation of his 2002 dissertation “Manuel de Falla and his European Contemporaries: Encounters, Relationships and Influences,” it appears that the young Spanish composer met both Maurice Ravel and Florent Schmitt within a few days of moving to the French capital — and those two composers would be among Falla’s closest professional acquaintances during his years in Paris.

Musicologist and conductor Christopher Guy Collins is director of the School of Languages, Literature, Music and Visual Culture at the University of Aberdeen. He is an authority on the life and work of Manuel de Falla.

Collins writes of the significance of these relationships as follows:

“Manuel de Falla was the only Spanish composer of his generation whose music was – and is – widely performance and admired outside his own country. The universal acceptance of his work is due in no small part to the cosmopolitan elements of his musical language – elements which developed as a result of his wide experience of music by contemporary composers of other nationalities.”

… And composers in Paris would prove to the most important of those outside influences.

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)

In the case of Maurice Ravel, one can easily understand the keen interest that Ravel took in his counterpart from Spain. The two composers were nearly the same age, born just a year apart, and Ravel’s heritage was Basque as well as French. Always partial to Spanish musical idioms, Ravel was already working on both Rapsodie espagnole and L’Heure espagnole at the time he met Falla.

As for Florent Schmitt, Ricardo Viñes’ diaries reveal that Falla was very partial to Schmitt’s piano compositions; Schmitt had inscribed to Falla several scores of his piano music, including the second book of Musiques intimes and Nuits romaines, both composed several years prior to Falla’s arrival in Paris.

Such a “deep dive” headfirst into the artistic milieu of Paris could well have been a little overwhelming to a naturally reticent personality such as Falla’s – but instead it seems to have brought out the best in him. In a 1907 letter he wrote to the Spanish painter Salvador Viniegra, the young composer excitedly described who he had already met since arriving in the city mere weeks before:

Isaac Albéniz (1864-1909) with Felipe Pedrell is considered the founder of the modern Spanish school of composition. Best-known for his piano music, Albéniz later branched into opera. From the 1890s onward he lived in London and France, where he encouraged younger Spanish musicians and assisted in funding their development. Albéniz’s untimely death at the age of just 48 — followed several years later by the tragic loss at sea of Enrique Granados during World War I — suddenly thrust younger Spanish composers like Manuel de Falla into the spotlight.

“The way they’ve received me here has been beyond my wildest dreams … I had Paul Dukas listen to my work … I’d never imagined the effect of doing so. Then the same thing happened to me with Albéniz, who’s very famous here; with Maurice Ravel; with Florent Schmitt; with Ricardo Viñes, our compatriot; with Nin; with [Dimitri] Calvocoressi, and with the librettist of Massenet’s Werther, who wants to premiere [La vida breve] here next season.”

Establishing such valuable contacts with the “up-and-comers” of musical Paris, it was only a matter of time before Falla would be inducted into the circle of artists that made up Les Apaches, the renegade group of composers, musicians, artists and literary figures representing every aspect of the avant garde in Paris in those days.

Les Apaches, pictured in Georges d’Espagnat’s painting of 1910 titled Réunion de musiciens chez les Godebski. Florent Schmitt stands at far left, Ricardo Viñes plays the piano, and Maurice Ravel is at far right. The painting is on exhibit at the Paris Opéra Library-Museum.

Georges d’Espagnat’s famous 1910 painting of a gathering at the home of Cipa Godebski may not show Falla in the company of his fellow Apaches Schmitt, Ravel, Roussel and others, but contemporaneous written accounts make it clear that he was present at many such gatherings during his years in Paris. Numerous Apache meetings were held at the home of Maurice Delage located in an industrial section on the outskirts of Paris – events that were fondly remembered by Falla years later.

G. Jean-Aubry (Jean-Frédéric-Émile Aubry), French music critic, author, impresario and translator (1882-1950). (Photo ca. 1916)

The untimely death of Isaac Albéniz in 1909 served as a catalyst that suddenly thrust Falla even further into the spotlight. As G. Jean-Aubry wrote in an article published in The Musical Times (London) on April 1, 1917:

“On October 30, 1910, the desire to pay pious homage to Albéniz having induced me to promote the first concert of modern Spanish music ever given in France, Falla came to accompany some of his own songs and play his Pièces espagnoles; and it was in the course of the following spring that I succeeded in bringing him to London. At that time we became fast friends, and the friendship brought me true relief from the loss of Albéniz and the great expectations for the modern Spanish School. 

At that time, Falla lived simply, unobtrusively, working unheeded, faithful to a few friends – for whom he was ever-ready to cross the whole of Paris to meet them at a station, or so see them off if they merely came through.”

The 362nd concert of the Société nationale de musique featured the premiere performance of Manuel de Falla’s Pièces espagnoles, played by  pianist Ricardo Viñes. Florent Schmitt’s monumental Piano Quintet (1902-08) was also on the program. The concert was held at the Salle Érard on March 27, 1909.

As for the music of the composers that Falla encountered during his years in Paris, the scores were all new to him; no pre-1908 concert programs housed at the Falla Archive include pieces by any of them, and none of the scores by these composers in Falla’s personal music library appear to have been obtained before that date. But once ensconced in Paris, Falla was quick to soak up all that he could in terms of the creative output of his contemporaries.

Judging from the evidence (programs from concerts attended by Falla as well as references in his own correspondence), between 1908 and 1914 he experienced concert or theatre performances of at least nine pieces by Ravel, six by Schmitt, two by Delage, and one each by Séverac, Roussel, Inghelbrecht, Caplet and Ladmirault … and there are likely many more beyond these.

[The Florent Schmitt compositions we know that Falla saw performed included Soirs, Chansons à quatre voix, Psaume XLVII, La Tragédie de Salomé, Une semaine du petit-elfe Ferme-l’oeil and the Piano Quintet.]

Florent Schmitt as a French soldier during World War I. Garrisoned at Toul (where he served alongside the noted harp player Carlos Salzedo), Schmitt would later refer to his service as “two less-than-amusing years of militarism.”

Falla’s seven-year sojourn in Paris would come to an abrupt end with the outbreak of World War I. As most of his Parisian friends departed for the front lines – including Schmitt to the garrison at Toul and Ravel to work as an ambulance driver – Falla bid a fond adieu and returned to Spain. While he would travel to Paris on various occasions during the 1920s and 1930s, it was never for more than a few days or weeks at a time.

But Falla took his passion for contemporary French music with him back to his home country. As G. Jean-Aubry has written:

“He was one of the first to spread in Spain a curiosity and taste for modern French music, including in his concerts the latest French musical productions.”

A vintage copy of the score to Florent Schmitt’s Quatre lieds, set to the words of poets Jean Richepin, Catulle Blée and Maurice Maeterlinck. Composed in 1913, the music was published by S. Chapelier (Editions Philippo).

For instance, during the war years Falla accompanied French mélodies on the piano — among them selections from Schmitt’s Quatre lieds, composed in 1913 as well as Demande from 1901 – and also presented a range of French music for solo piano in recital, including selections from Schmitt’s Musiques intimes (dating from 1904) and Nuits romaines (from 1901).

The décor for the Paris Opéra-Comique’s production of Manuel de Falla’s La vida breve, mounted in January 1914. This image appeared in the February 1914 issue of Musica magazine.

It was a two-way street; Paris was hospitable to Falla’s musical output as well. Indeed, Falla had scored a coup with the successful staging of his La vida breve in 1914 — first in Nice and later at the Opéra-Comique in Paris. In this and in three significant works that he would complete shortly after his return to Spain — El amor brujo, Nights in the Gardens of Spain (originally titled Nocturnes) for piano and orchestra, and the ballet The Three-Cornered Hat (originally titled The Magistrate and the Miller’s Wife) — Falla demonstrated how he could successfully incorporate musical influences absorbed during his time in Paris, even as he developed his own personal style that was true to the Spanish idiom.

The inside front cover page of Manuel de Falla’s score to La vida breve, inscribed by the composer. While several earlier works of Falla were published by Durand, Eschig would become the composer’s main publisher from 1913 onwards.

One could say that what Falla gleaned most from French influences was an admirable sense of proportion and the absence of superfluous phrases — along with qualities of orchestration that reveal themselves to maximum effect via a minimum of means. Christopher Collins states as much in the conclusion of his dissertation, writing about these French influences:

“The greatest significance that the work of these composers held for Falla was not so much that he was influenced by it, but rather that he identified with it … “

Collins goes on to summarize Falla’s feelings about Florent Schmitt’s music as follows:

“In Falla’s 1916 article Introducion a la música nueva, Schmitt is grouped with none other than Dukas, and the work of both is described as ‘admirable.’ 

In another article written the same year, there is a hint that his admiration withstood their significant aesthetic differences:  ‘How can we forget Florent Schmitt, who by the force of his wild will drew the unanimous admiration of spirits separated from him by the most opposed tendencies?’”

During World War I and in the years following, Falla would keep up a regular correspondence with his Parisian friends — particularly his fellow-Apaches. Letters and postcards that survive include those to and from Ravel, Schmitt, Roussel, Émile Vuillermoz and the Godebski family, among others.

This photograph of Manuel de Falla (l.) with dancer and choreographer Leonide Massine was taken at the Alhambra in Granada, Spain in 1917. At the time, Massine was working with Falla on the creation of the ballet The Magistrate and the Miller’s Wife (The Three-Cornered Hat) which would be premiered later in the year by the Ballet Russes in London, followed by Paris. The production also featured sets and costumes by Pablo Picasso.

In his correspondence with Falla, Schmitt reveals his keen interest in Falla’s recent works including El amor brujo and the Nocturnes, the latter of which received its Paris premiere in January 1920. Schmitt may have attended the Ballets Russes London premiere of The Three-Cornered Hat and definitely attended several additional performances of the ballet during its second run in Paris (Diaghilev’s company had commissioned the work). In a witty exchange that’s quite typical of Florent Schmitt, the composer wrote of Falla’s new address after his move to Granada, “Are you now the curator of the Alhambra?”

This poster announcing the Ballet Russes’ 1919-20 premiere production of Manuel de Falla’a ballet The Three-Cornered Hat features costume designs created by Pablo Picasso.

From the surviving correspondence we can deduce that Schmitt and Falla visited each other during Falla’s visits to Paris in 1920, 1923, 1930 and 1931 at least. Moreover, the correspondence between the two men was characterized by a personal familiarity that was rare for Falla. As Collins notes:

“[A June 19, 1923 letter is] the first of several in which Schmitt addresses Falla by [his] first name (a custom which is extremely rare in Falla’s correspondence, and, as far as the Apaches are concerned, unique to Schmitt); Falla returned the courtesy in his next two letters.”

This biography of Manuel de Falla, authored in 1930 by Alexis Roland-Manuel, was the first biography of the composer written in the French language.

The final batch of surviving correspondence between the two composers dates from 1931, and concerns Falla’s request for Schmitt to be his patron for Falla’s nomination to become an associate member of the Société des auteurs, compositeurs et éditeurs de musique (SACEM). Regarding this request, Collins writes:

“It is not certain why Falla chose Schmitt (above his many other Parisian acquaintances) to perform this duty: the most eminent French composer among his friends was certainly Ravel (though Schmitt probably held second place) … [one] possibility is that Falla encountered Schmitt – but not Ravel – during his stay in Paris in May-June 1930, and so felt more inclined toward the former when it came to asking favors … a further possibility is that Falla was simply closer to Schmitt than to Ravel … ”

Manuel de Falla (early 1920s photo)

Falla would consider Granada his home city from 1921 to 1939, while also visiting Barcelona and the Catalan province frequently. Those experiences provided further inspiration and influences on the composer, but we can also see that Falla became noticeably less productive after his initial postwar flurry of creative activity. (In fact, the composer’s last work, the large-scale orchestral cantata L’Atlántida, was left unfinished at the time of his death and was completed posthumously by Ernesto Halffter.)

Wanda Landowska (1879-1959), photographed at the harpsichord in 1937.

This isn’t to suggest that Falla’s output ceased completely, as happened with Jean Sibelius in the decades before the Finnish composer’s death. Several notable works by Falla from the 1920s include El retablo de maese Petro (Master Peter’s Puppet Show) as well as the Harpsichord Concerto, written for the Polish-born, Paris-based harpsichordist Wanda Landowska. Additionally, his suite Homenajes (Tributes) was premiered in Buenos Aires in 1939. But there was little other new material that came from the composer’s pen.

A November 1926 poster announcing a concert in Barcelona, featuring the music of Manuel de Falla. Note the star-studded roster of musicians including Pablo Casals and Wanda Landowska.

What caused this diminution in Falla’s creative output? Several things, probably. For one, Falla created a relatively few number of compositions overall — and in this regard he could be compared to French composers like Ravel, Chausson and Dukas, who also left us a body of work that was small in number but (nearly) all of very fine quality. By nature an introverted person who never chose to marry, Falla thrived best in the camaraderie of the fellow-composers he trusted — and who in turn respected him. It was the sort of support mechanism that nurtured him in Paris, but that eluded him following his return to Spain.

A page from Manuel de Falla’s manuscript for Homenajes (Tributes), his last orchestral work. Premiered in Buenos Aires in 1939, each of the suite’s four movements honored a composer that Falla held in high esteem: Enrique Fernández Arbós, Achille-Claude Debussy, Paul Dukas and Felipe Pedrell. (Image: Archivo Manuel de Falla)

Moreover, the tribulations of the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 were deeply felt by the composer. Initially he supported the proclamation of the Spanish Republic in 1931, but the desecration and burning of churches that followed was deeply offensive to him, and he responded by becoming ever-more reclusive. He had always maintained a wish to “remain far above the workings of politics,” which meant choosing to align with neither the Republicans nor with the Nationalist (Franco) forces.

Michael Christoforidis is professor of Musicology at the University of Melbourne (Australia). An expert on 19th and 20th century Spanish music and dance, he is the author of the book Manuel de Falla and Visions of Spanish Music, published by Routledge in 2017.

In the words of musicologist and Falla specialist Michael Christoforidis:

“There is little doubt that the imminent threat of another European war, and a desire to avoid being identified as a cultural-political emblem by the Franco regime, were key factors in Falla’s decision to travel to Buenos Aires in 1939 for a series of concerts.”

… And Argentina is where he elected to stay in the event, rather than return to Spain.

One of several concerts that Manuel de Falla conducted at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires in 1939. The composer never returned to Europe, spending the remaining years of his life in Argentina.

Maria del Carmen de Falla (1882-1971), pictured with her brother, Manuel de Falla. She cared for the composer in Argentina during his final illness. (Photo: Archivo de Manuel de Falla)

Argentina was even more of a remote artistic outpost than Spain had been. Falla devoted some time to teaching in Buenos Aires during his self-imposed exile, but his health began to decline precipitously in the 1940s, necessitating a final move to a dwelling in the province of Córdoba, a higher-elevation region of the country. Tended to by his devoted sister María del Carmen de Falla, the composer died of cardiac arrest at his home in Alta Garcia in November 1946.

This plaque has been placed on Manuel de Falla’s final residence in Alta Gracia, in Córdoba province (Argentina). (Photo: Javier Oviedo, August 1923)

Falla passed away thousands of miles from his homeland — as well as from Paris, his “second home” where he had spent many years soaking up the heady atmospherics that were so emblematic of France’s “Golden Age” of music. Undoubtedly, Paris was good for Manuel de Falla – and music-lovers everywhere have been the beneficiaries in turn.

This dwelling in Alta Garcia, Córdoba province (Argentina) was the last residence of Manuel de Falla. Deteriorating health necessitated a move from Buenos Aires to a more hospitable region of the country, several years after Falla’s 1939 self-imposed exile following Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s accession to power in Spain. Today a museum honoring the composer and his artistic legacy, the site attracts visitors from South America and beyond. (Photo: Javier Oviedo, August 2023)

The artist’s daughter, stage, screen and TV actress Élisabeth Margoni-Beneyton, rediscovered the portrait and presented it to pianist Claudio Chaiquin in recognition of his commitment to recording the music of Florent Schmitt.

Denise Margoni’s sketch portrait of Florent Schmitt was drawn four days following his death in August 1958. (Image: Courtesy Claudio Chaiquin)

One of the most fulfilling aspects of creating content for the Florent Schmitt Website + Blog is coming across historical artifacts that add human interest elements to the story of the composer and his artistry.

A poster announcing Claudio Chaiquin’s piano recital in Lanloup, France, held on August 26, 2023.

And as the website continues to grow in content and visibility, such discoveries have come to light with greater frequency.

Another such occurrence happened recently at a recital of music presented by the Argentine-French pianist Claudio Chaiquin at Église Saint-Loup in Lanloup, France.

Chaiquin’s repertoire for the Lanloup recital was emblematic of this pianist, consisting of less-familiar fare rather than a program of “audience favorites.”

“Rare and well-done”: The repertoire presented at Claudio Chaiquin’s piano recital in Lanloup, France (August 26, 2023).

The NAXOS recording of violin/piano compositions by Florent Schmitt, performed by Beata Halska and Claudio Chaiquin (2015).

In fact, exploring the byways of classical music is one of Chaiquin’s special missions as a pianist – and an interest that led him to team up with Polish-born French violinist Beata Halska to record a CD of music by Florent Schmitt written for violin and piano.

Released in 2015 on the NAXOS label, the Halska/Chaiquin recording has received critical accolades. I had the opportunity to interview both musicians for an article that was published on the Florent Schmitt Website in December 2015. You can read that informative interview here.

A publicity photo of Élisabeth Margoni-Beneyton, inscribed by the actress.

At the conclusion of Chaiquin’s August 26 recital in Lanloup, he was approached by an audience member with a gift to present to him. She was the French actress Élisabeth Margoni-Beneyton, and the gift was a sketch of Florent Schmitt that had been drawn by her mother, Denise Margoni, several days following the death of the composer on August 17, 1958.

Alain André Armand Margoni, photographed with his sister Élisabeth in front of the Conservatoire National Supérieur d’Art Dramatique on the day of his Prix de Rome (Second Prize for composition) awards ceremony in 1958. He would go on to win the First Prize in 1959, while Élisabeth would win two drama prizes at the same venue in 1968 and 1969 before launching her career as a stage, screen and TV actress. (Photo: Courtesy Élisabeth Margoni-Beneyton)

Furthermore, Élisabeth Margoni-Beneyton happens to be the younger sister of Alain Margoni, the French composer, author and Paris Conservatoire teacher who knew Florent Schmitt well as a student in the 1950s. In fact, Schmitt was something of a mentor to the younger musician, encouraging him in his composition studies with Tony Aubin and Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire – activities that led up to Alain Margoni winning the Prix de Rome first prize for composition in 1959 with his secular cantata Dans les jardins d’Armide.

