An original edition of Florent Schmitt’s Chansons à quatre voix, published by Mathot (1905).

Throughout his long composing career spanning from the late 1880s to the late 1950s, Florent Schmitt would return again and again to the human voice. While he never composed an opera, he wrote voluminous pages of music in every other form that features solo and mixed voices.

Tellingly, the composer’s Opus 1 and his final Opus 138 are both choral works.

Schmitt derived inspiration from diverse sources for his vocal compositions — sometimes religious themes but also contemporary poets, ancient texts, and even his own verse. This kind of diversity informs Schmitt’s Chansons à quatre voix, Op. 39, a set of six pieces for four solo voices (soprano, alto, tenor and bass) and piano four-hands which he composed between 1903 and 1905.

Chansons à quatre voix is a fascinating piece of music that consists of six contrasting movements, as follows:

I.    Véhémente

II.   Nostalgique

III. Naïve

IV. Boréale

V.  Tendre

VI. Martiale

Alfred de Musset (1810-1857), French dramatist, poet and novelist. (Painting by Charles Landelle)

Three of the movements (I, III and VI) are set to the words of the poet Alfred de Musset, while movement V is set to an ancient Arabic verse. The two remaining movements are likely the composer’s own verse (there is no attribution in the score to other writers).

The Chansons à quatre voix is not a well-known work — in fact, it’s a genuine rarity.  And yet it has fervent admirers.

Indeed, it isn’t an exaggeration to claim that anyone who encounters this music is immediately smitten by its charms — and by its depth.

The French musicologist, organist, composer and teacher Guillaume Le Dréau considers this score to be a very significant one in Schmitt’s catalogue of compositions, writing:

Guillaume Le Dréau

“The piece follows directly after Psaume XLVII [1904] and can be seen through the same Prix de Rome filter. It is written for four voices along with piano four-hands — very much in the tradition of the text choirs in the Prix de Rome composition competitions as well as the pieces of music which were typically dispatched from Rome to Paris by the prizewinners — Debussy’s Printemps, for example. 

I hypothesize that there is something ironic and mocking in the music’s setting. The poetry is Romantic and in some ways rather innocuous.  And yet, the first movement is titled “Vehement” as if to announce that respect for traditions is only relative — just as in the beginning of Psaume XLVII [which Maurice Ravel characterized as nearly shattering the concert hall].  

Besides this, the sequence of chansons, all written in 3/4 time, is eminently ravishing at times. The “Nostalgic” movement makes use of a motif that we hear much later in Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales (1911) and Daphnis et Chloé (1913). But remember, Schmitt’s piece was created in 1905!”

Along those same lines of “Schmitt the forerunner,” the American conductor JoAnn Falletta has said this about Chansons à quatre voix:

“The composer is always surprising. At first the music sounds like Stravinsky, and then becomes Romantic.  In both, so amazingly original — and in this regard I continue to be astonished by Florent Schmitt.”

Guillaume Le Dréau notes Schmitt’s “very orchestral use of the voices and the two pianos” in the score, which makes it no surprise at all that the composer orchestrated this piece as well.

Only commercial recording: Pascal Mayer directing the Chamber Choir of Fribourg University (2002).

Unfortunately, no recorded document exists of the orchestrated version, but we do have one commercial recording of the music (made in 2002) with a four-part chorus and piano four-hands. It features the Chamber Choir of the University of Fribourg in Switzerland under the direction of Pascal Mayer, which can be heard here.

In more recent years, this music has been championed by Edward Rushton, a British-born pianist and accompanist who has resided in Switzerland for the past two decades while performing and recording throughout Europe.

Together with fellow pianists and vocalists, he has presented Schmitt’s score in recitals throughout Switzerland.  Recently I had the opportunity to ask Mr. Rushton how he came to know and love this music.  His comments are presented below:

PLN: When did you first become acquainted with Florent Schmitt?  What was the first music of his that you heard?

Edward Rushton

ER: I first heard La Tragédie de Salomé on BBC Radio 3 as a teenager — I was maybe 13 or 14 — and it completely bowled me over!

The next piece I became addicted to was Dionysiaques.  I had a cassette tape of it, recorded off of the radio I think; I wore out the tape listening to it so many times. It thrilled me every time, as I would be whooping and cheering at the end!

PLN: As a pianist, what drew your attention to Florent Schmitt, and what inspired you to prepare his music for performance?

ER: For a long time I was content to listen to whatever orchestral and choral works of Schmitt’s I could obtain on CD.  I didn’t really know much of his piano music, except for Reflets d’Allemagne (Op. 28), which if I remember rightly I once tried playing through with my father.   

Later on, when I was looking for repertoire to perform with one of my groups of singers I was delighted to come across Schmitt’s Chansons à quatre voix.  And when I formed a piano duo last year we decided to learn and program Reflets d’Allemagne.  

I was also fortunate to find some instrumental partners last year to present Schmitt’s late chamber work Pour presque tous les temps (Op. 134), which I think is such a remarkable piece in so many ways.  

The Vocalise-Étude (Op. 30) has also been in my repertoire for a long time.  I play it often with my American saxophonist colleague Harry White.  We also recorded that piece on our CD called “23 Vocalises,” released on the BIS label last year.

PLN: You have chosen to focus much of your endeavors on Schmitt’s music featuring piano with voices.  How did this interest develop?   

ER: I was looking for repertoire for four voices and piano four-hands to program with a group of singers here in Switzerland. We needed something to pair with the classic works by Brahms and Schumann.  We considered some pieces by the Swiss composer Hans Huber, but found them rather heavy-handed.  

Imagine how thrilled I was to discover a work by Florent Schmitt for this same combination of musical forces — the Chansons à quatre voix.  And what a great piece too, which, being all in 3/4 time, complements the Brahms Liebesliederwalzer so perfectly. 

It also shares some of the “orientalisms” of Schumann’s Spanische Liebeslieder.

On top of this, I was attracted by the fact that some of the texts are Schmitt’s own.

PLN: How would characterize the musical style of this work?

ER: The titles of the individual pieces give good indications both of the attitude of the words and of the musical style Schmitt uses to portray those moods.  But what binds them together is a great deal of wit and charm — even in the most savagely dissonant and biting moments of the “Boréale” movement, for example.  

Schmitt is constantly playing with wild chromaticism, even slipping in some whole-tone shenanigans in the “Naïve” movement. There’s so much pure sensual beauty too, verging on kitsch.  

One of the singers in our ensemble characterized the “Tendre” movement perfectly when she remarked that it seemed as if all four singers were dreamily singing to themselves about something only of interest to them. 

But the sound of all four voices together — seemingly by random coincidence — is totally harmonious and unified.  Isn’t that the very definition of good polyphonic music?  

A mixture of playfulness, sensuality and brutality, such as is implicit in the idea of the hunt (in the first movement “Véhémente”), is perhaps a good way of imagining it. And this is a typical combination for Schmitt, I think!

PLN: What pieces of music does this work emulate, and what compositions does it presage?

ER: I’m rather sure its “grandfather” was Brahms’ Liebeslieder Walzer, as it’s composed for the same rather rare combination of musicians.  Also, all six chansons are in 3/4 time — but Schmitt’s composition is much less “well-behaved,” shall we say, than the Brahms!   

There is also a lot of longing for far-off places — Italy, Arabia — that we encounter so often in French poetry and song.  

There’s a piece by Jean Françaix for the same musical forces, Juvenalia [1947], which might be considered its successor — although I don’t know if Françaix actually knew Schmitt’s piece.

PLN: Where and when have you performed Chansons à quatre voix?

Chateau de Grandson

ER: I have performed it numerous times in the last couple of years all around Switzerland, both in “house-concerts” and in public venues.  The most recent performances were on New Year’s Eve in the Monastery of Fischingen, and in February 2017 at the Chateau de Grandson.   

I have programmed the music only with solo voices. I know it has been performed as a choral piece, but personally I can’t imagine it working as well with chorus, as the parts are really tricky and need flexible voices.  

It could be interesting to hear it done by a very good professional chamber choir, but I think I will always prefer the freedom and flexibility that solo voices can give it. 

PLN: How have audiences responded to the music?

ER: Audiences like it; often there’s even a smattering of applause and laughter following the first movement.  But I also feel that audiences are a little thrown off by it — maybe not knowing what to expect because the composer is so little-known.   

I suspect many would need to hear it again to fully enjoy it. After all, the piece is a bit of a whirlwind; so much information and it’s over all too soon.

