Recorded in March 2015 by the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, the pieces are slated for release on the NAXOS label later this year.

JoAnn Falletta

Under its music director JoAnn Falletta, the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra has established something of a reputation for programming neglected scores from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including performances in recent years of works by composers like Franz Schreker, Mieczysław Karłowicz, Josef Suk, Philippe Gaubert, Nikolai Tcherepnin and Ignacy Paderewski.

One of the composers who has particularly fascinated Maestra Falletta is Florent Schmitt — and especially the two Antoine et Cléopâtre Suites, Op. 69, which were written by Schmitt in 1920 for the Paris production of André Gide’s new adaptation of Shakespeare’s play.

JoAnn Falletta programmed the first suite with her two American orchestras, the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and the Virginia Symphony, in 2010.  And on March 7th and 8th of this year, she presented both suites together in concert with the Buffalo Philharmonic.

The 2015 performances were first time the complete Antony & Cleopatra music had ever been performed in North America — nearly a century after its composition.

Even better, the two suites, along with Schmitt’s Le Palais hanté, Op. 49 (The Haunted Palace), a symphonic poem dating from earlier in the composer’s career (1900-04), have been recorded by the same forces and are planned for release on the NAXOS label later this year.

I was privileged to attend the two Buffalo Philharmonic concerts featuring the Antony & Cleopatra music, as well as to observe the recording sessions of both suites plus The Haunted Palace.  At the same time, I was able to visit with Maestra Falletta to hear her thoughts and observations about Florent Schmitt, his music, and his importance as a composer.  Highlights from our conversation are presented below:

PLN:  What attracted you to the Haunted Palace score?  Was it the literary inspiration from Edgar Allan Poe, or something else?  

American author Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849). His “Haunted Palace” first appeared in print in a magazine published in Baltimore, Maryland in 1839. The following year it was included in a larger volume of works titled “Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.”

JAF:  The Poe connection is quite interesting.  I read somewhere that Edgar Allan Poe has inspired more music than any other literary figure except William Shakespeare.  He was extremely popular in Europe and in France in the late 19th century and early 20th centuries.   

The Haunted Palace is particularly interesting, because it’s symbolic.  It can be perceived as an actual palace that was ruled over by a benevolent king – and then is besieged and becomes filled with evil spirits.  But it can also be viewed in a more metaphysical way, where it’s someone’s mind that starts out healthy and strong but then descends into madness.  Considering Poe’s own struggles, that seems to be what he’s telling us. 

That was very intriguing to me, and it must have been to Schmitt as well.  When I explored the piece, I found it to be gorgeous – just beautifully written.  Especially with this wonderful scene at the end when the spirits are rushing out of the dwelling.  Schmitt portrays it with such wildness — the music is so brilliant.  It is a unique melding of the best of Impressionism with Romanticism.

Original printing of the miniature score for Florent Schmitt’s 1900-04 symphonic poem The Haunted Palace, inscribed by conductor JoAnn Falletta.

PLN:  The Haunted Palace is a relatively early orchestral score of Schmitt’s, being composed between 1900 and 1904.  Compared to his later scores, do you feel that Schmitt had mastered the art of orchestration that this time, or are there aspects that come across as less refined or otherwise less effective?

JAF:  I would never criticize Schmitt’s orchestration in The Haunted Palace, but I have to say that the level of complexity and subtlety that he arrived at 15 years later in Antony & Cleopatra is really astonishing.   

This isn’t to say that there’s anything wrong with The Haunted Palace; it’s just less involved and less complex.

The Buffalo Philharmonic concerts featuring Florent Schmitt’s symphonic etude The Haunted Palace.

PLN:  In The Haunted Palace, Schmitt continued a tradition of French symphonic poems composed in the Lisztian mould — works that included pieces like Saint-Saens’ Danse macabre (1874), Duparc’s Lénore (1875), Chausson’s Viviane (1882), Franck’s Le Chasseur maudit (1883) and Dukas’ L’Apprenti sorcier (1897).  Could you comment on how Schmitt’s composition fits into this continuum?

JAF:  Schmitt is clearly following the tradition of the symphonic poem as originated by Liszt and carried on by these French composers.  But Schmitt pushes the envelope further.  Consider the Dukas Sorcerer’s Apprentice.  It’s a solidly Romantic piece.  Even though it was composed just a few years before The Haunted Palace, it exists in another world.   

While Schmitt is operating in the form, he opens the door further, writing a piece that doesn’t quite answer all the questions and leaves something to the imagination.  

What we find with Schmitt is that he was able to weave together very dense tapestries at times, but always with this amazing clarity.  My teacher, Sixten Ehrling, always admired Richard Strauss for that, too, because he could write different parts and different lines all at fortissimo, and yet you can hear everything.   

Schmitt does this equally well.  In the Antony & Cleopatra suites, the music is rhythmically dense – harmonically dense as well.  There’s such a lot going on; the entire orchestra is playing.  And yet Schmitt is able to do it in a way that things are clear and everything is heard.

PLN:  You became familiar with Antony & Cleopatra some time ago, and you programmed the first suite with two orchestras about five years ago.  Apparently, it’s music that speaks to you strongly.  Can you tell us what makes it so special for you, for the orchestra, and for audiences?

JAF:  Florent Schmitt is actually a bit of a mystery to conductors and musicians.  He almost shares a name with another composer who was a contemporary of his:  Franz Schmidt, and people get the two of them confused sometimes.  

Also, Schmitt sounds like a German composer because of his German surname — yet he’s certainly not a German composer.  So that’s a bit of a mystery as well.   

The first time I performed this music in 2010 (the first suite only), it was an experiment.  I wanted to see how both orchestras — the Buffalo Philharmonic and the Virginia Symphony — would handle this music because it was in a style that the musicians had not encountered before, with this kind of rhythmic complexity.  

And it’s very complex music:  It’s rhythm that’s going against the grain often – where some of the orchestra is playing something that’s ‘straight ahead’ and others are working with rhythms that seemingly don’t fit, but that are knitted into the fabric of the music.   

The musicians found that very difficult.  It wasn’t predictable to them – perhaps that’s the best way to describe it.  Some of the musicians would say to me, ‘This is strange.  It doesn’t fit!’  Yet, the more they played it, the more it settled in.   

Klaus Heymann, the founder and head of NAXOS Records.

Back in 2010, I knew we had a ways to go on the music when we played the performances.  But many times, the first performances are not the “end.”  And so when I was able to convince Klaus Heymann of NAXOS to open the door for this project — which took awhile — it was a great opportunity for us to delve into the music a second time.

PLN:  From a musician’s standpoint, Schmitt’s music can be deceptively challenging.  Was this a surprise when you first came to know the Anthony & Cleopatra score?  What aspects of the music are particularly tricky?

JAF:  The music is surprisingly difficult — mostly rhythmically.  It’s not like Stravinsky, where every bar is sort of bopping into another meter.  It’s actually more difficult because the rhythmic challenges are actually woven into the fabric of the music.  It’s closer to Brahms in the sense that Brahms scores look ‘normal’ on the outside … but then you realize that everything is shifted off by an eighth-note.   

Schmitt’s rhythm is very difficult.  Even the idea of the portrait of Cleopatra — it’s stunning in how he orchestrates it with a kind of snake-charmer quality undergirding the music with the pizzicato strings and the tambourine.  You can clearly imagine some sort of Egyptian dance going on.  That is so locked in — but then he has these melodies that are sort of flowing and should sound absolutely free.  But they can’t be free because they have this web underneath that’s holding them.  That’s very, very difficult for an orchestra to play.  

JoAnn Falletta’s full scores for Florent Schmitt’s Antony & Cleopatra Suites #1 and #2.

There are even some slow bars in six-eight time where the rhythm actually feels more comfortable for the orchestra in three-four.  We re-barred them for ourselves so that we could toss it from second violins to violas to first violins and back to seconds, and have it really fit. 

Schmitt had a strategy in doing this, of course, because when you have rhythms that are competing with each other — rubbing against each other at the same time — the resulting conflict or tension that we hear is amazing.  

When you have people playing three against two, it releases a kind of energy.  It’s very purposeful on the part of the composer, and it gives the piece a kind of uneasiness underneath.  And of course, it’s perfect for this dark story of Antony and Cleopatra. 

There’s a tremendous amount of nobility in these characters, but there are also a lot of evil things that are going on.  It’s this important duality about the two of them — complex characters that they are.   There’s a sense of Schmitt keeping us off-balance, which reflects the portrait of these two personalities:  their passion for one another tempered by ulterior motives, political considerations and the clash of cultures between Egypt and Rome. 

Schmitt could have written a very languorous, beautiful, seductive portrait of the two characters, but instead it’s always a bit uncomfortable.  In Antony & Cleopatra, you’re never relaxed.  You always feel a certain wariness – an uneasiness.  That’s very profound.

PLN:  Your performance of the second suite was the North American premiere, even though the music is nearly a century old.  Is there a difference between preparing an older work for a premiere performance compared to a contemporary one?  More broadly, what are your strategies for rehearsing an orchestra when the personnel don’t know the music at all?

JAF:  Preparing an older work like this for a premiere performance is certainly different from preparing a premiere of a contemporary work.  When it’s a new piece, we have access to the composer (or sometimes the composer is with us in person).  The music is closer to our sphere and to our times. 

But when we go back and do a work where there’s no one alive who heard the music in its time and there’s no one alive who knew the composer intimately — all you have to go on is the score. 

Now, I did listen to the Jacques Mercier recording of the suites [on the Timpani label], in part because he is a person who comes from the same culture as Schmitt and who might have some musical connections available to him that I did not have.   

Even so, there are numerous questions about things in the score that may or may not have been addressed in that earlier recording.  The score does not provide easy answers, so we had to look at other parts of the score to try to determine what the composer actually intended.   

We found numerous issues:  things like wrong notes in the score, improper clef notations, and conflicting directions on the use of mutes.  One needs to be something of a detective, but you also have to worry about how much license you should take.   

Generally, my view is if you’re not sure, it’s best to leave things as written.  But in other cases, it’s pretty obviously a copyist’s error which we needed to correct.

In the case of Antony & Cleopatra, other adjustments were ones of necessity.  Our percussionists needed to rewrite the part Schmitt had prepared for a keyboard glockenspiel [jeu de timbre], an instrument that was unavailable to us, so that we could perform it using standard concert bells.

Also for Antony & Cleopatra, when we ordered the second suite, the publisher didn’t even have the orchestra parts available and had to print them especially for us.  Very likely the original parts were so old and fragile, they were unusable.   

The publisher did have the parts for the first suite, which turned out to be the same ones we had used in 2010.  Some of our musicians found their old marks still written in their parts! 

The North American premiere concert performance of Florent Schmitt’s complete Antony & Cleopatra, played by the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of JoAnn Falletta on March 7, 2015. (Photo: Enid Bloch)

As for preparing unfamiliar music for performance, we had five rehearsals for this music, which is more time than we usually devote for preparation.  And we had to be prepared for a little slower journey in the rehearsals, too.  It entailed things like the musicians looking very carefully at their parts, and more suggestions from the concertmaster about bow changes during rehearsals (even after the parts had been bowed in advance).   

So there’s more active working on the music in addition to playing it.  There’s none of the ‘auto-pilot’ that can sometimes happen with pieces that the musicians know really well. 

The other important part of a successful strategy when preparing and performing unfamiliar music is filling out the rest of the program with music that the orchestra already knows very well.  In this case it was Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F, a piece the orchestra had recorded not long ago.

The Buffalo Philharmonic concert program featuring Florent Schmitt’s complete Antony & Cleopatra suites.

PLN:  In Antony & Cleopatra, Schmitt’s music ranges from very soft and spare moments to passages of overwhelming power.  This is a hallmark of numerous late-romantic and early modern composers, but are there aspects of Schmitt’s approach that you find singular or unique in some ways?

JAF:  In terms of his orchestration, when Schmitt has the orchestra going at full tilt, it’s astonishing.  It’s simply great orchestration.  He really knows how to use an orchestra with everyone playing to create a mountain of sound.   

But Schmitt can also be very Impressionistic, and things just float.  To have both of those at his disposal is quite amazing.  Schmitt, along with Ravel, seems to have a real love for the “instrument” of the orchestra – in writing for it lavishly.   

Schmitt’s scores look very dense.  But he makes the ideas reveal themselves instead of being buried.  That’s a talent many composers don’t possess.   

We know that there are great composers who weren’t great orchestrators — the canvas of the orchestra wasn’t what was appealing to them.  Robert Schumann is one example.  And then there are others who may write beautifully for the orchestra but who don’t have the kind of profound heart that Schumann had. 

But with Schmitt, it’s both.  He has substance, and he’s also able to utilize the orchestra in a very glittery way.  

PLN:  Schmitt was known as the foremost “orientalist” composer of his day – certainly during the period when Antony & Cleopatra was composed and premiered.  In your view, how successful was Schmitt in conjuring up an authentic Eastern style?  Does the music successfully avoid sounding clichéd?

Florent Schmitt, age 66, in his study at his home in St. Cloud (1937 photo). (©Boris Lipnitzki/Roger-Viollet)

JAF:  Regarding his orientalist style, Schmitt’s music doesn’t sound clichéd at all.  But it does bring us into that world.  It’s not obvious, but before we know it we’re in that world.  Schmitt does this masterfully.   

There’s nothing that seems contrived about the music.  He is painting a tonal picture — and ancient world that’s just fantastic.  It’s cinematic for sure.  But it’s not contrived; it’s not a ‘cheap thrill’ or anything like that.   

Plus, all of the movements in the two suites are strong.  That’s certainly not something you can say about all suites or symphonies!

PLN:  Of the six movements in the suites, are there one or two that you find particularly special?  

JAF:  The movement that is the most difficult – but also the most rewarding – is the ‘Battle of Actium’ from the first suite.  It’s an incredibly difficult movement to play, but it really paints the agitation, fear and clash in a battle that was so disastrous for Marc Antony and Cleopatra.   

The fanfare [‘The Camp of Pompey’] from the first suite is also brilliant — an amazing four minutes of perfect music; you couldn’t take a note out or put another one in.   

And in the opening movement of the first suite, could one ever hear a more compelling or more beautiful portrait of these two people?

PLN:  While you have conducted and recorded music from all eras, from pre-Baroque to contemporary works by living composers, you seem to have a special love for composers of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.  Along those lines, with the Buffalo Philharmonic you have recorded music of Bartók, Frederick Shepherd Converse, Dohnányi, Glière, Respighi, Richard Strauss, Suk and Marcel Tyberg for NAXOS records.  Is the new Schmitt recording the continuation of a certain strategy along those lines?

JAF:  It is true that I am drawn to the music of that era.  The orchestra was a canvas in that period as in no other time.  The orchestra was so expanded, and the possibilities for color were just so extreme.   

For a conductor, working in that kind of sound-world is just thrilling.  Mozart is perfection, but it’s not the kind of canvas where you have these wild colors.  I love that aspect of it.   

A book commemorating the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra’s first 75 years (published in 2010).

Also, it was a very tumultuous world in those times – filled with ugliness and fear, but also with hope.  The changes in the world were reflected in musical styles, which suddenly delivered a much wider range of emotional content.  

The BPO musicians enjoy this kind of music, too — late Romantic and post-Romantic scores.

PLN:  Another keen interest of yours is the French repertoire.  In your view, do concert audiences in the United States get short shrift when it comes to orchestras performing French repertoire beyond just the warhorses?

JAF:  Unfortunately, I think that French repertoire is disappearing from our concert halls in America.  It makes me very sad to say that, but I think conductors and musicians don’t program French music because they feel that audiences don’t understand it.   

Not to over-generalize, but French music tends to be less architecture-driven, and often it’s not propulsive.  Often it’s about sheer beauty and color, and the architecture isn’t obvious to the audience.   

But if conductors did it well and performed it more often, I think audiences would come back to French music.  It’s something we should try to do — and certainly not be limited to French conductors exclusively.

PLN:  For many musicians, Florent Schmitt may be only a name in a textbook – just one of a number of French composers active during the time of Debussy and Ravel but eclipsed by both.  Do you view Schmitt in this fashion, or as someone more important than that?

JAF:  For musicians, it’s been so easy ‘not to know’ Schmitt.  But to know Schmitt is to realize that he is far greater than so many of the French composers who were active during the time of Debussy and Ravel.  

Unfortunately, even other conductors don’t know this composer; no teacher told them about him, and it certainly was not suggested to perform his music.  That’s a pity, because they — and audiences — are missing out on so much.

PLN:  Looking to the future, are there any other scores by Florent Schmitt that you would like to tackle – either in concert or on recordings?  

JAF:  I would love to program La Tragédie de Salome.  Psalm 47 is marvelous, too — a dazzling work.  But for that, you need a fine quality chorus as well.

Buffalo Philharmonic music director JoAnn Falletta listening to playbacks at the Florent Schmitt recording session on March 9, 2015 (with Tonmeister Tim Handley).

We are indebted to JoAnn Falletta and the Buffalo Philharmonic musicians for taking on the challenge of performing and recording Florent Schmitt’s music.

Having observed the recording sessions in early March, I can predict with confidence that the new NAXOS recording will prove to be a very welcome (and important) addition to the catalogue.  We’ll definitely share details on the release schedule as soon as they become available.

Meeting with members of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and talking about the music of French composer Florent Schmitt. Standing, l-r: Tim Smith, Matthew Bassett, Travis Hendra. Seated, l-r: Anna Mattix, Janz Castelo, Phillip Nones

In February and March 2015, the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and its music director, JoAnn Falletta, performed and recorded two of Florent Schmitt’s orchestral works:  the 1900-04 symphonic etude Le Palais hanté, Opus 49 (The Haunted Palace), inspired by a poem of Edgar Allan Poe; and the two Antoine et Cléopâtre Suites, Opus 69, composed in 1920 for André Gide’s new Paris production of Shakespeare’s play.

The Buffalo concerts were the North American premiere performances of the complete Antony & Cleopatra music — nearly a century after its composition.  I had the privilege of attending those concerts along with observing the recording of both Schmitt works, which are slated for release on the NAXOS label later this year.

While in Buffalo, I also had the opportunity to sit down with five members of the orchestra to discuss Florent Schmitt and his place in music history — and to learn what it’s like to prepare Schmitt’s music for performance and recording.

The group of musicians I interviewed represent the four major sections of the orchestra, as well as the all-important librarian function.  The musicians included:

• Matthew Bassett (timpani)
• Janz Castelo (viola)
• Travis Hendra (music librarian and substitute tuba player)
• Anna Mattix (English horn)
• Tim Smith (trombone)

We covered a variety of topics during the 90-minute interview.  Highlights from the discussion are presented below:

PLN:  Clearly, The Haunted Palace and Antony & Cleopatra aren’t part of the core orchestral repertoire.  What practice, rehearsal and performance strategies do you use when approaching obscure music like this?