As one of the few musicians still alive who worked with Florent Schmitt, Alain Margoni’s reminiscences of the composer make for fascinating reading. They are contained in this June 20, 2016 interview article (prepared with the help of French conductor Fabien Gabel, who had once been a student of Margoni at the Paris Conservatoire).

During his student days, Alain Margoni and Florent Schmitt met often at the composer’s home in St-Cloud in the 1950s, and it was there that Élisabeth Margoni- Beneyton came to know the aged composer as well.

Alain and Élisabeth Margoni, photographed in St-Cloud in about 1953. (Image: Courtesy Élisabeth Margoni-Beneyton)

Born eleven years after her brother, Élisabeth Margoni was a young child at the time, but her memories of Florent Schmitt are vivid. She recalls him as a man short in stature, but with a distinguished appearance with his white hair and beard — and a sharp mind as well. She remembers him as kind person who would always ask her brother to bring her along on his visits to Schmitt’s home and gardens in St-Cloud. It is a precious memory for her.

As for how Florent Schmitt came to become acquainted with the Margoni family, Elisabeth Margoni-Beneyton recounts:

The Margoni family’s parish church in St-Cloud (Église Notre Dame des airs – Val d’Or).

“We moved to St-Cloud in 1950 in order to be closer to the capital, my brother having entered the Paris Conservatoire. In addition to being an artist, my mother sang in the choir of Val d’Or, a district in the city of St-Cloud, which was also our parish church. There she met Mme. Helleu, a daughter of the painter of the same name [Paul César Helleu] and a granddaughter of Charles Gounod. Mme. Helleu knew Florent Schmitt well, living just 200 meters from his house, and I think it was she who put us in touch with him. 

This portrait of Alain Margoni, age 20, was painted by Denise Margoni in 1954.

We lived a little further away — around 600 meters [0.4 miles] — and I recall accessing Florent Schmitt’s house via a stone stairway. I remember him very well because he impressed me! He had a rather severe and rigid demeanor, but he must have been amused by me because he’d say to my brother, ‘Next time, come back with your little sister!’ I was very happy to visit and to play in the garden.”

Florent Schmitt’s longtime home on Rue du Calvaire in St-Cloud, where young Élisabeth Margoni played in the garden.

Florent Schmitt seated at the entrance to his study. (Photo: ©Boris Lipnitzki/Roger Viollet, 1953)

Parallel to this period of time, in 1954 the American music scholar and author David Ewen penned this description of Schmitt, who at that point had been a widower for a decade:

“Florent Schmitt spends winters in Paris at the home of Mme. Frédéric Moreau, who guards him jealously from the distractions and annoyances of the outside world. In summers he occupies his own house in St-Cloud. His diversions, today as yesterday, include travel, long walks, attending five o’clock teas of friends, and going to the theatre and movies. He possesses extraordinary vitality and has magically retained his enthusiasms. His conversation is usually spiced with cynical humor.”

Denise Hélène Montillier Margoni (1911-1987)

And what of the portrait of Florent Schmitt and how it came about? In addition to Denise Margoni possessing a fine singing voice (Élisabeth Margoni-Beneyton recalls her mother singing at Florent Schmitt’s home – although she cannot remember the music performed), she was also an accomplished painter who had earlier worked in the decorative arts (including fabric and wallpaper designs).

Her artwork drew inspiration from some of the most notable attributes of the French school of painting, and as such her oeuvre has stood the test of time well.

Denise Margoni stands next to one of her paintings. (circa 1960 photo)

Her paintings are prized by collectors not only in France but all over the world – and particularly in Japan where the artist’s reputation was established early on.

A Denise Margoni wallpaper design from early in her career.

Denise Margoni’s initial focus on fabric and wallpaper designs stemmed from her studies at the École Supérieure des Arts Appliqués Duperré, along with later work at the studio of the famed poster artist and theatre set designer Paul Colin. She collaborated on designing the décor for the Dutch East Indies pavilion at the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition, working with the noted French art director Raymond Gabutti.

A Denise Margoni fabric design for a tablecloth (1960).

Denise Margoni was also credited with inventing a technique of painting-on-silk via direct application on a waxed (oilcloth) canvas without “setting,” which conferred more freedom from the “stiffness” of traditional drawings.

Nature morte aux bouteilles: A Denise Margoni still-life painting.

It was in the 1950s that Denise Margoni’s stature as a painter began to grow, leading to exhibitions of her artwork in Parisian galleries and in other French cities. She was represented by Galerie Kriegel in Paris, as well as Galerie Taménaga in Paris and in Japan.

Hommage à Matisse: A painting by Denise Margoni.

For the next thirty years her art would depict an increasingly personal expression and style. Selectively integrating a range of outside influences, her paintings evolved into a “non-realistic pictorial” form — in essence a synthesis of the figurative and the abstract.

La Cueillette: A Denise Margoni landscape painting.

Extended stays at Côtes d’Armor at the abbey of Beauport (Paimpol) and later in Charente Maritime provided rich inspiration. Her later paintings — particularly those of seascapes and shorelines — became increasingly more meditative and refined in character.

Denise Margoni’s sketch of Florent Schmitt was signed and dated August 21, 1958, meaning that it was created just four days following the composer’s death. As in her paintings, in this sketch the artist is true to her philosophy of attaining a synthesis of the figurative and the abstract.

Florent Schmitt, photographed in 1957. Denise Margoni’s posthumous sketch portrait the following year would reveal more of the composer’s true personality. (Photo: René Pari)

In Margoni’s Florent Schmitt portrait, one can really sense the personality of the man; we can see it in the quizzical expression on the face, the irony of an upturned lip, and in the sarcasm of an arched eyebrow. Clearly, these are clues to the true character of the man — attributes that were often noted by his acquaintances, not least in descriptions penned by music journalists such as Bernard Gavoty, Émile Vuillermoz and René Dumesnil.

As the familiar adage asserts, “A picture is worth a thousand words” … and Denise Margoni’s portrait sketch proves that rule yet again.

Denise Margoni’s portrait painting of Florent Schmitt (1952). (Image: Courtesy Élisabeth Margoni-Beneyton)

[In addition, there is a portrait painting of Florent Schmitt that was created by Denis Margoni several years earlier. According to Élisabeth Margoni-Beneyton, her mother had once asked Schmitt to pose for her — a request that he kindly granted.]

The posthumous sketch of Florent Schmitt was found among Denise Margoni’s personal portfolio of artwork, where it had languished for decades following the death of the artist in 1987 … and this is where daughter Élisabeth Margoni-Beneyton again enters the picture.

Living life on the edge: Élisabeth Margoni-Beneyton and co-star Jean-Paul Belmondo in a scene from the blockbuster movie thriller Le Professionel (1981).

Best known as a stage and screen actress, she has numerous movie and TV credits to her name. Among her more notable roles are in Le Professionel (1981, opposite Jean-Paul Belmondo), Sexo por compasión  (2000, opposite Álex Angulo), Love Actually (2003, opposite Colin Firth) and the TV soap opera Un si grand soleil (beginning in 2019).

She is also part of a family of actors. She is married to film star Yves Beneyton, while the couple’s son, Aurélien Beneyton, is a web developer who once was a child voiceover talent. Among his many web development projects is a site devoted to the artistry of Denise Margoni, which includes copious examples of her work in various media.

A family of acting talent: (l.-r.), Yves, Aurélien  and Élisabeth Margoni Beneyton. (2023 photo)

These days at age 78, Élisabeth Margoni-Beneyton continues to make TV and stage appearances. Her most recent project is a show presenting classic and contemporary poetry on the overarching theme of “love.”

Titled L’Amour dans tous ses états (“Love In All Its States”) the show employs the verse of (mainly) French writers, ranging from the 16th century Louise Labé all the way up to Laurence Tardieu and Nashmia Noormohamed in the present day. All aspects of love are explored: conjugal, filial, platonic as well as torrid and friendly.

First mounted on August 18, 2023 at the captaincy of Paimpol in the Côtes d’Armor, the show is a true “family affair” in that it stars all three Beneytons (billed as the troupe Arts Vivants Armor). Additional performances are likely.

Sand and Sea: A painting by Denise Margoni (1969), was sold by Galerie Taménaga in Tokyo. Margoni was one of the first French painters featured by the gallery, helping to build the artist’s popularity in Japan.

But beyond her acting activities and appearances, Élisabeth Margoni-Beneyton is committed to promoting the legacy of her mother. She is a tireless advocate for Denise Margoni’s artistry — not only the approximately 1,000 paintings but also the fabric and wallpaper designs.

Galerie Taménaga was founded in Tokyo in 1969 as the first Japanese-based gallery specializing in European modern masters. Later expanding to Paris, the USA and other markets in Asia, Galerie Taménaga aims to be “a bridge between culture, mind and the arts in a globalized world.”

This advocacy has resulted in new exhibitions featuring a cross-section of Denise Margoni creations, such as a retrospective of 100 paintings featured in La Halle, France in 2022. That exhibit focused on Margoni artwork inspired by the region’s seashores and landscapes, including views of Poulafret, Kerarzic and Beauport Abbey.

At the opening of the exhibit Élisabeth Margoni-Beneyton remarked, “My mother would have been delighted. She adored Paimpol — and even if many others have also painted the region, few artists focused as she did on the abbey of Beauport.”

Élisabeth Margoni-Beneyton poses with several of Denise Margoni’s paintings. (Photo: Marie-Hélène Clam, Le Télégramme, 2022)

Thanks to Élisabeth Margoni-Beneyton, her mother’s sketch of Florent Schmitt has been resurrected as well, some 65 years after its creation. Pianist Claudio Chaiquin has had the drawing museum-quality framed for proud display in his music studio, while also sharing the artwork with the world. We are grateful to both of them for their generosity of spirit.

A talented family: This portrait of Eugénio Margoni (1903-1979) was painted in 1965 by his wife, Denise Margoni. An Italian from the Trento region, Eugénio Margoni emigrated to France in 1924. He was a shoe designer and shoemaker, as well as an amateur musician and painter. Examples of his artistic creations are on display at the Naïve Art Museum (Musée et Jardins Cécile Sabourdy) in Vicq-sur-Breuilh, near Limoges.

Florent Schmitt, photographed in 1953, two years following the premiere of Trois liturgies joyeuses. During the 1950s Schmitt would compose seven sacred works for a cappella voices — most with ad libitum organ accompaniment. (Photo: ©Lipnitzki/Roger-Viollet)

Among the final crop of compositions that Florent Schmitt brought forth during his long career are a group of sacred works written for chorus or mixed solo voices.  They are seven in number, penned or published during the final eight years of the composer’s life:

• Trois liturgies joyeuses, Op. 116 (1951)
• Psaume VIII (Domine, Dominus Noster), Op. 119 (1956)
• Quinque cantus, Op. 121 (1952)
• Laudate, pueri, Dominum, Op. 126 (1952)
• Oremus pro Pontifice, Op. 127 (1952)
• Psaume CXII (Cantique de Siméon), Op. 135 (1956)
• Messe en quatre parties, Op. 138 (1958)

With the exception of the 1958 Mass (Schmitt’s final composition), all of these pieces were written to be performed a cappella, with most including ad libitum organ parts as well. As such, they differ from Schmitt’s significantly more elaborate choral compositions with sacred texts that he had composed earlier in his career — Psaume XLVII, Op. 38 from 1904 being the most famous example, but also the Cinq motets, Op. 60 from 1917.

It’s intriguing to speculate on why Florent Schmitt might have been drawn to create such an extensive amount of sacred choral music during the final years of his life. Was it a newfound sense of spirituality developed in his twilight years? Or was the inspiration more practical — perhaps fulfilling commissions?

I can find scant evidence of the latter, so perhaps the notion of a man coming face to face with his own mortality may be a plausible explanation. But we shouldn’t forget that Schmitt wrote vocal music all throughout his seven-decade career, where we find him returning again and again to the human voice.

The Trois liturgies joyeuses, Op. 116 was the first of Schmitt’s late-career choral works to be completed. Written for four solo voices or SATB a cappella choir with an ad libitum organ part, the three sections of the work are:

Veni Creator (composed in 1949) — Come, Holy Spirit, Creator blest, and in our souls take up thy rest; come with thy grace and heavenly aid to fill the hearts which thou has made …

Adjiciat Dominus (composed in 1947) – He hath blessed all who fear the Lord, both small and great …

Magnificat (composed in 1950) – My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior, for he that is mighty hath magnified me … 

Using Latin rather than French texts, Trois liturgies joyeuses is music that reflects Florent Schmitt’s mature compositional style, imbued with the polyrhythmic and polytonal writing that was commonplace for the composer during this period.

A score page from the first of Florent Schmitt’s Trois liturgies joyeuses.

At the same time, it is highly “accessible” music that has a romantic, often-exuberant flavor – so much so that Florent Schmitt’s biographer Yves Hucher wrote that the music has an almost “pagan” feel.

A score page from the second of Florent Schmitt’s Trois liturgies joyeuses.

During the 1950s and ’60s, organist Jeanne Baudry-Godard performed not only Trois liturgies joyeuses, but also the important organ part in Florent Schmitt’s Psaume XLVII. One of her several Psaume performances with the legendary conductor Désiré-Émile Inghelbrecht was a 1951 International Human Rights Day concert presented at the Palais de Chaillot, attended by world-renowned dignitaries including former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

The work was premiered on May 25, 1951 in a Paris performance that featured four solo vocalists rather than a chorus: soprano Ginette Arvez-Vernet, mezzo-soprano Marguerite Myrtal, tenor André Leroy and bass André Pactat. The composition was published by Durand that same year, and shortly thereafter it was taken up by the Jean Machet Chorale and several other French choral ensembles.

Jean-Louis Gil (1951-1991). Born in Casablanca, Morocco, this talented artist was organiste titulaire at Église St-Médard, professor of organ studies at the Angers Conservatoire, and organist of the Orchestre National de Lyon. He was featured on the 1990 Erato recording of Florent Schmitt’s Psaume XLVII, with ONF forces conducted by Marek Janowski. Gil died tragically young at the age of just 40 years.

Conductor and pianist Michel Tranchant studied at the Paris Conservatoire. He served as assistant to John Alldis at the Groupe Vocal de France before becoming its music director in 1982, and later directed the Chœurs de Radio France.

Perhaps because of the music’s accessibility and audience appeal, Trois liturgies joyeuses has been programmed somewhat more frequently than Schmitt’s other late-career sacred compositions. Some of these performances featured noted directors and organists and were broadcast over French Radio, including:

• Chorale Jean Machet, with organist Marie-Louise Girod-Parrot (1954)
• Chœurs de la RTF, directed by Jean Gitton, with organist Jeanne Baudry-Godard (1963)
• Chœurs de Radio France, directed by Jacques Jouineau, with organist Jean-Louis Gil (1985)
• Chœurs de Lyon (Veni Creator + Adjiciat Dominus only), directed by Bernard Tétu, with organist Loïc Mallié (1995)
• Chœurs de Radio France, directed by Michel Tranchant, with organist Yves Castagnet (2000)
• Chœurs de Radio France (Veni Creator only), directed by Sofi Jeannin, with organist Denis Comtet (2016)

Yves André Claude Castagnet, French organist and composer, studied with Rolande Falcinelli and Michel Chapuis. Since 1988 he has been organiste titulaire of the choir organ at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris.

A number of other French performances of the music have happened outside of Paris in recent years as well. In June 2014, Ensemble Energeia presented Trois liturgies joyeuses as the opening number of a program that also included sacred music of Jean Langlais, Jehan Alain, Olivier Messiaen, Vincent Coupet and John Taverner.

Br. Jean-Dominique Abrell (1961-2019), harpsichordist, organist and choir director, began his musical career as a trumpet student of Maurice André. In addition to leading performances of Ensemble Energeia, he was a musicologist with wide-ranging interests covering the Middle Ages to contemporary creations. He entered the Ordre des Prêcheurs (Dominicans) in 1984.

Held at Paray-le-Monial, the concert featured four soloists rather than a chorus (soprano Brigitte Peyre, countertenor Michel Geraud, tenor Jean-Francois Chiama and bass Luc Bertin-Hugault), under the direction of the late Jean-Dominique Abrell.

Then in May 2018, Ensemble Affabilis, performing under the direction of Audrey Pévrier, presented Schmitt’s Trois liturgies joyeuses at Église St-Bonaventure in Lyon as part of a French program of sacred works that also included motets by Francis Poulenc and Maurice Duruflé plus Olivier Messiaen’s O Sacrum Convivium.

The Ensemble Affabilis program (2018).

Members of Ensemble Affabilis (2022 photo).

Sébastian Boin

Later that same year, the choral group Madrigal de Provence, directed by Sébastien Boin, presented Trois liturgies joyeuses at two December concerts in Cogolin and Toulon. Schmitt’s work shared billing with an interesting grouping of pieces from composers as diverse as Saint-Saëns, Poulenc, Debussy, Jean Absil, Maurice Ohana and Thomas Keck.

The Madrigal de Provence program (December 2018).

George Parris

The most recent performance of Trois liturgies joyeuses that I am aware of occurred in November 2021 in Finland. It featured the Helsinki Chamber Choir led by the English director George Parris, performing a fascinating a cappella program ranging from the early Pierre de Manchicourt to Elgar and Delius, Vaughan Williams and his pupil Ina Boyle, and concluding with the Schmitt work. In his description of his program, Maestro Parris remarked:

“Florent Schmitt’s Trois liturgies joyeuses concludes the concert with a luminous ecstasy that echoes the tonal world of Pierre de Manchicourt’s Magnificat secondi Toni.”

The 2021 Helsinki Chamber Choir concert was broadcast over Finnish Radio and remained accessible for some time thereafter, but appears to be no longer available.

The Helsinki Chamber Choir presented Florent Schmitt’s Trois liturgies joyeuses in 2021. The ensemble was founded in 1962 as the Finnish Radio Chamber Choir. It has performed more than 80 choral composition premieres since 2008.

Considering its rather robust history of live performances – including a goodly number of them in recent years – it’s rather surprising that no commercial recording has ever been made of Schmitt’s Trois liturgies joyeuses. But thanks to Jean-Marie van Bronkhorst’s excellent YouTube music channel, we now have access to hear the music while following along with the score:

Swedish-born Sofi Jeannin was the longtime director of the Maîtrise de Radio France, and now serves as the music director of the BBC Singers. (Photo: ©Christophe Abramowitz)

He has accomplished this by combining the 2016 Veni Creator performance by the Chœurs de Radio France, led by Sofi Jeannin, with the 1954 Chorale Jean Machet French Radio broadcast performance of the other two numbers.