PLN: Was it easy to find willing vocal partners who were as interested as you in investigating this unfamiliar repertoire?

ER: It was easy to convince my colleagues to take part in the Op. 39 project.  They were immediately won over by the quality and the charm of the music! 

Miravia Duo (pianists Alison Cullen and Edward Rushton).

So far, my piano partners have included Fabienne Romer and now Alison Cullen (with whom I formed the Miravia Duo last year and with whom I also perform Reflets d’Allemagne).  The singers have been Sybille Diethelm, Barbara Erni, Annina Haug, Jakob Pilgram, Raphaël Favre, René Perler and Marcus Niedermeyr.   

All of them are fans of the music.

PLN: Are there aspects of Schmitt’s style of writing for piano and voice that you find particularly interesting or noteworthy?  Do you sense certain influences on the part of Schmitt’s teachers Theodore Dubois, Jules Massenet or Gabriel Fauré? 

ER: In my view, the composer whose influence one can hear most in Schmitt may be Paul Dukas.  But  in general, I love the synthesis of what one might call “French” and “German” influences.   

You could say that Schmitt was fascinated with the pure-sound qualities of certain extended harmonies — one might call that a “French” quality.

But he was also interested very much in what Wagner achieved in German music, rhythmically and in terms of Wagner’s virtuosic mastery of polyphony. 

That being said, Schmitt is so completely individual! No other French composer wrote with so much bite, and so orgiastically.  Perhaps only Ravel — but then Ravel is worlds apart from Schmitt temperamentally.

PLN: In your opinion, does Schmitt write idiomatically for the voice and for piano? 

ER: Absolutely!  Schmitt’s music is gorgeous to sing and play.

PLN: Are there other vocal or piano works by Florent Schmitt that you would like to perform in the future?

ER: Most of my work as a pianist is with singers.  It is only natural to want to find repertoire by my favorite composers!  I am very keen to do some of Schmitt’s other songs, such as Trois chansons (Op. 4) and the Quatre poèmes de Ronsard (Op. 100). 

I have played the song Il pleure dans mon coeur (Op. 4, No. 2) in a recital program focused on Verlaine’s poetry that I present with the mezzo-soprano Annina Haug.   

But all of Schmitt’s songs are worthy of investigation, because they all look and sound so enticing! I am working on persuading some of my singer colleagues to learn and program more of them. 

One challenge, however: It is very difficult in the German-speaking part of Switzerland to program French music — particularly works by lesser-known composers.  

Even superstars like Debussy and Ravel have a relatively hard time of it here.  I think the German Swiss seem to have a collective trauma stemming from having to learn French at school; it is a great pity and something I cannot relate to at all.  

I’d also like to perform more of Schmitt’s piano duet music, and after doing the Reflets d’Allemagne, Alison and I will start working on Humoresques (Op. 43).

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We are very grateful for the evangelism of musicians like Edward Rushton who are tireless champions of Florent Schmitt’s lesser-known works. Thanks to the efforts of him and others, more of the composer’s output is making the transition from “rarity” to “repertoire we know” — not least the captivating Chansons à quatre voix.

In March 2017, the German ARS Produktion label will release a new recording consisting of works for trumpet and piano created by ten Francophone composers, featuring the esteemed international soloist and pedagogue Reinhold Friedrich.

Titled L’Amour française, the recording is particularly noteworthy in that much of the repertoire is relatively unfamiliar – even to trumpet players.

The goal of Mr. Friedrich, who is joined by pianist Eriko Takezawa on the recording, was to give voice to unfairly neglected compositions, such as those by Maurice Le Boucher and Henri Martelli.  Also on the recording is an unpublished score by Charles Koechlin.

Ten featured compositions, including Florent Schmitt’s Suite en trois parties …

One of the marquee pieces featured on the new recording is Florent Schmitt’s Suite en trois parties, Op. 133, a late-career work the composer created in 1955 when he was in his mid-80s.

Simply put, it’s a terrific piece of music – and its freshness and inventiveness belie the fact that the composer was by then well into his ninth decade of life.

Moreover, the Suite is a composition that poses significant technical challenges for the soloist; the French conductor and trumpet player Fabien Gabel has remarked that the piece seems more like music written for the clarinet rather than the trumpet!  But for those who take up the challenge, the musical rewards are many.

Up until now, the Trumpet Suite has had four commercial recordings of which I’m aware.  The first recording appeared on the Philips label in the 1980s and featured the Swedish soloist Håkan Hardenberger.

One of the recordings – with trumpet soloist Eric Aubier – is of a version of the score featuring the composer’s own orchestration of the piano part. It is a winsome arrangement, reminding us that Schmitt’s powers of orchestration had lost none of their luster as he reached old age.

Thanks to ARS Produktion, we now have a fifth recording of the Trumpet Suite in the offing. Recently, I had the opportunity to ask Reinhold Friedrich to share his observations about Florent Schmitt’s composition.  His comments, presented below, are translated from German into English.

PLN: Your new ARS Produktion recording, L’Amour française, looks quite fascinating. It contains music that will be unfamiliar to many listeners.  What was the inspiration behind this new project?

RF: As musicians and audiences, sometimes we have a bit of a blind spot between the period of Mahler, Richard Strauss and Schönberg and today’s times of contemporary modernity. 

But there is so much gorgeous music from other composers that is not so well-known, nor strongly perceived.  One of my objectives was to fill this gap. 

I also consider it a wonderful opportunity – and an honor – that I, as a German artist, can help the French people rediscover some of their own beautiful works.

PLN: Your selection of repertoire is a mix of better-known composers along with some names which even experienced music-lovers might not recognize.  Was there a particular “strategy” to determine which composers and pieces appeared on the recording?

RF: We could have easily produced a double CD, there are so many great works by French composers from this era! 

I had already made a recording of music covering the period 1890 to 1910, but there is a gap of some 25 to 30 years between the works on my La Belle epoque recording and this new L’Amour française one.   

As a descendant of French Huguenots myself – and also as a person born on the 14^th of July [Bastille Day], those are yet other significant connections.

PLN: Pertaining to Florent Schmitt’s Suite en trois parties which is one of the most prominent pieces on your new recording, that work comes from very late in the composer’s career when the Schmitt was already 85 years old. What do you find particularly interesting about this music – or possibly unique?

RF: Like Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto, the piece is a masterpiece from the pen of an aged and wise composer!  But at the same time, it brims with the inspiration and freshness of a much younger creator. 

In the Suite, the trumpet is freed of all fundamentals in how it is treated.  And this music has it all:  virtuosity, humor, introspection, sadness, and fireworks.

PLN: When you encountered the Suite for the very first time, what was your reaction to it?

Roger Delmotte was the soloist at the premiere concert performance of Florent Schmitt’s Trumpet Suite in 1956, although Maurice André had presented it in a radio broadcast shortly before.

RF: I was deeply impressed by the piece.  And I also realized the great provenance of this music, which has been performed by the most important trumpet masters in France such as Roger Delmotte and Eugène Foveau – not to forget Raymond Sabarich and Ludovic Vaillant as well, who were the teachers of Maurice André and Pierre Thibaud.

PLN: How would you describe each of the three movements of this Suite?

RF: Each of the movements stands on its own, and the worlds they describe are different.  All three movements are demanding to play, but from different perspectives.   

The first movement [gaîment] is fresh, funny, delicate and cheery. Think of a Basque chapeau, a baguette, and a glass of red wine! 

The second movement [Lent sans excès] is passionate and deep, giving the trumpet the freedom to rhapsodize. Schmitt has such a good feel for exploiting all the qualities of the trumpet and the piano — and how they blend together. 

And then the third movement [Vif] has this tremendous dynamism and a frenetic pace – along with the corresponding technical challenges that must be overcome.

PLN: Does Florent Schmitt write idiomatically for the trumpet?

RF: Indeed so.  Just as with Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss, Schmitt takes advantage of every possibility of the instrument – while at the same time understanding its limits.

PLN: Is it true that the technical skills required to play this music are particularly challenging?

RF: The music requires a consummate musician – both technically and musically.  The trumpet range is almost three octaves, so the technical demands are certainly formidable.   

At the same time, the proper blending of the trumpet with the piano is also important, and it requires much practice to get it just right – just like pairs in figure-skating.

PLN: Thinking about French composers active in the first half of the 20^th century, how does Florent Schmitt fit in stylistically?