Tim Smith:  I think pieces like this are kind of a trademark of the BPO.  When I first came here in 2009, I was always surprised when I looked at our season schedule.  I’d think, “What’s that?  And what’s that?  That’s not Mahler, it’s not Bruckner.  I don’t know that, and I don’t want to play that.”  But after playing enough pieces like them, I realize how good they are.

I call them ‘JoAnn specials.’  She finds this obscure music that’s not very well-known that I think should be well-known.  It’s very interesting.

As for how I approach this music, I just try to keep an open mind, and not bring a sense of already knowing how it’s going to go, like the articulation I know I need to use for Bruckner or the expansiveness of sound I would use in a Mahler fortissimo.  It’s more of a blank page.

For me, it’s all about being open-minded and sensitive as to what’s happening around me in the orchestra — especially in the first rehearsal.

I try to find some recordings of it, too.  Sometimes there isn’t a recording — or maybe just one recording — so I don’t have the benefit of comparing different ones.

Anna Mattix:  As an English horn player, my instrument would not be on the stage unless I have a solo of some kind.  So when I first go through pieces of music that are more obscure and that I don’t know, I’ll practice a little bit of my part.

Then the first listen-through for me is without the part as I’m listening for where my part is prominent.  Then I’ll listen with my part and mark the places that are potentially more exposed, or that will require a little more work.

Like Tim, I try to find recordings, but I usually go to the part first before I do a lot of listening, because I want to develop my own sense of how something should go.

What I can’t usually tell in parts like these involving composers of this generation is that they didn’t helpfully write ‘solo’ above the line for us.  I actually do have a few places in the Schmitt scores where it is clearly printed ‘solo’ in the part — yet not a single one of them is really a solo.  And anything that is legitimately a solo doesn’t have the part marked at all!

Also, when dealing with music I don’t know, I’m not really sure what sorts of reeds I’m going to need on the stage.  So a big part of my prep is gauging how many different reeds I’m going to need to get through the rehearsals and performances.  Will I need to project more?  Will I need a reed that plays better in the low register?  And so forth.

For the Schmitt pieces I’m rotating between three different reeds.  One is for the allegro movements that I can basically tongue very hard on and not worry about it dying on me.  I have another one for the solo passages, and a third reed available for some of the extremely low pianissimo playing.

In the first rehearsal, I actually had five or six reeds soaked up and ready to go until I could figure out the best ones for the music, but then narrowed it down to those three.

Janz Castelo:  As a section string player I rarely use recordings for preparation, in that we’re one of many players.  I could come up with my ideas of how the part should be played, but if my principal, or the concertmaster, or as a collective the strings do it differently, that early effort’s been wasted.  So I usually just grab the part and go from beginning to end.

The faster the notes, the more time I spend on a passage.  A reference recording can be useful, but even in the difficult passages, if you push the tempo a little bit one way or the other, something that is easy could end up being something I have to spend a lot of time on.  The tempo can really change the difficulty of a passage.

So it’s really a guess on what might be the most difficult passages, which I practice in a range of different speeds prior to the rehearsal.  Usually if you practice something a little slower, speeding it up isn’t that difficult.  So I try to do slow practicing of what look like the nasty passages.

Matthew Bassett:  I do the same thing as Tim.  I look over the schedule and if I see a piece I may not know, I do a lot of preparation way ahead of time.  I get my music as early as I can.  I find out if there are extra drums that I’ll need, like pedal timpani.  Perhaps it’s something that’s going to require me to set aside practice time in the hall ahead of time, since I can practice only some things at home because I don’t have a full set of four pedal drums at home.

Matthew Bassett, Timpanist, Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra

After I get my part, I go through it and do my initial tuning plan, as well as the sense that I get from the rhythm part of what I’ll need to do.  I’ll find recordings and try to get a full score.

Like Anna, I have considerable leeway since I’m a section unto myself.  I have a lot of decisions to make — or sometimes questions to ask.  Is this an ensemble moment?  Is it a solo moment?  All of those things — and typically those are not things the conductor is going to tell you.

Travis Hendra:  The two Antony & Cleopatra suites are rental sets that we had to have imported from Europe.  Our preparation starts long before the musicians’, because the only way they can prepare their parts is for us to have them first in the orchestra library.

Contractually, we have to have the music available to the players two weeks before the first rehearsal.  But we understand that the musicians’ preparation time is important, and it ultimately impacts the outcome.  So we try to have the parts available far in advance of the two weeks.

Typically, a rental period for parts is six weeks before the first rehearsal.  For the Antony & Cleopatra, it was eight weeks.  And we purchased the Haunted Palace parts for our own library.

Suite #1 of Antony & Cleopatra had previously been imported for us because we performed it in 2010.  So the U.S. distributor already had it here.  After we sent it back after the first time we did it in 2010, the parts probably sat on the shelf for four years, and they still had our musicians’ marks on the parts when we received them again this time.  The only other orchestra that used them in between was the Virginia Symphony, and that was during the same season.  Very possibly, those might be the only set of Suite #1 parts in existence.

Suite #2 was printed newly for us, and you’ll see that the new printed parts contain a new copyright date of 2014, while the original copyright date is 1922.  Chances are, the existing parts for Suite #2 were such a mess, they couldn’t be used anymore.  Actually, the parts we got for Suite #1 were very fragile — falling apart.  Suite #2’s were probably in worse shape, and the U.S. distributor looked at them and determined they couldn’t rent them to us like that.  They did that for us — absorbed that cost — and we appreciated it.

PLN:  Thinking about these scores, it there anything unusual or noteworthy in the way Schmitt writes for your particular section of the orchestra?

Janz Castelo:  Part of the reason why my preparation for these pieces wasn’t any different than for other pieces is that, aside from some difficult passages, there’s really nothing that I see in the parts technically that I don’t also see in a Richard Strauss score.  It’s challenging, but not that difficult.

Actually, things in the string parts fit in very well.  There’s nothing too crazy with the key signatures.  The parts are fairly clean, too, and visually it’s easy to see what’s going on.  When I compare these pieces to the Glière Ilya Mouremetz Symphony which we did last year — that one was a beast.

Matthew Bassett:  In my section, we were all very struck by how effective and knowledgeable the percussion writing is — for every single instrument:  making great use of a particular color and not overusing instruments, and allowing percussion instruments to be a mode of color.  Over and over again there are these single triangle notes that are very sporadically placed — just these wonderful moments of splash, instead of a repeated pattern of some kind.

From a technical perspective, Schmitt must have spent the time to understand percussion, or he ran his writing by experienced players.

Now specifically, his timpani writing is incredibly difficult.  For instance, in The Haunted Palace, the timpani part we received is actually a simplified one for three drums when we compared it to the full score, which calls for four.  So I had to transcribe the timpani part from the full score to make it correct, because that’s what the composer intended.

The reason I noticed the difference in the beginning was because I was listening to the Sao Paulo Symphony recording [Yan-Pascal Tortelier], and that timpanist was playing all of these notes that weren’t showing on the timpani parts.

Travis Hendra:  Just as an aside, there wasn’t a harp part, either.  So we had to transcribe that from the full score, for which there are two copyright dates, 1905 and 1906.  As far as we can tell, they are identical scores, and we knew of the harp part’s existence from looking at those.

Matthew Bassett:  So we see that the full score is written for timpani chromatique.  As far as we know, this is what Schmitt wrote originally.  This was at a time of changes in timpani technology, and it also took time for people to obtain the new pedal instruments to be able to play.  Most orchestras were still using hand-crank instead of pedal drums.

It may be that Schmitt himself prepared the simplified part for a particular performance situation, because it’s also a beautifully thought-out part that works very well with the music.  He just had to get rid of masses of pitch changes.  But we don’t really know for sure what happened.

There are a few places where the timpani plays in the simplified part where it does not play in the original part.  But more to the point, there are longer pedal rolls that don’t change whereas in the original full score, there’s all of this chromatic timpani movement happening.

What this shows is that Schmitt was writing for the timpani in a very knowledgeable way that really stretched the limits of players at the time.  It’s not dissimilar to Richard Strauss.  Schmitt and Strauss were the composers who were really making use of pedal timpani at the time.  (Schmitt, incidentally, is not mentioned in any of my percussion or timpani history books at all.)

Anna Mattix:  In the woodwind section, there are a few things that have struck me.  In general, French writing for woodwinds is incredibly strong.  Part of that is the high standard of technique in music schools like the Paris Conservatory, where they had first-class teachers and players — particularly woodwinds.  So the woodwind tradition coming out of France has been second to none, basically forever.

Anna Mattix, English Horn Player, Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra

Especially for oboe, essentially all of our technique comes out of the French school, and so for the technical aspects of playing these Schmitt pieces, they’re incredibly difficult and we had to put a lot of time into them.  But the oboe writing is really great, and it’s a lot of fun to play.

In contrast to what Janz said about the string parts being easy to read, the woodwind parts are not easy to read.  I’ve had to do work with the key signatures and other things where it’s just not intuitive.  I’m guilty of having to write in note names in a few places, which I don’t normally have to do — and it seems I’m not the only one in the woodwind section doing this.

Another thing that struck me was the registers of the reed instruments.  In general, the double reeds are using the full range of their instruments.  I go from the lowest note up to what was generally considered at the time the highest playable note on the English horn.

But the flute parts are not as extensive.  A lot of the solo flute writing is quite low in the register, and that presents a unique challenge because it’s difficult for the flute players to bring themselves out of the texture.  Not that they don’t also play in the upper register, but in general the solo lines for the flute parts are pretty low.

Tim Smith:  When it comes to the brass, I think French trumpet writing speaks for itself.  The French have had a very strong school of trumpet playing.  A lot of virtuoso players have come from that school.  Schmitt knows how to write for mutes, which sometimes composers don’t.  A composer might think, ‘I want this softer, I’ll use a mute,’ where mutes wouldn’t necessarily mean softer; it’s usually a timbre issue.

Schmitt writes really well for the horn section, and there are some beautiful solos that are spread amongst the section.  It’s not like he’s just writing for one solo horn — they all share in the load.

As far as the trombones go, the most interesting thing I’ve noticed is that Schmitt treats the bass trombone almost like a solo instrument.  The range of the bass trombone part may even go higher than the first two parts — maybe two and a half octaves — and it’s often playing higher than the tenor trombone part.  And the bass trombone has the bulk of the most technical licks, like in the beginning of The Haunted Palace, which is probably the most technical passage we have.

Here’s another thing:  Up until the 1950s most French orchestras were using small-bore trombones — what we would consider a jazz trombone today.  It was smaller diameter tube instruments, and the French-bass trombone would probably be what I’m playing now, a tenor trombone.

Travis Hendra:  Things are a challenge with French music, because there’s a specific French style that calls for a C tuba.  That’s way out of the standard German contrabass tuba symphonic register.

Even so, Schmitt’s tuba writing is not that French; it’s much more in the Germanic tradition and wind band/concert band tradition — most probably calling for a B-flat tuba.

In The Haunted Palace, Schmitt writes for the sarrusophone whereas in Antony & Cleopatra, it’s contrabassoon.  It’s an interesting distinction.  The sarrusophone was used mainly as a replacement for the contrabassoon in outdoor bands.  It’s a double-reed instrument made out of a nickel and brass alloy which has a loud, piercing tone that sounds sort of like a bad pipe organ.  But sarrusophones can achieve dynamics that other double-reed instruments could not — particularly in the outdoor setting.  So you have to wonder how that would affect how The Haunted Palace sounds.

Of course, modern orchestras don’t use the sarrusophone at all.  It would sound so out of place — the totally wrong color for what we do.  But Schmitt wasn’t the only French composer writing for that instrument.  Ravel wrote extensively for the sarrusophone in Daphnis et Chloé and in Shéhérezade.  Dukas wrote for it.  But it didn’t carry on much beyond about 1920.

PLN:  From a technical standpoint, Schmitt’s music can be quite challenging.  What specific aspects do you find the most noteworthy in this regard?

Anna Mattix:  My right hand hurts a lot this week!  In a lot of the very fast grace notes that we have to play, it requires a lot of extremely rapid, repeated motion of the hand.

Tim Smith:  With French music and brass playing, Schmitt and others write very intervalically and not necessarily within a key.  There are many odd intervals and a lot of tri-tones — something that would be hard to sight-sing for your average music school graduate like me!

There are some licks in the second suite of Antony & Cleopatra that don’t lie comfortably on the instrument — at least on the trombone.  Just getting those pitches correct is challenging, because on a brass instrument you have to form the note with your lips and your air speed.  You have to hear the note before you can play it, essentially.

Janz Castelo:  As I noted before, the viola parts fit really well.  It’s instinctive.  With Schmitt, everything fits naturally.  There’s only one three-measure passage in the Antony & Cleopatra Suite #1 that’s almost unplayable — and I won’t mention where it is so that people won’t listen for it in the recording!  In that spot, we’re in ledger lines in the treble clef; it’s almost as if we had been handed violin parts.

Janz Castelo, Violist, Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra

As far as changes in rhythm or time signatures, I haven’t found that to be a problem.  I use what I refer to as the ‘Zen Approach':  If you think about it too much, you get in the way of the music-making.

Once you get into the ‘Schmitt frame of mind,’ it’s very natural.  Once you understand it — the metric modulations and things like that — once you get it, it makes perfect sense:  You’re in the ‘Schmitt Zone.’

Matthew Bassett:  As for me, my calves are in great shape!  Honestly, unless you’re comparing a contemporary timpani solo or if you’re doing a lot of Richard Strauss or current pop stuff, you don’t do this amount of pedaling all the time.  And so as a player, I really notice it in a piece like The Haunted Palace.

PLN:  Considering the era when this music was composed — the period between 1900 and 1920 — was Schmitt doing anything different (or better) than his contemporaries in how he wrote for the orchestra?

Travis Hendra:  I think one of the biggest things we need to remember is the advances in technology in that time.  I think that this had a bigger effect on how the modern orchestra sounded than people realize.  Mass production of instruments — being able to produce the same quality of brass instruments — really changed how the orchestra sounded.  And it carried throughout the continent.

There was experimentation going on, too, as composers like Schmitt were figuring out how best to use these instruments in the orchestra.  So we see differences in how The Haunted Palace is scored compared to the later Antony & Cleopatra.

Janz Castelo:  Schmitt does brilliant orchestration with beautiful colors, but I don’t see it as more remarkable or better.  It was the way numerous composers orchestrated back then, and Schmitt was clearly in tune with what other composers were doing.  I don’t see anything that comes across as ‘bad’ orchestration, but also there’s nothing that’s particularly earth-shattering or unique.  I wouldn’t call Schmitt a pioneer.

Tim Smith:  I may feel a bit differently than Janz.  In general, I don’t have much appreciation for French music.  Part of it is because French composers tend to use trombonists as an extension of the percussion section:  ‘Oh, here’s comes a big orchestra crescendo or a chord or something like that.  Let’s add a trombone note.’

Tim Smith, Trombonist, Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra

I mean, when I see Debussy on our schedule or some other French piece from that period that I’m not familiar with, the first things I ask myself are, ‘What’s the instrumentation of that piece?  Is that a week I’m not needed in the orchestra?  Can I go south?’

I can’t think of any memorable passages for trombone that Debussy wrote.  Maybe my teacher will read this someday and say, ‘Shame on you, Tim!’

Ravel?  The first thing that comes to mind is Boléro, and some licks from Daphnis.  La Valse is interesting, but there are no melodic moments for trombone.

Contrast that with Schmitt.  I was noticing the whole orchestra this week; Schmitt has given everyone melodic fragments.  He’s treated every instrument like they can carry a tune at some point in time.

It’s not like thinking, ‘Tunes are good for violin, English horn and oboe — maybe the first French horn now and then.  But everybody else shouldn’t play a melody.’  Schmitt gives it to us all the time, and it passes around pretty equally from instrument to instrument.

Janz Castelo:  And I think that’s very democratic.  But it doesn’t make it remarkable.

Tim Smith:  But from my standpoint, it’s much more interesting.  If this was a Debussy recording week, I wouldn’t be here!

Janz Castelo:  Mentioning French repertoire, I remember driving somewhere as a teenager and hearing Ravel’s Daphnis & Chloé — the second suite — on the car radio.  I actually had to pull over to listen to it because I just didn’t think it was safe to keep driving.  I had never heard anything like that.  And Schmitt doesn’t do that for me.  It’s incredible and remarkable music too, but it isn’t earth-shattering.

Matthew Bassett:  I’d characterize Schmitt’s music as well-constructed, extremely competent, extremely polished writing for the orchestra.  And there are always these comparisons with Richard Strauss because of the time period and because of the bigness of the orchestra and the ‘busyness’ of the orchestra.

I’m curious with myself in this way:  If history were different and the Schmitt pieces were standard repertoire, and we all grew up listening to them and playing them — and therefore had a performance tradition like we have with Strauss — would we feel differently about this music and this composer?

Tim Smith:  It all goes back to the very first question in our discussion.  There is no performance tradition.

But Schmitt is very descriptive in what he writes — how he writes accents, how he writes dynamics, how he shapes the phrases — at least in our parts.  There’s really no guesswork involved.

Matthew Bassett:  One other thing I’ve noticed is that there’s so much going on in these scores, from an on-the-stage perspective, I actually like the music much less while playing it than when listening to a recording of it.  The music is way more appealing than it seems to be on the stage.

Anna Mattix:  I generally agree that there’s nothing uniquely different in the music, except that I feel Schmitt was different from his generation of other French composers.  Other French scores at that time were more sparse.

So I’m having some of the same difficulty; I’m enjoying hearing the recording more than when I’m playing it on the stage.  I’m having some difficulty separating things out, and figuring out what to listen for and what not to listen to.  That may mean that there’s a touch too much going on in the score — maybe it’s a bit overwritten.  But that doesn’t translate out in the audience — and that’s the mark of a great composer.

Tim Smith:  I’d like to mention one other thing.  One entire movement of the Antony & Cleopatra is scored just for brass and percussion.  When does that ever happen in orchestral music?

My brass colleagues and I were talking about whether the fanfare from the Antony & Cleopatra Suite #1 could work on a brass program.  I’m wondering if it has enough substance, aside from those repeated rhythmical notes that start the whole thing.

Also, it doesn’t end with a blaze.  Usually when you want to program a fanfare, you’re thinking of the Dukas La Péri or the Copland Common Man or a movement from the Tomasi Fanfares liturgiques that we played recently.  Ones that start with a blaze, have a middle section, and then end strong.  But perhaps the Schmitt fanfare could have a life of its own because as brass players, we don’t have centuries of original music to draw from.

Full scores for Florent Schmitt’s Antony & Cleopatra Suites and The Haunted Palace.

PLN:  One critic has described Schmitt’s musical style like this:  “Even though he made use of the harmonic and textural devices of his French contemporaries, delicacy and nuance were only a couple of his intermittent concerns as Schmitt meticulously constructed his enormous orchestral machines, full of tidal surges, anticipatory dread, and continuously unresolved climaxes.  Schmitt’s heart … was always drawn to the spectacle and excess of a theatrical ambience.”  In what ways do you agree or disagree with this assessment?