In van Bronkhorst’s view, the result isn’t an unalloyed success; as he noted to me:

Jean-Marie van Bronkhorst

“It’s unfortunate that this work was never recorded by the likes of the Robert Shaw Chorale or the Cambridge Singers, where the results would have been so much better. This type of music requires a clean, transparent, not-too-thick choral sound. [But] I realize that these broadcast performances are the only ones available currently …”

Marie-Louise Girod-Parrot (1915-2014) stands at the organ of the Oratoire du Louvre, where she was organiste titulaire from 1941 to 2008. A pupil of Henriette Puig-Roget and Marcel Dupré at the Paris Conservatoire, Mme. Girod-Parrot was also a composer. She plays on the 1954 French Radio broadcast performance of Florent Schmitt’s Trois liturgies joyeuses.

Despite those cautionary comments, we are fortunate to finally have a “score + audio” upload of this music accessible to us.

Hopefully, its availability will increase awareness of this fine composition, leading to more performances across the world as well as an eventual commercial recording of the piece.

A score page from the third of Florent Schmitt’s Trois liturgies joyeuses.

Matthew Bengtson at the keyboard.

A vintage copy of the score to Florent Schmitt’s piano suite Trois danses, composed in 1934-35 and published by Durand in 1936.

In September and October 2023, American pianist Matthew Bengtson performed three recitals in which he introduced a selection that was new to his repertoire: Florent Schmitt’s Trois danses, Op. 86. Composed in 1934-35, the piece is a relatively late work among the voluminous quantity of piano music that Schmitt created for piano solo, duet and duo beginning in the early 1890s.

The composer himself is a relatively new discovery for this pianist, who first performed music of Florent Schmitt only in 2022 – the formidable Sonate libre en deux parties enchaînées (ad modem clementis aquæ), Op. 68 dating from 1918-19  — as part of a recital of pieces by Schmitt, Joseph Marx and Cyril Scott in which he was joined by the American violinist John McLaughlin Williams. (Click here to read an interview that I conducted with Messrs. Bengtson and Williams following that recital.)

Realizing the worthiness of Florent Schmitt’s artistry in the Sonate libre sparked further investigation by Bengtson into the composer’s vast catalogue of piano works.

Matthew Bengston’s 3-CD recording of the music of Karol Szymanowski, with Polish-American violinist Blanka Bednarz (Musica Omnia label).

Considering that he has long championed the music of late-romantic and early-modern masters, it is wholly unsurprising for an artist like Bengtson to be curious about Schmitt’s piano works. Indeed, as part of his focus on the music of that era, Bengtson has recorded all of the piano sonatas of Alexander Scriabin as well as solo piano and violin/piano works of Karol Szymanowski. (Not confining himself to that time period, Bengtson also performs the music of living composers such as Paul Schoenfield, Roberto Sierra and William Bolcom, while also dipping back into the repertoire of the Classical era.)

Figuring that he might find Florent Schmitt’s Trois danses worthy of exploration, I passed along a copy of the score to Bengtson in 2021. And now, two years later, he has begun to play this music in concert: To date he has included Trois danses in recital programs presented at Temple University, Cornell University and Bucknell University.

Matthew Bengton’s Bucknell University recital program, held on October 23, 2023, when the pianist was also interviewed about Florent Schmitt’s piano set Trois danses.

I attended Bengtson’s Bucknell recital, at which time I was able to interview the pianist about his journey of discovery with Florent Schmitt and this particular score. Highlights of our very interesting discussion are presented below.

PLN:  The music of Florent Schmitt is a relatively recent addition to your solo and chamber music programs. What attracted you to his music? What makes it “good repertoire” for the kind of programs you like to present?

MWB:  Although I’m interested in music from all eras, the early twentieth century remains my favorite period. From those times you can encounter the most creative use of harmony, freewheeling imagination, the strong individuality of composers, and the notion of endless possibilities. There are also fascinating contrasts between the composers of different nationalities who created dynamic, virtuosic scores — as well as the feeling of looking both forward and backward in history. 

You experience all of this in Florent Schmitt. French art and music are among my favorites of the period, and Schmitt has turned out to be a vibrant and fresh new face – one who has obviously been underrated, and who left us a lot of fine music to explore.

PLN:  I had the opportunity to see you and violinist John McLaughlin Williams perform Schmitt’s Sonate libre in 2022. That piece dates from about 15 years before Schmitt’s Trois danses. What similarities — or differences — in musical style do you notice between the two scores?

MWB:  First of all, the two works are clearly in completely different genres, with entirely different requirements. But both pieces are absolutely first-rate works of their kind. 

A vintage copy of the score to Florent Schmitt’s fascinating Sonate libre en deux parties enchaînées, ad modem Clementis aquæ, composed in 1918-19 for violin and piano.

The Sonate libre is a much more ambitious score, and more mysterious. It’s more expansive, and one might say more “Romantic.” There are touches of Wagner and Richard Strauss which are absent in Trois danses, a piece that is more jewel-like, more perfect, clear-cut — perhaps more Ravelian. Think of Romantic versus Classical, Beethoven versus Mozart, Debussy versus Ravel. 

It’s clear enough, though, that both pieces come from the same composer because of the imaginative, coloristic use of harmony. In terms of form or phrase structure, you can see Schmitt’s tendency to include irregular repetitions of the same material, especially in the outer movements. This is a style we usually associate with Stravinsky and Le Sacre. 

In both Schmitt pieces there is a contrast of style elements between suave lyricism and luxury on the one hand, and dance rhythms with acerbic humor, biting with half-step dissonances (but not as harsh or severe as in Stravinsky). 

The ending of the third piece “Danse de Corde” in Trois danses also mirrors the ending section of the Sonate libre, where the tempo undergoes disintegration before an energetic and rather curt conclusion. 

The program for Matthew Bengtson’s September 23, 2023 piano recital at Cornell University. Note the three separate keyboard instruments played in the recital, with Florent Schmitt’s Trois danses being performed on an 1878 Blüthner Aliquot grand piano.

PLN:  What characteristics of Trois danses make this suite interesting as a set of pieces? How does the work compare in style to the piano music of other French composers active at the same time as Schmitt in the early 20th century?

Pianist Matthew Bengtson holds a copy of the score to Florent Schmitt’s Trois danses while seated backstage following his recital at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. (October 23, 2023)

MWB:  With their fast-slow-fast structure, the pieces have the feeling of a sonatina, whether or not Schmitt specifically intended that. There isn’t really an obvious companion work in the standard rep that I can think of. The three-piece Debussy cycles — Pour le piano, Estampes, both sets of Images — are longer and less formally clear-cut. 

Trois danses goes well beyond Suite bergamasque in sophistication and difficulty. Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin might be the closest thing to it, but Tombeau is on a much larger scale, and it’s probably a more traditional work since Ravel starts with a prelude and fugue, and the other dances he chooses are much less obscure.

By contrast, Schmitt’s titles of the pieces in Trois danses are quite mysterious — but I don’t think audiences would find this any impediment to appreciating them, since the music is so lucidly written.

PLN:  What are your thoughts about how each of the three movements of the set are written, and how they come across to an audience? Starting with “Montferrine” …

MWB:  This is the most “lean” and neo-classical of the three pieces — a textbook example of the altered partial repetition of phrases. Schmitt always keeps us off-balance and guessing as to how many measures of repetition there are going to be each time. 

“Montferrine,” the first of Florent Schmitt’s Trois danses, was dedicated to the legendary French pianist Marguerite Long. In addition to being close personal friends, Schmitt and Long maintained a rewarding artistic collaboration over many decdes.

The “Bourée lombarde” subtitle perhaps suggests some similarity to the “Rigaudon” in Ravel’s Tombeau. The ending of “Montferrine” is much more fully scored, but you need to keep a brisk tempo to project the right character, and this is technically challenging.

The first page of Florent Schmitt’s original manuscript for Trois danses. Note the composer’s characteristically small, meticulous penmanship.

PLN:  How about the contemplative middle movement, “Bocane”?

William John ‘Bill’ Evans (1929-1980) was an American jazz pianist and composer. He is known for his use of impressionist harmony, block chords and rhythmically independent melodic lines — techniques that continue to influence jazz pianists today.

MWB:  This is a really gorgeous piece. It’s the least dancelike of the three — more a kind of intermezzo. It could be really effective played on its own, or even presented as an encore. The “Bocane” can be played very freely, with the pure beauty of the sound almost jazz-like, in the Bill Evans manner.

There is a mystical impression created by the harmony and the texture that perhaps feels English in some ways, too — somewhat akin to Gustav Holst. The parallel chords in falling fourths are a simple but unique musical gesture — very effectively and imaginatively carried out.

“Bocane,” the second piece in Florent Schmitt’s Trois danses, was dedicated to the French pianist and teacher Lucette Descaves, whose roster of stellar students included Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Pascal Rogé, Brigitte Engerer and the Labèque sisters.

PLN:  And lastly, the “Danse de corde”?

MWB:  The final number is catchy and exciting, and it grabs the listener with its swing and energy. This so-called “rope dance” suggests acrobatics in a public arena — in a kind of circus-like atmosphere. The movement feels like a sonata form, with very clear outlines and a strong sense of sequential development in the middle. 

There is a beautiful little interlude on the last page with a series of pauses that sets up a characteristically energetic Schmittian ending.

“Danse de corde,” the third of Florent Schmitt’s Trois danses, was dedicated to the French pianist Hélène Pignari. Mlle. Pignari was a major champion of Schmitt’s music throughout her career, including presenting numerous live performances of the composer’s scores that were broadcast over French Radio in the 1940s and ’50s.

PLN:  Florent Schmitt was known to be a fine pianist himself. Are those traits evident in the way he writes for the piano? Is his writing for piano idiomatic … and does it lay well under the fingers?

MWB:  Schmitt’s piano writing is certainly idiomatic in the manner of Debussy, Ravel or Poulenc. Trois danses is demanding to play in a way that satisfies the pianist, but it isn’t intimidating as in the Sonate libre. 

One difficulty is the harmonic idiom, which makes for challenging reading at first, but you get used to it. There is also the brisk tempo in the outer movements. The most difficult element is the frequent changing of position which results from the multi-layered compositional thinking. 

Composer Florent Schmitt with pianist Marguerite Long, photographed together in February 1953. Schmitt dedicated the “Montferrine” movement of Trois danses to her. (Photo: courtesy Emmanuel Jourquin-Bourgeois)

In “Montferrine,” the pianist often has to cross over the fifth finger in the right hand. It seems slippery at first, but you do get accustomed to it and then it’s pleasurable to play. 

I am not generally a fan of the concept of “orchestral thinking” at the piano — it feels a bit cliché — but in these particular pieces I find it hard not to associate certain passages with orchestral instruments or combinations.

PLN:  Florent Schmitt’s music has been undergoing a renaissance in recent years, and nearly all of his keyboard music has now been commercially recorded. Is the renewed interest in his work – particularly the keyboard pieces – justified?

MWB:  Yes — if for no other reason that he was such an important composer in the first half of the twentieth century. Schmitt wrote a ton of piano music, and no study of the French piano repertoire is complete without taking into account his substantial contribution to the literature.

PLN:  Do you have future plans to explore more of Florent Schmitt’s keyboard music – and possibly add it to your repertoire? Which pieces in particular are you investigating?

MWB:  There is certainly a lot of interesting piano music. I would like to record the pieces I have already performed. Even if most of Schmitt’s piano compositions have been recorded by now, there are so few versions available that a second or third recording still feels like it would make an important contribution to the discography. 

Florent Schmitt seated at the piano in his study. This photo dates from 1937, several years following the creation of his Trois danses for solo piano. (Photo: ©Lipnitzki/Roger-Viollet)

It’s difficult to definitively say which additional solo pieces I would wish to learn. Ombres and Crépuscules are really substantial sets, but at the moment I am more attracted to smaller pieces such as the ones that make up Op. 23 [Nuits romaines], Op. 29 [Musiques intimes, Book II], Op. 42 [Pièces romantiques], and Op. 70, No. 1 [Mirages: Le Tombeau de Claude Debussy]. 

The chamber music is appealing as well – and also a way to introduce this composer and his remarkable creative output to other performers.

In Matthew Bengtson’s Temple University piano recital (September 12, 2023), Florent Schmitt’s Trois danses appeared on the first half of the program.

PLN:  Beyond the possibility of programming more Florent Schmitt in the future, what other projects or performances do you have on your schedule right now?

MWB:  I’m in the midst of a pretty intensive series of recitals, which will continue with performances later this year in San Francisco as well as a chamber music presentation of the Vittorio Giannini Piano Quintet on the East Coast. Of course, my position as Associate Professor of Piano Literature at the University of Michigan takes up a good deal of my time. But I’m always investigating new repertoire with an eye towards performance and recording – and Florent Schmitt is definitely part of those endeavors.

____________________

We are fortunate to have a consummate artist of the stature of Matthew Bengtson advocating for Florent Schmitt’s Trois danses. From my research, it may well be that he is the first American pianist to present these pieces in recital in more than a half-century. Hopefully, his aim to record this music will be realized – as well as performing more of Schmitt’s music for the benefit of grateful audiences across North America.

Boulanger’s remarks were made as part of her Lectures on Modern Music presented at Rice University in Houston, Texas (January 1925).

Juliette Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979)

In the world of classical music composition, Nadia Boulanger is universally acknowledged as one of the most significant and influential teachers of the craft. In that capacity, Boulanger guided the education of several generations of composers in their formative years – most famously ones from the United States and other English-speaking countries.

The list of noted American composers who made the pilgrimage to France to study with Boulanger, either at the American School at Fontainebleau or privately at her Paris apartment, reads like a veritable “who’s who” of twentieth century greatness: Elliott Carter, Aaron Copland, Philip Glass, Roy Harris, Virgil Thomson and George Walker, to name just some of the best-known names. (George Gershwin attempted to become her student as well, but Boulanger demurred, declaring, “I can teach you nothing.”)

Ernest Henri Alexandre Boulanger (1815-1900) was a winner of the Grand Prix de Rome first-place prize for composition in 1835, at the age of just 20 years. His daughters Nadia and Lili also competed for the prize, but only Lili would win the first-place prize in 1913 — also at the age of 20 years. (ca. 1872 photo)

Nadia Boulanger grew up in a musical family. Her father, Ernest Boulanger, was a composer who had won the Prix de Rome first prize for composition in 1835 and who married late in life. Eldest child Nadia was born in 1887 when her father was 72, and younger daughter Lili was born six years later. Both girls exhibited an early interest in music — particularly focusing on composition.

Nadia entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of nine, studying composition with Gabriel Fauré and keyboard performance with Alexandre Guilmant and Louis Vierne. Proof of her keen interest in composing during her early years, she entered the Prix de Rome composition prize competitions four years running (1906-09), but failed to win each time.

In 1900 Ernest Boulanger passed away at age 85, which resulted in looming financial hardships for the family. In the event, Nadia was required to became the chief breadwinner for her mother (an impoverished Russian-born princess and former singer) and her younger sister Lili, who was then just seven years old.

A vintage copy of the score to Florent Schmitt’s Psaume XLVII. Note the different numbering in the title (Vulgate version of the Bible).

To contribute to her family’s financial well-being, Nadia began to concentrate on teaching in addition to undertaking a demanding schedule of organ and piano performance gigs – including playing the important organ part in the premiere of Florent Schmitt’s Psaume XLVII presented at the Paris Conservatoire the day after Christmas in 1906.

The home of the Boulanger family from 1904 onwards, where Nadia Boulanger also taught privately. Located in the 9th arr. of Paris, the former Rue Ballu address has been renamed Place Lili-Boulanger in honor of Nadia’s younger sister, who won the Prix de Rome first prize for composition in 1913 and who left an astonishing legacy of compositions in the wake of her untimely death in 1918, at just 23 years of age.

In 1904 Boulanger had begun teaching privately from the family’s home in Paris, helping to produce a stable stream of income for the family. In her 1982 biography Nadia Boulanger: A Life in Music, Léonie Rosenstiel writes about Nadia’s activities during these early years of her career:

“Nadia auditioned Fauré’s composition class for several years before joining it officially. She had begun work with Andre Gédalge, Fauré’s assistant, as early as 1904. Perhaps her most important early associations were in the Fauré-Gédalge circle: Charles Koechlin, Georges Enescu, Florent Schmitt, Raoul Laparra, Maurice Leboucher, Maurice Ravel, Alfred Cortot, and the master’s favorite disciple, [Jean] Roger-Ducasse.

 Of them all, Ducasse was admittedly the closest to the Boulangers, followed at some distance by Enescu, Koechlin, Cortot and Schmitt. Despite Nadia’s constant proximity to some of the most eligible and talented musicians of her day, there was never any hint of romantic involvement with any of them. Her personality, her family situation, her training — all removed her from such consideration.”

Nadia (l.) and Lili Boulanger, photographed in about 1914.

Also at this time, Nadia began to take a keen interest in cultivating younger sister Lili’s prospects as a composer, recognizing her as the greater talent. Some years later, Nadia would explain to her erstwhile composition teacher, Gabriel Fauré, why she stopped composing: “If there is one thing of which I am certain, it is that I wrote useless music,” she declared.

And in an interview she gave later in life, she expanded on this, stating, “When I decided to abandon composition, it was because I knew that I would never be a great genius. My music could perhaps have been played — but music played because ‘it is by a good friend’ doesn’t interest me at all.”

Indeed, rather than Nadia, Lili was the one to win the coveted Prix de Rome composition prize in 1913 at the age of just 20 years — the same age as her father nearly 80 years before.

A photo from the back of the 1960 Everest LP record jacket, showing Nadia Boulanger at the playback sessions.

In the decades following Lili’s untimely death in 1918, Nadia was to be a ceaseless champion of Lili’s music as a performer and conductor, and she served as an artistic advisor in the making of the world premiere recording of Lili’s most important works for chorus and orchestra featuring the Chorale Elisabeth Brasseur and the Lamoureux Orchestra under the direction of Igor Markevitch, which was released on the Everest label in 1960. As an authoritative recorded document, it has remained in the catalogue nearly continuously in the six decades hence.

The world premiere recording of Lili Boulanger’s works for chorus and orchestra, released on the Everest label in 1960, with musical forces conducted by Igor Markevitch. Nadia Boulanger was present at the recording sessions and served as an artistic advisor on the project. The recording included Lili Boulanger’s three masterful psalm settings, composed in 1916 and 1917. The influence of Florent Schmitt’s Psaume XLVII (composed in 1904) is unmistakable; Lili knew that score well, since she had attended the rehearsals and premiere of Schmitt’s Psaume in 1906, at which Nadia played the important organ part.