RF: I think that Schmitt took “tradition” as the basis for his writing, and then formed a bridge. 

André Jolivet and Olivier Messiaen would be considered even more modern, but with such composers as Schmitt, Ravel and Debussy, we come to understand the course of that development and how musical style progressed from the traditional to the contemporary. 

And Schmitt was part of that musical scene for decades.  Not all composers have been blessed with the kind of long life that Florent Schmitt had. Imagine how Mozart, Schubert, Mendelssohn and Mahler might have composed at 85 or 90 years of age!

Florent Schmitt, photographed at his home in St-Cloud in 1953, two years before he composed his Suite en trois parties. (©Boris Lipnitzki/Roger-Viollet)

PLN: Before making this recording, was the Suite in your repertoire?

RF: Yes it was, but this new CD was an occasion to learn the piece again from scratch.  My first involvement with the music was a long time ago, towards the end of my studies.   

Later on, in the search for some “big pieces” when I was head of the jury for the Philip Jones International Trumpet Competition in Guebwiller (Alsace) around 15 years ago, I succeeded in getting the Suite included in the first round of the competition program as a prescribed piece.  And it was a very good one for all of the wild young men and women who participated in that competition. 

For me, competitions are where new skills and new knowledge should be exchanged – not just the latest musical works but also the less familiar ones – which help us close gaps in the repertoire.  

Indeed, this was another rationale for my new recording.

PLN: The new ARS Produktion release identifies you and the pianist Eriko Takezawa as the “Duo Friedrich.”  When did you establish this musical partnership?

RF: Eriko and I have been working together for 22 years and have also been a couple in private life for four years.  Likewise, Florent Schmitt’s Suite has been with us for many years and we have presented it all over Europe, in Japan and in South America.

PLN: You have had an impressive 30-year career as a trumpet soloist, orchestral section leader, teacher and pedagogue.  What are some of your current artistic endeavors?

RF: In my orchestral activities, the Lucerne Festival Orchestra now has a new director in Maestro Riccardo Chailly, and currently there is an exciting process of artistic development among the old Abbado corps of musicians.

As a soloist, I am involved in performing baroque and other early music on period instruments, as well as presenting new works such as HK Gruber’s Aerial and Pietá in Memoriam Chet Baker by Christian Jost, who is a very innovative composer from Berlin. 

Again and again I am asked to perform my “calling card” – Bach’s second Brandenburg Concerto, which was how I first fell in love with the trumpet as a 7-year-old. 

I am gratified that many of my former students have made remarkable careers for themselves as trumpet soloists, professors and teachers, specializing in both old and new repertoire. 

I am glad to see it all, but I’m always asking myself, “Are you still up to it?” That is, I press myself to continually keep striving and learning.

PLN: What major new projects are you working on at the moment — and are there any future plans to perform Schmitt’s Suite?

L’Eventail de Jeanne: The 1927 ballet score was a collaborative effort by ten French composers including Florent Schmitt.

EF: My dream is to play Schmitt’s Suite with an orchestra – that would be a wonderful experience! 

I am also hoping to obtain permission to arrange L’Eventail de Jeanne, a ballet composed by ten composers including Schmitt, Poulenc, Ravel, Delannoy, Ibert, Roussel, Roland-Manuel, Auric, Milhaud and Ferroud, for chamber ensemble (trumpet, alto saxophone, cello and piano), and to record it as well.  But there are still a few details to be ironed out first …

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We are grateful that Mr. Friedrich continues to be so active in such varied musical endeavors. As for his dream to perform Schmitt’s Suite en trois parties with an orchestra, I can think of a few conductors who would be the perfect collaborators for such an endeavor.  Who’s game?

In April 2017, the Delaware-based chamber group Mélomanie presented Florent Schmitt’s Sonatine en trio, Opus 85, an intimate and engaging piece for flute, clarinet and harpsichord the composer created in 1935.

The Schmitt Sonatine was part of a fascinating program that featured seven works stretching from the 1600s (Marin Marais) through to contemporary pieces by Nicolas Bacri, Shulamit Ran and Vittorio Rieti.

Also on the program was the world premiere of Sandstone Peak, a composition commissioned by Mélomanie that was created by New York-based composer and flautist Bonnie McAlvin.

The program was representative of Mélomanie’s mission to present “provocative pairings of early and contemporary works.”  The concert was held at the aesthetically and acoustically pleasing performing space at The Delaware Contemporary, Wilmington’s premiere gallery of contemporary art.

Mélomanie’s core performers include musicians playing flute, violin, viola da gamba, cello and harpsichord, so the inclusion of Schmitt’s Sonatine en trio was an apt choice.  The composer himself created three versions of the music: one for flute/clarinet/harpsichord; another for flute/clarinet/piano; and a third one for violin/cello/piano. While they are nearly identical in terms of the notes, they have a very different flavor due to the combination of instruments featured in each version.

The Sonatine is presented in its harpsichord version least frequently, likely because of the lack of access of that instrument compared to the availability of a piano.  Thus, the Mélomanie concert was a rare opportunity to see and hear the music performed in Florent Schmitt’s original conception.

Tracy Richardson (harpsichord), Joshua Kovach (clarinet) and Kimberly Reighley (flute) performed Florent Schmitt’s Sonatine en trio at The Delaware Contempory in April 2017.

Following the concert, I had the opportunity to interview the three musicians featured in Schmitt’s piece:

• Joshua Kovach, clarinet
• Kimberly Reighley, flute
• Tracy Richardson, harpsichord

Various topics were covered during the 45-minute discussion, which was conducted from the stage for the benefit of the many members of the audience who chose to stay to hear the exchange. Highlights from the interview are presented below:

PLN: Prior to preparing and performing the Sonatine en trio, were any of you familiar with the composer Florent Schmitt and his music?

Joshua Kovach: I was familiar with Florent Schmitt through my parents, who are also musicians.  When I started to play in a band, they said they hoped I’d have a chance to perform Dionysiaques, which is Schmitt’s most famous piece for concert band.  As it turned out, I did get a chance to play that work during my first semester.  It’s quite a piece:  very strong writing – very creative – a terrific piece that makes you wish Schmitt had written more for band.

Kimberly Reighley: I was introduced to Florent Schmitt and to this piece by one of my graduate students at West Chester University School of Music who was doing research for his graduate chamber recital.  He unearthed it and performed it, which is why I can attest to the fact that the version for flute, clarinet and piano sounds strikingly different.  It’s quite a different character than the version with harpsichord – a completely different picture.

Tracy Richardson: I have to confess, I did not know of Florent Schmitt or his music before playing the Sonatine.

PLN: How did you come to select and perform the Sonatine en trio here at Mélomanie?

Kimberly Reighley: As the artistic leaders of the ensemble, Tracy and I made the selection.  Being familiar with the piece already, I knew that the keyboard part was not indicated as “piano,” but rather as “clavecin.”  Prior to this, Mélomanie had performed a piece for flute, violin and harpsichord by Martinů that is similar in many ways to the Schmitt, so it seemed like an ideal piece for us to present when we invited Josh to play with us at this concert.

PLN: What were your first impressions of the music when looking at the score, or listening to a recording of it?

Tracy Richardson: The piece is very bright and scintillating.  It goes by very quickly in terms of its emotional changes.  I thought it was very, very witty when I heard it.

Joshua Kovach

Joshua Kovach: My first impression, thinking about the only other piece I knew by Schmitt [Dionysiaques], is that it’s difficult to imagine that the two pieces were composed by the same person!  I did listen to a few recordings of the piece, and what struck me was a great deal of lightness – or wit, as Tracy says – that could only come across in the harpsichord version.

Also, there’s a lot of musical information that’s compressed into small phrases, that might otherwise be glossed over with the piano.

I was also struck by how difficult the music was to play! It may sound easy, but it is a little bit awkward to play, so our aim was to try to achieve that lightness in spite of the difficulty of performing it.

PLN: I’d like to know your thoughts on each of the four movements – and anything in particular that you find noteworthy or special.  Let’s start with the first movement – the Assez animé.

Tracy Richardson: Since I look at the whole score when I play, I was struck by some interesting aspects of the key signatures.  The piece is written in two sharps – what you’d think of as D major or B minor.  And in fact, the first movement does start and end in D major.

But in this movement Schmitt has a series of chords followed by an ornamental gesture in the right hand. First it’s a C major chord; then he changes one note in the chord and it becomes C minor.  Then, another couple of measures later he adds an A-sharp and it becomes a diminished seventh chord, following by changing one note more in that diminished seventh chord.