Janz Castelo:  I totally agree with that statement.  And it’s why, while I enjoy the music, I may have some problems with it.  There are all these great colors and ambience and wonderful textures, but at the end of the day, I have a hard time humming a melody.  There’s no one big tune that catches you.  The theatrical ambience is always there, but I need a little more of something to grab me.  As a listener, I think I may need to be led by the hand a little more as opposed to just wandering through this sonic realm.

Tim Smith:  The first thing that comes to my mind when I hear about ‘continuously unresolved climaxes’ and the ‘spectacle and excess of a theatrical ambience,’ is Wagner.  Wagner never cadences; it just keeps going.  I definitely hear something programmatic about what Schmitt writes in his music.  You can tell this from the titles he uses; he didn’t call these pieces ‘Symphony #1′ or ‘Orchestral Suite #2.’

But the other thing is this:  I like listening to Schmitt’s music.  He keeps it moving.  He doesn’t linger on something for too long.

Maybe I’m just not a very patient listener, but I find that in a lot of pieces, when we get to a certain stretch it just feels like we sit mired in it forever.  I don’t feel that way with Schmitt’s music.  He brings forth his ideas and then moves along to the next thing.  Whether you consider it fully developed or not is a personal observation, I guess.

Anna Mattix:  As a double reed player, I’ve played more French music than any other style, probably.  So Schmitt is such an interesting mix for me, because the technical demands are so French but the sound is so Germanic.  That’s really how it all comes together for me.

The very first time I read through The Haunted Palace, my first thought was that the piece reminds me of the circus.  Not like circus music, but the atmosphere where there’s so much going on — so many colors and so many things to look at.  The phrase that keeps coming to me this week has been ‘somewhat overwhelming.’  That’s not a negative thing, by the way.

Matthew Bassett:  With Schmitt, the instinct is to go with a heavy German sound — to play it big and fat.  It actually helped me a lot to resist the temptation to do that.  As the timpani, if I choose not to do that, it’s noticed, and it probably influences how the rest of the orchestra plays, too.

Travis Hendra:  In music like this, we listen through our ears of history.  We have Debussy, we have Ravel, and we associate those composers with the French style.   And then we have Richard Strauss and Wagner and Beethoven — that’s our German style.

Schmitt isn’t French enough to be considered with Debussy and Ravel, and yet he isn’t German enough to be considered with Strauss.  And you can tell, because in his music, he straddles this world.

Schmitt was born in the Lorraine region of France, so you have to wonder if there was an internal conflict (despite his French musical training) — consciously or subconsciously throughout his entire life — of straddling these two worlds.

PLN:  What sort of special challenges are there in preparing the orchestra parts for lesser known scores like these?  Was there anything in particular about preparing this music for performance that was unusual or challenging?

Travis Hendra:  For music like this, we have to know as soon as JoAnn wants to program it.  Often, we have to import these kinds of scores.  We had a missing harp part; we had a timpani part that had to be transcribed.

Travis Hendra, Associate Librarian, Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra

The bass clarinet in the score is a different style of writing because of the instruments available at the time the music was composed.  For the performers, these things can be tricky because it’s not how the musicians are used to playing.  So we transposed all of those parts for B-flat clarinet.

The sheet music for Antony & Cleopatra Suite #1 is not in great shape.  Because the paper was discolored, brittle and fragile, we had to repair numerous pages where there were tears.  Those printed parts might even date back to the 1920s.

PLN:  Do you have any other interesting anecdotes to share about preparing the Schmitt pieces for performance and recording?

Matthew Bassett:  Common to French music of this time is which keyboard percussion instruments are called for in the score.  In the Antony & Cleopatra Suite #2 there is a celesta part, and there’s also a part for jeu de timbres, which is a keyboard glockenspiel that the orchestra doesn’t have.

There is a tradition in French orchestras where a percussion keyboard player is assigned to celesta, keyboard glock, regular glock, xylophone and chimes.  That probably explains this particular part in the score.  Although it’s written on a grand staff, it’s nearly all playable by one person on a standard glock using an extra stick here and there and leaving out a couple of weird leaps that are not useful at the tempo we’re playing it.  So we had to go through the part and figure out how to get it to work for us.

Janz Castelo:  Tim and I may have our disagreements as to whether or not Schmitt is better than Debussy.  But you know, you can only do so much Debussy and Ravel.  So as the person who may have been the least enthusiastic about the composer in our discussion today, let me state that I have thoroughly enjoyed being in the ‘Schmitt Zone’ this week!

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Hearty thanks to these five members of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra for taking the time to share their observations about Florent Schmitt and his music.  It was a highly informative discussion.  What we learned is very helpful in understanding the challenges and rewards of preparing and performing Schmitt’s music.  Moreover, it’s certainly a different perspective from those of us who are in the audience or listen to recordings.

The Cleveland Orchestra performed Florent Schmitt’s La Tragédie de Salomé in April 2015 — the first time in seven decades.

On April 16 and 18, 2015, The Cleveland Orchestra performed Florent Schmitt’s 1907/10 ballet La Tragédie de Salomé for the first time in over 70 years.  Not only was it the first time the Cleveland musicians had played this work with the orchestra, for most, it was their first time ever performing any music of this French composer.

I had the privilege of attending the Cleveland concerts in which the Salomé score was on the program — and it was played magnificently.  As music critic Mark Satola wrote in The Plain Dealer, the city’s leading newspaper:

Conventional wisdom holds that concert hall audiences only respond to tried and true warhorses — Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms — and that it’s not in anyone’s best interest to puzzle listeners with something unfamiliar, however brilliant, refreshing or revelatory it might be.

Thursday night’s Cleveland Orchestra concert put the lie to that belief when conductor Lionel Bringuier returned to Severance Hall with a program that had as its centerpiece the astonishing symphonic suite La Tragédie de Salomé, by the largely neglected French composer Florent Schmitt. 

Lionel Bringuier

The last time [this work] was played by The Cleveland Orchestra was in the mid-1940s. Schmitt’s music … inhabits its own world of startling sonic brilliance and terrifically difficult execution. 

To say the orchestra fully realized Schmitt’s intent with this score is to understate their impressive achievement. From the colorful “Dance of Pearls” to the exciting “Dance of Terror,” Bringuier crafted a dazzling reading that went beyond a good reading of the score and became something extraordinary. 

Mark Satola could have gone further:  Not only did the orchestra rise to the occasion, the sold-out audience responded enthusiastically to music that most of them must have been hearing for the first time ever.

Going beyond the audience appeal, I was also interested in hearing what members of the orchestra felt about playing this music. While in town I was able to interview two musicians — violist Eliesha Nelson and principal bassoon player John Clouser. Presented below are highlights from our discussion:

PLN: Prior to these Cleveland Orchestra concerts, had either of you ever performed any music by Florent Schmitt?

John Clouser: No, not prior to this.

Eliesha Nelson: I had never played any music of Schmitt, although I am familiar with his Légende, which is a piece for viola [or saxophone]. I hope to perform that work one day.

PLN: La Tragédie de Salomé isn’t part of the core orchestral repertoire, of course. What practice strategies do you use when approaching more obscure music like this?

John Clouser: It’s not uncommon for The Cleveland Orchestra to play something new. The notion that if it’s not canonical, it’s out of our wheelhouse isn’t true. Sometimes it’s a piece that’s a commission. But we embrace all kinds of music.

Of course, there’s a bit more discovery when it comes to understanding the meaning of music that we don’t know and that we haven’t performed previously.

Eliesha Nelson: With an unfamiliar piece of music, I look at the part from beginning to end to see if there might be some tricky passage that I will have to break down and practice. I tend not to go to recordings at the beginning. I prefer to experience the way the conductor wants the music to be, rather than come in with a set idea because of what I’ve been listening to on a recording.

PLN: Thinking about the Salomé score, is there anything about the way Schmitt writes for the orchestra — or for your particular section of the orchestra — that’s unusual or noteworthy?

Eliesha Nelson

Eliesha Nelson: It seems like Schmitt had a very good understanding of string playing. For me, I found that the music fits very well in the hand, and nothing was awkward. There are a few places where the notes are high — perhaps a high C-sharp out of the blue. But outside of that, it feels fine.

John Clouser: Schmitt’s craft is great. He writes well. We got the music a couple weeks before the performances. I looked it over and it didn’t have any major challenges for the bassoon — things that I’d have to spend too much time on. There were some passages that I had to learn, but it wasn’t an exorbitant effort.

When I first looked at the music, it looked like a piece by Debussy or Ravel. As I leafed through the part and heard it in my head, it really had that French Impressionist feel. I also sensed Holst — sections where it seemed like The Planets.

Eliesha Nelson: When you get to a certain point in an orchestral career, you have an idea about music of a certain genre and style and country — there are certain things that one just comes to expect. And Schmitt’s music falls neatly into those categories — it’s very “French”!

John Clouser: I’d also say that Schmitt’s music is well-crafted in comparison to music that just wallows around, or that doesn’t speak well idiomatically or ensemble-wise. The music is very efficient in that regard. He writes so well for the wind corps — and particularly for the bassoon from my own point of view.

PLN: What are your thoughts on Schmitt’s orchestration in the Salomé score?

Eliesha Nelson: To me, the orchestration is tight and really colorful. It’s also very intelligently composed. To me, it makes a lot of sense as it flows.

John Clouser: Schmitt uses the orchestra in the best way possible. He uses instrumentation in much the same way as the other Impressionists. The music is colorful. It’s dramatic. It’s cinematic, but without being insipid in any way. It’s quite sophisticated.

Eliesha Nelson: Depending on the orchestra and the conductor, you could really fly with this score! It’s very dramatic music, with huge brush strokes.

PLN: Do you have any particular observations about rehearsing this music prior to performance?

Eliesha Nelson: In our first run-through of the work, which Lionel did without any pauses, the music just made sense to me.

John Clouser: That’s right. The first time we rehearsed it, Lionel Bringuier read the whole piece through without stopping. That was the right thing to do, and it worked. It’s the kind of thing we can do well, considering the level of talent that’s sitting on the stage.

John Clouser

One of the really great things about this piece is that it rolls together so well. This is music that isn’t in our ears already. When we come to unfamiliar music like this, we have to get it in our ears, because no one wants to be playing the first performance while still trying to figure out how it all comes together. The beauty of this score is that it’s so well-written, and it goes together so well, that this wasn’t a problem at all.

But there was one point I noted. When we first played through the music, one thing that didn’t seem quite right to me was the oboe solo in the middle of the work. But then I found out that the score actually calls for an offstage soprano voice, and I think that would work better. Otherwise, it seems as though the oboe isn’t conveying what we should be hearing at that pivotal moment — it needs that sense of wailing off in the distance. Maybe having the oboe playing offstage might be a more effective way to perform it if a soprano soloists isn’t available.

PLN: Are there other observations you would like to share about Florent Schmitt and La Tragédie de Salomé?

Florent Schmitt (l.) and Igor Stravinsky (r.) in later life (1957 photo).

Eliesha Nelson: Once thing that’s really interesting is the connection between Schmitt and other composers like Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky. Lionel talked about this in rehearsal — about how Schmitt and Stravinsky were friends. We can hear the rhythmic things that Stravinsky took from Salomé for The Rite of Spring. One might listen to Schmitt and think, ‘I can’t believe that Schmitt stole this from The Rite of Spring.’ But then you’d have to realize that it’s the other way around!

I think a lot of people in the orchestra really like this piece. My stand partner mentioned that she felt the music was very strong, and I agree. It’s a great work.

John Clouser: The Salomé is a programmatic piece — and since it started out as a ballet, it’s very theatrical, too. It’s highly dramatic and cinematic. It’s not hard to unlock the meaning of the music.

It’s also a very meaningful piece. It’s quite a joy to take something that’s so well-crafted and give it the life it deserves. I think Schmitt’s Salomé is quite something, and I was very happy to have the chance to play it.

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… And we music lovers are equally happy that the orchestra chose to program La Tragédie de Salomé, which hadn’t been played in Cleveland in seven decades.

As it turns out, it was an exhilarating experience hearing music so masterfully interpreted by Lionel Bringuier, and brought to life beautifully by the stellar musicians of The Cleveland Orchestra. What a thrill for us all.

Riccardo Zandonai (1883-1944)

Faithful readers of this blog know that its focus is nearly 100% on the life and music of French composer Florent Schmitt.  However, occasionally we “relax the routine” to present a different sort of musical topic.

Back in 2013, one of those articles was an interview with the Italian pianist and author Alberto Nones about his newly published book on Giuseppe Verdi (coinciding with the bicentennial anniversary of Verdi’s birth):  Ascoltando Verdi:  Scrigni di Musica, filosofia politica e vita (Listening to Verdi:  Shrines of Music, Political Philosophy and Life).

The book approached its topic differently than the usual biographical volumes that are published about musicians.  Instead, it revealed the persona of Verdi through the 26 operas he created over his lengthy career.  In so doing, readers come to know Verdi in a fresh and different way.  And since the trajectory of Verdi’s life paralleled the struggle for Italian unification and independence, the musical and the socio-political factors were inextricably combined.

While he and I share the same family name, more important and relevant is that Alberto Nones is both a musician and a scholar.  After studying piano performance in conservatory, he went on to earn a Laurea degree in Philosophy from the University of Bologna … then a Master’s degree in Political Theory from the London School of Economics … then a Ph.D. in International Studies from the University of Trento … then became a visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. and being named a Fulbright Scholar as well as a 2009-10 Olin-Lehrman Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University.

Alberto Nones

Following his Verdi success, Alberto Nones is back with a new biography – this time on the life and work of the Italian composer Riccardo Zandonai (1883-1944).  In writing this new volume, titled Zandonai:  Un musicista nel vento del Novecento (Zandonai:  A Musician in the Crosswinds of the Twentieth Century), the author has taken his customary-yet-unique approach to biography and applied it to this composer as well.

In something of a parallel to Florent Schmitt, who has long been known for one work in particular (La Tragédie de Salomé), Zandonai has encountered a similar fate:  He is considered essentially a ‘one work composer’ (the opera Francesca da Rimini) even though he was the creator of numerous operas, choral pieces, orchestral works and chamber music.

Because the new book has not yet been published in an English translation, I asked Alberto Nones to share his perspectives on what he discovered about the composer while researching and writing about him, for the benefit of the many non-Italian speakers who read the Florent Schmitt Blog and whose love for classical music extends well beyond Paris of the early-to-mid 20th century.

[Even better for me, Alberto Nones was kind enough to share his thoughts and perspectives in English!] 

PLN:  How did you first become interested in Riccardo Zandonai, and why did you decide to write a book about him?

AN:  The composer Riccardo Zandonai was born in the Trentino region of Italy, which is also my home. Along with Francesco Antonio Bonporti, he is considered ‘the’ Trentino composer.  But since Bonporti was a 17^th century composer, Zandonai is much closer to us in time – and a witness and participant in the major events of the first half of the 20^th century.

And yet, even in his home region, Zandonai is known more by name rather than through true knowledge of his life and music.  This is why I became interested in studying more about him and then writing this book.

PLN:  Would you characterize the book as a ‘standard’ biography, or did you take a different  approach? 

AN:  To me, music is one of the most fascinating manifestations of the human spirit.  It is also intertwined with history, rooted in it — and finally transcends it.  

Music is bound to society and the world of interconnected human beings who lived in a certain context.  But also, music seems at times to float over it, and it also speaks to people who haven’t shared the same experiences.

My book does follow the sequence of the most important events and circumstances that affected Zandonai’s life, but it also expands on the historical and cultural context.  In it, I seek to speak about the man and composer as if he were, in a sense, our contemporary.  Indeed, we are all connected, in a way that goes beyond the limits of time and space.

PLN:  In your view, does Zandonai have any unique or singular ‘claim to fame’ as an Italian composer, or as a composer of operas?  

AN:  Zandonai was born in 1883 and died in 1944.  He became famous for his operas in the early 1910s, being acclaimed as the heir to Puccini.  He was then active, more or less, for the following three decades.

Two things are particularly noteworthy regarding this period. The first is the historical dimension:  Zandonai lived through two world wars and also through the rise and fall of a totalitarian regime in Italy.  The second aspect is decidedly cultural:  Zandonai wrote operas during a time when the operatic form was being gradually but steadily surpassed by other forms of art, particularly the cinema.

The question is what kind of operas Zandonai was writing under these circumstances.  I try to shed some light on that question in my book, showing also how Zandonai didn’t limit himself to writing operas solely.  He also composed some noteworthy orchestral pieces and chamber works.

One example is the wonderful Quadri di Segantini.  Another is one of his most thoughtful compositions:  a chamber music piece, the Trio-Serenata that he composed in the final year of his life.  It was in 1944, when Italy was torn asunder by the civil war and Zandonai’s beautiful Villa San Giuliano in Pesaro was occupied by German troops. 

It was a time in which not only the world of opera, but an entire vision of a world order, was seemingly collapsing — albeit with some small signs of hope for the future.

PLN:  Of the various operas Zandonai composed, which one or two do you feel are the most important – the ones that deserve to be programmed most often?

AN:  The only Zandonai opera that is still programmed today is Francesca da Rimini.  It’s so well-known that it was actually staged at the MET Opera in New York City recently.  Composed in 1914, it is Zandonai’s acknowledged masterpiece and still deserves to be seen and heard.  

Based on verses by Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, it sets to music the poignant story, famously recounted by Dante in his Commedia, of the doomed love between Paolo and Francesca.

The style of the music in this opera falls somewhere between Wagner and Debussy (as unusual as that combination may seem), along with the presence of Verdi and of verismo, too.  

I like to say that Francesca da Rimini oscillates between magma and vapor – ‘matter’ and ‘dream.’

PLN:  Do you have a personal favorite among Zandonai’s operas?  

AN:  Zandonai wrote far more than just one opera, and so perhaps it’s his curse to be associated only with Francesca.  One of my favorite Zandonai operas is Giulietta e Romeo, a work which presents the Shakespearean story by ‘re-imagining’ it though its original Italian, Veronese matrix.

Consider this:  In a sublime moment in the opera, when the equivalent of a newspaper boy of the time sorrowfully announces that Giulietta would be dead, such news is sung in Veronese dialect.  It’s quite sophisticated on the part of Zandonai’s librettist, Arturo Rossato — and wholly appropriate.

What follows this hypnotic, suspended aria in Veronese dialect is Romeo’s furious ride, powerfully evoked by the orchestra.  An evocation, not a description – because again, as always with Zandonai, matter and dream are mixed, confused or disembodied.

Once, just before coming to the podium when he was to conduct the piece, the composer himself emphasized to an interviewer that his music was not just descriptive:  ‘La tempesta è tutta interiore’ (‘The tempest is inside’), he noted. 

Personally, I hear and see in this music not so much a horse being launched on the plains, but instead a man being overwhelmed by his destiny.  Or even, considering the times (the 1920s), by history.