In hindsight, we can recognize that Nadia Boulanger’s shift to teaching was a particularly fortuitous move for her, even as she continued keyboard performances and conducting activities throughout her career. Among the latter milestones, she would be the first woman to conduct a host of orchestras around the world including the London Philharmonic, Royal Philharmonic, Boston Symphony, New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra and National Symphony Orchestra of Washington, DC, among others.

Boulanger’s teaching responsibilities widened with her 1920 appointment to the faculty of the École normale de musique (headed at the time by the pianist Alfred Cortot), where her academic specialties were organ, harmony, counterpoint and fugue.

The campus of the Fontainebleau Schools of Music and Fine Arts, located approximately 65 kms. southeast of Paris. Wthin a few years of opening, the school was offering concert series featuring the participation of eminent composers and performers. In 1924 alone,  individual concerts devoted to the compositions of Maurice Ravel, Florent Schmitt, Lili Boulanger and Roger-Ducasse were presented. Performers at the June 28th all-Schmitt concert included tenor Charles Hubbard, pianist Beveridge Webster and violinist André Pascal. Also in 1924, an August 4th concert organized by Nadia Boulanger featured American music by Aaron Copland, Henry Elwell and Melville Smith.

Even more consequentially, in 1921 the French Music School for Americans opened in Fontainebleau, with Nadia installed as professor of harmony. Her success there, and in teaching privately, boosted her fame in the English-speaking world.

In 1924, conductor Walter Damrosch, arts manager Arthur Judson and the New York Symphony Society arranged for Boulanger to undertake the first of her several American tours — one of which was an extended stay in the United States during World War II when she taught at Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore and the Longy School of Music in Cambridge (Boston).

Boulanger’s January-February 1925 American tour included the premiere performances of Aaron Copland’s newly composed Symphony for Organ & Orchestra (she was the dedicatee), as well as a series of lectures presented by Boulanger at Rice Institute (today Rice University) in Houston. The three “Lectures on Modern Music” were delivered at the college on successive days in late January, 1925, and her highly perceptive profile of Florent Schmitt and description of his artistry were part of the first lecture in the series, titled Modern French Music.

The three “Lectures on Modern Music,” given by Nadia Boulanger at Rice University (Houston, Texas) on January 27-29, 1925.

Nadia Boulanger’s January 1925 “Lectures on Modern Music” were published in the April 1926 issue of the Rice Institute Pamphlet. In 1960 the Institute was renamed Rice University.

Encountering the text of this lecture a century later, I am struck by how brilliantly Boulanger has captured the true essence of Florent Schmitt’s creative genius – as well as noting key aspects of his personality that come through in his music — and which made him so unique among French composers of his time.

The full text of Boulanger’s description of Schmitt and his artistry is reproduced below:

Florent Schmitt was born in Lorraine (1870) and his music shows clearly the traces of his double Latin and Teutonic heredity. Clarity and balance of form, sensuous harmonies, acute sensitiveness in matters of sonority — in short, traits which we usually think of as being more or less Gallic — alternate or unite with the more Germanic ideals of ponderous force, of imposing construction and of abundance and depth of feeling. 

Being of fiery and impetuous temperament, Schmitt naturally revels in the world of rhythm, and many are the contributions which he has made to this aspect of modern music. As early as 1908 to take but a single example, we find him, in the last movement of the Piano Quintet, wielding a type of meter, based on unequal measures, that was later to become a marked feature of Stravinsky’s style:

An excerpt from Florent Schmitt’s Piano Quintet (final movement), illustrating Nadia Boulanger’s 1925 Rice Institute lecture.

He delights — and particularly excels — in rhythms of nervous force and movement which, like the following, become positively sinister by virtue of their insistence and whose violence and abandon often, as in ‘Orgies,’ rise to the point of frenzy:

An excerpt from the score to the “Orgies et danses” movement from Florent Schmitt’s Antoine et Cléopâtre Suite No. 2, illustrating Nadia Boulanger’s 1925 Rice Institute lecture.

There is something titanic about the man. Not only his rhythms but his themes, so long in line and so lavish of emotional intensity, his luxuriant harmonies, the extraordinary opulence of his counterpoint — and last but not least, the barbaric splendor and color of his orchestra — all point to a personality of more richness and power than is usually granted even to men of genius. 

Instinctively, therefore, Schmitt turns for expression to the grandiose, the ponderous and the mighty. He erects those gigantic and monumental constructions like the Psaume, the Piano Quintet and Antoine et Cléopâtre, which, coming from a feebler pen, would be ‘as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals’ but which, at his hands, have acquired the overwhelming force and that sense of inevitability which only the very great can achieve. 

Yet one feels that, after all, it would be impossible to imprison within the pages of even such scores the tumult and the torment of a soul like Schmitt’s. For the man is fundamentally insatiable. He is athirst for the infinite, and no matter how far he may push his lust for intensity of feeling, one knows in advance that he will never quite reach the limit of his desires — that there will always be something more that remains ungiven, unexpressed. And in this abundance of reserve strength lies the chief secret of his power. 

In the work of such a temperament, one might expect to find that note of ironic bitterness and disillusion which so often accompanies the sense of human defeat. But with Schmitt’s music, such is not the case. To the composer of La Tragédie de Salomé has been given the rare privilege of rendering the torture of a soul in exile without ever, in so doing, falling into the snares of a futile and destructive pessimism. 

In his teacher’s footsteps: This advertisement for a November 1927 lecture by Aaron Copland on new trends in contemporary music appeared in the pages of Musical America magazine. It was one of a series of lectures presented by Copland following his return to the United States from studying in France with Nadia Boulanger.

The immense suffering and solitude which are the glorious lot of every genius, have been sublimated by Schmitt into a life of impetuous and creative activity: No one more than he arouses in us the love and need of living to the full the brief span of our existence. To a generation which (by a reaction that, in its day, was necessary) was given the taste for ‘precious’ trifles and rare sensations, Schmitt’s solid and impassioned music offers the opportunity of dwelling, for a moment, in those high, free regions where, if to suffer means to live more intensely, even suffering is a joy. Hence he belongs among the leaders of men, among those who have brought us light and consolation.

 A single quotation from Rêves — to illustrate the richness of Schmitt’s style and to justify the plea that his works be given more frequent hearings and the wider recognition which their greatness merits:

An excerpt from the piano reduction score to Florent Schmitt’s Rêves, illustrating Nadia Boulanger’s 1925 Rice Institute lecture.

 ________________________

Florent Schmitt, photographed in the early 1920s by two French brothers, Henri Manuel (1874-1947) and Gaston Manuel (1880-1967). In the interwar period, the G. L. Manuel Frères studio portrayed ‘tout’ Paris: Auguste Rodin, Mistinguett, Josephine Baker, Aristide Bruant, Colette, Jules Renard, Yvonne Printemps and the best-known composers.

So there we have it: 600 words that neatly sum up the artistry of Florent Schmitt – at the time 55 years old — with uncanny perceptiveness, coming from a fellow musician who knew and observed him keenly from the early years of his creative development.

As American musicologist Christopher Hill notes:

“It’s particularly valuable to hear how Florent Schmitt sounded to a perceptive musician when his music was new. There’s no doubting the fervor with which Nadia Boulanger expresses her admiration. Partly this fervor is due to the role of new classical music in early 20th-century Parisian culture. Music then could play a significant role in structuring one’s sense of social identity; it was not yet the commodity it has since become.

Christopher Hill

That said, Boulanger’s fervor certainly derives even more from the innate power evident in Schmitt’s scores themselves. She articulates well the richness of this composer’s oeuvre — and my 21st-century ears agree.”

Her characterization of Florent Schmitt also helps us to understand, from another vantage point, how the always-insightful Nadia Boulanger came to be such an admired mentor to so many budding composers over so many decades.

Camouflage, a painting of Florent Schmitt’s longtime home in St-Cloud by French contemporary artist Mathieu Cherkit (2017).

Much has been written about the famous salonnières of Paris — the wealthy and often-flamboyant grandes dames who opened up their drawing rooms to musicians, authors and artists — facilitating not only the camaraderie of “breaking bread” together but also providing a venue for these creatives to socialize with prominent members of Parisian society representing government, business and the professions.

Names like Winnaretta Singer (Princesse de Polignac), Élisabeth de Caraman-Chimy, Jeanne Dubost and Marguerite Jourdain de Saint-Marceaux will forever be remembered for the manner in which they cultivated the arts by welcoming artistic genius, without class distinction.

6 rue de Vercingetorix, home of Le salon Molards and the studio of Paul Gauguin.

Less famous, less glamorous, yet also significant were the salons of the creative artists themselves. In the early 1900s, it was the musician William Molard and his sculptor wife who held court at 6 rue de Vercingétorix, where French artists and musicians mingled with “fellow travelers” from foreign lands – among them Delius, Vaughan Williams, Casella, De Falla and Enescu. It was also the composer Maurice Delage, who hosted gatherings of Les Apaches at his dwelling in an industrial section of Paris, where the conviviality could go on late into the night without fear of disrupting the neighbors.

Florent Schmitt’s home on Rue du Calvaire in St-Cloud, the site of countless Jeudis de Florent Schmitt gatherings from the early 1920s onward.

But it was the mid-afternoon open house events hosted by Florent Schmitt and his wife, Jeanne, at their home in St-Cloud which would become a fixture of the Parisian arts scene over the lengthiest period of time. Indeed, the Schmitt home was the venue for countless gatherings from 1920 onwards. They would happen until nearly the end of the composer’s long life — even continuing a full ten years after Jeanne’s death during World War II.

The gatherings came to be known as Jeudis de Florent Schmitt (“Florent Schmitt Thursdays”), and they were an important meeting ground for budding talent as well as established musicians. As just one example, the recollections of the Swiss tenor Hugues Cuénod, recounted late in his extraordinarily long life, give us a sense of how important and beneficial these gatherings could be:

Hugues-Adhémar Cuénod (1902-2010)

“It was in 1928 that I began singing in concerts, thanks to my cousin Virginie Cuénod who knew so many people in Paris. She introduced me to painters, composers, writers, and some people from other segments of society I probably never would have met without her … which threw me into the middle of the Parisian world of that time. I made friends a little bit with Florent Schmitt, who always had an open house on Sundays [sic] at his beautiful estate near Boulogne. He engaged me to put together a vocal trio [with Marcelle Bunlet and Lina Falk] … to perform several of his works. We sang in the large hall of the Paris Conservatoire …”

[Mr. Cuénod can be forgiven for misremembering the day of the week of the Schmitt open house events, considering that he was nearly 100 years old when he gave the recollections above!]

Fortunately, history has left us with accounts of several additional Florent Schmitt Thursdays gatherings. They have appeared in three books — a travelogue from the 1920s, a diary from the 1930s, and a late 1980s autobiography looking back to the 1950s — that are excerpted below.

The Wide-Eyed American Tourists

The Jeudis de Florent Schmitt gatherings weren’t musician-only events. Other guests were welcomed, and we have the account of one such visitor.

Regina Jais (1869-1948) was an American travel writer who authored several books in English covering historical sites in France and Germany. Her book Legendary France, Carcassonne and the Basque Country, published by Dial Press in 1931, came in the wake of the success of a similar volume authored by Jais covering the southern region of Germany.

Her France book is a collection of vignettes related to her travels through various regions of the country, in which she adopts a breezy, cheerful tone – barely suppressing a sense of “wide-eyed wonder.” In one chapter of the book, she writes about a Florent Schmitt Thursdays visit, likely dating from the late 1920s, that evidently made quite a positive impression on her.

Here is that book excerpt:

Florent Schmitt (l.) with American-born tenor Charles Hubbard at Schmitt’s home in St-Cloud. (1924 photo)

One day we had dejeuner in a small cafe with Charles [Hubbard], a tenor from America. For fifteen years he has lived in Paris; an enviable reputation as exponent of modern French songs is his.

Charles had arranged to drive out to St. Cloud with us this Thursday for tea with Florent Schmitt, the composer, whose songs he sings to the delight of musical Paris. M. et Mme. Schmitt are at home with a few hours’ leisure in the afternoon to receive friends. A pleasure indeed to meet this celebrated musician, for many years a friend of Claude Debussy.

”The origin of the name St. Cloud is rather an interesting one,” said Charles as we neared the outskirts of this olden environ of Paris. “Ancient St. Clodoald, grandson of the great Clovis, founded a monastery here back in the sixth century!” 

My Pal [Regina Jais’ husband, Jacob David Jais, born in Algiers] nodded, “And in later years the palace was the haunt of kings; Louis XIV, Bonaparte and Napoleon III all chose it for a summer residence within easy reach of Paris.” 

Open, Mathieu Cherkit’s 2017 painting. Looking  out from the top floor of Florent Schmitt’s home shows St-Cloud apartment buildings in the foreground that were surely not yet built at the time of Regina Jais’ visit 90 years earlier. The Eiffel Tower can be seen in the distance, some ten miles away.

The lazy little town, beloved of artists, wakes to feverish life when long green stretches of the Racecourse attract thousands of visitors. A wonderful view from this hilly suburb right across the Seine valley and the Bois de Boulogne to Paris! Arc de Triomphe, the Trocadéro — Paris! Paris! filling the whole horizon! On a plateau above the river are two of the finest golf courses near the capital. They were built, not so many years ago, in part of the Forest of St. Germain. 

Ascending a slight hill, our auto stopped at a flight of steps leading to a charming garden. Under the trees tea tables welcomed, set with Sèvres porcelain, manufactured not far away. This lovely ware greets you in every corner of the globe — magnificent tall floor vases, museum pieces, presented to Eastern potentates by French Kings in the early eighteenth century. 

Entre deux, Mathieu Cherkit’s 2013 painting of one of the entrances to Florent Schmitt’s home in St-Cloud.

Mme. Schmitt, gracious and smiling, moved among her guests, one of whom I found a most interesting and enthusiastic music critic — a benevolent old Abbé in black robes. The simple villa, standing back from the road, looks out over the whole of Paris. Wandering through the garden, in the clear afternoon light we distinguished one well-loved outline after another — an inspiration for Florent Schmitt! 

A pleasant hour, hearing music; new compositions of mutual friends.  Au revoir, à bientot! Going down the steps, we stamped forever on our memory a silhouette of Florent Schmitt, caught by our movie camera, as he graciously took us to the gate. We drove back from this sequestered spot, ideal for artistic creation! 

One is left wishing that the film footage caught by Mrs. Jais might still exist to be viewed nearly a century later. But in all likelihood, it is lost to the mists of time …

The sincerest form of flattery? The sky garden of Regina Jais, located at 290 West End Avenue in Manhattan (New York City), bears unmistakable similarities to the urban gardens she undoubtedly encountered during her travels to European cities. (Photo: Jessie Tarbox Beals, ca. 1936)

Dysfunction All Around: The Nin Family Pays a Visit

The diaries of Anaïs Nin are extensive, taking up multiple volumes. Her description of a 1931 Jeudis de Florent Schmitt visit is published in Volume 4.

A far cry from the idyllic atmospherics of Charles Hubbard and the Jais family chez Florent Schmitt was the visit of a different family several years later. We have the diaries of the literary figure Anaïs Nin that provide a glimpse of another Jeudis de Florent Schmitt open house gathering – this time in April 1931 when the young Anaïs Nin and her family came to visit.

According to Nin’s diary entries, she had met the composer at a social gathering earlier in the month, and Florent Schmitt had extended the invitation. Here are Anaïs Nin’s entries as they pertain to her family’s visit, which evidently did not go very well:

April 17, 1931

My darling is away for a week. When he is not here I’m only half alive. I’ve tried to keep busy. Have gone out a great deal with Mother and Joaquín. Met the composer Florent Schmitt at the Lumleys’—a small, sharp gray-haired man with a mischievous mouth who is always flinging out direct questions like an indiscreet child, which amuses everybody. “Who are you? What do you do for a living? You’re not married? Why aren’t you married?” He took quite a fancy to my face and immediately invited us all to his house.

Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell (1903-1977) was a Cuban-born American diarist, essayist, novelist, and writer of short stories and erotica who spent her formative years in France. She lived a colorful and in many ways unconventional life — at one point revealing in her journals that she had carried on an incestuous relationship with her own father, the composer Joaquín Nin. (ca. 1920 photo)

April 30, 1931

Visit to Florent Schmitt a failure. Nobody else there who could distract Mother’s attention [singer Rosa Culmell], and so she and Florent could dislike each other freely. At such moments I get so painfully sensitive, I can only plead with my eyes, now to Mrs. Schmitt, now to Florent.

He is a strong character, droll, mordant, and Mother takes him seriously. And when Mother dislikes somebody she talks twice as much, dominates the conversation aggressively, and you feel her so overwhelmingly that even Schmitt was silent —poor man — and annoyed. Joaquín and I could not float; we sank. She delivered a lecture on Godoy (whose poetry of course they don’t like), she insisted on being called Mrs. Culmell and not Mrs. Nin, she would not let Mrs. Schmitt and me talk peaceably about books.

Even my passport (my face), though it smoothed Mr. Schmitt’s nerves, could not neutralize Mother. When he came with unusual affability to survey my diet at the tea table, he was confronted with Mother the dragon, who accepted the cakes he intended for me. And all the hopeless subjects: what is the best route from the station; the Spanish revolution; the awful spring weather.

Mrs. Schmitt, who is ill, painfully wasted, had forgotten her kettle on the fire. M. Schmitt reminded her: “It is always the same.” She justified herself: “Because sometimes I am thinking of something else.” When he left the room she justified him: “He is in the middle of some work – he is tired. And when he is working, he is like the water, he boils over.”

“Why don’t you put the lid on him?” asked Joaquín.

Fortunately for him, we left early.

From the tone of Anaïs Nin’s diary entry, it seems as though one could have cut the tense atmosphere at the gathering with a knife!

The New Flute Composition that (Nearly) Wasn’t

Over the years, Florent Schmitt Thursdays would act as a catalyst for hatching more than a few artistic projects — which isn’t at all surprising considering how it was a gathering spot for so many Parisian luminaries over so many decades.

We see this clearly in Hugues Cuénod’s recollections quoted above. Another such project came about in the mid-1950s, a decade after the death of Schmitt’s wife Jeanne but while Jeudis Florent Schmitt gatherings were still happening at the composer’s home. In this instance, it involved the young flute virtuoso Jean-Pierre Rampal.

The autobiography of Jean-Pierre Rampal (1922-2000), written with the assistance of Deborah Wise and published in 1989.