So he’s really playing around with our ears. It’s like when you twist a word just a little bit and it changes the meaning – that’s what he seems to be doing musically.  By playing with the harmony, he’s playing with the emotional content of the movement, too.

Kimberly Reighley

Kimberly Reighley: What I was most struck by, in both the first and second movements, is the way Schmitt writes for the flute and the clarinet — so that if we’re doing our job right, the listener cannot tell when one instrument’s line fuses into the other.

The coloring that this produces is amazing, where sometimes the flute and the clarinet blend together into this new sound which isn’t exactly the flute nor exactly the clarinet, either. I’m particularly struck by this in the first two movements of the Sonatine.

PLN: The second movement, marked Assez vif, I see as a weird little waltz – one that’s just a little “off.” Would you agree with that characterization?

Tracy Richardson: I do see this movement like a waltz as well.  To me it’s very graceful, and yet it has some gestures that are very difficult to bring off on the harpsichord.  You have to go to distant places on the keyboard.  Something like that is not as challenging on a piano, but on the harpsichord it means shifting between manuals, and of course you don’t have the pedal or the percussive touch of a piano to help you.

About the harmony in this movement, the piece begins in F-sharp minor but ends in B major. So it’s another twist – or is it perhaps a joke?  Normally, the dominant chord of B major would be F-sharp major, but Schmitt starts with it as F-sharp minor.  Starting with a minor dominant is unusual.

And then, ending the movement in B major isn’t what you expect either, because you’d expect it to end in B minor. So I think he’s playing with the performers and listeners here as well – more than simply experimenting with harmony.  The ending of this movement always takes me by surprise; it’s so unexpected to be in B major!

Kimberly Reighley: To me, this movement is very much like a dream in the sense that it seems you’re joining something that’s already happening – that’s already been in motion – and then we leave the picture at the end of the movement even though the activity seems to be continuing to go on.

Tracy Richardson: … And that final chord on the harpsichord keeps going as the other two instruments drop out.  They’re done with the dream but I’m still in it!

PLN: What about the third movement – Très lent?

Joshua Kovach: To further Tracy’s point about small changes that create added interest, the third movement is quite interesting in that there’s not a lot of musical material – and yet I found it to be engaging all the way through.

Schmitt makes changes by placing the main melody in different registers and creating interest that way: arriving at a cadential section – sort of a Stop sign – and then continuing again with a slight change.  I don’t know if he would agree with that characterization, but it seems as though Schmitt is doing something very creative with these very minute changes.

Tracy Richardson: In this movement – which is marked “very slow” – at the end of each phrase the harpsichord has a kind of hand-over-hand gesture that is all open-fifths.  We don’t have the thirds in there which would make it explicitly minor or major.  But the cadences implied in the music are all over the place – F-sharp, D-sharp, A-sharp; it’s not what you’d expect in tonal or even polytonal music.  They’re far-ranging, and yet Schmitt doesn’t wander; he goes there.

Kimberly Reighley: Also, I think “spaciousness” is built into the rhythm of this movement.  So you really don’t have to do much with it other than let it stand as the composer wrote it.  That spaciousness is there without having to broaden the tempo or anything else.

PLN: For the last movement – Animé – I sense a good deal of humor in the music. Your thoughts on this?

Tracy Richardson

Tracy Richardson: To me, this movement is like a friendly conversation the clarinet and flute are having – but in opposition to the harpsichord!  It’s not “all together now” as much as it is “one after the other.”  Teasing and ribbing.  For the harpsichord, there’s a crazy-fun right-hand tremolo on the last page that I just love, too.

Also, this movement begins in A major and ends in D major, which brings us back to the original key signature of the entire piece. Of course, we go all over the place before we end up there!

Joshua Kovach: I wouldn’t want to attempt to sum up the piece in only a few words, but I’d say the fourth movement is extraordinarily welcome after a first movement that seems like you’re going on this journey, a second movement that has this quirky waltz, and a third movement that exudes nostalgia and longing.

When we get to the finale movement, we have this welcome, upbeat music. But then right at the end in the last few measures, Schmitt brings back some of that quirkiness we heard in the second movement.  And you’re thinking, “Wait – what’s going to happen now?  He’s already done so many unexpected things!”

But then it’s all over, in predictable Schmitt fashion.

Kimberly Reighley: The one image comes to mind for me in this last movement is … champagne bubbles!

Florent Schmitt, photographed at his home in St-Cloud in 1937, two years after he composed the Sonatine en trio. (Photo ©Boris Lipnitzki/Roger-Viollet)

PLN: When you think about the musical style of the Sonatine en trio, do you view it as being in the realm of “French flavor”?

Joshua Kovach: I do find this music to be very French.  I hear elements of Debussy and Ravel – and Fauré in the third movement definitely.

Tracy Richardson: I find it very French-sounding also.  It has elements of Poulenc in it, too – or perhaps it’s more correct to say that Poulenc was influenced by Schmitt.

PLN: As you know, Schmitt prepared three versions of the Sonatine en trio featuring different sets of instruments. What are your thoughts on how well the voices work together using today’s performance with flute, clarinet and harpsichord compared to the alternate version with piano and the winds, and also the one with piano, violin and cello?

Florent Schmitt’s Sonatine en trio exists in three versions prepared by the composer: for flute/clarinet/harpsichord … flute/clarinet/piano … and violin/cello/piano.

Kimberly Reighley: What I appreciate in the version we’ve performed is that we have the opportunity to hear all of the detail, which I don’t think is quite as apparent with piano.  We’re hearing the clear distinction between two instruments that can be very “sustaining” – the flute and clarinet – and one that isn’t – the harpsichord.  So we have that contrast, and it all works so well.

Tracy Richardson: I’ve had the chance to listen to several recordings with the piano, flute and clarinet, and I’m struck by how different that version sounds.  It’s much smoother – which of course cannot be the case on the harpsichord.

Also, the opportunity for dynamic interpolation of accents and so forth is much greater on the piano – and pianists probably have an easier time playing the music than harpsichordists.

Joshua Kovach: Hearing the piece with harpsichord was how I encountered it first, and I think first impressions are often the ones we continue to favor; I know I’m guilty of that.  I try to be open to a version with piano – as obviously the composer was – but I’m quite fond of the “instant response” of the harpsichord as well as the lightness that’s generated when performed that way.

PLN: Was this a fun piece to rehearse and perform together?

Kimberly Reighley: It was great fun!  Part of the discovery process in rehearsing the piece was how we used “space and time” so that all the detail within each moment would be heard and be balanced — I don’t quite know how else to say it.  I thoroughly enjoyed that part of the process – as well as working on balances and blend, which are always important considerations when performing with the harpsichord.

Joshua Kovach: I had great fun rehearsing the piece as well.  There’s the desire to convey the composer’s intent, of course, but I think there were also some moments where we could introduce our own ideas without detracting from that larger goal.

There were places where we felt it would be wise to add a bit more time to allow a certain phrase to come to an end in a certain way, before allowing the next phrase to begin. Basically, it was finding that balance so as not to have one phrase risk running into the other.  Our goal was to do that judiciously and tastefully.

Tracy Richardson: For the slow third movement, we have several different colors in our palette on the harpsichord, so I decided to end each of those phrases using the upper manual for a more delicate, more nasal sound — maybe approaching it like an organist might.  No directions are in the score, but I felt it was the right thing to do.

PLN: Does the Sonatine en trio make you keen to discover more works by Schmitt for chamber music forces?

Tracy Richardson: Schmitt composed music for a wide range of chamber players, but unfortunately no other pieces are written for the instrumentation of our core ensemble at Mélomanie.  So there may not be additional works for us to perform – except to do this one again, and we’d certainly like to do that!

If we don’t have our guest clarinetist with us the next time, perhaps we could substitute our viola da gamba player to perform the clarinet part, which had been re-scored for the cello in the composer’s string instrument version. Viola da gamba would be a bit different from what the composer intended — but why not?

Joshua Kovach: From my standpoint as a clarinetist, I would love to play Schmitt’s Clarinet Sextet at some point.  I have a recording of that, and it’s a very interesting piece that deserves to be performed.

The Mélomanie ensemble.

PLN: Tell us a little about Mélomanie’s mission and programming strategy – and how the Schmitt composition fits into that picture.