PLN:  When you think of Zandonai’s life, are there any particular events, or experiences he had, that you find particularly interesting or noteworthy?

Riccardo Zandonai, photographed at about the time of the completion of his most famous opera, Francesca da Rimini.

AN:  To me, one of the most interesting aspects is his having lived through Fascism.  I devote some space in my book to this issue, both in the main text and the endnotes.

Interestingly, the bulk of the Italian scholarship on Zandonai so far has sort of skirted the issue of his relationship to Fascism, but it was covered in greater depth in the English biography by Konrad Claude Dryden.

My own conclusion is this:  On one hand, Zandonai strived to be recognized by the ‘system’ – which meant those in power.  He was a composer of operas, and opera composers famously need to rely on commissions in order for their works to be successfully mounted.  Thus, his need to cultivate good relations with theaters, government officials, politicians and so forth.

But Zandonai did this awkwardly and with inconsistent success.  He relied more on a friend, Nicola D’Atri, who served as his public relations person.  

Comparing the two, the ‘man of the world’ was D’Atri.  By contrast, Zandonai was the solitary ‘Trentino bear,’ as the composer’s librettist Rossato referred to him.  Zandonai couldn’t abide compromises for long and the result was that he ended up living in a kind of ‘voluntary seclusion’ in his villa set amongst parklands in the seaside town of Pesaro – a property he was able to design and build for himself with the fortunes from his artistic career.  (Commonly known as Villa Zandonai today, the San Giuliano property happens to be for sale at the moment, which surely must be tempting to potential buyers who also have a love for classical music or opera!)

Villa Zandonai, the home of Riccardo Zandonai in the seaside town of Pesaro, Italy which is also the native city of Gioachino Rossini. Reportedly, Zandonai personally supervised the expansion of this Art Nouveau structure surrounded by parklands designed and planted by him and his landscape architect. Zandonai’s wife, the soprano Tarquinia Tarquini Zandonai, wrote that she, the Maestro and their daughter spent “years of true, authentic beatitude” there. Villa Zandonai is currently for sale and is sparking international interest — a rare opportunity for lovers of opera and classical music as well as fine architecture to possess an important piece of cultural history.

In complete contrast, D’Atri was ‘in the arena’ at all times as Zandonai’s learned and skillful collaborator and publicity person. 

Here’s an example that will be of particular interest to readers of the Florent Schmitt Blog:  In one of his letters written to Zandonai in 1935, D’Atri mentions ‘the musician Florent Schmitt, who hasn’t missed this other occasion for teasing Respighi’ – the occasion being an article Schmitt had written about Stravinsky in the Parisian newspaper Les Temps. The letter was written by D’Atri just as he had been informed of the positive reception of Zandonai’s opera La farsa amorosa in Paris.  

Concerning Zandonai’s relationship with the Italian Fascist regime, we encounter a kind of contradiction that’s not unfamiliar to many if not most Italians of the time: a mix of displeasure with (or even revulsion against) the regime along with a shared responsibility for creating and maintaining it.

Of course, what counts most for musicians is not any clumsy attempts at gaining the favor or stubbornly criticizing the politicians of their day.  Rather, it’s the music they left us.

PLN:  What sort of reception has your book had since its publication?  

AN:  I published my book on Zandonai with a small, meritorious publishing house of Trento, with the intention of sharing knowledge on the composer in his home region, as well as to expand the circle of Zandonai enthusiasts.

The recently restored Teatro Zandonai, Rovereto, Italy.

This being said, Zandonai, who was born near Rovereto, would move to Pesaro where he actually spent most of his life. Nevertheless, his home region did not forget him.  Indeed, the main theater of Rovereto, dating from the 18^th century and today named after Zandonai, reopened in 2014 after several years of a major, no-expense-spared renovation.  The Teatro Zandonai is now able to host large productions.

Coincidentally, 2014 was the hundredth anniversary of Zandonai’s opera Francesca da Rimini and the seventieth anniversary of the composer’s death.

PLN:  Through presentations or interviews, have you had opportunities to speak about your book and the research that went into creating it?

AN:  Attention to my book on Zandonai is only part of the picture; attention to his music is what counts more.  Thankfully, more musicians are rediscovering and presenting his music – and not only his operas.  Just to mention several recent examples, the Zandonai Ensemble (a chamber orchestra based in Trento) has made a double CD recording devoted to the composer’s chamber music and pieces for small orchestra.  The Italian pianist Diego Massa has recorded Zandonai’s complete piano works.

For my part, I too am making a contribution.  Besides writing the book, I prepared a program focused on the life and work of the composer for the Trento branch of RAI, the Italian national radio and TV network.  

I have also prepared a stage presentation in which I talk about the composer and an actress reads excerpts from my book.  A major part of the presentation is devoted to my playing selections of Zandonai’s music on the piano.

This show presents Zandonai’s life through his music, which also illuminates some of the more momentous aspects and events of the 20^th century.  

As one example, in the show we present three pieces for choir — Inno degli Studenti Trentini (1901), Alla Patria (1915), and Requiem (1916) – which together resulted in Zandonai receiving a sentence for High Treason by the tribunal of Innsbruck in 1916.  It helps us remember that the town of Rovereto, although ethnically Italian, was actually part of the Habsburg Empire (Austria-Hungary) for 100 years until the end of World War I.

Zandonai — legally speaking an Austrian citizen – had committed the crime of writing ‘irredentist’ music.  In the event, the composer’s house was confiscated, his possessions looted, and even his damaged piano was found dumped in a war trench on a mountainside overlooking Rovereto.

PLN:  Now that you have completed major books about two important Italian operatic composers — Verdi and Zandonai — what’s next for you?  Do you have any new scholarly works in development or are you concentrating more on stage performances?

AN:  I am concentrating on performances right now, plus a piano recording project is in the pipeline.  The ‘scholar’ in me loves to research and write about music, and to speak about its spirit and its history.  However, writing books and lecturing only accomplishes so much.  After all, music is only truly alive when it is being played!

We are fortunate that scholars like Alberto Nones have devoted time to research and write about not only famous composers such as Verdi, but also less familiar artists like Zandonai.  They may not be as famous … but that doesn’t mean they didn’t create beautiful, worthwhile music.

Lionel Bringuier (Photo: Paolo Dutto)

French conductor Lionel Bringuier’s meteoric rise in the classical music field has been noteworthy.  Not yet 30 years old, he has been conducting major orchestras in the United States and Europe since 2006.

Currently, Maestro Bringuier is chief conductor of the Tonhalle Orchestra in Zürich, Switzerland.  Prior to that, he was an associate conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra during the tenure of Esa-Pekka Salonen and later Gustavo Dudamel.

Florent Schmitt’s ballet score La Tragédie de Salomé (1907/10) has been part of Maestro Bringuier’s repertoire since 2009.  He has conducted the work with numerous orchestras, including ensembles in Frankfurt, Maastricht, Stockholm, Helsinki, London, Los Angeles and elsewhere.

This past week, he conducted the Salomé score with The Cleveland Orchestra at a pair of concerts.  It was the first time the music had been performed by the orchestra in over 70 years.

I had the privilege of attending those Cleveland concerts, and the work was played magnificently.  As music critic Mark Satola wrote in The Plain Dealer, the city’s leading newspaper:

Conventional wisdom holds that concert hall audiences only respond to tried and true warhorses — Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms — and that it’s not in anyone’s best interest to puzzle listeners with something unfamiliar, however brilliant, refreshing or revelatory it might be.

Thursday night’s Cleveland Orchestra concert put the lie to that belief when conductor Lionel Bringuier returned to Severance Hall with a program that had as its centerpiece the astonishing symphonic suite La Tragédie de Salomé, by the largely neglected French composer Florent Schmitt. 

The original version of Florent Schmitt’s La Tragédie de Salomé (1907) was danced by Loïe Fuller. The composer’s 1910 rework was half the length but featured a full orchestra instead of a chamber ensemble.

The last time [this work] was played by The Cleveland Orchestra was in the mid-1940s. Schmitt’s music … inhabits its own world of startling sonic brilliance and terrifically difficult execution. 

To say the orchestra fully realized Schmitt’s intent with this score is to understate their impressive achievement. From the colorful “Dance of Pearls” to the exciting “Dance of Terror,” Bringuier crafted a dazzling reading that went beyond a good reading of the score and became something extraordinary. 

Not only did the orchestra rise to the occasion, the sold-out audiences responded enthusiastically to music that most were likely hearing for the first time ever.

While in Cleveland, I was fortunate to be able to speak with Maestro Bringuier about his love for La Tragédie de Salomé and his commitment to programming it in concert.  Here are highlights from that discussion:

PLN:  I’ve read that you studied the Salomé score during your days in the conservatory.  Can you tell me about that experience?

LB:  When I was 15 or 16 years old, one of my courses at the Paris Conservatoire was a music analysis class.  The instructor liked to take a half hour during the class and put on some music that we would not know in advance, and then we would discuss it. 

This was music that we students wouldn’t know, and that we would find only rarely or never on a concert program.  But the musical exercise was important and interesting because it could help us develop our ears for music in general. 

One of the pieces the instructor played for us was La Tragédie de Salomé by Schmitt.  In this particular case, all of the students were looking at each other saying, ‘What is this?  Maybe this is some Ravel that we don’t know?  Maybe some Stravinsky?  Maybe some Debussy?’   

But in reality, we had no idea what the music was. 

The teacher had a big smile on his face and said, “No — it’s Florent Schmitt!”   

We were amazed, because although we recognized the composer, we only knew his name.  But most importantly, we were so amazed at the quality of the music.  We had no idea how important Schmitt had been as a composer.

PLN:  Was it “love at first hearing” for you?

LB:  It just so happened that two weeks following that class, the work was performed in a concert, which I attended.  Hearing the entire piece, I thought it was musical genius.  So beautiful — the mastery of orchestral colors, and such great rhythms. 

Then I bought the score.  And I vowed to myself, ‘One day I will conduct this music.’

The full score to Florent Schmitt’s ballet La Tragédie de Salomé, inscribed by conductor Lionel Bringuier.

PLN:  It seems as though you were able to fulfill that dream …

LB:  True!  Later on, when I started to conduct more concerts, I remembered this piece and determined that I would try to program it at some point.  And actually it happened not long after, first in Frankfurt with the radio orchestra there.   

One thing with the radio orchestras in Germany is that they like to program some repertoire that is kind of unknown.  So this allowed me to conduct the music there, but later in Scandinavia and the United States, too.  When I played it with the BBC Symphony, we paired it with “Salome’s Dance” by [Richard] Strauss.

PLN:  How would you characterize the music and its style?

LB:  I really love this piece.  Clearly, Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky are part of the patterns of this music. 

In some places, such as at the beginning, it is remindful of La Mer.  Some other places are like The Rite of Spring.  And in fact, this piece inspired Stravinsky for writing The Rite of Spring.   

Igor Stravinsky (l.), photographed with Florent Schmitt in about 1910.

Stravinsky himself said to Florent Schmitt, ‘Thank you for this masterpiece.’  And he was in the midst of writing The Rite of Spring at that very moment.  So some of the patterns in the last section of Salomé are exactly what we find in the ‘Danse sacrale,’ the final section of the Rite. 

This shows how much everyone in Paris was influencing each other at that time.  Stravinsky was Russian; DeFalla was Spanish; Ravel, Debussy and Schmitt were French.  But they were working together, and you can sense that in their music.

PLN:  You have conducted this music quite regularly since 2009.  It seems to be a piece that you enjoy performing a good deal.

LB:  You know, the more I conduct this piece, the more amazed I am about the great structure of the music.  It was a Ballet Russes production, and the music is in two parts like The Rite of Spring — and also like the two suites of [Ravel’s] Daphnis in a way.  In these scores, there is this idea of devising the musical program in two distinct parts — and Schmitt was the first to do this in La Tragédie de Salomé. 

I should also mention the orchestral colors.  They’re just amazing — and it’s even more obvious with The Cleveland Orchestra, where the players can work the dynamics so finely.  The pianissimo, for instance:  very soft, but we can still hear absolutely everything.

The Cleveland Orchestra’s concert program (April 2015).

PLN:  In presenting La Tragédie de Salomé in concert, is it part of a larger performance strategy?

LB:  I have always been interested in performing not only the music of living composers, but also lesser known repertoire from the last century or before.  For instance, I have recorded the music of Vincent d’Indy. 

Florent Schmitt is part of that, too.  Obviously, he is not famous — and probably will never be as famous as Ravel or Debussy.  It’s why I feel that, in a way, it’s my responsibility as a French conductor to perform not only a piece like Boléro, but also lesser known repertoire by composers like Schmitt and Roussel — just as a Czech conductor might choose to program some unknown works by Martinů.

PLN:  Thank you for bringing this great music to American audiences, Maestro.

LB:  You’re welcome!  I am amazed that here in Cleveland, we are doing three sold-out concerts and the Schmitt Salomé is on those programs.  That is so wonderful to see happen.

We owe a debt of gratitude to Lionel Bringuier for being such a passionate advocate for Florent Schmitt’s music and La Tragédie de Salomé in particular.  Here’s hoping he’ll continue to program it “forever and ever” … and perhaps even make a commercial recording of the music someday.

The NAXOS family of labels (NAXOS, Marco Polo, Grand Piano, etc.) has been one of the most active in bringing the music of Florent Schmitt to the microphones.  In fact, its catalogue of Schmitt compositions includes numerous world premiere commercial recordings.

And this month, NAXOS is doing it again with the release of a new recording devoted to works by Schmitt for violin and piano.  The featured artists are violinist Beata Halska and pianist Claudio Chaiquin, making their first album for NAXOS.

Together, Halska and Chaiquin have selected a highly interesting program that begins with three world premieres from the composer’s early period:

• Chant du soir, Opus 7 (1895) 

• Quatre pièces, Opus 25 (1901)

• Scherzo vif, Opus 59 (1910)

Beata Halska

These early works find Schmitt at his most lyrical.  The music sounds Schumanesque in places, and the influence of Schmitt’s teacher and mentor Gabriel Fauré is also evident.

The Scherzo vif was also published in a version for violin and orchestra, in which form it was first played in concert.

An additional work on the new release is being recorded for the first time in its violin-and-piano incarnation.  It’s Habeyssée, Opus 110, a suite in three movements that was composed in 1947 when Schmitt was in his late 70s — making it a late-career composition.

Interestingly, NAXOS is also the label that recorded Schmitt’s own version of this piece for violin and orchestra, featuring violinist Hannele Segerstam, which was released in 1994 on NAXOS’ sister label Marco Polo.

The longest and most substantial work on the program is the mid-career Sonate libre en deux parties enchainées, Opus 68.  Completed in 1919, it is one of the towering violin sonatas of the 20th century.  For this reason alone, it has had more exposure in recordings.

In fact, Halska/Chaiquin represents the fourth commercial release of this stunning work; earlier recordings include Fournier/Doyen, Paik/Sermet and Then-Bergh/Schäfer.

[There is also a very fine live performance with American violinist John McLaughlin Williams and pianist David Riley that happens to be my personal favorite.]

The new NAXOS recording will be released on May 12.  However, you may now pre-order the album from numerous sources including Amazon.  In addition, generous audio clips are already uploaded on Amazon’s UK site which you can access here.

Claudio Chaiquin

Based on how impressive the track samples sound, I predict we’ll have a winner of a recording on our hands in just a few short days.

For those who enjoy violin-and-piano music — as well as those who like late 19th and early 20th century music more generally — this album is self-recommending.  Enjoy!

Florent Schmitt’s early composition Soirs, composed between 1890 and 1896 and published by Durand in 1911. Schmitt later orchestrated eight of the ten preludes.

Most music lovers who know the works of French composer Florent Schmitt are most familiar with his compositions dating from the early 1900s onward.

Far less known are the numerous works Schmitt created in the years before his startling and celebrated Psaume XLVII, which was composed in 1904 in Rome and premiered in 1906 in Paris.

Even today, many of Schmitt’s earliest compositions have yet to be recorded commercially, although a number of them including the Quatre pièces and the Chant du soir for violin and piano, the Andante & Scherzo for harp and string quartet, the Scherzo-Pastorale for flute and piano, and the Prière for organ have at last received their recording premieres within the past several years.

However, there is one early work by Schmitt that has been in the record catalogs for years.  It’s Soirs, Opus 5, consisting of ten preludes for piano composed in 1890-1896 when Schmitt was between 20 and 26 years of age (although the score wouldn’t actually be published until 1911).

Being such early pieces, they inhabit a sound-world vastly different from the compositions of Schmitt that most people know.

Listening to these preludes, one can easily discern the influence of Frédéric Chopin and Robert Schumann — as well as Gabriel Fauré, who was Schmitt’s beloved teacher and mentor at the Paris Conservatoire.

The ten preludes bear descriptive titles redolent of the prevailing salon piano literature of the day:

1. En rêvant (Dreaming)
2. Gaity (Gaiety)
3. Spleen (Melancholy)
4. Après l’été (After the Summer)
5. Parfum exotique (Exotic Fragrance)
6. Un soir (An Evening)
7. Tziganiana (Gypsy Style)
8. Eglogue (Idyll)
9. Sur l’onde (On the Wave)
10. Dernières pages (Last Pages)

But of course, they are far more than mere salon miniatures.  The musicologist Eric Berman captures the essence of Schmitt’s suite well when he states:

“The title [Soirs] quite remarkably defines it:  A nostalgic atmosphere and a feeling which is very close to romanticism hangs over the whole composition.  The influence of Chopin is undeniable, but the preludes already have the stamp of a master … 

The themes are beautiful, with minor tonalities prevailing.  This very intimate music appeals directly to the soul without any artificial means.  It also has a certain innocence which makes it both charming and fascinating.”

Only commercial recording of the original piano version of Soirs: Francisco Manuele (Cybelia label, late 1980s).

The piano suite has been recorded commercially just once, performed by pianist Francisco Manuele and released on the Cybelia label in the 1980s.

As he would also do with many of his other piano compositions, several years afterward Schmitt prepared an orchestral version of Soirs, omitting two of the preludes (Tziganiana and Dernières pages) and reordering the remaining eight.

The orchestral version of Soirs has been recorded twice — first by James Lockhart and the Rhenish Philharmonic Orchestra on the Cybelia label in the 1980s, and later by David Robertson and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo, released in 1994 on the Valois label.

Essayist and music critic Benoït Duteurtre has remarked on Schmitt’s orchestral version of this music as follows:

“The light orchestration shows the consummate talent of the student, his capacity for simplicity and naturalness, which preceded the scholarly elaborations of his mature years.”

David Robertson’s recording of Florent Schmitt’s orchestral version of Soirs, with the Monte-Carlo Philharmonic Orchestra (Valois label, 1994).

The Robertson/Monte-Carlo recording has been uploaded to YouTube in two parts, which you can listen to here and here.

Because of its multi-movement structure, the various preludes making up Soirs are sometimes performed by pianists and orchestras individually or in smaller groups rather than as the entire suite.  Along these lines, four of the preludes will be performed in concert in Tokyo on September 6, 2015 by the Orchestre Français du Japon.