We’ll let Mr. Rampal himself tell the story, which he recounted decades later in his autobiography Music, My Love, published by Random House in 1989. (And there’s a story twist at the end.)

Here is the extract from Rampal’s book:

Florent Schmitt, who was born in 1870, was already an old man renowned for his choral compositions and ballet scores when I first met him in Paris in the fifties. He was very small, with a dry manner. As a young man he had been a pianist, but as his eyesight dimmed with age, so did his playing. He lived in Saint Cloud, across the Seine from Paris, and I had often been at his house for the Jeudis de Florent Schmitt, as his Thursday afternoon gatherings were called. The whole of Paris’s musical world could be found there at one time or another.

It was a tangible link with the past.

I particularly remember two venerable composers who attended these salons regularly: Gustave Samazeuilh and Henri Büsser.

Gustave Samazeuilh (1877-1967), photographed in 1937.

Samazeuilh had been a great friend of Debussy’s; he typified the cultured European gentleman — polite, well-read and with an extraordinary memory. He adored cornering some unsuspecting youngster at M. Schmitt’s and regaling him with tales of the past. Schmitt, who was good at making up clever nicknames, called Samazeuilh “l’Insistance publique,” a pun on “l’Assistance publique” – the French for public assistance, or what in the [United] States would be called welfare. When he started to talk, it was almost impossible to escape. Still, one was never bored when captured by Samazeuilh; I could – and did – listen to his tales many times over. He talked of people I revered as old masters as if he had just left their drawing room. You would think that Debussy was still living, to hear Gustave speak. 

His memories went even further back; he used to tell us of the day when, as a very young boy, his parents had taken him to a house where he saw Liszt sitting in the parlor, playing the piano. The great composer had picked him up and sat him on his lap. It was incredible to me to meet someone who had actually met Liszt. The story had an apocryphal ring to it, but what did that matter? 

Henri Büsser (1872-1973)

Henri Büsser told me an even taller tale of Brahms. Büsser, who was one of Massenet’s students, was refused admittance to Brahms’ house. He and a companion had set out to meet le maître in Germany, reaching their destination only after a long and arduous journey. They found the Brahms residence and rang the doorbell. A butler answered the door and, in the background, the two young men caught a glimpse of a bulky back and a head of long, grey hair. The butler asked their business. 

“We are two French composers come to see le maître,” they answered. 

“Wait one moment,” said the butler. 

He turned to convey the information to his employer. They young men heard a grunt, and then the words, “French composers? Huh, they’re all merde.” 

The butler closed the door in their faces — and, disappointed and somewhat shocked at being referred to as “shit,” the two left. 

Can you imagine talking to someone who had been – or claimed to have been – that close to Brahms? It was as thrilling as playing concerts in halls that echoed with the great names of the past … 

I have always sensed links to the past very strongly, and because of this tried to attend as many of Florent Schmitt’s jeudis as possible. One afternoon I asked him if he was interested in writing a flute concerto. He wasn’t what you’d call an avant-garde composer, being more closely allied to the style of the past — the style of Ravel, for example, who was his contemporary. He was less modern than Jolivet or Boulez, but he was as modern as Poulenc, and he had a fine reputation. I always believed, not only for my own benefit but for the benefit of future flutists, that it was my duty to try to develop the repertoire as much as possible. I always regretted that the previous generation of great flutists did not push the composers of their time to write concerti or sonatas for the flute … 

Florent Schmitt was not very well-known internationally, but I felt convinced that he could, and should, write something for the flute. We corresponded about the project, and one day I received a letter asking me to come to his Saint Cloud apartment [sic] to go over the music. 

“Voilà! My concerto, which I shall call Suite for Flute and Orchestra,” he said when I arrived. Then he suggested we play it through together. 

The score to Florent Schmitt’s Suite en quatre parties. (Photo: James Strauss)

I stood between him as he sat at the piano and I tried to read over his shoulder. Even though his nose was just about touching the score, he wasn’t having much luck. And he was blocking my view almost entirely. He played an approximation of a tightly written score, and I played what I could see of the extremely complicated music. We must have presented a very funny picture: a tall flutist bending over a small grey man squinting at an almost-illegible score. 

“That’s very good,” he said at the end. “Very good.”

I wasn’t quite so convinced. I had barely been able to see the music, let alone play it. 

“Maître, could I please keep the music so that I can work on it?” I asked, rather embarrassed at my performance. 

“You played very well, very well,” Schmitt reiterated, keeping a firm hold on the music. 

“But I was just sight-reading, and the flute part is written so small I can hardly tell if it’s playable,” I protested. 

“I think you played very well, but I’ll make you a copy if you wish,” he answered. 

Several weeks later the music arrived. I had my copy – but the notes had already been published! There wasn’t a chance of changing a single note, and some of it was excruciatingly difficult. Nevertheless, I agreed to give the premiere with the Orchestre National. I had to be on tour prior to the concert, but spent all my evenings working on the new music. 

I arrived in Paris three days before the event and expected to go into immediate rehearsal. My manager called me at my home. 

“The concert with the Orchestre National is canceled.” 

“Why? What happened?” 

“They couldn’t locate the orchestra score. Mr. Schmitt is accusing the publisher of having lost it, and it was his only copy. He’s absolutely livid, and he’s threatening to sue.” 

“Well, we’ll just have to reschedule the concert when they come up with the music,” I said. 

I never did get to play the Schmitt concerto. The music never turned up. Many years passed, and just before Schmitt’s death it was discovered that he had forgotten to orchestrate the piece, and then forgotten that he’d forgotten. Only the flute and piano parts exist.

The recording session for the Florent Schmitt Suite en quatre parties, featuring flautist James Strauss and the Lithanian National Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Laércio Diniz (2012).

… And now the story twist which comes with the realization, discovered decades later, that “old man Schmitt” actually had orchestrated the Suite en quatre parties. In 2002, the noted Brazilian flautist James Strauss discovered the original manuscript hidden away deep in the archives of Durand (Universal). The publishing company had indeed lost it – or more accurately, had misfiled it all those years ago.

Strauss notes:

“There never was a premiere with orchestra; the flute part with piano accompaniment was performed for the first time on October 29, 1959, a little more than a year after the death of Florent Schmitt … 

It is, without doubt … one of the most difficult works for flute and orchestra composed in the 20th century. The Suite is within the impressionistic universe of Debussy and Ravel; the orchestration is quite transcendental. It really does sound like a Debussy or Ravel concertante piece.  And the ending is remindful of Daphnis et Chloë, with a dance in 5/8 time.”

The first — and to-date only — recording of Florent Schmitt’s Suite en quatre parties for flute and orchestra.

And so it was that more than a 50 years following its creation, the orchestrated suite was finally presented in front of an audience – as well as a fine commercial recording made in 2012. It featured James Strauss in a performance that does complete justice to Schmitt’s score — just as surely as Rampal would have done had circumstances turned out differently. Strauss has kept the Suite in his repertoire ever since, hoping for opportunities to perform it in more places in future years.

These three accounts of Jeudis de Florent Schmitt gatherings help conjure up the atmospherics of what was an important gathering place for musicians and other creative artists over many decades. Perhaps not quite the vaunted salons of the grandes dames of Paris – but surely the next-best thing.

His soon-to-be-released album includes two premiere recordings plus an unpublished 1950 piano sonata that later became the wind composition Chants alizés.

Pianist Clément Canonne recording late piano music by Florent Schmitt at IRCAM’s Espace de projection in Paris (December 2023).

A new recording of piano works by Florent Schmitt is scheduled for release in mid-2024 – one that’s particularly important in that its focus will be on late-career compositions that have never been commercially recorded before now.

The musician bringing these three compositions to the microphones is the French pianist Clément Canonne. Trained in piano performance at the Lyon Conservatoire, Mr. Canonne has made his career in the field of music research. But recently he has put renewed energies into performing, and one of the fruits of his activities is a soon-to-be-released recording that includes the following works by Florent Schmitt:

• Clavecin obtempérant, Op. 109 (“The Ill-Tempered Clavier”) — a work for harpsichord or piano composed in 1946 for harpsichordist Marcelle de Lacour
• Scènes de la vie moyenne, Op. 124 (“Scenes from the Mundane Life”) — composed in 1950 in both orchestral and piano versions
• Piano Sonata – the original 1950 version of a composition that would later become Chants alizés, Op. 125 for wind quintet

Florent Schmitt, age 83, seated at the doorway to his study at his home in St-Cloud, France. This photograph was taken in 1953, around the time that the three works featured in Clément Canonne’s soon-to-be-released recording of late-career Schmitt piano compositions were created. (Photo: ©Lipnitzki/Roger-Viollet)

Significantly, all three pieces are commercial recording premieres (although the final wind ensemble version of Chants alizés has received a number of recordings during the LP and CD eras).

Clément Canonne has a keen interest in these late-career compositions, which were written by Schmitt as he approached his 80^th birthday and beyond. While they bear unmistakable characteristics of the artistry of the master, they differ markedly from the vast trove of piano music that Schmitt had created during the first 30 years of his career. Those earlier scores are generally better known and performed more frequently.

Intrigued by the pianist’s interest in these works, I contacted him to learn more about  how he came to discover the compositions, as well as to find out why he considers them such significant works. Highlights of our highly engaging discussion are presented below. (Note: Mr. Canonne’s comments are translated from French into English.)

PLN:  Let’s start at the very beginning. Do you remember how you first became acquainted with Florent Schmitt’s music? Which pieces were your introduction to the composer?

CC:  I discovered Florent Schmitt’s music at around the age of 16 or 17, I think. This was about the time I began practicing the piano works of Ravel and Debussy. Those pieces led me to explore other French composers from the early 20th century in a more systematic way.

The 1993 Valois recording that sparked Clément Canonne’s interest in the music of Florent Schmitt.

In so doing, I quickly came across the name of Schmitt. In particular, I acquired a CD [on the Valois label] which contained his Sonate libre for violin and piano and the quartet Hasards. I was fascinated by the sonata. I didn’t understand everything about it — far from it — but was intrigued enough to want to hear it again and again until the work became completely familiar to me!

Since then, I never lost sight of Florent Schmitt, and I’ve tried to keep up to date with the new releases of recordings devoted to this composer.

PLN:  What impresses you most about Florent Schmitt’s keyboard compositions? In your view, does he write idiomatically for piano?

A vintage copy of the score to Florent Schmitt’s Ombres, inscribed by the composer to the English pianist Myra Hess (1919).

CC:  Actually, I recall that my first contact with Schmitt’s solo piano works was a bit disappointing. I wasn’t particularly interested in his very early works, but instead placed a lot of hope in Ombres [1912-17], expecting to discover another Gaspard de la nuit. When I was finally able to get my hands on the score, I quickly gave up. The piano writing seemed too “thick” to me – and much more orchestral than pianistic in inspiration.

I remember, for example, the tremolos in the first pages of the opening movement, J’entends dans le lointain, which seemed to be a somewhat unsuccessful way of bringing the musical line “to life” in octaves — far from the kind of vibrating unleashing that one encounters in contemporaneous works of Scriabin or Szymanowski, for example.

I readily acknowledge the subjective – and perhaps even unfair – nature of this judgment, but it explains why I did not persevere at that time! The way I saw it, Schmitt was above all a composer of chamber music and orchestral music — that is, until I became acquainted with later [mid-1930s] piano works such as Chaîne brisée and Trois danses. I found Schmitt’s “orchestral” writing in those as well — but stripped of what had frustrated or annoyed me when reading Ombres. The complexity of these later piano pages no longer seemed linked to an excess of ornamentation, but rather to an extreme mobility and great harmonic density – two characteristics that have a lot to do with a kind of properly pianistic virtuosity.

In my view, it is what makes the music both orchestral and pianistic, as it is in the piano version of Stravinsky’s Pétrouchka.

PLN:  For your new recording, you have selected three Schmitt compositions that have never been commercially recorded before now. All three are “late-career” works, having been composed when Schmitt was nearing 80 years of age and older. What drew you to these particular pieces?

CC:  Beyond the aesthetic points I’ve already mentioned, there are two other, more pragmatic reasons that guided me towards these sets – and both have something to do with my professional activities. Although professionally trained in piano performance at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse in Lyon, I gravitated towards the field of research at the conclusion of my musical studies – a profession that I have now practiced for nearly a decade within the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), the most important institution for public research in France. I wanted the Schmitt recording project to be complementary to my work in research, which aims to produce and disseminate new knowledge.

A stone plaque commemorating Florent Schmitt’s tenure as director of the Lyon Conservatoire (1921-23). Clément Canonne studied at the same institution eight decades later.

Providing access to piano pieces that have never been recorded ties in well with this objective.

Furthermore — and still as part of my work as a researcher — I have developed an interest in the topic of “humor” in music. Specifically, what are the musical and sonic parameters that facilitate the inference of a humorous intention? With what values are musical humor practices associated? And to what extent can those theories be developed to account for verbal or representational forms of humor?

With regards to such questions, the music of Florent Schmitt provides an interesting case study: Whereas the “humor” is clearly stated as we can see in the titles of his pieces, the humor is often more discreet in the music itself. The three works that I selected for recording [“The Ill-Tempered Clavier,” “Scenes from the Mundane Life,” Chants alizés/”Champs-Elysées”] are no exception. Moreover, they’ve enabled me to examine questions related to the pragmatics of musical humor, by exploring the interpretative resources available to us in the communication of a humorous intention.

PLN: Regarding Clavecin obtempérant, this work was written originally for harpsichordist Marcelle de Lacour in 1946. But the published score indicates either harpsichord or piano instrumentation. In what ways does the piece come across differently when played as a piano composition rather than one for the harpsichord?

The Clavecin obtempérant score denotes performance on either piano or harpsichord.

CC:  To begin with, we need to remember that the harpsichord to which Schmitt had access was most likely Pleyel’s great concert model — an instrument very far removed from what we consider a “harpsichord” today — and closer to a piano than what we generally imagine when we think of the harpsichord.

But even beyond this, for me there is little doubt that Schmitt composed Clavecin obtempérant both on the piano and for the piano. It’s evidenced by the great variety of the dynamic palette (from pp to ff), the numerous crescendos and decrescendos which dot the work, and even the chords that the composer directs to be allowed to resonate here and there.

The first page of the score to Florent Schmitt’s Clavecin obtempérant (“The Ill-Tempered Clavier”).

The score also includes many octaves and large chords – as in the climax of the final “Animé” movement – which provide a lot of energy when played on the piano but risk sounding less rewarding on the harpsichord.

All that being said, behind this very pianistic writing there is definitely something like an evocation of the harpsichord, too. In this respect, the piece is not unrelated to Ravel’s Tombeau de Couperin. By playing this work on the piano, I endeavored to emulate the precision that we readily associate with the harpsichord, while always staying very close to the fingers in the playing of the phrases.

PLN:  Turning to Scènes de la vie moyenne, this four-movement suite from 1950-51 appeared simultaneously as a solo piano composition and a work for orchestra. As such, the piano version is quite “orchestral” in its flavor, which might pose additional technical difficulties. What challenges did you encounter when developing your interpretation of this music?

A vintage copy of the score to the piano version of Florent Schmitt’s Scènes de la vie moyenne, dedicated to the French pianist Lélia Gousseau.

CC: Scènes de la vie moyenne is certainly highly virtuosic music. It would not be out of place in a recital of transcriptions alongside Ravel’s La Valse or Stravinsky’s Pétrouchka. As is so often the case, the main difficulty is in maintaining the readability of the different lines despite the richness of the overall texture, along with compensating for the absence of instrumental contrasts by achieving greater precision in the dynamic or agogic accent characterizations – all of which further increase the need for maintaining pianistic control.

PLN: Each of the movements of the suite is quite different in musical flavor. What thoughts do you have about each of them – and do you have a favorite of the four?

CC: The suite presents a certain “dramatic” unity, with a chicken as the main character! Chabrier and his art of musical painting are never far away.

Within the suite, “Castles in Spain” contrasts sharply between gentle reverie and passionate outbursts, all in a hyper-chromatic language. It is undoubtedly in this movement where I searched most for what the right “tone” could be; ultimately I chose to emphasize the great lyricism of these pages rather than trying to “twist” the melodic lines.

This oasis of reverie only reinforces the incongruity of the “Chicken Somersault” – a truly devilish final movement that’s full of octaves and thirds, right down to the chord strokes in contrary motions of the last measure! The tone may sometimes be lyrical but it is never for long, and there is always an ornament or a brief silence to interrupt the flow and thwart any pathos.

The first page manuscript to the orchestral version of the “Castles in Spain” movement from Florent Schmitt’s Scènes de la vie moyenne.

Broadly, if I had to choose one movement from this suite that is the most compelling to me, it would be the first, titled “The March to the Market.” I admire its implacable character – the rhythmic engine that underlies it all – as well as its truculence. You really do have the impression of being immersed in the hubbub of a market scene, and the contrasting or collage effects seem to me to be particularly effective.

PLN:  Chants alizés is interesting in that it’s listed in the Schmitt catalogue of works as a quintet for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and horn. Nowhere do we find any reference of it as a solo piano work. Tell us how you discovered this version of the piece.

CC:  While investigating the piano works of Florent Schmitt on the website of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, I came across a mysterious mention: “Piano sonata, first version of Chants alizés, quintet for wind instruments, opus 125.” Intrigued, I immediately made an appointment at the Music Department of the BNF in order to view the manuscript. There I discovered a perfectly clean manuscript score, dated December 25, 1950.

The first page of the manuscript score to Florent Schmitt’s Piano Sonata, which was used by Clément Canonne in making his recording in December 2023.

The version the world knows best — scored for wind ensemble and published in 1955 as Florent Schmitt’s Opus 125.

I don’t know why Schmitt ended up not publishing this so-called “piano sonata” – the only piece so named among his entire output.  We do know that he received a commission from the ORTF’s wind quintet shortly after completing the manuscript of this sonata — and so one could hypothesize that he decided that his recent sonata could very well do the job to fulfill that commission.

In fact, the manuscript of the piano sonata includes a very large number of pencil modifications that were clearly made after the completion of the original score — and which aim to both orchestrate and transform the piano material for performance by a quintet of wind players.

My recording presents the initial manuscript version as prepared by Florent Schmitt when he had the writing of a piano sonata in mind, before rewriting the work for wind quintet.

PLN:  When you compare the final wind version to the initial piano sonata treatment, what major differences do you see? How successful is the piece as a piano work, and which attributes appeal to you in particular?