Tracy Richardson: Our mission at Mélomanie is to present music from the baroque era and either side of it, along with music of the 20^th and 21^st centuries.  We call this our “provocative pairings of early and contemporary works.”  Nearly all of our programming features this combination of pieces, and so within that mission Florent Schmitt’s Sonatine was perfect for us.

Mélomanie has a core group of instrumentalists, but we like to invite other people to join our performances as guests, which is why, when Kim found this particular piece, we were excited to have Josh join us.

Joshua Kovach: This is actually my second time performing with the group.  The first time I was here we performed a piece by Heitor Villa-Lobos – the Choros No. 2 for flute and clarinet – and also a contemporary composition named Fable by David Bennett Thomas.

Tracy Robinson: … To which I’d add, we’re very pleased that in the past 15 years or so, Mélomanie has commissioned and premiered around 45 pieces of new music.

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We are indebted to organizations like Mélomanie that do more than their share to give voice to lesser-known music from all eras, in addition to supporting classical music of today through inventive programming and composer commissions.

As an indefatigable champion of contemporary music in France in the first half of the 20^th century, undoubtedly Florent Schmitt himself would have approved!

The international Bachtrack website is in the process of uploading its global database of classical music programs for the upcoming season.

Although it isn’t an exhaustive listing of every orchestral group, the site covers nearly all of the major orchestras, opera and ballet companies and other important ensembles around the world, making it the “go-to” resource for information about what’s happening on the concert calendar.

The 2017/18 season is now coming into focus – and yet even at this early date we see that five important compositions by Florent Schmitt will be presented by orchestras in Cleveland, London, Lyon, Milwaukee and Paris conducted by Lionel Bringuier, Jonathan Darlington, Fabien Gabel and Sakari Oramo.

Here are details on the concerts, plus links to more information about the performances and ticket reservations:

August 19, 2017

Schmitt: Le Palais hanté  (1900-04)

Debussy: Ibéria

Prokoviev: Piano Concerto No. 1 in D-flat Major, Op. 10

Ravel: Boléro

The Cleveland Orchestra, Fabien Gabel, conductor

Juho Pohjonen, pianist

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October 18-19, 2017

Schmitt: La Tragédie de Salomé, Op. 50  (1907/10)

Debussy: Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune

Prokofiev: Romeo & Juliet, Suite No. 2, Opus 64b 

Ravel: Boléro

Orchestre de Paris, Jonathan Darlington, conductor

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October 27, 2017

Schmitt: Symphony No. 2, Op. 137  (1957)

Franck: Symphonic Variations

Ravel: Piano Concerto in D Major for the Left-Hand

Sibelius: Symphony No. 3 in C Major, Op. 52

BBC Symphony Orchestra, Sakari Oramo, conductor

Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, pianist

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November 16, 2017

Schmitt:  La Tragédie de Salomé, Op. 50  (1907/10)

Berlioz:  Le Corsaire Overture

Ravel:  Concerto in G Major for Piano & Orchestra

Orchestre National de Lyon, Lionel Bringuier, conductor

Nicholas Angelich, pianist

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January 26-27, 2018

Schmitt:  Rêves, Op. 65  (1915)

Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-Flat Major “Emperor”

Bernstein: Fancy Free

Ravel: La Valse

Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, Fabien Gabel, conductor

Louis Schwizgebel, pianist

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June 9-10, 2018

Schmitt: Antoine et Cléopâtre, Suite No. 2, Op. 69b  (1920)

Debussy:  Khamma

D’Indy: Istar

Ravel: Shéhérazade

Roussel: Padmâvatî, Suite No. 2

Orchestre de Paris, Fabien Gabel, conductor

Measha Brueggergosman, soprano

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More information on these upcoming concerts can be found here on the Bachtrack site, or on the web pages of the five orchestras (click or tap on the orchestra names above).

In the coming weeks, it is likely that additional orchestral concerts featuring Florent Schmitt’s will be announced. They will be added to the listing above as soon as the information becomes available.

First performance in North America (Orchestre Symphonique de Québec, May 2017): Florent Schmitt’s Ronde burlesque (1927).

On May 24, 2017, the Orchestre Symphonique de Québec and its music director, Fabien Gabel, presented the North American premiere performance of Florent Schmitt’s Ronde burlesque, Opus 78, a work composed 90 years before (in 1927).

Not only was it the first performance of this piece on the continent, it was also the first time most members of the orchestra had ever played any music by Florent Schmitt at all. It turned out to be a blockbuster performance of a sonic showpiece that is chockfull of interesting and inventive musical ideas – all encapsulated within a short 6+ minutes.

I had the good fortune to attend the premiere, which was part of a concert of orchestral showpieces including Richard Strauss’ Eine Alpensinfonie as well as shorter works by Arthur Honegger, Bechara El-Khouri and Frank Zappa.  Having known Ronde burlesque only from two fairly ancient commercial recordings – one of them dating all the way back to the 78-rpm era – I was bowled over by the stunning OSQ interpretation, which was clearly head-and-shoulders above the recordings.

While in town for the concert, I had a special opportunity to interview several musicians of the OSQ, asking them what it was like to prepare Florent Schmitt’s piece for performance – the challenges as well as the rewards. The four musicians interviewed included:

• Catherine Dallaire (violinist and concertmaster)
• Stéphane Fontaine (principal clarinetist)
• Mélanie Forget (bassoonist)
• Blair Lofgren (principal cellist)

It was a lively 45-minute roundtable discussion that touched on numerous points, including how Florent Schmitt’s music requires a special kind of approach in order to prepare it properly for performance. Highlights of the discussion are presented below.

PLN: Florent Schmitt’s Ronde burlesque is clearly not part of the core orchestral repertoire. What practice, rehearsal and performance strategies do you use when approaching obscure music like this?

Stéphane Fontaine:  For me, the first thing is to listen to a recording of the music before practicing it.  Often I start by practicing it slowly, and that was particularly the case in this Schmitt piece.  I noticed right away in the score that there’s nothing “obvious” in the lines or the scales, so I had to begin very slowly, taking things faster only after a while.  My main objective was to get every note correct!

Mélanie Forget: For me, I listen to the music first, and I try to hear several recorded versions while following along with the score.  I’m listening for tempo, I’m looking for things like accent marks, and I’m also trying to decide what kind of interpretation I should present.

With this piece by Schmitt, I immediately sensed a French sound, which is a bright one. That affected my reed selection – how I will be tonguing the part and the brilliance I want to achieve.  For this piece I wanted to achieve a brilliant sound, which is not the German sound that we had in the Strauss Alpine Symphony on the same concert.

What I discovered was that in the single recording that’s available of the Ronde burlesque, the performance was not nearly as brilliant as it turned out to be for us in our rehearsals and performance.

Blair Lofgren: Yes, the tempo was different – being much faster on that one recording.  To me, it made so much more sense to play it at the slower tempo that we did.

Catherine Dallaire: True – because there’s so much information to hear in this work.  Those details can really come out in a slower interpretation, and the music breathes much better.  There’s so much information in such a short six-minute piece that you shouldn’t rush it.

Blair Lofgren

Blair Lofgren: When I first listened to the recording while following along with my part, it sounded almost like a cacophony to me.  The music goes by so fast, you don’t even have time to process what’s happening.

I remember my very first thought, which was:  “OK, I guess we’ll give this a try …”

But then when we came to rehearsal, there was so much more “room” in the tempo that Fabien [Gabel] used.  I think all of us realized that there were so many great things going on in the piece that were worth discovering.

My usual approach to learning music that’s new to me is similar to Mélanie’s. The first thing I do is sit down with a cup of coffee and the part – just listening while reading through the part.  In this particular case, at first I felt that the writing wasn’t particularly elegant; it’s actually quite disjointed.  It jumps around and seemed a little bit awkward as I first read it.

There are a lot of complicated, intricate notes jumbled up, and with these little glissando jumps – lots of little notes and you ask yourself, “How many of these notes do I actually need to get into that split second to have it sound OK”? Even the positions and the jumps – they aren’t comfortable.  For things like bowings and trying to figure out what’s going to be the easiest and the most comfortable for people to be able to play the music the same way — it was all a bit of a stretch.

Not easy at all — but I found that the more I played it, the more it made sense.

Catherine Dallaire

Catherine Dallaire: When I encounter a piece that I’ve never heard about or that I don’t know already, I look at the part before doing anything else.  I’m trying to figure out the tempi, how I’m going to play this or that, and I also think about fingerings and bowings as part of my section responsibilities.