Daijiro Ukon conducts the Orchestre Français du Japon.

The OFJ was formed in 2013 with the express purpose of performing French music for audiences in Japan.  Music professor and Ravel specialist Arbie Orenstein of Queens College played a major role as artistic advisor during the orchestra’s formation, which performed its first concert earlier this year under its music director Daijiro Ukon in works by Faure, Ravel and Honegger.

The OFJ concert performance will include En rêvant, Gaiety, Parfum exotique and Sur l’onde from Soirs, in addition to music by three other French composers (Debussy, Ravel and Milhaud).

Devotees of Florent Schmitt who are in Japan and East Asia should make the effort to attend the concert because, to my knowledge, this is the only live performance of Schmitt’s orchestral music that will be occurring in the Far East in the upcoming concert season.

Late-career luxuriance: Florent Schmitt’s score to Cinq chœurs en vingt minutes (1951).

Within the extensive catalogue of Florent Schmitt’s compositions are a great many vocal works — pieces written for solo voice or for chorus.  In fact, there are over 50 such opus numbers.

Many of Schmitt’s choral works are based on sacred texts, although often the scores seem quite removed from a sense of piety.  Perhaps the best-known example of this is Schmitt’s Psaume XLVII, Opus 38 which dates from 1904.

Of that particular work, music critic Terry Blain has written:

“Going from the lurid sex and violence of Salomé to Schmitt’s setting of Psalm 47 should be a major wrench stylistically — but isn’t. The orgiastic volleys of brass and percussion in its opening paragraph have a distinctly pagan feel about them, and are a long way from conventional religiosity.”

With that in mind, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that quite a few of Schmitt’s choral works are based on secular texts, and he took his inspiration from a wide variety of literary sources.  Unfortunately, a number of these intriguing choral scores have yet to see their first commercial recordings.  Among them are:

• Danse des Devadasis, Opus 47 (1908)
• Chant de la guerre, Opus 63 (1914)
• Fête de la lumière, Opus 88 (1936)
• L’arbre entre nous, Opus 95 (1939)
• Le chant de la nuit, Opus 120 (1951)

But three significant secular works featuring mixed chorus have been recorded — and they demonstrate just how effective Schmitt’s secular choral writing can be.

One is Hymne funèbre, Op. 46 for wind ensemble and chorus, dating from 1899 and available in a 2008 premiere recording on the Corelia label, performed by the Orchestre d’Harmonie de la Région Centre conducted by Philippe Ferro.

A second work is the 1933 ballet Oriane et la Prince d’amour, Op. 83, which contains a large and important choral part.  It is available from Forgotten Records in a 1956 O.R.T.F. live performance under the direction of Pierre Dervaux.

A third such piece is Cinq chœurs en vingt minutes, Op. 117 (Five Choruses in Twenty Minutes) — a later-career work by Schmitt for mixed chorus and large orchestra, which dates from 1951 when the composer was past the age of 80.

To begin with, the work’s title isn’t all that accurate because its five movements, taken together, represent less than 15 minutes of music rather than twenty.

But one supposes that Schmitt, as he would often do, came up with the title simply because of the rhyming and alliteration of the words “cinq” and “vingt” in the French language.

Of the five movements that make up the set, all but one clock in at two minutes or less, while the fourth movement — the emotional high point of the piece in my view — is twice that long.

Rather than relying on a single author, in this work Schmitt drew his literary inspiration from diverse texts including anonymous writings from the 6th and 16th centuries (the 2nd and 4th movements) as well as the writings of Maurice Carême, Maurice Fombeure and Lucien Marceron in the 1st, 3rd and 5th movements respectively.

None of the three men is a particular household name today.  Yet their writings gave Schmitt plenty to work with — not merely in the subject matter but also in the use of alliteration, plus onomatopoeic sounds in two of the movements (#3 and #5).  Considering the musical results, it is indeed rare for poets’ words to be given such marvelous treatment.

The five movements in the set are as follows:

1. Le Cerisier (The Cherry Tree)
2. J’ai vu sept pies (I Saw Seven Magpies)
3. Je stipule (I Stipulate)
4. L’hiver arrive (Winter is Coming)
5. Oral (Words)

Within a short overall span (under 15 minutes), Schmitt treats us to many contrasting moods and colors.  In particular, the fourth movement contains some of the most gorgeous polytonal choral writing ever penned by the composer.  Its voluptuous — even rapturous — character is quite reminiscent of the famous middle section of Psalm 47 from nearly a half-century earlier — rich, chromatic chords that just make you want to crawl up inside the notes and stay there.

In the final movement, the words are nearly nonsensical — and were likely chosen purely for their alliterative character.  The text begins as follows:

“Lac Ladoga, lac Péïpous, lac Alpha, lac Onéga — Hi-ou!  Hi-ou! Fait des cocottes en papier.  Ah! Monsieur le professeur.  Ha-hic!

… and it continues in this vein all the way through to the end.

Florent Schmitt, photographed in 1953 at the time of the Paris premiere of Cinq chœurs en vingt minutes. © Boris Lipnitzki/Roger-Viollet

Cinq chœurs en vingt minutes was given its premiere performance at the Strasbourg Festival in 1951, under the direction of Louis Martin.  Two years later (October 1953), the work received its Paris premiere by the René Alix Chorus and the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra conducted by André Cluytens.

Thereafter, it appears that performances of this music have been few, unfortunately.

The Cinq chœurs, along with Le chant de la nuit (a piece Schmitt also composed in 1951 on commission for the United Nations), would turn out to be the last two secular choral pieces the composer ever wrote.

He did pen several sacred works for unaccompanied voices, or with organ accompaniment, during the final years of his life.  But those pieces are more spare in their conception and sound, which is another reason why Cinq chœurs is so special — representing as it does a kind of valedictory work of Schmitt’s in this vein.

Indeed, in creating Cinq chœurs, Schmitt proved that he had lost none of his powers to conjure up heady atmospherics and opulent sounds.  To prove the point, we can listen to the single commercial recording ever released of the piece:  a live concert performance from 1976 by the Chorus and Symphony Orchestra of the Nord-Deutscher Rundfunk conducted by Helmut Franz.

Only recording (so far): Hulmut Franz and the chorus and orchestra of North German Radio (1976).

To my knowledge, that recording, which was released back in the LP-only era, has yet to make it to CD or digital downloads.  But those fortunate enough to have heard it know just how infectious the music is.

Rich, opulent, voluptuous and always interesting, each of the movements of Cinq chœurs is its own special adventure.  Clearly, music this fascinating deserves to be heard — and heard often.

Here’s hoping it will attract the interest of choral groups in the years ahead.  True, it is complex music that requires intense preparation.  But the end-result is nothing short of amazing.

A sonic “experience”: Florent Schmitt’s Psalm 47 (1904).

The Psaume XLVII of Florent Schmitt is recognized as one of the most important choral works of the early 20th century.  And while it isn’t performed with great regularity, it has benefited from quality interpretations as revealed by some of the world’s leading conductors, ensembles and soloists.

Particular pride of place goes to a group of distinguished sopranos who have lent their considerable artistic talent and appeal to the very important solo part in the middle portion of the Psalm focusing on the Song of Songs.

The French music critic Emile Vuillermoz has characterized the soprano solo passages in the Psaume as brimming “with sensual chromaticism which has lithe and languorous movements … that give utterance to her soft, dove-like cooings … in a contemplative reverie through which pass all the perfumes of the East.”

The rich and ecstatic nature of the score yearns for a soprano voice that can do the music justice — and over the years a number of artists have risen to the occasion in a particularly effective manner.

A near-comprehensive listing of public performances of the Psaume since 1945 can be found here, and details on the studio and live recordings of the music can be viewed here and here.  Among these many performances, the following ones are particularly noteworthy in part because of the participation of some of the vocal greats of the past half-century.

Denise Duval

Denise Duval — Known as the muse to Francis Poulenc, the French soprano Denise Duval performed Psaume XLVII with André Cluytens and the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra in October 1951, and then was chosen to make the first commercial recording of the work in 1952, in the presence of the composer.  Miss Duval was joined by a star-studded roster of performers that included the Chorale Elisabeth Brasseur, the organist-composer Maurice Duruflé and the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra, all under the direction of Georges Tzipine.  This recording remains available today — more than a half-century after its debut — and Miss Duval herself is still with us today as well, a living legend in her mid-nineties.

Elisabeth Schwarzkopf

Elisabeth Schwarzkopf — The famed German soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf performed Psalm 47 in concert in Paris in April 1953, with the French National Radio Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Igor Markevitch.  French repertoire might not have been Miss Schwarzkopf’s main calling card, but she acquits herself well in this performance, soaring high above the orchestra.  Only a fairly short excerpt of this performance is available to hear today, but we can only hope that the complete performance will surface at some point in the future for all of us to enjoy.

Régine Crespin

Régine Crespin — The famous French soprano Régine Crespin joined with the ORTF Orchestra and Chorus in a memorial concert held in October 1958, two months following the death of Florent Schmitt.  The all-Schmitt programme featuring five works was conducted by Désiré-Emilie Inghelbrecht, who had directed the premiere performance of the Psalm more than a half-century before (1906) and who would continue to champion this music for his entire conducting career.  The full 90-minute Schmitt memorial concert, with the Psalm as the final item, is available for audition (and also as a high-res download) from the INA archives of the French National Radio and Television network.

Andréa Guiot

Andréa Guiot — In 1973, the marvelous French soprano Andréa Guiot collaborated with conductor Jean Martinon and the ORTF Orchestra and Chorus to perform and record Psaume 47.  For more than a few music-lovers, this 40+ year old EMI recording, which also features the legendary organist Gaston Litaize, continues to be the top favorite of all commercial recordings of the Psalm.  Listeners can also hear the exciting public performance — minus the powerful organ of the Salle-Gaveau — courtesy of the INA archives.

Sylvia McNair

Sylvia McNair — Those who know and love the artistry of Robert Shaw may wonder if the great choral conductor was ever inspired to program Psalm 47.  And the answer is ‘yes':  In February 1982, American soprano Sylvia McNair joined forces with Shaw and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus to present the Psalm.  While no recorded document of this performance appears to be available, reports I’ve heard from concert-goers fortunate enough to have attended the performances have been very positive.

Judith Blegen

Judith Blegen — In May 1986, Robert Shaw programmed Psalm XLVII with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus for the second time inside of five years.  The soloist in the 1986 performances was the famed American soprano Judith Blegen.  Taking this sonic showstopper on the road, Miss Blegen also sang the part during the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s tour of Paris and other French and European cities that same year.

Sharon Sweet

Sharon Sweet — The American soprano Sharon Sweet is featured on a 1990 Erato recording that also includes the Orchestre National de France and ORTF Chorus led by conductor Marek Janowski.  Miss Sweet’s solo is a darker, more voluptuous interpretation than most of the other sopranos who have performed the Psaume.  Nevertheless, it is a valid, interesting and ultimately quite winsome approach to the music.

Korliss Uecker

Korliss Uecker — In April 1997, the American soprano Korliss Uecker, a stalwart performer at the MET Opera, joined with the Canticum Novem Festival Singers and the American Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Leon Botstein to present Psaume XLVII at Lincoln Center in New York City.  Having attended that concert, I can attest to the fact that it was a truly memorable experience.  Miss Uecker’s spectacular interpretation remains a fresh memory nearly 20 years on.

Susan Bullock (Photo: Raphaelle Photography)

Susan Bullock — The most recent commercial recording of Psalm XLVII, made in 2010, is a truly transnational affair, featuring the British soprano Susan Bullock along with French conductor Yan-Pascal Tortelier conducting the Brazilian OSESP (São Paulo) Orchestra.  A fine Chandos production, it happens to be my personal favorite of all the commercial recordings of this music.  A good measure of the reason is because of Miss Bullock’s well-nigh perfect conception of the soprano solo part.

Jacquelyn Wagner (Photo: Mary DuPrie Studios)

Jacquelyn Wagner — The most recent concert performance of Psaume 47 took place in Berlin in April 2015, featuring the American soprano Jacquelyn Wagner and the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Marek Janowski (who also directed the proceedings in the 1990 Erato recording listed above).  Eric Butruille, one of the faithful readers of the Florent Schmitt Blog and Website, traveled from France to Germany to attend this concert and shared these observations about Miss Wagner’s interpretation:  “Jacquelyn Wagner’s warm and mysterious tone was perfect in the soprano solo.  Never before — live or in recordings — have I heard such fine balances between the chorus and the soloist in this music.  The sound was almost dreamlike: surreal, like an angel floating on waves of divine sounds.”  This memorable performance was broadcast over German radio, and can be heard here.

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While we could always hope for more frequent performances of Psalm 47, we can be pleased that the music has been blessed by many fine interpretations by equally fine artists — particularly the attentions of some very talented and celebrated soprano soloists, both in the concert hall and on recordings.  It is a testament to their distinguished artistry that many of these performances remain available today, years (or even decades) after their initial presentation.

Florent Schmitt in his early years as a composer.

Recently, the INA archives (French National Radio and Television) has begun offering for download a memorial concert held in honor of Florent Schmitt.  The concert, which was broadcast in October 1958 two months following the composer’s death, had never been made available since its initial airing until now.

The memorial program featured five works by Schmitt including his two most famous compositions, Psalm 47 and La Tragédie de Salomé.  In addition, three “rarities” were presented — one of which was a short work for soprano and orchestra titled Musique sur l’eau (“Water Music”).

It is perhaps the most significant discovery on the program, even though the piece is barely four minutes in length.  But it opens up an entire new realm of the composer’s work that has been untouched for decades — namely, his music for solo voice and piano/orchestra.

Albert Samain, French Symbolist Poet (1858-1900)

To realize what this trove of music might represent, let’s start by focusing on Musique sur l’eau.

The work dates from 1898 (although it wasn’t published until 1913).  It was inspired by a poem of Albert Samain (1858-1900), the French symbolist writer whose works were also set to music by other French composers such as Camille Saint-Saëns and Jean Cras.

The words to the poem give clues as to the musical atmospherics Florent Schmitt would create for it.  The poem is presented below not in its original French, but in an English translation by Kevin Germain:

Oh! Listen to the symphony;
No softness like anguish
In the unlimitable euphony
Breathing in the vaporous distance;

The night, a langour intoxicates,
And delivers our heart
From the monotonous labor of living,
One dies a langourous death.

Let us slip between sky and wave,
Let us slip beneath the deepening moon;
All my heart, from the world away,
Takes refuge in thy eyes.

And I gaze at thy eyes
That swoon beneath the chanterelles,
Like two ghostly flowers
Under melodious rays.

Oh! Listen to the symphony;
No softness like anguish
Of the lips on lips, kiss
In the unlimitable euphony. . .

About this particular poem as well as other literary creations of Albert Samain, the American poet Amy Lawrence Lowell made this insightful observation:

“These poems are as fragile as the golden crystals [Samain] speaks of.  What do they give us?  It is impossible to say.  A nuance … a colour … a vague magnificence.”

Régine Crespin, French Soprano (1927-2007)

Responding in kind, Florent Schmitt’s music is ravishingly beautiful; that is plain to hear by listening to the fine interpretation by the French soprano Régine Crespin in the 1958 memorial concert, accompanied by conductor Désiré Inghelbrecht and the French National Radio Orchestra (ORTF).

You can listen to this gorgeous music here — four minutes of sheer magic.

Indeed, it is “water music” in the finest French tradition.

And there’s another important aspect to consider that makes the piece even more noteworthy:  Schmitt’s composition actually predates Debussy’s La Mer and Ravel’s song cycle Shéhérazade by nearly a decade.

So in a sense Schmitt was the forerunner, rather than a composer penning a piece after being exposed to those other, more famous works that also deal with the oceans and water.

The unexpected (and welcome) emergence of the ORTF “musical relic” from 50+ years ago leaves us anxious to hear more from Schmitt in this vein. And in fact, a review of the composer’s catalogue of works reveals that Musique sur l’eau is hardly an isolated piece.

Indeed, Florent Schmitt produced numerous such chansons over a roughly 20-year period beginning in 1890.  And yet … it’s a part of his output that is barely known.  The question is: Why?

Perhaps one reason is because the early works of Schmitt, like those of many other composers, might be prone to reflect other musical influences rather than an “authentic” style.

That certainly seems to be the case when listening to Schmitt’s early work Soirs, Op. 5, a set of nocturnes composed for piano between 1890 and 1896 and also orchestrated by the composer.  It is easy to discern the influence of composers like Robert Schumann and Gabriel Fauré, Schmitt’s own teacher and mentor, in that work.

But in the Musique sur l’eau of 1898, we already hear elements of Schmitt’s own personal style, and the inventiveness of the score makes one wonder what other vocal gems await an intrepid explorer.

Unfortunately, investigation isn’t easy, as very little if any if this output is available to audition.  Indeed, there are many early vocal works of Schmitt that have yet to receive their first commercial recording:

• Deux chansons, Op. 2 (1890-94)
• Trois chansons, Op. 4 (1892-95) (the second of these three chansons can be heard here in a 2012 live concert performance in Madrid by countertenor Philippe Jaroussky)
• Les Barques, Op. 8 (1897)
• Soir sur le lac, Op. 9 (1898)
• Deux chansons, Op. 18 (1895-1901)
• Trois chansons, Op. 21 (1891-1897)
• Vocalise, Op. 30 (1906)
• Musique sur l’eau, Op. 33 (1898)
• Quatre lieds, Op. 45 (1901-1907)

Particularly intriguing is that Schmitt found his inspiration for these compositions in the poetry and words of leading French literary figures including:

• Théodore Aubanel
• Catulle Blée
• Henry Gauthier-Villars
• Camille Mauclair (Séverin Faust)
• Robert de Montesquiou
• Albert Semain
• Paul Verlaine

What’s more, while Schmitt’s chansons were originally written for voice and piano, he also orchestrated a goodly number of them.  Such was the case with Musique sur l’eau.  Knowing that information makes the prospect of investigating this repertoire even more appealing.

In his later years, Schmitt would continue to compose works for solo voice and piano (and orchestral versions of them as well). Examples such as Trois chants, Op. 98 and Quatre poèmes de Ronsard, Op. 100 from the early 1940s — both of which were commercially recorded by the Roumanian-American soprano Yolanda Marcoulescou in the 1970s — underscore the fact that Schmitt’s writing for voice remained idiomatic and inventive over many decades.

But to my mind, it is the early works that beckon most invitingly. The Musique sur l’eau gives us a tantalizing foretaste of what splendors await exploration. Hopefully we will not have to wait much longer to find out the treasures that are in store for us.

David & Abisag, painted by the Brazilian artist Pedro Américo in 1879. Acknowledged as one of the most important Brazilian painters in the Academic style, Américo (1843-1905) died in Florence, Italy.

One of the lesser known of Florent Schmitt’s “orientalist” works is Danse d’Abisag, Opus 75.  This work, which was composed in 1925, began life as a ballet but soon migrated to the concert hall.