CC:  The piano version has some notable differences from the wind quintet version, particularly in the first movement, the middle portion of the second movement, and the lyrical spots of the fourth movement. The initial movement is titled “Un poco maestoso” in the piano version, which became “Of a somewhat martial gravity” in the wind quintet version. The irony implied by this indication (and which Schmitt achieves in particular by giving a somewhat separate role to the horn, and by the use of certain dissonances) is not present at all in the piano version, which I characterize as a much more “serious” inspiration.

Clément Canonne recording Florent Schmitt’s Piano Sonata at IRCAM’s Espace de projection in Paris (December 2023).

In any case, this “sonata” is perfectly pianistic even as it remains formidably challenging — like practically everything else that Schmitt wrote for the instrument. I’ll add that it was extremely moving to see and interact with the clear, meticulous handwriting of the composer while attempting to bring this piano sonata back to life.

Of course, the discovery is not completely “new” since the basic thematic material will already be familiar to fans of Florent Schmitt’s music, as well as to many wind players in general. But we’re finally able to hear what the piano sonata of a composer who waited more than 80 years to write his first (and only) one sounds like!

PLN:  In this new recording, and in other pieces by Florent Schmitt that you have worked on, you tend to gravitate to the composer’s later period of compositions rather than the extensive body of piano works he composed between the 1890s and 1920s – some of those significantly better known. What aspects of Schmitt’s later style do you find particularly compelling and worthy?

CC:  Broadly speaking, I appreciate the “edgier” character of Florent Schmitt’s late period, with its clear, bold harmonies and great rhythmic power always evident. Schmitt’s piano works of this period are no exception, and I think they deserve to be much better known!

PLN:  Please tell us a little about your background as a musician – as well as your work with IRCAM.

CC: My training is that of a classical pianist: I studied at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse in Lyon, where I was very interested in contemporary music and in accompanying singers.

The 2008 Les Emeudroïdes recording on the Neos Music label. Clément Canonne is pictured at far left.

In those years I also practiced improvisation, and in 2008 I made a recording on the Neos Music label featuring my quintet Les Emeudroïdes.

Concurrently, I studied philosophy and musicology, preparing a doctoral thesis devoted to collective improvisation. At the conclusion of this thesis, I was fortunate to be recruited at the CNRS, thereby able to work as a full-time researcher with complete academic freedom.

Pierre Boulez (1925-2016), French composer and conductor. (1968 photo)

I am part of the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music (IRCAM), founded by Pierre Boulez in the late 1970s with the idea of bringing artists and researchers together. Within IRCAM, I lead the Analysis of Musical Practices team; we develop empirical approaches (inspired by both social sciences and cognitive sciences) to understand better the musical world that surrounds us — from production to reception, including the multiple technical components that constitute it.

PLN:  Are you currently active in the realm of piano performance?

CC:  After I joined the CNRS, my pianistic activities became sporadic: a little accompanying of singers or instrumentalists, a few improvisation masterclasses — but also the use of the piano in the context of conferences for purposes of illustration or exemplification. But I have never abandoned regular piano practice, and for me this Florent Schmitt recording is a way of reconnecting with everything that nourished me before I embraced my career as a researcher.

Beyond the piano, I am active with various artistic projects as well. For instance, I participate in a Sonic Games project which attempts to produce authentic games (not just constrained scores) that take sound for medium. And also, a project on desynchronization with a wonderful sextet of musicians, for which I proposed various playing and experimentation protocols.

PLN:  What is the schedule for final production and release of the new Florent Schmitt recording? When, where and how will it be available to music-lovers?

CC:  The actual recording activities are finished – they were carried out in mid-December at the IRCAM Projection Space. Next is completing the editing and mixing work. The recording should be available in mid-2024, and it is being released on the Urborigène label.

The reopening of the IRCAM Espace de projection performance venue in Paris featured a presentation of Iannis Xenakis’ groundbreaking electro-acoustic creation Polytopes de Cluny. (Photo: Quentin Chevrier, June 2022)

The CD version of the recording will be available by ordering directly from the label, and the CD will include a booklet with three essays written especially for it by fellow musicologists.

The download/streaming version of the recording will be available on the usual platforms, too.

At the moment, we’re still looking for a little additional financial support to finalize the release, including CD pressing costs, and to ensure good distribution of the recording. To that end, we’ll be launching a crowdfunding effort in the coming weeks, and we’re hopeful that Florent Schmitt fans around the world will be able to help us bring the project home!

PLN:  Do you have plans to continue your exploration of the music of Florent Schmitt, possibly with an eye towards more recording? Which pieces in particular interest you?

CC:  Indeed, I would like to continue this work dedicated to Florent Schmitt’s scores by recording a second CD of later-career piano works. That disc would likely include Trois danses, Chaîne brisée, and the Suite sans esprit de suite. I don’t have firm plans or a timeline quite yet, because those dates will depend in part on what the reception will be to the first recording.

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We are indebted to musicians like Clément Canonne, whose endless curiosity has led him to investigate the byways of the piano literature, uncovering unjustly neglected gems and undertaking the recording of those compositions.

Finalizing the release of the premiere recordings of three late-career piano works by Florent Schmitt is an endeavor that is clearly worthy of our support. Details on the fundraising initiative will be shared as soon as they are available.

Alain made important first recordings of French piano scores by Florent Schmitt, while Tristan is exploring the composer’s sumptuous early-career mélodies.

Tenor Cyrille Dubois and pianist Tristan Raës in recital (Abbaye de Lessay in Normandy, August 2023).

Recently a multi-country recital tour was announced featuring tenor Cyrille Dubois and pianist Tristan Raës, in which mélodies by the composer Gabriel Fauré and several of his students would be performed. I was pleased to learn that one of the mélodies selected by Messrs. Dubois and Raës was Florent Schmitt’s Les Barques, Op. 8, one of a group of five pieces from the turn of the last century colloquially referred to by the composer as his Poèmes des lacs.

Alain Raoul Raës (1947-2023) began his piano studies at the Schola Cantorum before becoming a protégé of Lélia Gousseau at the Paris Conservatoire starting in 1965. He won the Conservatoire’s Piano First Prize in 1970, followed by the Grand Prize at the Geneva International Competition in 1973.

I was even more intrigued when I discovered that Tristan Raës is the son of Alain Raës, a respected pianist who made critically acclaimed recordings of solo piano music by Albert Roussel, Arthur Honegger and Florent Schmitt.

The original Alain Raës’ 2-LP recording of Florent Schmitt piano scores (FY label), recorded in 1985 and released in 1987.

Most of the Florent Schmitt album – a 2-LP set in its first incarnation in 1987 – were world premiere recordings, making the project one of substantial artistic significance.

I first made contact with Tristan Raës in early 2023 with the intention of interviewing him and his father together about their voyage of discovery with Florent Schmitt’s music. Unfortunately, Alain fell seriously ill shortly after our initial correspondence, and sadly passed away in June 2023 at the age of 76 years.

After a pause of several months, Tristan and I came to a mutual realization that the story of Alain, Tristan and the rest of the highly musical Raës family (which also includes violinist Florestan) needed to be told – not just as a tribute to Alain, but also in recognition of his unceasing advocacy for the entire corpus of piano music that came from France’s “Golden Age” – especially the composers beyond Debussy and Ravel.

This photo of the Raës family was taken in 2017 on the occasion of Alain’s 70th birthday. Pictured in the center is Tristan; Florestan is at right.

The interview highlights presented below encompass several discussions held with Tristan Raës between April 2023 and February 2024. (Note: Mr. Raës’ remarks have been translated from French to English.)

PLN:  How did you first discover the music of Florent Schmitt? Which pieces by him did you know first?

A vintage copy of the score to Florent Schmitt’s Suite en trois parties, composed in 1955.

TR: My father’s recording devoted to Florent Schmitt’s piano music was made in 1985, four years after my birth. But unfortunately, I cannot say that my first contact with the composer was through this recording. I had to wait until I was 22 to play my first piece by Schmitt – and it wasn’t one of the solo piano pieces, but rather the Suite en trois parties for trumpet and piano. 

It was music that surprised me by its complexity and its extremely detailed, chiseled writing – equally demanding in terms of the level of its pianistic realization and musical comprehension.

PLN:  Sometimes credit can go to teachers for encouraging their students’ interests in certain composers or styles of music. In your case, did any of your teachers influence you in this regard?

TR:  Looking back on the time of my piano studies, although my father encouraged me to investigate Albert Roussel (the very beautiful Sonatine) and also to read through some Dukas, basically I stayed on the “well-worn path” for a long time, repertoire-wise. 

I now realize that in the piano classes at the Paris Conservatoire, there was a strange chasm within the French repertoire, in the sense that after Debussy and Ravel we went straight to Messiaen and Dutilleux.

Caplet, Roussel, Honegger, Schmitt – so many composers were sadly left out. 

Tristan Raës

Instead, I had to wait for the continuation of my studies – more centered on chamber music and instrumental and vocal accompaniment classes — to discover this wonderful repertoire. 

I think that the rich legacy of French music from this period, in order to be properly advocated for and defended, requires cultivation and a certain insistence from teachers. 

The natural attraction for the great romantic outpourings that stretch as far as Rachmaninov is very powerful — and for a young musician, the “emotional reward” seems much more immediate than the complexity of these other works. But by not concentrating on them, we are missing out on so many wonderful things!

PLN:  Let’s talk more about your father Alain, who gave us such marvelous recordings. Most notably, he recorded solo piano works by Albert Roussel, Arthur Honegger and Florent Schmitt – many of which were world premiere recordings when they were first released. What inspired him to do this?

Nearly all of the Florent Schmitt piano works selected by Alain Raës were world premiere recordings at the time of their initial release on the FY label in 1987. Most of the collection was re-released on a single CD in 2009 (Solstice label).

TR:  My father discovered the riches of this repertoire just after winning his prize at the Geneva competition. He was offered the opportunity to make a recording of piano music by Honegger. His curiosity aroused, he went on to explore the piano music of Roussel and Schmitt on his own. 

To answer your question about his inspiration more directly, I think that many young musicians find themselves faced with a delicate choice: Should they interpret the great works of the known repertoire which, to be honest, the public likes to hear because they are familiar with them? Or, should they explore the musical side roads, thereby making themselves a spokesperson for music that is unjustly forgotten or neglected? 

The first option, as satisfactory as it may seem for concertizing, unfortunately condemns them to making the 300^th interpretation or recording of an over-exposed piece of music …

Alain Raës’ 2012 recording of Massenet vocal/piano compositions also features tenor Damien Top (BNL label).

But with the second choice, some performers have chosen to stray off the well-trodden path — not only because they love the element of discovery, but also because they can develop artistically in a more fulfilling way.

I think this may be why my father chose the second option — and in his time he did a lot for the cause of these great composer talents who, it must be said, had been smothered under the “sacred behemoths” Debussy and Ravel. 

These days, it is welcome to witnesss younger musicians investing in similar noble causes, such as discovering female composers like Charlotte Sohy, Marie Jaell, Rita Strohl and so many others.

PLN:  As the son of a renowned pianist, it is likely that you received valuable encouragement from your father as you developed your artistic talents. Indeed, your entire family is one that is filled with music – your brother Florestan is an accomplished violinist and your mother Emmanuelle is in orchestra management.

TR:  I actually learned piano from my father, who taught me in my first years. This of course doesn’t mean that I didn’t continue to learn from him well after those early lessons – indeed, right up until the end. 

Violinist Florestan Raës studied at conservatories in Douai, Roubaix, Lille, Brussels and Paris. He has performed as a soloist, in chamber ensembles at the Prades Festival, as well as in several opera and symphony orchestras in France.

It’s the same with my brother Florestan who, although having chosen the violin, saw his passion nourished and encouraged from a very early age by our father.

His words of advice were so numerous that it would be impossible to summarize them in just a few sentences. But beyond the technical, analytical and stylistic considerations, I always remember one piece of advice he would tell us before concerts: “La musique avant toute chose.” (“Music before everything else.”) It was his way of emphasizing that despite doing the necessary work of a goldsmith — adjusting and calibrating even the smallest details before a performance — we must above all convey emotion; the expression of feeling is the only true purpose of performing.

PLN:  Your recent efforts have focused on vocal music – in particular collaborating with the tenor Cyrille Dubois to present relatively unfamiliar mélodies from France’s “Golden Age” created by composers like Chausson, Dubois, Duparc, Godard and Roger-Ducasse, in addition to Florent Schmitt. How did the two of you decide which pieces to feature in your programming?

The Cyrille Dubois/Tristan Raës recording of the complete Fauré mélodies encompasses three CDs (Aparté, 2022), which won a Gramophone Classical Music Award in 2023. The two musicians began performing together in 2010 as the Duo Contraste.

TR:  Our shared interest in French  vocal repertoire from that period has been continually nurtured by the foundation Palazzetto Bru Zane with its insatiable musical curiosity. For me, the interest has also come from various chamber music competitions and activities which led me to discover more of these hidden gems. 

Our most recent recital project fits in with this taste for discovery — which is why, in a year of tributes to Gabriel Fauré upon the centenary of his death, Cyrille and I wanted to showcase not only Fauré’s mélodies, but also to present works by some of Fauré’s greatest pupils – Florent Schmitt, Nadia Boulanger, Roger-Ducasse and others. 

The newest Cyrille Dubois/Tristan Raës recording collaboration: Mélodies by Louis Beydts (Aparté, 2024).

We have also focused on the completely unknown composer Louis Beydts, whose music we are featuring in our next album.

We can also dream for an opportunity one day to do the same for Roussel and Schmitt! The Poèmes des lacs of Schmitt is a wonderful cycle of five mélodies, and we have a particular crush on Les Barques which is one of the pieces being featured on our current tour.

PLN:  Regarding Florent Schmitt’s pianistic style, we have the famous words of Alfred Cortot who referred to the composer’s piano music as “fistfuls of notes.” Do you concur?

TR:  The music of Schmitt that I’ve had the opportunity to play seems to me, above all, harmonic. Perhaps this is what Cortot meant – in the sense that the piano formulae are ”in the hands” via chords. At the same time, these rich harmonies change with such fluidity through inspired modulations, such that one often feels close to the impressionist universe of Debussy or Ravel. 

French pianist Alfred Cortot (1873-1952), photographed with Florent Schmitt (r.) in the early 1950s.

Pianistically, I would say that “virtuosity for virtuosity’s sake” doesn’t interest Florent Schmitt at all; he is one composer for whom each note has a role. Importantly, Schmitt does not “fill to fill.” 

That being said, Schmitt’s writing for the piano is often not easy — but it always makes the instrument sound magnificent once mastered by the performer!

PLN:  In his mélodies, Florent Schmitt most often chose the verses of modern poets to set to music (there is an exception in Pierre de Ronsard). To what extent does Schmitt manage to capture the “essence” of the words in his music?

TR:  The literary knowledge and keen curiosity of the French composers of that time for contemporary poetry is remarkable. I sometimes joke with Cyrille by asserting that the less gifted the composer, the more he or she chooses to set poetry that is ultra-known – even a little rehashed. Conversely, the more talented the composer, the more the choice of poems is a rarity – and sometimes even eclectic. 

In the mélodies of Schmitt that I’ve explored, I find that his relationship to poetry is more “impressionistic” – more in the tradition of Debussy and Caplet and less like that of Fauré. 

Count Robert de Montesquiou (1855-1924), did not so much live as “perform” his life. (Painting by Giovanni Boldini, 1897)

Indeed, the latter is a kind of French exception; with Fauré, the musical form and structure are beautifully written in keeping with the poem as a whole — but more often than not he seemingly resists having the music bend to every word, or to figuratively illustrate each stanza of the text. Maybe this is out of modesty? (I sometimes feel that Fauré waited until the Mirages, Op. 113 from later in his career to really achieve the figurative in music.) 

On the other hand, Florent Schmitt’s music in Les Barques — taking cues directly from Robert de Montesquieu’s text — is the wind, the water, the bell or the quivering of the leaves. Superb on every level!

PLN:  Did you and your father ever team up for performances or making recordings?

The 2006 father-and-son Poulenc recording, on the Solstice label.

TR:  Yes! A long time ago we made a recording of piano duet and duo music by Poulenc, on the Solstice label. We also had the opportunity to do concerts together, exploring repertoire from Mozart’s Sonata to Messiaen’s Visions de l’Amen.    

The original printing of the piano duet version of Florent Schmitt’s Reflets d’Allemagne was published by Mathot (1905).

We played so many works, and I remember us reading together Schmitt’s Reflets d’Allemagne as well as Une semaine du petit-elfe Ferme-l’oeil.

But we never had the opportunity to play any Schmitt together in recital — much less make a recording.

The unfortunate fact is that Florent Schmitt’s piano duo repertoire is basically never given in concert; personally I can’t ever remember having seen it programmed anywhere. But through the Florent Schmitt Website you have aroused my curiosity as well as that of other pianists, I’m sure. And that is the first step!

The original edition of Florent Schmitt’s piano four-hand composition Une semaine du petit elfe Ferme-l’oeil, composed in 1912.

PLN:  … And how about performing with your brother Florestan?

TR:  My younger brother also performed with my father in a number of sonata concerts. And today it is with a sense of continuity – certainly tinged with sadness but also with enthusiasm – that my brother and I regularly concertize together. This year we will be performing some Mendelssohn [the 1823 Sonata for Violin and Piano] and Lalo.

PLN:  This leads to my next question: In future seasons, what plans might you have to present Florent Schmitt’s music in recital?

Tristan Raës and Cyrille Dubois (2023 photo)

TR:  I am in the midst of touring with Cyrille with our program which we’ve titled Maître Fauré, and which includes Les Barques by Schmitt.  We have taken this program to Vevey in Switzerland and to Venice in Italy, to the Philharmonie in Paris as well as the Abbaye de Lessay in Normandy. 

Next, we’re planning to present the program in Montreal, Canada in March, and in more locations after that. 

The score to Florent Schmitt’s early composition Les Barques, composed in 1897 and based on the poetry of Robert de Montesquiou. As with many of his vocal works, Schmitt also orchestrated this piece.

You could say to me that Les Barques is just one mélodie and there are so many others by Florent Schmitt that are just as sublime – and you’d be right. But this was our opportunity to present Schmitt within the larger context of his teacher Fauré and his fellow students. I can tell you that post-concert feedback from the public about this mélodie is dithyrambic every time. People tell me that they cannot believe they don’t already know this wonderful music!

Richly inspired: The program developed by Cyrille Dubois and Tristan Raës for their Maître Fauré recitals, presented in Europe and North America in 2023-24.

The score to Florent Schmitt’s Sonate libre en deux parties enchaînées, ad modem Clementis aquæ, composed in 1919.

As for Schmitt’s Sonate libre, Florestan and I have not yet tackled it, but it’s certain that performing this work would be a tribute – and an extension of the love our father had for Florent Schmitt as well as for that particular piece.