Once I have a sense of these things, then I listen to the music along with the part, which can give me a good idea as to what instruments are exposed in different places, and where the violins are paired with other instruments.

Of course, things like tempo aren’t completely settled at that early point, because when we arrive at the first rehearsal the conductor may have different ideas. For a piece that we’ve never played before, it’s difficult to know what the conductor will want; we simply can’t know for sure.

At the first rehearsal, the conductor runs through the piece at a slower tempo so everyone can become acquainted with it a little bit. For this particular piece, we actually had our first rehearsal with our assistant conductor, Nicolas Ellis.

Blair Lofgren: Everyone knew that this week would be a particularly heavy one with the magnitude of the Strauss Alpine Symphony plus the other four pieces on the program.  So it was a wise decision to go with an early run-through of several of the smaller pieces like the Zappa and the Schmitt a couple of weeks earlier with the assistant conductor – which is something that isn’t done as a habit.  But this helped us understand what was coming up with music that is rarely heard and that we’d never played before.

PLN: Thinking about the Ronde burlesque, is there anything unusual or noteworthy in the way Schmitt writes for your particular section of the orchestra?

Mélanie Forget: This is a really well-written piece for the bassoon.  It makes me think of some pieces of Eugène Bozza, but he was later on.  The music is very French, and it’s also very idiomatic writing for the bassoon.

I also sense the same with the clarinet and oboe writing, although I cannot speak for sure about the flutes.

Stéphane Fontaine

Stéphane Fontaine: I would agree that the music is very well-written for the clarinet, and for woodwinds in general.  When you look at the parts, you recognize immediately that Schmitt knew woodwind instruments very well.

I’d also say that Schmitt is very original; I immediately trusted him, and I respect the text exactly how it is written. I paid attention to every little detail in the part, because as soon as I read it, it was clear.

Also, I feel that the music makes sense within the period it was written, like with Ravel and Debussy in the way they were writing for woodwinds — but with some differences of course.

Blair Lofgren: As I practiced this music, the feeling I had while preparing alone was not at all the feeling that I had later when I played it in the orchestra.  The indications that are in the part actually reminded me of something heavier than it ended up being.

As it turned out, I was actually practicing it in a way that was quite Straussian – but instead it turned out to be more Stravinsky-style. It was like very dense popcorn and you’re just trying to get your hands around it!  So I was actually quite relieved when we came to the first rehearsal and I realized that the music was actually easier than I’d thought it would be.

But overall, I’d characterize Florent Schmitt’s music as quite stressful to play.  The Ronde burlesque is sort of like “panic counting” for six minutes.  Your eyes are continually moving as fast as they can.

Mélanie Forget: So true!  The trombones might be doing triplets while I’m doing quarters – and then the composer switches it up on us!

Blair Lofgren: Right.  It’s feeling like you’re sight-reading every time you play the piece.  You might have played it ten times but you’re still worried about it.

Catherine Dallaire: Schmitt definitely keeps his players on edge! Ronde burlesque is also the type of piece where there are so many indications that he has put in – and you’ve got to respect every single one of them – to be super-precise with all of them.

I’d also say that you need to have a crisp sound at almost all times. There are also a lot of grace notes – really fast and not necessarily predictable.

Blair Lofgren: Schmitt is so typically French in that way:  Everything is written.  You really don’t need to invent a single thing.

PLN: From a technical standpoint, Schmitt’s music can be quite difficult.  What aspects of the composer’s scores do you find to be the most challenging in this regard?

Catherine Dallaire: Schmitt is the kind of composer where you have to take a small section and tackle it a little at a time.  And then take the next little section.  You need to do that everywhere in the score.  Then eventually you can bring it all together and it makes sense.

It isn’t music you can merely read through like you would the Strauss Alpine Symphony.  You need to treat this music with a magnifying glass instead.

Mélanie Forget

Mélanie Forget: For me at home when practicing, I would concentrate on five lines at a time – just learning those lines.  Then I’m closing my score and returning a half-hour later and doing another section.  In a sense, it’s the kind of music you almost have to learn by heart.

Blair Lofgren: It’s a process of digesting – not only for each musician but also for the orchestra as a whole.  Each time it settles in a bit more – even between our dress rehearsal and the concert.

Catherine Dallaire: With a composer like Richard Strauss and the Alpine Symphony, it’s so completely different.  There, you have time to see the notes coming.  There are challenges in that music of course, but nothing like what we have in the Schmitt.

Stéphane Fontaine: There are three specific bars of music in the Ronde burlesque that were particularly tricky for me – the fingering was not obvious.  Also, seeing flats and sharps on notes in the very same measures and bars was surprising to say the least; you really have to work at it just to make your brain be able to process it all!

I also found some legato lines that turned out to be difficult passages with notes moving within and between vastly different registers.

Blair Lofgren: For me as a cellist, the notes don’t sit comfortably.  It’s sort of like gymnastics to get all of the notes.

Also, there are small note changes everywhere. There are repeated patterns, but each time they’re just slightly different – maybe one note off.  So it isn’t possible to rely on something to be repeated as before.  The changes aren’t “evolving” so much as “altering,” because the music doesn’t seem to be going to some special place because of the evolution.

It makes me wonder if Schmitt might have been something of a practical joker – the way he’s playing with us like that.

Catherine Dallaire: It makes you wonder what instrument he played, too.  Because for the violins as well, it isn’t comfortable.  Once you get the hang of it, then it’s OK — but it takes some doing.

Blair Lofgren: One thing’s for sure, there are a lot of little extra notations I’ve had to write into my part!

PLN: Considering when Ronde burlesque was composed – the 1920s – was Schmitt doing anything different from his contemporaries in how he wrote for the orchestra?

Stéphane Fontaine: I don’t know Schmitt’s music well, so it’s difficult for me to comment on his style of writing beyond the Ronde burlesque.  I recall that when I first started practicing the music, I was reminded of Hindemith.

Blair Lofgren: I think the way Schmitt writes – in a way where seemingly disparate elements somehow come together – was actually ahead of his time.  When you think about when that type of writing became common, it was more in the 1960s and 70s – the idea of creating spatial effects that create one larger effect altogether.

Particularly in the last 30 years, that style has been popular with composers like Arvo Pärt and [Henryk] Górecki and John Taverner. They did a lot of writing like that, whereas Schmitt was doing it decades before them, though obviously much less expansively.

Mélanie Forget: For me, the piece fits very well with its title: “Ronde burlesque.” And I certainly would like to hear more from this composer!

PLN: Do you have any anecdotes – perhaps comments you heard from your orchestra colleagues – about preparing Ronde burlesque for performance?

Stéphane Fontaine: For me, I had never had a chance before now to listen to La Tragédie de Salomé or Psaume XLVII – Schmitt’s most famous pieces.  So this gave me an incentive to do so, and I am so impressed by what I’m hearing.  I can also see how Stravinsky would have been influenced Schmitt’s music.  It’s all quite exciting for me to learn about these new aspects.

Mélanie Forget: As for the bassoon players, we prepared more for the six-minute Schmitt piece than for the 50-minute Strauss.  You can hear almost everything from the bassoons in the Ronde burlesque, so preparation and getting everything right was so important.  For this concert, my colleague, Richard [Gagnon], was always saying to me, “Don’t forget to work on the Schmitt!”

Catherine Dallaire: For sure, the Strauss has some difficult passages, but the Schmitt did require more preparation.  I definitely practiced it more – for just six minutes of music.

Blair Lofgren: It’s the same for me.  I have a running joke with my stand-partner.  She has a way of subtly pointing out my mistakes by asking if an accidental note should have been a sharp or whatever.  In the Schmitt piece, we were saying things like that each other pretty much all the time.  It was a constant opportunity to have that little joke between us over and over again!

The Orchestre Symphonique de Québec’s concert program featuring the North American premiere performance of Florent Schmitt’s Ronde burlesque. The musicians spent more pre-rehearsal practice time on Schmitt’s 6-minute piece than on Richard Strauss’ 50+ minute Alpine Symphony.

PLN: A final question:  Was this your first opportunity to perform music by Florent Schmitt?

Stéphane Fontaine: This was the first time for me, but I can tell you that I’m looking forward to playing more of Schmitt’s music in the future!

Blair Lofgren: This is the first piece by Florent Schmitt that I’ve played, too.  In fact, I’d never even heard of Schmitt, except for Fabien [Gabel] who kept talking about this composer.  And now, I’d like to know if Schmitt wrote any music for the cello.