In creating the orientalist works upon which so much of his fame rests, Schmitt derived inspiration from historical, biblical and fictional events.  Danse d’Abisag is no exception, being based on a passage from the Old Testament of the Bible.

Abisag (sometimes spelled as “Abishag” or “Avishag”) was a beautiful young virgin woman from Shunam who was selected to be a “helper and servant” to King David in his old age.  Quoting from the New Interpreter’s Bible:

“… The Hebrews … believed that the fertility of the soil and the general prosperity of the people were bound up with the fertility of the king.  David, by this time, was old and decrepit and his sexual vigor is called into question.  Attempts are made to remedy the situation. 

The first cure is to heap clothes upon his bed in order to secure such physical heat as might render him capable.  When this fails, a search is made for the most beautiful woman in the land.  Great emphasis is placed upon her charms …”

Among Abisag’s responsibilities was to lie next to King David to keep him warm.  However, there were no sexual relations between the two.  As the Book of Kings recounts:

“The damsel was very fair, and cherished the King, and ministered to him; but the King knew her not.”

[As an interesting aside, some scholars have speculated that Abisag is the same protagonist in the Song of Songs — which is interesting in that the Song of Songs figures prominently in another one of Florent Schmitt’s orientalist works — the far better known Psalm 47.]

The story of Abisag in the Old Testament provided fertile inspiration for Schmitt to create a work that contains many of the trademark aspects of the composer’s orchestral scores from this period.

The piece begins in the depths of the orchestra (bass clarinet, bassoon and low strings) — in a way that’s quite remindful of several other orientalist scores of the composer — Antoine et Cléopâtre (1920), Salammbô (1925) and Oriane et le Prince d’Amour (1933).

Carina Ari (1897-1970), the Swedish ballet artist (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.

The music then segues into an oriental dance rhythm with sinuous themes and movements presented by the woodwinds — and punctuated by periodic brass note clusters suggesting the King’s attempted but ultimately unsuccessful sexual response.

As the story line suggests, the music proceeds in fits and starts, ultimately ending quietly, with a sense of resignation.

Throughout the work, the prevailing tone and mood is dark.

The first public performance of Danse d’Abisag was a choreographic production at the Opéra-Comique.  Presented in June 1925, it featured Carina Ari dancing the starring role, with the theatre orchestra conducted by Désiré-Emilie Inghelbrecht.

Paul Paray, French Conductor and Composer (1886-1979)

Early the following year (January 1926), Danse d’Abisag had its concert hall premiere in a performance by the Lamoureux Orchestra under Paul Paray, the director who was to introduce concert audiences to more of Schmitt’s orchestral music than any other conductor.

Only commercial recording to date: Leif Segerstam and the Rheinland-Pfalz Philharmonic (1992).

To my knowledge, Danse d’Abisag has had only one commercial recording to date, made in 1992 by the Rheinland-Pfalz Philharmonic (German Südwestfunk Radio), conducted by Leif Segerstam and released on NAXOS’ Marco Polo label.  The recording has been uploaded to YouTube and can be heard here.

To my ears, the music of Danse d’Abisag reminds me not only of Schmitt’s music to the silent film Salammbô, composed in the same year, but even more so to Schmitt’s final orientalist composition, the large-scale ballet Oriane et le Prince d’Amour, which was composed in the early 1930s.

In fact, I consider Danse d’Abisag to be the forerunner of the later ballet — albeit on a much smaller scale than Oriane, which clocks in at well over 50 minutes and also includes a large chorus and solo tenor.  (By comparison, Danse d’Abisag is less than 15 minutes in duration.)

In the early 1940s, writing to the then-director of the Académie du Disque Français, Michel de Bry, Schmitt provided a glimpse of his “oriental muse” (translated from the French):

“I love the Orient as my third homeland – without neglecting that Italy, where I lived, is the second.  I cherish my voyages in Arabia, in Persia, in Afghanistan and other unforgettable small countries nearby, even if I am ignorant of their languages …”

Of course, by the time Schmitt penned this note, his orientalist compositions were well behind him.  Yet it seems those compositions remained the favorites of his “musical children.”

Critics seem to agree:  Taken as a group, these works represent not only the core of the composer’s orchestral oeuvre, they’re also the ones singled out most often for praise.

Danse d’Abisag may not be the brightest star in that galaxy, but it is a highly characteristic piece that deserves a place among the great orientalist music of Florent Schmitt — La Tragédie de Salomé … Psaume XLVII … and all the rest.

Villa Medici, Rome

In the century period from 1850 to 1950, the Prix de Rome was probably the single most important and prestigious recognition for French composers. And for that reason, nearly every important French composer strove to win it.

Offered to students at the Paris Conservatoire, winners of the award were rewarded with a handsome stipend, along with a multi-year stay at the Villa Medici in Rome in the company of fellow composers plus artists, sculptors and architects.

While in Rome, award recipients were free to follow their own artistic pursuits — the only requirement being to send back periodic envois to the Conservatoire, which for composers meant various works of music composed during their time in Rome.

Some composers were successful on their first or second attempt at winning the coveted prize, such as Claude Debussy in 1884. Others tried numerous times but were never successful, like Ernest Chausson and Maurice Ravel.

Like so many of his fellow composers, Florent Schmitt competed for the prize multiple times, beginning with the secular cantata Mélusine in 1896 and followed by Frédégonde in 1897 … Radegonde in 1898 … and Callirrhoé in 1899.

Finally, in 1900 Schmitt won the Prix de Rome first prize in composition in his fifth attempt with his secular cantata Sémiramis, Opus 14, scored for three voices, mixed chorus and orchestra.

Semiramis, the cantata that won Florent Schmitt the Prix de Rome in 1900.

In later years, Schmitt would explain that his success was due to the non-musicians on the selection committee. He wrote:

Gabriel Fauré, Florent Schmitt’s teacher and mentor at the Paris Conservatoire.

“I had to compete five times for the Prix de Rome to win it once. And if in the end I was not left out in the cold, it was thanks to Gabriel Fauré, my much-lamented teacher, who managed to gather for me enough votes among the sculptors and painters to counterbalance the animosity of the musicians who, with the exception of Massenet, Reyer and Saint-Saens, turned thumbs-down on me. But I have no shame for all that … the important thing was the 30,000 gold francs.” 

A photo of Parisian musicians taken in 1900, the year Florent Schmitt won the Prix de Rome first prize in composition. Schmitt is pictured in the back row (second from left). Other composers in the photo include Gabriel Dupont and Jean Roger-Ducasse (back row) and Maurice Ravel (front row, second from right). (Photo Courtesy of Philippe Raynald Simon)

For Schmitt, his tenure in Rome was distinguished by the amount of time he wasn’t there — thereby turning the typical 24-month stay into a four-year travel adventure. Between 1900 and 1904, Schmitt journeyed to numerous European countries including Germany, Austria-Hungary and Scandinavia.

An early 1900s map of the lands of the Mediterranean. Florent Schmitt explored the region from end to end during his Prix de Rome period (1900 to 1904).

He also explored the Mediterranean region end-to-end, traveling to Sicily, Corsica, Spain, North Africa and the Near East. In doing so, Schmitt absorbed many different influences, which also contributed to his developing interest in orientalism.

One such orientalist work, Psaume XLVII, Opus 38 would be his final envoi sent from the Villa Medici to the Conservatoire. By far the most substantial piece of music resulting from Schmitt’s Prix de Rome years, this stunning work, scored for soprano, mixed chorus, organ and large orchestra, would take Paris by storm in its 1906 premiere performance. It was a composition that had breathless critics speaking of Florent Schmitt as “the new Berlioz.”

There is no question that the magnificent splendor of the Psalm has overshadowed the other envois that Schmitt sent from Rome.

One of these, Le Palais hanté, Opus 49 (The Haunted Palace), is a symphonic etude inspired by an Edgar Allan Poe story that Schmitt worked on from 1900 to 1904. This piece is actually fairly well-known, and has received four recordings beginning in 1983 (Georges Prêtre), with the latest one recorded earlier this year (JoAnn Falletta, slated for release in November on the NAXOS label).

All-but-unknown is another orchestral work, Musiques de plein air, Op. 44 (Outdoor Music). Schmitt had begun work on this three-movement suite before he won the Prix de Rome . While at the Villa Medici, Schmitt completed the composition and submitted it as an envoi to the Conservatoire. The score is marked “Rome — 1900″ although the music wouldn’t be published until 1916 (by Durand).

Schmitt dedicated the suite to T. J. Guéritte, an important Parisian impresario who was responsible for organizing concerts of French music in England and who brought Claude Debussy to London to conduct his own music.

Musiques de plein air is in three movements, as follows:

• La Procession dans la montagne (The Procession in the Mountain)

• Danse désuète (Outmoded Dance)

• Accalmie (Lull)

To my knowledge, this work has never been recorded commercially. Moreover, I have been unable to find any evidence of the music being performed anywhere within the past half-century.

However, we are fortunate in that the first movement of the suite — La Procession dans la montagne — was selected by Désiré-Emilie Inghelbrecht as one of five of Schmitt’s compositions the conductor led at a French National Radio Orchestra concert in memory of the composer. The concert occurred on October 9, 1958, approximately two months following the composer’s death.

The broadcast tape from this concert has now been made available in its entirety for the first time in nearly 60 years.

You can listen to the ORTF performance of the first movement of the suite here. (A generous “thank you” to Eric Butruille, a faithful reader of the Florent Schmitt blog, for preparing the high-res file.) 

While the music clearly sounds like early Schmitt, it exhibits many of “trademarks” that would come to characterize the composer’s clearly recognizable style — from the opening English horn solo to the chromatic orchestral writing and the passionate tutti climaxes. At the quiet conclusion of the movement, the mood is both mystical and magical.

To my ears, this music makes one wish for the entire suite to be recorded. Here’s hoping that one of Florent Schmitt’s passionate advocates — Leon Botstein, Lionel Bringuier, Stéphane Denève, JoAnn Falletta, Jacques Mercier, Sascha Goetzel, Yan-Pascal Tortelier or some other conductor — will be inspired to investigate this score … and finally bring Musiques de plein air to the microphones.

Dancing Demons (artwork by moravid)

Within the catalogue of Florent Schmitt’s compositions are a goodly number of brilliant orchestral showpieces that exploit the colors of the orchestra to the fullest degree.

One of the most interesting and effective of these also happens to be one of the shortest — the Ronde burlesque, Opus 78.

This piece was composed in 1927 during a time when Schmitt was experimenting with a more contemporary compositional style. The most prominent fruit of this experimentation is the stunning Symphonie Concertante for Piano and Orchestra, Opus 82, a major 30-minute work known as much for its its craggy atmospherics and jagged rhythms as for its glittering orchestration.

Equally brilliant, the Ronde burlesque, which was premiered at the Salle Pleyel in 1931 by the Franco-Romanian conductor Georges Georgescu, seems a fitting forerunner to the Symphonie Concertante.

Barely six minutes in length, it is music that befits the classic (i.e., non-striptease) definition of the term “burlesque” — that is, an absurd or comically exaggerated imitation or parody.

In the case of this particular burlesque, the composer revealed that it was supposed to represent “an underwater airplane combat”!

Others have sensed different connotations as well. Arts critic Émile Vuillermoz described Ronde burlesque like this:

“A kaleidoscope of swirling rhythms that leaves no rest for the instrumentalists drawn into its frantic gyrations — it is a truly hellish atmosphere that leads this grimacing, satanic dance. Taking on the character of the grotesque religious imagery of the Middle Ages, timbres squeak, giggle and whistle with a kind of fantastic fury.”

Musicologist and writer Robert Dezarnaux sensed similar echoes of “olden times” in the piece, characterizing the music as follows:

“It twists, grimaces and jumps like those damned in the boiler — like the clawed devils one encounters in the underworld of the Old Dutch Masters.”

When I listen to Ronde burlesque, I can picture all of these images quite clearly. But to my mind, the imagery that comes closest to the target is Schmitt’s own characterization of an “underwater airplane dogfight” — weird and unrelentingly frenetic sounds that seem at once phantasmagorical and yet all-too-real.

Dancing demons and underwater airplanes: The piano four-hands version of Florent Schmitt’s Ronde burlesque (1927).

To be sure, Ronde burlesque is a virtuoso number — and it requires a virtuoso orchestra to do it full justice. To my knowledge, there have been just two recordings ever made of this fascinating score. Unfortunately, in my view neither of them quite measures up to the music’s full potential.

The earlier of the two recordings was made in the later years of the 78-rpm era and featured Gaston Poulet conducting on a Decca-Odeon disk. I own a copy of that recording, which I believe has never been re-released in LP, CD or download format.

The newer recording dates from the late 1980s and appeared on the French Cybelia label in both LP and CD incarnations. That performance features Pierre Stoll directing the Rhineland-Palatinate Philharmonic Orchestra.

Although captured in decent sound quality, it too is not as polished a performance as one would wish to hear of this brilliant tour de force.

Beyond which … the Cybelia recording has been out of print for nearly 20 years, making it a rarity to say the least. Anyone who wishes to hear this music has a hunt on their hands.

So … what we really need is for one of today’s ardent Schmitt advocates to take up the cause of Ronde burlesque and produce a recording that boasts not only fine sonics, but also the polished performance this scores deserves. Lionel Bringuier … Stéphane Denève … JoAnn Falletta … Sascha Goetzel … Yan-Pascal Tortelier:  Whose game?

Dancer and Dramatic Actress Ida Rubinstein (1913 portrait by Antonio de la Gandára)

In every era, there are always a few people in the arts whose life and career sound like something out of a movie or novel.

Such a characterization is wholly apt in the case of dancer and dramatic actress Ida Rubinstein, the Russian-Jewish femme fatale who dominated the limelight in Paris for nearly half a century.

Born in 1885 into a fabulously wealthy sugar, brewery and banking family from the Ukrainian city of Kharkov (then part of the Russian Empire), Lydia Lvovna Rubinstein was orphaned shortly thereafter. But the lucky child was raised in St. Petersburg by relatives who were firmly integrated into the social fabric of the Imperial Capital.

From a very early age, Rubinstein exhibited a flair for the theatrical, always going by the name “Ida” instead of her given name. Her arts-loving family ensured maximum exposure to the cultural activities of the city.  Traveling to Greece as a young woman inspired her to pursue the theatre with even greater intensity.

Leon Bakst (1866-1924) (self portrait)

Rubinstein met and began working closely with theatrical designer and artist Lev Rosenberg (later known as Léon Bakst) to stage a private showing of Sophocles’ ancient Grecian play Antigone. This marked the beginning of her career as a dramatic actress — as well as the beginning of what would turn out to be a lifelong friendship with the soon-to-be-world famous set and costume designer.

Through Bakst, Rubinstein was introduced to other important artistic figures of the day in Imperial Russia, including the impresario Serge Diaghilev and the choreographer Mikhail Fokine. Both men would prove to be very instrumental in her later international success.

In 1907, Rubinstein married a cousin, thereby gaining control of her inheritance as well as the social independence she craved; the marriage appears to have been one of convenience. Following a second private theatrical production in St. Petersburg — this one roundly criticized by government censors — Rubinstein joined up with Serge Diaghilev in 1909 when he formed his Ballets Russes troupe for its first Paris season.

In the inaugural Paris season, Rubinstein’s dancing thrilled audiences in such ballet productions as Cléopâtre (set to the music of Arensky, Glinka, Mussorgsky and Glazunov), which included a notorious disrobing scene that surely set tongues wagging throughout the city.

A veritable “who’s who” of Paris artistic society attended the season; in addition to Florent Schmitt, key luminaries seen in the audience each night included Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Isadora Duncan, Auguste Robin, José-Maria Sert, Jean Cocteau and many others.

Rubinstein’s Paris debut was so noteworthy, she soon had the opportunity to dance in London (at the Coliseum), in Italy, and even at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

Count Robert de Montesquiou (1855-1921), did not so much live as “perform” his life. (Painting by Giovanni Boldini)

Even greater success came in 1910 when Rubinstein danced the part of Zobéïde in the Ballets Russes production of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade — widely admired at the time for its sumptuous staging and frank sensuality.

In the audience that season were Pablo Picasso, Sarah Bernhardt, and Count Robert de Montesquiou-Fézensac, a Symbolist poet, aesthete and patron of the arts who would become Ida Rubinstein’s indefatigable social champion during the next decade.

In the run-up to World War I, Rubinstein would open a Paris studio where she prepared theatrical productions such as Oscar Wilde’s Salome (in Wilde’s own original French manuscript) and several productions featuring libretti by the Italian journalist, playwright and poet Gabriele D’Annunzio.

Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863-1938)

One of these in particular is interesting in how it presaged Rubinstein’s practice of commissioning music from contemporary Parisian composers for her new stage works. It was D’Annunzio’s production of Le Martyre de Saint-Sébastien, set to new music by Claude Debussy with choreography by Fokine and costumes by Bakst.

Ida Rubinstein as Saint Sebastian (costume design by Léon Bakst)

Its premiere was controversial, with Rubinstein — a Jewish woman — playing the part of Sebastian, a Christian man (and a saint to boot).

The Archbishop of Paris went so far as to issue a pastoral letter condemning the work as “offensive to the Christian conscience,” and forbidding French Catholics from attending performances under penalty of excommunication.

Ida Rubinstein During World War I (painting by Romaine Brooks, 1917)

With the onset of war, Ida Rubinstein, like many other musicians, artists and authors, volunteered for the war effort — but in her own theatrical way. In her specially tailored nurse’s uniform (designed by Bakst), not only did she attend to wounded soldiers, she traveled the country, reciting poetry from Count de Montesquiou’s Offrandes blessées. Seeing her in this garb, Jean Cocteau described Rubinstein “like the pungent perfume of some exotic essence — ethereal, otherworldly, divinely unattainable …”

During this time, Rubinstein also produced and starred in a new version of Racine’s play Phèdre, donating the financial proceeds to the French war effort. According to dance historian and author Lynn Garafola, “World War I made the Russian-Jewish cosmopolitan of the prewar years a member of the French cultural polity.”

French author André Gide (1869-1951), photographed in 1893. Schmitt composed the incidental music for Gide’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s play.

Towards the end of the war, Rubinstein began working with André Gide on a new French production of Shakespeare’s play Antony & Cleopatra. “I dive into the translation … with rapture,” Gide reported in his diary in April 1917. By November it was completed, and Gide read it to Rubinstein in the company of Bakst, who was to design and produce the sets and costumes.

It was Bakst who suggested retaining Igor Stravinsky to compose incidental music for the play — much in the way that Debussy had written musical numbers for Saint-Sébastien.

Reportedly, Stravinsky was interested. But he expressed his concerns about the style of the music envisioned for the production in a letter to Bakst dated July 11, 1917:

“I must talk seriously with either you or Gide [about] how you intend to present Shakespeare. If you are going to put him in the … light spirit and sumptuous settings of Saint-Sébastien … then I definitely can’t imagine a link between such a treatment … and the music I would be interested in writing.”