PLN:  Do the other four mélodies that make up Schmitt’s Poèmes des lacs interest you and Cyrille as well?

TR: Cyrille and I read the entire cycle before extracting Les Barques for our Maître Fauré recitals. (Unfortunately, we could include only one of them because the scope of the concert was about representing all of Fauré’s students – and there were many of them.) 

Les Barques is such an exquisite gem — and I recall my father, hearing me working on this piece one day, who was surprised by the luxuriant harmonic richness of the piece.

He said to me, “Ah, superb! Here we have Florent Schmitt at the top of his game!” 

Florent Schmitt, photographed in 1900 around the time he composed the five pieces that make up the Poèmes des lacs. (Photo: Eugène Pirou)

But to your question more directly, we fully intend to present these Lake Poems in their entirety eventually – and who knows, perhaps one day we will be able to record them. Cyrille and I have recently made new recordings devoted to Beydts and Gabriel Dupont — but Schmitt and Roussel are among our favorites, and we are just beginning with them!

PLN:  As we conclude our conversation, are there any additional observations you’d like to make about Florent Schmitt and his importance to the world of French music?

TR:  As musicians, we must make sure that we don’t ostracize Florent Schmitt. I can tell you from direct personal experience that once people encounter his music, they are delighted!  

Schmitt’s compositions are magnificent in their compositional structure, melody line, harmony and counterpoint. And let’s also not forget his superb talent as an orchestrator, too. The key is to get people into the room, because once they come, they never leave disappointed.

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We are grateful that the musical talents of the Raës family have been focused on bringing to light unjustly neglected gems from France’s “Golden Age” of music. Here’s hoping that Tristan and Florestan Raës will follow in their father Alain’s footsteps in performing and recording more of Florent Schmitt’s fascinating music (with fair dues to tenor Cyrille Dubois as well!).

Tout Paris came together 100 years ago to fete the Russian-born conductor upon his election as a Chevalier of the Legion d’honneur.

Serge Alexandrovich Koussevitzky (1874-1951)

The Russian-born conductor Serge Koussevitzky arrived in Paris in 1920, leaving behind Soviet Russia where he had led the Philharmonic Orchestra of Petrograd since 1917. Maestro Koussevitzky was already a household name in music, of course, as his reputation stretched back nearly two decades – first as a noted double bass player (he also played piano, violin, cello and trumpet) and later as a conductor, beginning with his 1908 debut leading the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.

Upon settling in Paris, the conductor immediately organized the Concerts Koussevitzky, which he would lead in in nine memorable seasons from 1921 to 1929. Those concert programs were ones that presented new works by Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Ravel (the famous orchestration of Mussorgsky’s solo piano work Pictures at an Exhibition) as well as offering numerous other modern compositions – among them Florent Schmitt’s La Tragédie de Salomé and Rêves.

Koussevitzky’s growing fame as a conductor of international renown spread quickly, extending even to the United States where, in 1924, he was named the new music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, replacing the departing Pierre Monteux.

A photo of the Boston Symphony Orchestra during Serge Koussevitzky’s tenure as music director.

The Boston orchestra was an ensemble Koussevitzky would lead for the next quarter-century, cementing his legacy not only with noteworthy performances and recordings of repertoire stretching from Bach through the Romantics to the 20^th century, but also by premiering new works from composers ranging from Frenchmen Albert Roussel and Florent Schmitt to Prokofiev, Bartok and Bax, plus Americans Barber, Bernstein and Copland, to name just some.

It is a measure of the significant Serge Koussevitzky’s artistic influence and cultural impact that, in 1925, he was named a Chevalier of the Legion d’honneur in France, barely five years after arriving in Paris. The honor was an occasion that called for a big celebration – which is exactly what happened.

Henrietta Malkiel Poynter (1901-1968) was an American journalist and businesswoman. Born in New York City into a family of political and labor union activists, she graduated from Columbia Journalism School in 1922. Malkiel worked as a features and foreign desk editor for several publications including Vanity Fair and and Vogue. She also served as assistant to film director John Houseman. Malkiel married Nelson Poynter in 1942 and subsequently served as an assistant program chief for Voice of America. In 1945 she and her husband co-founded Congressional Quarterly, aiming to provide a link between local newspapers and Washington DC’s complex Federal government activities. (ca. 1940 photo)

And what a celebration it was! Looking back from the vantage point of a century later, a feature article published in the July 18, 1925 issue of Musical America magazine gives us a glimpse of the festivities, which attracted a veritable “Who’s Who” of artistic Paris and beyond. Penned by Henrietta Malkiel, not only does the Musical America article recount the boisterous events of the evening, it also touches on the keen interest with which the attendees were observing the state of the arts in the United States.

At the time, Koussevitzky was just one year into his Boston Symphony tenure (which would overlap with his Paris seasons until 1929). At the gala event honoring Maestro Koussevitzky, no doubt Ms. Malkiel proactively solicited guests’ viewpoints concerning the American cultural scene. While most of them likely had more questions than answers on the topic, Malkiel’s article gives us a glimpse into the mindset of the Europeans as they observed the new adventure that Serge Koussevitzky had embarked upon — and what its long-term significance might be.

[Of course, we know how the story turned out — how Koussevitzky would successfully meld the two musical worlds by bringing new compositions from “Old Europe” to the “New World”; one of those was the Boston Symphony’s commission extended to Florent Schmitt to write his Symphonie concertante for Orchestra and Piano for the orchestra’s 50^th Anniversary season, at which Schmitt himself played piano at the Boston premiere in 1932.]

The first page of the score to Florent Schmitt’s Symphonie concertante for Orchestra and Piano, dedicated to Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Schmitt himself performed the notoriously challenging piano part at the Boston world premiere in 1932.

Either way, Henrietta Malkiel’s Musical America article is an important historical document that gives us a window into a bygone world – a world of incredible musical talent, and one where there was still a sense of “wondering” what the future of music might hold on both sides of the Atlantic. The original article is reproduced here in its entirety, with the full text extracted and presented below it for ease of reading.

The July 18, 1925 Musical America magazine article about the Koussevitzky gala event.

MUSICIANS ABROAD GAMBOL IN KOUSSEVITZKY’S HONOR

By Henrietta Malkiel, Musical America Magazine 

Chevalier of the Ordre national de la Légion d’honneur.

PARIS, July 7—Boisterous humor in modern music occasionally graces solemn occasions, but it is too often unconscious. The Legion of Honor is undoubtedly a serious institution, but the modernists of Paris, with their proverbial perversity, made it an excuse for revelry. When Serge Koussevitzky was named a Chevalier of the order, composers and musicians gathered to honor him and to show him that they were good enough friends to enjoy a joke at his expense. It was an evening of caricature and slapstick. We saw Serge Koussevitzky in all his moods, in musical portraits for the accepted and unaccepted instruments. There was a line drawing for piano, a watercolor for harps, a charcoal for his favorite contrabass and a somewhat ribald caricature for the player-piano.

Master of Ceremonies: Henri Casadesus (1879-1947) …

The conférencier, Henri Casadesus, who in his more serious moments is the head of the Society of Ancient Instruments, played the court jester and mocked everybody from André Messager, whose speech of welcome did not predict the merriment that was to follow, to Mr. Koussevitzky and the celebrated artists who filled the hall.

Alfred Cortot (1877-1962) was there …

The program began with a piece by Arthur Honegger for trombone, with Alfred Cortot at the piano. It pictured the regret of the composer that he could not be there, in plangent tones, and then described the clowning and gaiety which he would miss.

Paul Dukas (1965-1935) was there …

Paul Dukas confided to the piano loud protestations of welcome and pompous assurance of the importance of the occasion, mingled with sly slapstick and the intimation that there was, after all, only a delusion of grandeur. It was entirely entre nous, of course, and so we must admit that to our friends we are not really so important.

Albert Roussel (1946-1937) was there …

Albert Roussel, a shy short man with a horror of being conspicuous, presented a facetious vignette for bassoon and contrabass, which revealed a sly humor and a telling irony which the little man who sat stroking his little beard did not even suggest.

The Satirical Harps

Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953) was there …

The curtains were drawn to allow the orchestra to prepare—or so the conférencier predicted. A piano began in burlesque of the grand symphonic manner to bang out a ribald caricature, almost a Coney Island ballyhoo. It finished with a challenging bravado, and there was revealed Serge Prokofieff, his pale red head bent over the keyboard, pumping away at a player-piano.

Carlos Salzedo (1885-1961) was there …

Then there was a celestial avalanche of harps, which caused Francis Macmillen to interrupt festivities with a cry of “So this is Heaven!” Carlos Salzedo played his idyllic conception of Serge Koussevitzky, and Roland-Manuel and Raymond Charpentier demonstrated in harp quartets that even so gentle an instrument can be satirical.

Alexandre Tansman (1897-1986) was there …

Alexandre Tansman paid the respects of Poland in a piano solo. Félia Litvinne, a famous Brünnhilde, sang two Russian folk-songs, and Paul Le Flem presented a quartet.

Then Mr. Casadesus explained that there was to be a great tribute. A little girl in England had written a letter of appreciation to Mr. Koussevitzky, and a clarinet piece. Mrs. Ernest Newman had to pronounce the name, which French lips could not manipulate, and to decide that the child was twelve years old.

Germaine Tailleferre (1892-1983) composes a carol in honor of Serge Koussevitzky …

After the naive solo there was a call for volunteers. A chorus was formed to sing a carol to Koussevitzky. The composer was anonymous, but it was whispered about that Germaine Tailleferre disclaimed all responsibility for it.

Florent Schmitt (1870-1958) and tenor Charles Hubbard were there …

The singers, however, proudly announced their names. Henri Casadesus was the soloist, and in the chorus were Germaine Tailleferre, Madeleine Grovlez, Carlos Salzedo, Maurice Ravel, Florent Schmitt, Albert Roussel, Félia Litvinne, Bérthe Bert, Nadia Boulanger, Serge Prokofieff, Alfred Cortot and Marie Miller.

Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979) was there …

Serge Koussevitzky was the excuse for the festivities. It was he who had to respond to the applause and to kiss each composer on both cheeks; but the event was more than an honor to a famous conductor. It was an international reunion of musicians and composers. They laughed at themselves. They laughed at each other, and for the most part forgot that they had reputations to uphold and remembered only that a spirit of conviviality had to be maintained.

Jacques Rouché (1862-1957) was there …

Jacques Rouché, director of the Opéra, was there, looking like Gatti-Casazza and the director of an opera house, and Maurice Ravel, a very small man, with keen, shrewd eyes and gray hair and a gracious charm, and D. E. Ingelbrecht and Jacques Ibert.

Lazare Saminsky (1882-1959) was there …

The American contingent, too, was well-represented. There were Vladimir Shavitch of the Syracuse Symphony; Lazare Saminsky, who recently conducted his symphony here; Charles Hubbard, an American tenor who sings in Paris; Tina Lerner; Alexander Steinert, the young Boston composer, and William Brennan, manager of the Boston Symphony.

There was much talk of America by those who have been and those who want to go. There is always talk of America in musical Europe. And there were the inevitable comparisons of orchestras, of programs and of prices. The Boston Symphony, Mr. Koussevitzky explained, is a perfect instrument. Its ensemble effects are incomparable. European orchestras cannot achieve such results in the short rehearsal time they are allowed, but there is individual talent and versatility in the European orchestras and a spontaneity which is the substitute for the perfection of the American organization.

André Messager (1853-1929) was there …

America is still the land of promise, but it is no longer the only market for artistic wares. Europe is coming back and reclaiming its own. Most of the artists are preparing to limit their American tours next season to two or three months and tour the rest of the year in Europe and the Near East, which, with the Balkans, is rapidly becoming an important and profitable musical field. Concert fees are almost as high as in America and the overhead is less.

Jacques Thibaud (1880-1953) was there …

In Greece and Rumania artists are paid in American dollars and concerts are sold out in advance, Jacques Thibaud, who has just returned from a tour there and in Africa, says. And in the countries on both sides of the Mediterranean prices are quoted in Swiss francs. The reappearance of the European cities in the musical market means, in part, the solution of the American problem, and the artists welcome the idea of a short, closely booked tour in the United States instead of the scattered dates which they have had to accept for the past few years.

Fair Exchange

Jacques Ibert (1890-1962) was there …

America has done a great deal for the artists who have gone over, but they have done as much for America. Europe has lost the idea that anything can be sold to America. The artists who have come back have told of the musical development of the country and the high artistic standards. They are beginning to take music in America seriously over here and to realize that, although the field is big, the competition is keen. It is a matter of the survival of the fittest, and minor artists no longer talk hopefully of the fortunes to be made across the ocean.

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) was there …

The change in attitude in France in the last few years is a reflection of the musical development of America. Its importance from the business angle has long been acknowledged. It is now being accepted as an artistic center. Musical Europe is beginning to look to its laurels.

Paul Le Flem (1881-1984) was there …

This attitude is reflected in all the musical circles in Paris. It was seen at the Koussevitzky soirée, where all the factions, conservative and futurist, met. At the forums of the Revue musicale, where musicians gather to try out the newest of new music, it is noticed, as well as in the green rooms of the concerts and at the musical teas, which inevitably turn to “shop talk.”

Désiré Inghelbrecht (1885-1965) was there …

All the musicians of the world seem to be in Paris now. The season is almost over. They are on vacation, and in their idle moments they forget the solemnity of the causes which they represent and amuse themselves. But they are always musicians, for their very puns, their humor and frivolities take musical form — even if they are not musically significant.

Premiered in May 1940 — mere weeks before the fall of France — the piece was shelved thereafter, with the unpublished score and parts languishing in the archives of the Bibliothèque national de France and Universal/Durand.

The Artiguemy Tree on the property of Florent Schmitt’s country retreat in the Haute-Pyrénées. It served as inspiration for the composer during the creation of L’Arbre entre tous (“The Tree of All”) in 1939.

Within the catalogue of Florent Schmitt’s compositions, there are a significant number of works for orchestra with chorus. Some could be classified as “miniatures,” such as Danse des Devadasis and Chant de la nuit (Ode à Frédéric Chopin), as compared to several of Schmitt’s biggest scores, most notably Psaume XLVII, Fête de la lumière and the ballet Oriane et le Prince d’Amour (the latter calling for an eight-part mixed choir).

Jean Élie Paul Zay (1904-1944) was a politician who was elected to the French parliament in 1932 as a member of the Radical Socialist Party, which later became part of the Popular Front that came to power in the 1936 national elections. Zay was appointed Minister of National Education and Fine Arts soon thereafter. In addition to planning the 150th anniversary French Revolution celebrations including the Florent Schmitt musical commission, Zay proposed creation of an annual international film event in France (which would ultimately bear fruit as the Cannes Film Festival, inaugurated in 1946). At the outbreak of World War II, Zay resigned as minister to join the French Army. Arrested aboard ship in August 1940 and charged with desertion, he was convicted and imprisoned. In June 1944, Zay was removed from Prison Riom by three militiamen and murdered at an abandoned quarry; he was just 39 years old. In 2005, a French literary prize was named in Zay’s honor, and in 2015 he was recognized at the Panthéon in Paris as a leading figure in the French Resistance.

Occupying a sort of middle ground is a piece that’s all-but unknown: L’Arbre entre tous, Op. 95 (“The Tree of All”), a 15-minute work commissioned for celebrations in 1939 marking the 150^th anniversary of the French Revolution.

Florent Schmitt’s was the only musical work commissioned for the anniversary by the French Ministry of National Education, under the leadership of Jean Zay, and it was planned for performance at concerts on September 20^th and 21^st, 1939, at the Place de la Nation in Paris.

Zay came up with “Revolution and Intellectual History” as the theme of the 150^th anniversary celebration– but with Europe moving rapidly to a war footing, it was only natural that a large dose of French patriotism and nationalism would underlie any focus on revolutionary symbolism.

Novelist and poet Jules Supervielle (1884-1960) was born in Montivideo, Uruguay. Orphaned at a young age, he was raised by relatives in his native country and in France, where he settled permanently in 1894. His first volume of poetry appeared in 1901, and novels, plays and fantasies followed. Supervielle was named an officer of the Legion d’honneur, and was elected Prince des poètes shortly before his death in Paris in May 1960.

The piece that Florent Schmitt created was a large-scale choral work set to words by the poet Jules Supervielle. Uruguayan by birth, French by choice (as well as by ancestry), Supervielle was an interesting literary figure whose body of work was described by Wallace Fowlie in his 1955 book Mid-Century French Poets as follows:

“The poetry of Jules Supervielle represents a triumph of verbal simplicity in an age when poetry is not simple … [a man] who all his life has been a poet and has written poetry as naturally as he breathes … It is a poetic voice which seems monotonous until one realizes that its tone and vocabulary match very perfectly the total simplicity of the thought and the imagery.”

An engraving by Horace Vernet depicting the Battle of Valmy in northern France (September 20, 1792).

The poem that Supervielle penned focuses on French national unity and the anniversary of the French Revolution through the symbolism of the Liberty Tree of Valmy.  The Battle of Valmy that occurred on September 20, 1792 against the armed forces of Prussia in northern France was the first major French victory in the months and years following the declaration of the French Republic in 1789. The victory emboldened the newly assembled National Convention to formally declare the end of the monarchy in France the very next day. In the historiography of the French Revolution, the Battle of Valmy is considered the first victory of a citizen army, inspired by the cause of liberty and nationalism.

The Bayeux Liberty Tree in Normandy dates from the time of the French Revolution. It stands at Place de la liberté, adjacent to Bayeux Cathedral. (Photo: Donald R. Bennie)

Around this same time the French revolutionary government adopted the symbol of the Liberty Tree, which was based on a similar notion that had been spawned in the United States during the American Revolution.

In the new poem that he chose to title L’Arbre entre nous, Jules Supervielle, who believed in the “cosmic brotherhood of men,” found fertile inspiration in the Liberty Tree symbolism. As a representation of liberty and the revolutionary heritage, the Liberty Tree transcends “joys and angers” to become the common possession of the French people. Moreover, the crown of the tree is the vantage point from which all of Europe is visible.

Jules Supervielle’s verse L’Arbre entre tous appeared in the August 1939 issue of La Nouvelle revue française, barely a month before war was declared on Germany by the Western Allies. Note the poet’s notation “for the anniversary of the French Revolution” of 1789.

The cover of the August 1939 issue of La Nouvelle revue française, in which Jules Supervielle’s poem L’Arbre entre tous appeared.

Supervielle’s poem, consisting of three stanzas, was published in the August 1939 issue of the literary magazine La Nouvelle revue française. In fact, the version that Florent Schmitt used in his composition included an added stanza, in which the patriotic sentiment is most pronounced.