Catherine Dallaire: It’s the same for me, too.  When Fabien presented us with the season calendar last year, he said, “Oh and yeah, we’ll do music by this great composer, Florent Schmitt.”

My first reaction was, “Who is that?”  But Fabien replied, “Don’t worry – you will love it!”

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Now that they’ve been exposed to the artistry of Florent Schmitt, we hope that the members of the Orchestre Symphonique de Québec agree with music director Fabien Gabel that the composer’s pieces are well-worth performing.

Clearly, Schmitt’s compositions present their share of challenges in preparation, but the rewards are many. Hopefully there will be more opportunities for the OSQ musicians to present more of Schmitt’s music in the future.

Fabien Gabel

Fabien Gabel is one of France’s leading conductors of the younger generation, with an international career. He has been music director of the Orchestre Symphonique de Québec since 2012, and this year was also named music director of the Orchestre Français des Jeunes, succeeding David Zinman.  In addition, he guest-conducts regularly in the United States and major European countries.

Moreover, Maestro Gabel is one of just a few conductors on the international circuit who have made it their mission to perform works by the French composer Florent Schmitt. In the current orchestra season and the upcoming 2017-18 season, Maestro Gabel is presenting four separate compositions by Schmitt in Germany, France, Canada and the United States.

Importantly, none of the four compositions could be classified as among Schmitt’s better-known pieces. In fact, one of Maestro Gabel’s featured works by Schmitt qualifies as a “first.”  On May 24, 2017, his presentation of Schmitt’s Ronde burlesque, Opus 78 with the Orchestre Symphonique de Québec was the North American premiere performance of this orchestral tour de force, 90 years following the work’s creation in 1927.

I was fortunate to be able to attend that performance, which turned out to be a stunning interpretation – far superior to the only two commercial recordings ever made of this music. One of those, conducted by Gaston Poulet, dates all the way back to the 78-rpm era while the newer one – a production of German Radio – was recorded in 1987 and has been long out-of-print as well.

[More information about Schmitt’s Ronde burlesque, a fascinating showpiece for orchestra that the composer described intriguingly as “an underwater airplane dogfight”(!), is provided in this article.]

While in Québec City to attend the OSQ’s performance, I had the opportunity to visit with Maestro Gabel and ask him about his perspectives on Florent Schmitt’s music in general and the Ronde burlesque in particular.  The hour-long interview touched on a variety of topics.  Highlights from the discussion are presented below.

PLN: Tell us how you came to know Florent Schmitt and his music.  Is he a composer you knew from a young age?

FG: I knew the name of Florent Schmitt from the time I was quite young.  At home we had a recording of La Tragédie de Salomé with [Paul] Paray, and I also had a recording featuring a brass ensemble playing French fanfares from Lully to Jolivet.  On there was “Le Camp de Pompée” from Schmitt’s Antoine et Cléopâtre.

Later on, when I was a student of the trumpet at the Conservatoire in Paris, I played Schmitt’s Suite for Trumpet which is an extremely difficult composition. 

And then the next step was my teacher of harmony and counterpoint at the Conservatoire, Alain Margoni, who had been one of Schmitt’s protégés.  Through him I came to know more about Florent Schmitt’s music.

Until pretty recently I didn’t know that much about his output, actually. But I’m always looking for new French pieces to program.  I love Debussy and Ravel, of course, but they have the chance to be played more or less everywhere.  And sometimes I’m asked to do something French when I guest-conduct – but not Debussy and Ravel – since often the music directors are reserving those pieces for themselves because it is the only French music they know. 

One day,thanks to YouTube, I had the chance to hear for the first time Schmitt’s piece Rêves.  When I listened to that piece, I had a shock.  I couldn’t imagine that a composer from that era in France could be completely independent of the Debussy stream or the Ravel stream. 

What I suddenly realized is that Schmitt has his own personality as a composer. His music sounds French, with the rich harmonies and such, but it doesn’t sound like Ravel or like Debussy.  This is what surprised and attracted me.

What’s more, I could sense my own potential in that music. After all, when you like something a great deal, you have a better chance to be successful when performing it.  So that’s basically what my path was in coming to Florent Schmitt’s music.

PLN: At the Paris Conservatoire, were there other teachers of yours besides Alain Margoni who focused on Florent Schmitt and his music?

Before becoming a conductor, Fabien Gabel was a classically trained trumpet player. One of his teachers was the eminent international performing artist Reinhold Friedrich. Today they still work together — but as collaborators, as in this 2015 concert with the OSQ. (Photo: ©Erick Labbé / Le Soleil)

FG: No.  Even in my trumpet studies, Schmitt’s Trumpet Suite wasn’t that popular.  That piece is so difficult, our teacher asked us to work on it.  I had the score at home because my father is also a trumpet player; he’d never played the piece but he owned the music. 

Unfortunately, that piece is not as popular as the trumpet concertos by [André] Jolivet and [Henri] Tomasi. But I think that Schmitt’s Suite is far better than the Tomasi.

PLN: In the past few years, you have become one of just three or four conductors in the world who endeavor to program a variety of Florent Schmitt’s pieces in the concert hall.  Instead of focusing on Schmitt’s most famous compositions such as La Tragédie de Salomé and Psaume XLVII, you’ve devoted your efforts to some of Schmitt’s lesser-known orchestral works. Is there a particular strategy behind this approach?

FG: Many of Schmitt’s pieces are rather short, so it is easier to include them in concert programs of French music – or even in a program of non-French works.  If I’m planning to do a Stravinsky or Bartók piece, it’s possible to insert one of Schmitt’s works into those programs because the instrumental forces are similar.

When I’m planning a guest conducting appearance, the strategy is to suggest the name of Florent Schmitt. That’s what happened with The Cleveland Orchestra for a concert that is coming up in August.  I sent them the YouTube link to Manuel Rosenthal’s broadcast performance of Schmitt’s Le Palais hanté, and immediately they were keen to perform it. 

I don’t know anybody who doesn’t like the music of Schmitt – once they come to know it. But many people don’t even know the name.  Or if they know the name, they don’t know the music at all. 

But when they listen to music by Schmitt, they say, “My God, this is extraordinary! Let’s play that!”

PLN: What are your impressions of Schmitt’s music compared to the musical style of his contemporaries?

FG: Schmitt has a different way of composing and orchestrating.  When you look at a Schmitt score, it doesn’t even look like Ravel or Debussy. 

It’s less “clear” than Ravel. Ravel is immaculate; you know exactly where you are, and in the orchestrations you know exactly what it is at each point.  Schmitt is not at all like that – but it sounds great! 

With Ravel, you can read the score vertically, but with Schmitt it’s the opposite. You must read the lines before the harmonies, because the lines are what make the harmonies.  You have to dig a little bit more.

But this is so integral to Schmitt’s personality, and his writing has its own language. After working with a few of his pieces, I was then able to recognize some idioms and patterns that are typical of Schmitt – and unique to him.

As for the players, they find it a big challenge. In some cases, they don’t know what’s going on with the music.   

A vintage copy of the duo-pianist reduction score prepared by Florent Schmitt of his Ronde burlesque, inscribed by conductor Fabien Gabel.

PLN: What was the process by which you discovered and then decided to perform Ronde burlesque?

FG: The occasion came about for this Québec concert when we were selecting paintings to pair with the musical numbers being presented.  For one of those paintings – Kanaka by Marcelle Ferron – we needed to find a piece that was short and sparkling.  I immediately thought about this particular music, with its instrumentation that fit so well with the rest of the program. 

Ronde burlesque a short piece, but it’s difficult.  Part of the reason for that is its musical language.  And just as with a spoken language when you’re learning it, it’s very difficult at first.  In music it’s the same. 

But the more that orchestras play Schmitt’s music, the easier it will become. Think about other French composers; there have always been some orchestras that know how to play French music better, but today everyone knows Ravel’s Daphnis, which wasn’t the case before.

The Orchestre Symphonique de Québec concert program, inscribed by music director Fabien Gabel. The OSQ’s performance of Florent Schmitt’s Ronde burlesque was the North American premiere presentation of this music — 90 years after its creation.

PLN: This OSQ performance of Ronde burlesque was the North America premiere – nearly a century following its composition in 1927. What is it like to introduce a “new old” piece of this kind, as compared to a contemporary composition by a living composer?