In response, Bakst noted the “recent, bitter failure” of another production that had been designed in a neo-primitivist style. “If Shakespeare’s masterpiece had to be portrayed in the same ‘progressive’ terms, obviously I would have to do without the honor and pleasure of your collaboration,” Bakst wrote.

In the event, Rubinstein withdrew her substantial financial offer of 25,000 Swiss francs, and turned to another composer — Florent Schmitt.

Why Schmitt? Two reasons, probably.

First, at this time Florent Schmitt was considered not only the foremost “orientalist” composer in France, but in the entire world. In order to exemplify and augment the lush exoticism that Gide, Bakst and Rubinstein envisioned for the production, Schmitt’s score would undoubtedly contribute mightily to the overall effect.

A poster from the 1919 production of La Tragédie de Salomé, featuring Ida Rubinstein in the title role.

The second reason is that Rubinstein had recently danced the leading role in Schmitt’s popular ballet La Tragédie de Salomé, which had had its stage premiere in 1907 with several other successful Paris productions thereafter (in 1912 with Natalia Trouhanova, and a 1913 Ballets Russes production featuring Tamara Karsavina in the title role).

The 1919 production starring Rubinstein, with new choreography by Nicola Guerra, was likewise a strong success. In the process the two artists had developed a mutually rewarding working relationship. That same year, Rubinstein decided to commission Schmitt to compose the incidental music for her next big production.

Antony & Cleopatra came to the stage in 1920. True to form, it was a gala spectacular at the Paris Opéra that spared no expense. Bakst’s original conception of ten pieces of incidental music had been reduced to six. Even so, between the music and the play itself, the production went into the wee hours of the morning.

Ida Rubinstein as Cleopatra in the Gide/Schmitt production (Paris, 1920).

As reported in Roger Nichols’ book The Harlequin Years: Music in Paris 1917-1929, one critic wryly noted:

“The show dragged on and on, and towards 1 a.m. the orchestra followed the audience’s example and discreetly improvised a variation on the Farewell Symphony. For it was only towards 2 a.m. that Cleopatra at last consented to die …”

Despite the lavish production values, which included not only Rubinstein but also the famed Edouard de Max in the starring roles along with sets by Bakst and costumes by Jacques Drésa (Rubinstein’s costumes prepared by no less than Maison Worth), Antoine et Cléopâtre would run for just five performances.

Salvaging the music, Schmitt prepared two concert suites from the incidental music, which were published by Durand as the composer’s Opus 69.

Conductor JoAnn Falletta with the scores to Florent Schmitt’s Antoine et Cléopâtre suites.

The music is unquestionably remarkable. The American conductor JoAnn Falletta, whose Buffalo Philharmonic recording of the two suites is due for release on the NAXOS label in November 2015, considers it to be among Schmitt’s greatest masterpieces — on par if not superior to the composer’s far more famous Salomé and Psalm 47.

[An interview of JoAnn Falletta talking about performing and recording the music can be read here.]

Equally important, Rubinstein’s production of Antony & Cleopatra marked the launch of her own ballet company, Les ballets Ida Rubinstein. Over the course of the next two decades, in addition to revising ballets such as Stravinsky’s Firebird and d’Indy’s Istar, Rubinstein would produce and star in more than a dozen completely new stage works, featuring music written by some of the best composers working on the Paris scene.

Ida Rubinstein, costumed for the premiere staging of Ravel’s Boléro (1928).

The list of Rubinstein’s “new creations” is impressive, and includes:

• Florent Schmitt: Antoine et Cléopâtre (1920)
• Paul Paray: Artemis troublée (1922)
• Arthur Honegger: Les noces d’Amour et de Psyché (1928)
• Darius Milhaud: La bien-aimée (1928)
• Maurice Ravel: Boléro (1928)
• Henri Sauget: David et Goliath (1928)
• Igor Stravinsky: Le baiser de la fee (1928)
• Georges Auric: Les enchantements d’Alcine (1929)
• Maurice Ravel: La valse (1929)
• Arthur Honegger: Amphion (1931)
• Jacques Ibert: Diane de Poitiers (1934)
• Igor Stravinsky: Perséphone (1934)
• Arthur Honegger: Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher (1938)
• Florent Schmitt: Oriane et le Prince d’Amour (1938)

And notice … bookending the list are stage productions with music composed by Florent Schmitt.

Regarding Oriane et le Prince d’Amour, the second collaboration between Schmitt and Rubinstein, the manner in which the composer came to learn of the commission is amusingly recounted in Vicki Woolf’s biography of Ida Rubinstein, Dancing in the Vortex.  In it, the author quotes Schmitt in his own words.

[When Ida Rubinstein] came to tell him, she found he was far away in his country retreat at Artiguemy in Hautes-Pyrenees.  Schmitt remembered: 

“It was a beautiful summer afternoon. I was in Artiguemy lying under the apple trees facing an incomparable southern peak untouched by snow – completely at peace, thinking no evil thoughts – when a sound like an earthquake shattered the quiet.  A motor car, foolishly tackling the goat path, had smashed itself around a great oak and hurled its two lady passengers onto the ground.

The oak tree had only a few scratches. As for Mme. Rubinstein, everyone knows she is above such calamities: Tracing the line of the oak tree, as erect, as high and still smiling, she scarcely realized that she had escaped the most picturesque of deaths.  By her side, no less unscathed, was Mme. Fauchier-Magnan, a friend of Ida’s.  They had come 873 miles to offer me this ballet.”

The set for Florent Schmitt’s ballet Oriane et le Prince d’Amour, staged in 1938.

And what a ballet it was:  A nearly hour-long production in two acts and four scenes, the story line went several steps beyond the “passion and blood” of even Salomé, Cléopâtre and Salammbô, Schmitt’s other major “orientalist” frescoes.

The musical forces called for in the production were every bit as sumptuous as the costumes and scenery — requiring a tenor soloist in addition to a large mixed chorus and full orchestra.

[More information about the music to this ballet, including a link to the only recording currently available of the full score, is available here.]

While press accounts regarding some Ballets Ida Rubinstein productions (as well as her dramatic stagings) varied in the extent of their praise, author Roger Nichols notes that “many of the critical notices in the Paris press exuded a rank smell of xenophobia — with more than the occasional whiff of anti-Semitism. But no critic likes to be baffled for long.”

Regarding Rubinstein’s level of “inscrutability,” Nichols quotes Mme. Madeleine Milhaud — Darius’ Milhaud’s wife who lived from 1902 to 2008 (!) — who offered this cameo description of Rubinstein:

“She was a very astonishing lady. Difficult to know … she didn’t want to be known. There was a mystery, and I think she guarded it. She was thin and extremely tall — unreachable. As an actress, she had a very special inflection — rather precious, not quite simple, not quite natural — as she was, in fact.”

Ida Rubinstein, photographed in the gardens of her home across from the Place des États-Unis in Paris (1925).

By the end of Les ballets Ida Rubinstein’s glorious run, it is indisputable that Rubinstein had achieved, in the words of Ida Rubinstein’s biographer Michael de Cossart, “the personal satisfaction of knowing that … she had succeeded not only in mounting more original works than any independent impresario in living memory, but also in starring in each and every one of them herself.”

While Rubinstein was to have recurring interactions with several other composers as frequently as she did with Schmitt — Ravel, Honegger and Stravinsky in particular — it is likely that Rubinstein and Schmitt forged the most natural social bond based on a kind of “shared elitism.”

Each was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in the 1930s. Each artist was blessed with having access to ample financial resources, thanks to family money and wealthy benefactors.  And each enjoyed the finer things in life — international travel, fine food, stylish clothes and impressive homes.

Florent Schmitt, photographed outside his home in St-Cloud in 1937. ©Boris Lipnitzki/Roger-Viollet

Florent Schmitt’s home from 1910 onwards, Villa Oiseau de feu in fashionable St-Cloud (even today, the city in France with the second highest per capita income level), was the scene of many social get-togethers with like-minded artists and dignitaries, while Rubinstein’s 1921 move to a lavish new residence across from the Place des États-Unis (designed by Bakst), would be her home until leaving Paris at the onset of World War II.

The war would prove to be challenging for both artists. For Schmitt, it was a time when he spent most of his days at his country retreat in the Pyrenees Mountains, returning to Paris mainly to attend concerts of his music. At the end of the war, the 75-year-old composer was questioned by the French government for suspected “collaboration” with the Vichy French regime.  The result of the investigation was a one-year suspension of performances of Schmitt’s music in France.

Despite this setback, Schmitt, who never stopped composing, came back to see two dozen late-career compositions premiered during the final decade of his life, culminating in the 1958 performance of the Symphony #2, his penultimate work, by Charles Munch and the French National Radio Orchestra at the Strasbourg Festival just a few months before his death.

The composer had already achieved official redemption of his status as an elder statesman of French classical music by becoming the recipient of the Grand Music Prize of the City of Paris in 1957.

For Ida Rubinstein, the war was more upending. As Paris fell to the invading German armies, she fled first to Algiers, and from there to Casablanca, Lisbon, and finally to London. Reprising her World War I role, Rubinstein cared for wounded Free French troops in England — all while residing at the fashionable Ritz Hotel in Piccadilly.

As her Paris home had been ransacked during the war — including the loss of her collection of rare books and artwork — Rubinstein elected not to return to Paris, but rather to move to Biarritz and later to her final home, Les Olivades, on the French Riviera near Nice.

St-Paul de Vence cemetery, where Ida Rubinstein is buried.

Having retired completely from public life — as well as having converted to Roman Catholicism — Rubinstein lived the final 15 years of her life in near-seclusion, spending one month each year at the abbey of Hautecombe near Chambrey, where she was described as “characteristically clad in robes made of the finest white silk.”

When Rubinstein died in 1960, it was nearly a month before her death was reported in the Paris newspapers. It was as if she had willed her own oblivion. Today, her grave in the south of France continues to be decorated by French veterans, who have never forgotten the service she gave to her adopted country over the decades.

“Florent Schmitt’s music should be mentioned in the same breath as Debussy and Ravel.”

— JoAnn Falletta, American Orchestra Conductor

JoAnn Falletta

In March of this year, the American conductor JoAnn Falletta recorded two important works by Florent Schmitt: the 1904 symphonic etude Le Palais hanté, Opus 49 and the two suites of incidental music for André Gide’s 1920 adaptation of Shakespeare’s play Antony & Cleopatra (Opus 69).

The recording is scheduled for release on the NAXOS label on November 13, 2015, but is already available for pre-order on Amazon and other online music sites.

Neither of these scores has been particularly well-represented on recordings. Prior to the new Falletta release, The Haunted Palace has had just three commercial releases — the premiere recording conducted by Georges Prêtre (1983), Leon Botstein (a 2003 live concert recording) and Yan-Pascal Tortelier (2011).

Antoine et Cléopâtre has had even fewer recordings — Leif Segerstam’s premiere recording in 1988 followed by Jacques Mercier in 2008.

For JoAnn Falletta, performing and recording these Schmitt works has been something of a personal crusade. She programmed the first suite from Antony & Cleopatra in 2010 with her two American orchestras, the Virginia Symphony and the Buffalo Philharmonic.  As she recounted in an interview I conducted with her earlier this year:

“The first time I performed this music in 2010 … it was an experiment.  I wanted to see how both orchestras … would handle this music because it was in a style that the musicians had not encountered before, with this kind of rhythmic complexity.  

And it’s very complex music:  It’s rhythm that’s going against the grain often – where some of the orchestra is playing something that’s ‘straight ahead’ and others are working with rhythms that seemingly don’t fit, but that are knitted into the fabric of the music.   

The musicians found that very difficult.  It wasn’t predictable to them – perhaps that’s the best way to describe it.  Some of the musicians would say to me, ‘This is strange.  It doesn’t fit!’  Yet, the more they played it, the more it settled in.   

Back in 2010, I knew we had a ways to go on the music when we played the performances.  But many times, the first performances are not the ‘end.’  And so when I was able to convince Klaus Heymann of NAXOS to open the door for this project — which took awhile — it was a great opportunity for us to delve into the music a second time.”

Having attended the Buffalo concert performances and subsequent recording sessions for the Schmitt album this past March, I can state with utmost confidence that Maestra Falletta has the full measure of the music, and that the new recordings are on track to be the best ones yet made of these scores.

Recently, I was able to interview the conductor a second time, which gave me the opportunity to ask her about her hopes for the recording.

PLN: Tell us what it means to you personally to have made these new Schmitt recordings.

JAF: For me, it’s very exciting because it’s a great musical discovery.  As orchestra conductors, at a certain point in our careers we’ve done many of the same pieces over and over.  There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but to find a piece of such superb quality — that becomes less likely over the years.   

So when we find a discovery like that — and then get the opportunity to perform it and even record it — it feels like both a privilege and a responsibility.  

By a responsibility, I mean this: You know that when people hear it they will be dazzled by the music, but you also hope you’re making the case for other musicians to play it, too. 

PLN: What makes this Schmitt recording particularly special among the dozens of recordings you’ve made in your career?

JAF: In Buffalo in particular, we’ve recorded a good deal of lesser-known music — even unknown music.  New music and contemporary music as well.  There are many wonderful pieces that we’ve done. 

But in terms of the recordings of lesser-known pieces that I’ve made, to me this material is the strongest musically. Schmitt’s output is music on a different level.  It’s music that should be played with Debussy and Ravel — and mentioned in the same breath as Debussy and Ravel.   

It is a thrill to be able to do something that will introduce people to this great music.

Conferring with conductor JoAnn Falletta on several documents pertaining to French composer Florent Schmitt — a miniature score of Schmitt’s Piano Quintet (1908) inscribed by the composer to Vincent d’Indy, plus a letter sent by Schmitt to Albert Roussel (1912).

PLN: What will listeners come away with after hearing this music (in the way of discovery)?

JAF: They’ll find that it’s very powerful music.  It’s very evocative.  It’s in Schmitt’s own language, but there’s enough familiarity in there that listeners will have a reference; it won’t be incomprehensible. 

Indeed, it’s how Schmitt uses the language that is so fresh — and it’s in his own unique voice. 

But I also think many people’s reaction will be, ‘Why don’t we know this composer?  Why isn’t his music played?  Why don’t we hear it in the concert hall all the time?’   

I think people will be surprised, or even shocked, to realize that music of such high caliber is something they don’t already know.

PLN: What are your own personal expectations for this recording?

JAF: My hope is that through this recording and through the efforts of Schmitt’s ambassadors in the field of music today — myself and others, like you — this composer’s music will begin to appear on symphony programs in the United States as well as in Europe and the Far East far more frequently than has been the case up to now.   

My hope is that we’ll have many more situations where orchestras and conductors are saying, ‘We have to play this’ — and that this occurrence will be much more common ten years from now.

PLN: Are there any other points you’d like to share with us about the composer or the music?

JAF: Just this:  I’m hoping that the Buffalo Philharmonic players make their own case for the music, too, because our musicians came to really love this music.  They found it quite challenging, but they embraced it.  They put a good deal of their own effort and personality into it.  There was a real desire to play in a really committed way, because they loved it so.   

I think that this experience has given them their own feeling of ownership about this recording.

[Click here to read an interview with five musicians of the Buffalo Philharmonic talking about performing and recording the music of Florent Schmitt.]

Meeting with members of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and talking about the music of French composer Florent Schmitt (March 2015). (Standing, l-r: Tim Smith, Matthew Bassett, Travis Hendra. Seated, l-r: Anna Mattix, Janz Castelo, Phillip Nones.)

I am in complete agreement with JoAnn Falletta in her belief that the new Buffalo recording represents a significant achievement. I predict that lovers of Florent Schmitt’s compositions — and anyone else who enjoys French music from the early 20th Century — will find the recording to be full of excitement and drama as well as great beauty — and stunningly played, too.

The recording will be released officially on November 13, 2015, but is already available for pre-order here.

… His music, quintessentially French, moves beyond impressionism into a lush and tangled world of dark poetry and sumptuous story-telling. Rhapsodic, brooding and startlingly beautiful, Schmitt’s language is deeply personal – passionate yet extraordinarily detailed, sophisticated and elusive.

—  JoAnn Falletta, American Orchestra Conductor

The NAXOS release of two of Florent Schmitt’s most expressive “tonal pictures” — Le Palais hanté (1904) and Antoine et Cléopâtre (1920), is happening worldwide this month.

The recordings, made in March 2015 by conductor JoAnn Falletta and the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, followed several memorable concerts in which nearly all members of the audience were hearing this music for the very first time.

In fact, the second suite from Antony & Cleopatra was being performed in North America for the very first time — nearly a century after its composition.

By virtue of being considered one of the most important NAXOS releases for the month of November, JoAnn Falletta was interviewed for a special podcast, during which she explained the musical importance of the two works, as well as the literary inspiration behind them (Edgar Allan Poe, William Shakespeare and André Gide).

JoAnn Falletta

Maestra Falletta also commented on Schmitt’s musical language, his originality, and the place he holds in the era in which he worked — a composing career that spanned some seven decades up until the year 1958.

You can listen to the podcast here, courtesy of NAXOS records.

The new recording can be purchased on Amazon and on other online music websites.

Maestra Falletta has given several related interviews to the Florent Schmitt Website + Blog, which can be accessed and read here and here.

The new NAXOS recording includes several discographic world premieres, along with the monumental Sonate libre.

In mid-2015, NAXOS released a recording devoted to Florent Schmitt’s music for violin and piano.  It contains several world premieres, along with the Sonate libre en deux parties enchainées, Opus 68, a half hour-long stylistically advanced tour de force composed by Schmitt in 1919.

All told, the recording contains five works composed over a half-century period — the earliest being the Chant du soir, Opus 7 from 1895 and the latest the Habeyssée, Opus, 110 from 1947.

As can be expected, hearing the pieces chronologically helps demonstrate the composer’s stylistic evolution.  But even in the earliest works — such as in the “Barcarolle” movement from Quatre pièces, Opus 25 (1901) — Schmitt’s originality comes through with music stripped of all mannerism.

The NAXOS recording features the artistry of violinist Beata Halska and pianist Claudio Chaiquin.  The musicians hail from Poland and Argentina respectively, but more recently have made their musical careers in France.  Both have enjoyed successful solo careers, and they also perform together in recital.

This is Halska and Chaiquin’s first recording collaboration, and it has been warmly received by critics and music-lovers alike.  In his praiseworthy review of the recording in the Nov-Dec 2015 issue of Fanfare magazine, critic Robert Maxham commented on the importance of the music as well as the perceptive performances.  About the Sonate libre, Maxham noted a musical “style that occasionally recalls that of Debussy — now elusive, now ecstatic — but [which] projects his language far into the future.”

And in the early Chant du soir, Maxham states that the music “slithers in this reading with the seductiveness of Scheherazade.”

Recently, I had the opportunity to interview Beata Halska and Claudio Chaiquin about their new recording and how they put it together.  Their observations, presented below, are translated from French into English.