It is unclear who penned the additional verse – whether it was Supervielle, Schmitt or someone else. Either way, the imagery was certainly more in keeping with the fast-moving events, considering the rapidly deteriorating geopolitical situation that would culminate in cascading declarations of war beginning in early September 1939 — with France, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand declaring war on Germany in the wake of the Nazi invasion of Poland.

The added stanza of the poem that appears in Schmitt’s manuscript score is as follows:

Demandez-le à nos bois, à nos montagnes, nos plaines,

Au silence des lointains comme à celui de nos morts.

A-t-on besoin d’une voix pour témoigner qu’on aime?

Demandez-le au grand vent de l’ avenir, au vent de liberté qui souffle, qui animé nos drapeaux.

II est si haut, il est si beau, l’ arbre de Valmy,

L’ arbre chevelu, l’ arbre géant de la famille française.

C’ est l’ arbre de liberté et de victoire!

Here is an English translation of the added verse:

Ask it of our woods, of our mountains, our plains,

To the silence of the horizon as to that of our dead.

Does one need a voice as a testament to our love?

Ask it of the great wind of the future, of the wind of freedom which blows, which animates our flags.

It is so high, it is so beautiful, the tree of Valmy,

The plenteous tree, the great tree of the family of France.

It is the tree of freedom and of victory!

Florent Schmitt’s country retreat in the Haute-Pyrénées, with the “Artiguemy Tree” pictured at left.

We know from Florent Schmitt’s letters that the general atmosphere during the time he was composing L’Arbre entre tous was one of foreboding (and that’s putting it mildly). He worked on the score at his country retreat in Artiguemy in the Haute-Pyrénées during July and August of 1939. In a July letter Schmitt wrote:

“Here it is better. First the sun came, creating the illusion – alas! – of a less tragic universe. Then I more or less finished [the piece], except for one passage to change (and perhaps a few others later). I have even started penning the large [manuscript] pages of 40 staves.”

On August 31^st, with Europe hurtling rapidly towards the inevitable outbreak of war, Schmitt wrote:

“I have almost finished L’Arbre. Something must be done despite the nightmare … but will I ever hear it [performed]?”

American musicologist and author Leslie Sprout is the author of the 2000 dissertation Music for a ‘New Era’: Composers and National Identity in France, 1936-1946. Currently she is a professor of Music at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey (USA).

As for the music itself, the American musicologist Leslie A. Sprout has studied Florent Schmit’s unpublished piano-reduction manuscript which is housed at the archives of the Bibliothèque national de France. The description of the music below is excerpted from her article “Muse of the Révolution francaise or the Révolution nationale? Music and National Celebrations in France, 1936-1944,” which was published in the Spring/Fall 1996 issue of Repercussions magazine:

“Like Milhaud’s Revolutionary march, L’Arbre entre tous begins with a fanfare. Schmitt fulfills the communicative aspect of his commission by centering the musical interest of the composition around the setting of the celebratory text provided for him. In setting the first two stanzas of the poem, Schmitt varies the mood and texture of the music according to the imagery of the text. After the expository first stanza, the tempo quickens for the choral proclamation of the second stanza: ‘It is so tall that one may easily compare it to mountains.’ The contrast in metaphorical imagery for the tree — between the grandeur of the mountains and the diminutive symbol that “enters into our hearts” is represented in the text-setting. 

For the second half of the second stanza, a solo soprano soars above the declaiming chorus, singing in vocalise. The composer makes the third stanza the musical climax by bringing back the fanfare from the opening. Here, the voices and instruments unite in a homophonic texture to proclaim what was the final stanza in the original poem, and what was originally its culmination in nationalist imagery. Schmitt emphasizes this latent nationalism by repeating the first line of the stanza at the end. 

The harmonic language of the third stanza contributes to the sense of sheer power represented by the orchestral fanfare united with the chordal declamation of the text. 

“The orchestral fanfare united with the choral declamation of the text”: A page from the score to L’Arbre entre tous by Florent Schmitt.

Schmitt uses triads in root position, leaping most often by thirds, with little recurring pattern to the harmonic progression. The lines of the stanza are set in a loose sequence — that is, the chorus declaims each line in a pattern of parallel triads, after which the orchestra responds with a chromatic flourish. With the majority of the triads in root position, there is little sense of melodic continuity in the soprano line of the chorus. Thus musical continuity is not maintained by harmonic progression or melodic line. Instead, the force of the unified chorus and the projection of the text in clear, repeated phrase patterns unites this climactic section of the piece.”

In Leslie Sprout’s view, Schmitt employs the fanfare motif in his score to refer explicitly to “militaristic idioms” in the final measures of the piece and its closing line: “It is the tree of liberty and of victory!”, observing:

“As the chorus proclaims in sustained homorhythmic chords the concluding line of text, the orchestra builds up to a final explosion of triplet sixteenth-notes to embellish the arrival on the tonic (approached with the substitution of a dominant eleventh chord on ♭VI for the dominant). The brief reference here to military music is just enough to enhance the recurring fanfare sounds with a final flourish.”

The concluding bars of Florent Schmitt’s L’Arbre entre tous.

Albert Louis Wolff (1884-1970)

Because of the cancellation of the celebrations originally scheduled for mid-September 1939 due to the outbreak of war, L’Arbre entre tous wouldn’t be presented until March 3, 1940 in a Concerts Pasdeloup performance along with the City of Paris Chorus under the direction of Albert Wolff.  Present at the premiere was the Paris correspondent for Le Droit, Canada’s leading French-language daily newspaper, who reported in the paper’s March 6, 1940 issue:

“At the [Concerts] Pasdeloup, it was the revelation of a powerful and clear work for orchestra and chorus by Florent Schmitt based on a poem by [Jules] Supervielle with the assistance of the choir of the City of Paris under the direction of Albert Wolff. Curious title: ‘the tree among all’ — but also a curious formula, of rare ingenuity, and an instrumental luxury which unleashed enthusiasm.”

Jean-Joseph Émile Vuillermoz (1878-1960)

A more extensive review of the premiere was authored by the French music critic Émile Vuillermoz and published in the March 6, 1940 issue of The Christian Science Monitor, in which he compared the new composition with Schmitt‘s monumental choral work Psaume XLVII, composed ~35 years earlier:

“L’Arbre entre tous is the tree which was planted 150 years ago in the soil of France – the ‘Tree of Liberty.’ It has sent down strong roots in our soil; it has drawn from it a generous flow of sap and has never ceased to grow and flourish. Its branches extend majestically in every direction. From its topmost branches one looks across the whole of Europe and its millions of rustling leaves under a stirring symphony.

This very musical subject was admirably suited to the tumultuous and luxuriant genius of Florent Schmitt, who has always been in his element with delineations of this sort. Nobility, grandeur and dynamism are in fact fundamentals of his style.

L’Arbre entre tous approaches in inspiration and execution the splendid Psaume XLVII by the same composer; one finds in it those thrilling contrasts between the heroic opening fanfares and the glowing, sympathetic responses of the orchestra. The choruses are used with the same vigor, which does not shrink from the shrill tessitura so difficult for sopranos. Through it all reigns a magnificent serenity, and the sonority of this outpouring polyphony constantly makes one feel that the concert hall where it detonates is too small to hold it.

Technicians will be interested to compare these two scores which are fundamentally so similar, [yet] rather different in form. Indeed, it is curious to study the aural evolution which is brought about in a composer who, like Florent Schmitt, has lived through so rich and restless a period in our musical history.

Though he has a strong sense of individuality, Florent Schmitt, who was a pupil of Gabriel Fauré and a co-disciple with Ravel — and who has witnessed the Debussy revolution and the surging growth of the polytonal style — has been swayed in spite of himself by what he has heard. It is very noticeable that his writing has become progressively more biting and more aggressive, though the [thinking] remains the same.

This beautiful hymn to liberty had a tremendous and well-merited success at its first hearing. Under present circumstances the hymn took on an exceptionally moving import.”

Emile Vuillermoz’s review of the premiere performance of Florent Schmitt’s L’Arbre entre tous, published in The Christian Science Monitor (May 6, 1940).

Vuillermoz’s final sentence in his review is underscored by musicologist and author Caroline Potter in her chapter “French Music and the Second World War” from the 2006 book French Music Since Berlioz, wherein she writes of the premiere:

“During the performance, the work’s theme of freedom spoke to the public more powerfully than Schmitt could perhaps have imagined.”

… Indeed so, since war had broken out after Schmitt had completed writing his composition.

But then, in a rapid succession of events, the French armies would be defeated on the battlefield barely two months after the premiere performance of L’Arbre entre tous – followed by the fall of the French government and the city of Paris occupied by German troops.

In the grim new reality, far from resonating with the public, music such as L’Arbre was more likely a bitter reminder of the freedoms the citizens of France had just lost. Under the circumstances, it’s little wonder that the piece was never published. Instead, the manuscript was set aside, remaining among Florent Schmitt’s papers that were bequeathed to the BNF upon the composer’s death in 1958.

In the years that followed the 1940 premiere, I can find no evidence that this choral piece has ever had another hearing – either in its orchestral form or using the piano reduction. But based on news accounts of the premiere — along with consulting the manuscript held at the BNF — the piece certainly appears worthy of resurrection. Recent correspondence with Durand (Universal), reveals that the manuscript score, orchestral and vocal parts are archived there as well. Perhaps L’Arbre entre tous is a project that can be taken up someday by one of the composer’s growing number of advocates in the orchestral and choral worlds.

The NAXOS Grand Piano recording of solo piano music by Florent Schmitt, released in 2021.

In 2021, the NAXOS label’s Grand Piano imprint issued a CD featuring solo piano music of Florent Schmitt performed by Biljana Urban. This Paris-trained pianist. now living in Amsterdam, has a particular appreciation for the piano music of French composers from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – Florent Schmitt included. (Click here to read an interview I conducted with Ms. Urban at the time of the new recording’s release.)

Jacques Bonnaure

The 2021 recording met with highly favorable reaction. The comments of author and critic Jacques Bonnaure, writing a review published in the April 2022 issue of Classica magazine, are representative:

“Biljana Urban plays a piano of rare elegance, as nuanced as possible with refined resonances — in short, everything that is needed to arouse interest in this music and this composer, who is still largely unknown.”

The selected program focuses almost exclusively on early-career compositions by Schmitt — all but one being world premiere recordings as well. One of those premieres is a particular gem: the Ballade de la neige, Op. 6 (Ballad of the Snow), which dates from 1896 when the composer was 26 years old and still a student at the Paris Conservatoire.

Pianist and composer Juliette Toutain (1877-1948) was a classmate of Florent Schmitt at the Paris Conservatoire. Encouraged by the Conservatoire’s director, Théodore Dubois, to compete for the Prix de Rome composition prize in 1902, Toutain was unable to secure a change in the rules barring women from entering the competition. (That change would happen shortly thereafter, enabling Lili Boulanger to compete and win first prize in the 1913 competition.)

The Ballade was dedicated to Juliette Toutain, who was a fellow classmate at the Conservatoire. No doubt Mlle. Toutain presented the Ballade de la neige in recital in those early years. (Interestingly, she also premiered Schmitt’s Chant du soir with violinist Georges Enescu, a piece composed two years before the Ballade.)

The Ballade is noteworthy in that it reveals the first flowering of Schmitt’s own compositional voice. By contrast, the piano works written before this one – notably the Trois préludes, Op. 3 and Soirs, Op. 5 — seem more Schumanesque than Schmittian.

Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924), Florent Schmitt’s teacher and mentor at the Paris Conservatoire.

But in the Ballade, we sense the composer blossoming into his own language, even as we can also discern a musical debt to the Gabriel Fauré of the first Nocturne or the fifth Barcarolle. (Tellingly, Schmitt had become a disciple of Fauré at the Conservatoire not long before.) But what is also very clear is that this piece points the way towards Schmitt’s future piano and instrumental music.

The Fourth Edition of the Guide to the Pianist’s Repertoire, published by Indiana University Press in 2013.

In his book Guide to the Pianist’s Repertoire, professor and pianist Maurice Hinson provides short profiles of eleven piano works by Florent Schmitt, of which the 1896 Ballade de la neige was the earliest one composed. Hinson summarizes that work’s qualities as follows:

“Expressive, two against three, parallel broken chords float through closely related harmonies.”

Alfred Cortot’s two books on French piano music, published in 1932.

We also have a more detailed explanation of the piece that is included within pianist Alfred Cortot’s monumental two-volume survey of French piano music, published in 1932. As compared to Schmitt’s earlier piano works, Cortot considered Ballade de la neige “a more serious intent with a more pronounced descriptive tendency.” Cortot’s perceptive observations about the Ballade included this description of the piece:

“Borne by a vague undulation of contrasting rhythms suggesting the slow, monotonous falling of show, a low horizon and a forlorn sky, a sorrowful melody emerges from the harmonies, expands, contracts again and is repeated — hollowing out a slow, desolate furrow in a moving substance of sound.”

The first page of the score to Florent Schmitt’s Ballade de la neige, originally published in the early 1900s by Rouart, Lerolle et Cie. — an imprint absorbed by Salabert in 1953. Notice the dedication to pianist and composer Juliette Toutain, a fellow student at the Paris Conservatoire.

A very dapper Florent Schmitt, photographed at about the time he won the Prix de Rome first prize for composition in 1900. The Ballade de la neige came along four years earlier.

In keeping with the characteristics of snowfall, the music is written in a free form, including fluctuations in tempo alternating between slowing and speeding up, as often happens during snowfall. In places the music becomes polyrhythmic – quintuplets in the left hand against six quavers in the right hand. (Such polyrhythmic treatments – along with many bars of the score being written on three staves — would become common characteristics of Schmitt’s subsequent piano writing.)

In the span of a mere four minutes there are no fewer than four “waves” of snowfall, with descriptive markings in the score ranging from “expressive and sorrowful” to “restless and impassioned.” The final moments of the piece are meditative, suggesting the visage of a frozen landscape in the crystalline night air.

Biljana Urban’s recording of Ballade de la neige was recently uploaded to YouTube accompanied by the score, in which one can “see as well as hear” the music along with the composer’s markings:

Note that the Schmitt’s concluding notation is marked á peine effleure (“with the lightest touch”), which correlates to two ascending phrases separated by a pause, as if a recollection of final snowflakes.

It’s rather surprising that Ballade de la neige had to wait more than 125 years to receive its first-ever commercial recording. Consulting various recital programs and concert reviews published in the European and American musical press from the turn of the century reveals that the piece was, if not a recital staple, certainly a composition that was known and performed. As just one example, a review in Guide musical covers a February 4, 1901 presentation of the piece by pianist Jane Darmand at the Salle Pleyel in Paris.

The French pianist Alfred Cortot (1873-1952), photographed with Florent Schmitt in the early 1950s.

Pierre Carrive

Happily, the work has a new champion today in the person of Biljana Urban, who fell in love with the piece while investigating repertoire to include in her 2021 Schmitt recording. That she should be drawn to the piece makes complete sense, because Urban’s pianism is ideally suited to this particular type of score. As music critic Pierre Carrive wrote in his review of the NAXOS Grand Piano recording in the August 22, 2022 issue of Crescendo magazine:

The full Jacques Bonnaure review of the 2021 Biljana Urban recording, published by Classica in April 2022.

“Biljana Urban’s interpretation is perfect in every way. The delicate alchemy between the simplicity and subtleties of this music suits her perfectly; she remains disciplined — never overdoing it and always with care and elegance. She knows how to underline each intention — whether rhythmic, harmonic, melodic or dynamic.”

Since the release of her Schmitt piano recording, Urban has made it a point to feature repertoire from the CD in her recitals – including Crépuscules but most especially the Ballade, which has appeared on various programs she has presented in several European countries. As she stated to me:

“Nearly all of my recitals since 2021 have included Ballade de la neige. It is a remarkable pianistic treasure to explore – and to introduce to audiences to help them discover it. It’s a masterfully crafted piece of music that resonates with me on so many levels.”

Christian Bobin, French author and poet (1951-2022).

According to Urban, the theme of snow is one that has inspired some of the most poignant musical numbers – including Debussy’s The Snow is Dancing and Poulenc’s An Evening of Snow. As Christian Bobin has written nostalgically, “Le neige c’est une enfance” (“Snow is a childhood”).

I asked Ms. Urban to give me her further impressions of the music, having now “lived with” the piece for several years. Here are her insightful observations:

Ernst Wilhelm ‘Wim’ Wenders, German filmaker and playright. (Photo: Elena Ternovaja, Berlinale, 2024)

“I recorded the Ballade during a sorrowful time in my life [the death of Ms. Urban’s mother], which is one reason why this piece is even more deeply etched in my mind. I can’t help but recall a poem from the Wim Wenders film The Sky Over Berlin [Wings of Desire]:  ‘When a child was a child, it awaited the first snow … and it waits that way even now.’

Written in a free-form with the marking Expressif et douloureux (‘Expressive and sorrowful’), this composition reaches deep into the intimate, the vulnerable, confessional and personal layers of the soul. Here we find Schmitt’s intensity dwelling in the realm of the senses to capture the instantanée – the ‘immediate.’

An anouncement promoting Biljana Urban’s March 1, 2024 piano recital in Amsterdam, which included Florent Schmitt’s Ballade de la neige.

There’s a kind of spatiality to the music – a hallmark of subtle-yet-major musical transformations that will inform Schmitt’s future music, just as it had done with Debussy before him.

The rhythmic element is mostly a polyrhythm that perfectly characterizes the falling of snow. In a brief span of time Schmitt speeds up to agitato and passionate fortissimos – and then just as quickly slows down to the lightest touch of pianissimo. In his marking at the end of the piece à peine effleure (‘with the lightest touch’), Schmitt gives us a notation that only Scriabin was doing at the time. Moreover, the pauses and fermatas that occur after climaxes aren’t stasis, but instead are long resonances that remain until the last overtone vanishes.

A photo of Biljana Urban taken following her recital in Osijek, Croatia that included Florent Schmitt’s Ballade de la neige (December 2022).

It’s a very poetic piece that I am playing these days whenever and wherever I can.”

… And that is most certainly the case; in fact, Biljana Urban has performed Ballade de la neige in recital each year since her recording was made — including at the Concertgebouw in October 2021, Osijek (Croatia) in December 2022, Maastricht in October 2023, and again in Amsterdam in March 2024. Several French outings are in the planning stages, too.

We are indebted to Ms. Urban for becoming an indefatigable champion of this very worthy composition — and for her advocacy to help bring the music back to life in the best kind of way.