PLN:  How did you become familiar with the music of Florent Schmitt? 

CC:  I have always loved French music — particularly the piano and chamber works of Debussy and Ravel as well as the songs of Fauré and Chabrier.  Little by little I came to discover other French composers as well — lesser-known ones like Reynaldo Hahn, André Caplet, Maurice Emmanuel, and of course Florent Schmitt.  The very first pieces I knew by Schmitt were part of the two-piano suite Reflets d’Allemagne.

Beata Halska

BH:  Actually, I did not know the chamber music of Florent Schmitt before I first proposed to record a live France Musique [Radio France] broadcast in its Festival Présences series in which the Sonate libre was performed.  But I already knew and enjoyed hearing some of Schmitt’s orchestral works, beginning with La Tragédie de Salomé.

PLN:  How did the idea of doing an album devoted to Schmitt’s music for violin and piano come about?

CC:  As Beata mentioned, she had already performed the Sonate libre with her mother, Barbara Halska — a well-known Polish pianist — for the radio program.  But she and I had also performed many times together, so when NAXOS expressed the desire for a recording of violin works by Florent Schmitt with the sonata as the centerpiece, it was a project the two of us took on. 

Of course, I did not know any of this music before!

BH:  Actually, the project didn’t come about immediately after performing the Sonate libre on the radio.  At the time, I was devoting myself to preparing a recording of Polish music on the Dux label, including works of Andrzejowski, Zarzycki, Wielecki and Twardowski.  Next I recorded the beautiful violin concerto of Alexandre Tansman with the Symphony Orchestra of Radio Warsaw. 

The positive critical reviews of these recording projects helped me realize that continuing to focus on the music of unjustly neglected composers was a worthwhile endeavor — which is how I came up with the Florent Schmitt project.  So with the Sonate libre in hand, Claudio and I worked to discover additional music, including a number of discographic world premieres.

PLN:  As you say, there is a mix of world premiere recordings plus other works on the CD.  How did you go about selecting the music for the disk?

Claudio Chaiquin

CC:  Beata and I tried to play all of the music that Schmitt had composed for violin and piano.  Some of the pieces sounded too easy, while others sounded better on the cello.  It was an interesting process of consideration; for example, we elected not to record the Légende [1918] which had been written originally for saxophone [and also for viola], opting instead to record the Quatre pièces which we found to be close to Caplet in style and also very expressive.

PLN:  Is there anything about the way Schmitt wrote for the piano and for the violin that you find particular unusual or noteworthy?

BH:  What strikes me most is Schmitt’s mixture of ardor and sensuality — it is dreamlike but also with passion and power.  It’s also noteworthy how he combines the violin and piano writing so that the two instruments project a “symphonic” sound that can be very grandiose — particularly in the Sonate libre.

I also love Schmitt’s at-times overflowing imagination and his ability to create quite unique sound and rhythmic combinations — some of them quite extraordinary!

Another interesting aspect is Schmitt’s penchant for “word games”; we see this in the Habeyssée, in which the title of the music is remindful of the letters “A-B-C.”

CC:  For me as a pianist, initially I thought I could approach this music as one would Debussy — with a light touch and a lot of pedal.  I was wrong!  Schmitt’s music is very different — even if one can discern some similar points.  Many times, Schmitt’s writing is sharp and energetic — and sometimes it’s enigmatic.  It is also very difficult to play — many notes, and not always “logical.”  But once you spend time with it, the meaning becomes so clear.

PLN:  What has been the critical reception of this recording?

CC:  We have received universally positive reviews of the recording.  For example, the CD received four stars in Classica Magazine.  We are very pleased!

PLN:  Have you had the opportunity to perform any of these pieces in recital?

CC:  We have played all of the pieces in public.  The first time we performed the Sonate libre in recital (in Versailles), we were apprehensive.  Before we performed the music, Beata spoke to the audience and explained that the piece was quite long, difficult to play, and required intense listening.  When we finished our performance, we received a standing ovation.  The audience was very moved hearing this music — most of them probably for the first time in their lives.

BH:  Claudio is correct.  Unlike my radio performance of the Sonate libre which was clearly for “connoisseurs,” the audience at Versailles was made up of a more general music-loving public.  It was a joy to see that our performance before this kind of an audience was such a success. 

As it turned out, the many great contrasts in the piece — the beauty of the melodic lines and even the “modernisms” that might have been problematic for some — turned out to be accessible to everyone and very well-received!

Since then, we have had no trepidations about presenting this music in public.  Indeed, members of the audience tell us how astonished they are that such great music by such a great composer is heard so rarely. 

The Sonate libre score, composed by Florent Schmitt in 1919.

PLN:  Do you have one or two favorites among the five pieces on the recording?

CC:  I must say that I especially like the Scherzo vif.  In spirit, it seems close to Richard Strauss’ Till Eulenspiegel.  But I also like Chant du soir, a piece with a very different character.

BH:  For me, each time I play one of these works, I say to myself, ‘This one is the most beautiful!’  But if forced to choose, I’d agree that the Scherzo vif is particularly wonderful, and it’s always appreciated by audiences.  I also dearly love the first movement of the Sonate libre.

PLN:  What other musical projects do the two of you have happening now, or planned for the future?

BH:  We have a series of recitals in France, and we are working on setting up some in other countries, too.  Unfortunately, we had to cancel our most recent concert because of the attacks in Paris, which was a very difficult situation for us all.

We also have separate musical projects.  Claudio performs duo-pianist works with another recitalist, and I am preparing solo appearances with the Les Solistes de Versailles, including music of Vivaldi and Piazzola, along with performing violin duo recitals with my husband, Bernard Le Monnier.

PLN:  Are there any final comments you’d like to make about Florent Schmitt and the NAXOS recording?

CC:  I think that Florent Schmitt’s music is slowly entering the repertoire.  And that trend is justified, because he is an important musician, setting aside World War II-era polemics and politics.  For our part, I loved preparing and recording these Schmitt works with such a great artist as Beata. 

We are indebted to Beata Halska and Claudio Chaiquin for bringing this fine disk of Schmitt’s violin-and-piano music to the microphones, including several world premieres.  Through their investigative efforts and their perceptive interpretations, these artists are indeed helping to spread the word about some truly wonderful music — highly interesting and inventive scores that make the repertoire of music for violin and piano all the richer.

The recording is available in disk and download form from Amazon and other online vendors, as well as from NAXOS directly.

In a life cut tragically short even as Florent Schmitt’s was blessedly long, Olivier Despax was a musical meteor shot across the sky.

Olivier Despax in 1955 (age 16).

Music history is full of examples of family members following in the footsteps of important composers and musicians. It’s easy to understand why — exposed (and even immersed) as they would have been to some truly great inspiration.

No such examples exist in the family of French composer Florent Schmitt, except for one surprising case — unusual in that it comes in the world of popular instead of classical music (although not completely unheard of; Evelyn Künneke, the daughter of German composer Eduard Künneke, enjoyed a lengthy career as a pop singer and actress).

As it so happens, Florent Schmitt’s grand-nephew was the French heart-throb guitarist, singer and actor Olivier Despax, who was born in 1939. Based on his successes in playing, singing and acting, clearly he would be well-known today but for his untimely death in 1974 from leukemia at the age of just 35.

Despite his relative obscurity today, Olivier Despax was quite the star in France during the 1960s and into the early 1970s. Recently, Mortimer Winterthorpe published a biographical profile in his online series on French pop vocalists, Le Net plus ultra de la chanson Française, which helps us understand just how important a personality Despax was in those times.

In Winterthorpe’s profile, we learn that Olivier Despax exhibited extraordinary musical talent early in life, winning an award for Best Jazz Guitarist in 1955 from the Salon de la Jeunesse du Grand Palais when he was just 16 years old.

Florent Schmitt, photographed at about the time his grand-nephew, Olivier Despax, won the Best Jazz Guitarist award at the Salon de la Jeunesse du Grand Palais (1955).

At the time, Despax’s grand-uncle Florent Schmitt was 85 years old and still in robust health — so no doubt the “grand old man of French music” would have been quite proud of young Despax’s accomplishment.

Four years later, with another national medal for guitar performance under his belt, Despax was conscripted into military service in Algiers — a hapless decade-long campaign against the Algerian freedom fighters that Charles DeGaulle would finally end several years later.

With that unpleasant episode in his life behind him, Despax would return to music in earnest, forming a pop group he named The Gamblers.

Despax’s colleagues in the band included several famous pop instrumentalists in France at the time such as saxophonists Jean Marie Dariès and Philippe Maté, and bassist Ricardo Galeazzi. The band performed at important venues like the Madison Club, where the popular dance of the same name got its start in the late 1950s.

Olivier Despax and The Gamblers (early 1960s album jacket).

Under the name Olivier Despax and The Gamblers, the band was signed to a three-year contract with the Barclay record label, which expanded its fame across the country with songs such as The Madison, Be-Bop-a-Lula, Sack O’Woe and Mashed Potatoes.

Le Papagayo Nightclub, St. Tropez, France.

During the summer of 1962, the band appeared at the grand opening of the soon-to-be-famous Le Papagayo nightclub in St. Tropez. The band was flying high … but as is often the case, personality conflicts within the group led to its disbandment just two years later.

Olivier Despax sings the ballad Syracuse on French TV (1965).

Undeterred, Olivier Despax proceeded to embark on a solo career, singing as well as playing the guitar. Clips from several television appearances in the mid-1960s demonstrate his photogenic personality as well as his sophisticated crooner’s voice, such as this December 1965 RTF performance of the ballad Syracuse.

There was even a joint television appearance with the actress Brigitte Bardot in a song titled The Guitar Lesson, where Olivier Despax attempts to teach Miss Bardot how to play the instrument — only to have the stage-set morph into a nuptials scene.  This broadcast led to rumors of a romantic relationship between the two artists (which proved to be unfounded).

During the mid-1960s, Despax also parlayed his “movie-star good looks” into a film career, ultimately starring in a dozen French films by 1970.

Unfortunately, as Mortimer Winterthorpe states in his biographical profile, for Olivier Despax it was “too soon, too young”:  The artist suffered the curse of a young death in 1974 at the age of 35, in sharp contrast to his grand-uncle Florent Schmitt, who had lived almost to the age of 90.

Unlike many young stars whose lives have been cut short by drugs, alcoholism or other incidences of their own making, Despax was stricken with leukemia, which in a sense makes his early death even more tragic.

Olivier Despax towards the end of his short life.

Today, Olivier Despax is better known for his singing rather than his instrumental or acting career. But his most famous quote, given to a French magazine in 1959, was as an instrumentalist commenting on the perception of jazz music in France at the time:

“Black musicians have a singular character — a spirit of their own and one that whites lack. It is a kind of ferocity of rhythm, a violence which they call ‘swing.’ They also have a great deal of sensitivity — and it is absolutely not the sensitivity of whites.”

For more examples of Olivier Despax’s artistry, you can listen to additional recorded songs here and here and here. I think you will be impressed.

For music-lovers who aren’t very familiar with the music of Florent Schmitt, they may well think that the composer is German. Or at the very least, they might assume that the music bears a strong resemblance to Germanic musical style.

Of course, for those who are more familiar Schmitt and his artistry, they know that any “German” musical influence falls well-behind French influence for the simple reason that Florent Schmitt was a French composer through and through. His entire musical education was in France — first in Nancy and later at the Paris Conservatoire where his teachers included Théodore Dubois, Jules Massenet and, most importantly, Gabriel Fauré.

Moreover, Schmitt “came of age” in a musical Paris that was rebelling against the perceived notion of Teutonic hegemony in classical music. Claude Debussy of course — but also composers like Édouard Lalo and Emmanuel Chabrier — had been charting new courses in music distinctly removed from the Wagnerian and Brahmsian traditions.

… And if there were potent outside musical influences in France, more often they came from the Russia of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.

In the case of Florent Schmitt, while it is true that his music conveys an “epic” sense far more than other French composers of his time, his style seems to echo the power, opulence and color of Hector Berlioz or the Russian “Mighty Five” more than it does, say, Richard Strauss.

American Composer Kenneth Fuchs

Schmitt’s large-scale choral work Psaume XLVII, dating from 1904, is a case in point:  The American composer Kenneth Fuchs has noted the special position this piece holds in the French repertoire, writing:

“The Psalm is unusual for French music because it has such a big profile.  Even Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, at its largest moments with chorus and orchestra at full throttle, doesn’t quite have the ‘hugeness’ of this piece.  The Psalm’s language is not Germanic — but the dimensions somehow are.”  

Despite the musical currents and “atmospherics” in Paris at the time, for any serious student of classical music it was impossible to escape exposure to the Germanic tradition completely; indeed, many a budding French composer or musician would make the pilgrimage to Berlin or Weimar or Bayreuth.

Schmitt did the same — sort of.

Villa Medici, Rome

During his Prix de Rome period, which at four years lasted far longer than the tenure of the typical prizewinner, Florent Schmitt traveled all across Europe as well as in North Africa and the Near East.

The fruits of those travels manifested themselves in a noteworthy string of “orientalist” compositions — significant enough that in the several decades that followed, Schmitt would be considered the foremost orientalist composer not only in France, but in the entire world.

Still, Schmitt’s time of travels in Germany and Austria-Hungary around 1900 did result in one striking musical creation: a suite of eight waltzes he composed for duo-pianos in the period 1902-05 which were published as a collection under the name Reflets d’Allemagne, Opus 28 (Reflections of Germany).

With one exception, each of the waltzes in the suite was given the name of a prominent city in Germanic Europe, with shifting moods that combine to create a musically engaging piano set — full of interesting contrasts throughout.

The movements are as follows:

1. Heidelberg
2. Coblentz
3. Lübeck
4. Werder Island
5. Vienna
6. Dresden
7. Nuremberg
8. Munich

Far meatier than mere “musical postcards,” each of these numbers are small gems that puts the musical sophistication of Florent Schmitt on full display. They take as their point of departure Schumann (by way of Fauré), but go much further.  As the writer and musicologist Michel Fleury has remarked of the eight movements that make up the suite:

“Their discreet smile seems to comment on the composer’s tender amusement at Germanic customs — ceremonious, pompous or, to the contrary, saturated with nostalgia and effusion [as] scenes of Romantic Germany file past.”

Maurice Ravel

Reflets d’Allemagne began life auspiciously, with none other than Maurice Ravel joining Schmitt as the piano duo featured at the premiere public performance of the suite in Paris in 1906.

Over the years, Reflections of Germany has achieved greater fame and popularity than many of Schmitt’s other sets of piano music.  The composer himself performed the score with some regularity — including new arrangements he made of the music for piano duet and also for piano solo, the latter of which was included in the programs on the composer’s American concert tour in 1932.

Likewise, Reflets d’Allemagne has fared rather well on commercial recordings.  Among the more recent and most widely circulated renditions are those by Christian Ivaldi and Jean-Claude Pennetier (on the Timpani label), the Invencia Piano Duo (Andrey Kasparov and Oksana Lutsyshyn, on NAXOS Grand Piano) and Leslie De’Ath and Anya Alexeyev (on Dutton-Epoch).

The individual movements of the suite pop up on piano recitals with some regularity, too. Numerous excerpts have been uploaded on YouTube such as this one featuring pianists Mami Kino and Jean-Roch Lyeuté, and this one from a piano teachers’ conference recital program in Japan.

As with a number of other Schmitt orchestral compositions that began life as piano scores, Reflections of Germany would be orchestrated by the composer several decades later — in this case for a ballet production that was mounted at the Théâtre National de l’Opéra-Comique in May 1932.

The new ballet carried a shortened title Reflets (“Reflections”).  The choreography was by Robert Quinault — who also danced in the production along with prima ballerinas Mariette de Rauwera and Colette Salomon — with the ensemble conducted by Élie Cohen.

The orchestral version of Reflets has been less fortunate on recordings compared to the versions for piano.  Florent Schmitt himself made a recording of the ballet’s final two movements in the early 1930s (“Nuremberg” and “Munich“) in a Pathé release that also featured the composer’s own “vocal autograph” at the end of the recording.

That historic recording is available today on the Timpani label. The two movements have also been uploaded on YouTube as well (links are included in the paragraph above — accessible to American viewers only).

No other commercial recordings exist of the orchestral version of Reflets — either as a complete work or individual excerpts. However, three of the movements (“Dresden,” “Werder” and “Munich”) were performed at an October 1958 memorial concert honoring Florent Schmitt six weeks following the composer’s death — a concert that was also broadcast.

Désiré-Emilie Inghelbrecht

Relegated to the archives of the ORTF for over half a century, the recorded broadcast was finally made available to the public in 2015. Featuring the legendary Désiré Inghelbrecht leading the French National Radio Orchestra, it can be considered a definitive interpretation of one of Schmitt’s most engaging and melodious scores.

The Inghelbrecht/ORTF performance of the three excerpts can be heard here. The entire 1958 memorial concert, which includes a total of five Schmitt compositions, is available for audition on French INA website and also can be purchased as a high-res download.

Listening to these historic recordings, the clear and immediate conclusion is that the orchestral version of Reflets d’Allemagne deserves a modern (and first-ever complete) recording.  Who among Florent Schmitt’s most ardent advocates — Leon Botstein, Lionel Bringuier, Stéphane Denève, JoAnn Falletta, Sascha Goetzel, Jacques Mercier, Yan-Pascal Tortelier — is ready to take up the cause?

French composer Florent Schmitt, age 83, photographed in 1953, three years before his interview with Bernard Gavoty at Jeunesses Musicales de France. (Photo: ©Boris Lipnitzki/Roger-Viollet)

For devotees of the Florent Schmitt Website + Blog, we are pleased to provide a link to a rare taped interview of the composer, done in 1956 when Schmitt was 86 years old.

The interview was conducted at the Jeunesses Musicales de France by Bernard Gavoty, the famed French organist, author and music critic who interviewed many musical personalities during the 1950s and 1960s.

Listening to the discussion, which was conducted in French, one can easily tell that Florent Schmitt, always known for his sense of wit and irony, had lost none of those qualities even after more than eight decades.

It is fascinating to hear the composer speak about La Tragédie de Salomé, his most famous work, as well as the notorious 1913 premiere of Stravinsky’s ballet Le Sacre du printemps, about which Schmitt wrote so convincingly (and scathingly) in the newspapers at the time.

Here is a link to the spirited interview, conducted in the presence of a lively audience that clearly found the discussion highly interesting and — judging from the amount of laughter and applause — thoroughly engaging.

We are indebted to Nicolas Southon, French musicologist and a specialist in the music of Francis Poulenc and Gabriel Fauré, for unearthing this rare taped document that gives us the opportunity to hear Florent Schmitt in all of his witty glory.

It’s even more wonderful that the Gavoty interview was captured just two years before the end of Schmitt’s long and eventful life — a career that spanned the most glorious era in all of French music — as it gives us the chance to hear Schmitt’s perspectives based on the benefit of hindsight that comes from “a life well-lived.”