FG: You know, the classical repertoire is so big we could easily play Brahms or Mahler symphonies all the time.  But it’s good for orchestras to be curious about unfamiliar music and to play new things. 

Of course, it means practicing harder before the first rehearsal.

In the case of this piece, I read through it with the orchestra the first time not too fast – just so the musicians could hear what it was like. And then we rehearsed it from there. 

But there isn’t really a “standard” approach to the preparation; each work has its own unique qualities.

As for the music parts, they were in immaculate condition – newly printed for our players – even though the original parts must have been very old.

PLN: Thinking about Ronde burlesque, what are the aspects of the score that you find particularly noteworthy? What is it about this music that makes it special for you?

FG: It’s the whole atmosphere of the piece – the character of the music.  It’s very original and inspired, even though the form is very classical.  It’s in three-part form.  There’s a little fugue in there, and some canons.  And of course a big orchestra.  There are so many things wrapped up in a six-minute piece.  

What is amazing is that Schmitt wrote such a brilliant piece of music, but it’s very complicated also. When you first look at the score you think, “This is so difficult; I don’t know how to understand that.”  But when you isolate each bar and each instrument, you start to understand it a little bit more. 

It’s the same thing with Rêves.  At first you don’t think there’s any form to it at all.  But eventually you do realize that it definitely has a form. 

PLN: what kind of reaction or comments did you get from the OSQ musicians when preparing this piece for performance?

FG: Everyone’s first comment was the same: “It’s difficult!”  But I think they ended up enjoying doing it, and had fun performing it.  For winds, the music is super-interesting.  For the brass, it’s likewise a very interesting piece.

Fabien Gabel and the Orchestre Symphonique de Québec presenting the North American premiere performance of Florent Schmitt’s Ronde burlesque, paired with Marcelle Ferron’s painting Kanaka (May 24, 2017). (Photo: ©Caroline Gregoire / Le Soleil)

PLN: Your Schmitt performances represent just some of the French music of the late Romantic and early Modern era that you have presented to audiences all over the world – Dukas, Chausson, Aubert, Roussel and other composers.  What kind of reception have they received?

FG: It’s always very good.  The Dukas La Péri for instance – it is always breathtaking for an audience.  As you know, that music ends softly, and most of the time there’s a big silence after that, before the applause starts. 

When I performed Schmitt’s Rêves in Berlin last year, both the orchestra and the audience were so impressed by the quality of the music.  Probably many people would have loved to hear it a second time to absorb more of the breathtaking sounds in that piece. 

Rêves is special in another way because it is a crazy psychedelic piece; the beginning and ending in particular are completely strange. 

PLN: In your view, what responsibility does an orchestra conductor have for programming lesser-known repertoire?

FG: It is a huge responsibility.  And this is a problem with some of my colleagues.  Maybe that’s saying it too strongly, but the key is to be curious. 

Conductors of my generation – in our 40s – we are curious. We want to explore many things, from Baroque all the way to Contemporary music. 

But for some of the younger generation here in North America, they want to be doing Brahms, Beethoven, Dvořák … and that’s all good. They should be more curious and willing to explore much more, but instead they want to conduct the “big hits” of classical music. 

I have met conducting students and recent graduates who don’t know anything about the repertoire beyond those hits, surprising as that might seem. But they just want to do the big Romantic repertoire, maybe some of the Shostakovich symphonies — and always Mahler. 

PLN: You have several concerts in the upcoming orchestral season that will feature the music of Florent Schmitt.  Please tell us a little about them.

Florent Schmitt, photographed at about the time he composed Ronde burlesque. (Photo: Boris Lipnitzki/Roger-Viollet)

FG: The very next one is with The Cleveland Orchestra where I’ll be doing Schmitt’s Le Palais hanté in August.  It will be the first time that this orchestra has ever played that piece. 

I will also be performing Rêves with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra in January, and then comes an Orchestre de Paris concert in June that will include the second suite from Schmitt’s Antoine et Cléopâtre. 

PLN: Tell us more about the Orchestre de Paris concert, which I understand will feature colorful scores by Schmitt, Ravel, Debussy, d’Indy and Roussel.  Some of the pieces will be unfamiliar to most concertgoers.  How did the idea for this concert come about, and how was the repertoire chosen?

FG: Working with the producer at the Philharmonie and the Orchestre de Paris, our mission was to come up with a theme for this concert.  We were looking for a link that went beyond all of the music merely being French.  And we weren’t looking at regular French repertoire like Daphnis or La Mer.  It isn’t that these five composers aren’t well-known in France, but we were looking for music by them that is less played. 

I started by submitting a list of pieces that I wanted to do, and on that list I put Schmitt’s Rêves and Debussy’s Khamma.  That was the point of departure.  Along with Khamma, I thought about Shéhérazade by Ravel, and so the idea of “orientalism” as a theme began to take form. 

The story of Khamma takes place in ancient Egypt, so it was natural to think about Schmitt’s Antoine et Cléopâtre – also set in Egypt. Istar [Vincent d’Indy] is in Persia, and Padmâvatî [Albert Roussel] takes us to India.

But beyond the common subject of the Orient, all of these composers knew each other, which makes the thread of the concert’s theme even stronger.

And all of the pieces are fantastic.

PLN: In addition to being the music director of the OSQ, you keep a very busy schedule conducting orchestras in Europe as well as in North America.  Tell us a little about those activities.

FG: Yes, I’m very busy conducting in North America and in Europe.  I have my ten weeks here in Québec each season, plus I’ll be conducting six weeks in the U.S. next season including orchestras in Detroit, Houston, Rochester, Milwaukee and San Diego as well as the National Symphony in Washington.  In Houston, it will be my fourth time conducting them. 

I’m also conducting in Germany, in Helsinki, as well as in France. As for repertoire, I do everything – not just French music. 

PLN: Are there any additional aspects about Florent Schmitt and his music that you would like to share?

Fabien Gabel in his dressing room following the May 24, 2017 concert with the Orchestre Symphonique de Québec, holding the conductor’s score of Florent Schmitt’s Ronde burlesque.

I think one challenge with Schmitt is that he died so much later than the other composers of his generation – in 1958. And he kept his own musical language up to the end, which was a time when avant-garde contemporary music by [Pierre] Boulez and others was so vastly different. 

But unlike some composers like Jacques Ibert, Schmitt has his own voice. He’s an independent, and his style is distinct.  That’s part of what makes him so very special.  He is a great French composer who deserves to be known and to be played.

It takes time, but little by little I think we are making that happen. La Tragédie de Salomé is being played by more orchestras, but we must also do that with other pieces he composed. 

For me, it’s actually more interesting to introduce completely new music to audiences rather than something like the Salomé.  I want to show that just because a piece is never played doesn’t mean that it isn’t good. 

More broadly, over the past 50 years what audiences expect to see on symphony programs has changed. There’s been this big wave of emphasis on Shostakovich and Mahler – so big that it’s killed nearly everything else.  I love Mahler, of course, but there’s not only Mahler, you know …

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True to his word, Fabien Gabel has been advocating diligently for Florent Schmitt’s music, and this was underscored in the OSQ presenting the North American premiere performance of Ronde burlesque.

Many music-lovers are grateful for the efforts of Maestro Gabel and a handful of other conductors who are seizing every opportunity to expose audiences to Schmitt’s highly interesting and inventive compositions. Here’s hoping that the Maestro will continue to do so for years to come.

“In my estimation, Dionysiaques is the first truly artistic work created for large concert band … Regardless of how many times I listen to Dionysiaques, it always feels new and interesting.  It also suggests that Florent Schmitt considered the wind band ensemble to be ‘without limits’.” 

— Dr. Armand Hall,  American conductor and educator

Armand Hall

Florent Schmitt’s Dionysiaques, Opus 62, composed in 1913, is acknowledged today as one of the most inventive and interesting works for concert band ever created.

It was revolutionary when it first appeared, and more than a century after its composition, it remains one of those pieces of music that always elicits surprise and delight among audiences whenever it is presented.  (I know this from personal experience, having witnessed audience reactions when the piece was performed by wind ensembles at Peabody Conservatory and the University of Maryland.)

These days, Dionysiaques is played the word over.  It’s a composition that’s as popular in North America and the Far East as it is in France and Europe.  But that wasn’t always the case.  In fact, it took many decades for the piece to find its rightful place in the concert band repertoire.

Two reasons are responsible for that slow evolution. One is the work’s difficulty; ask any wind ensemble director and nearly all of them will tell you that Dionysiaques is among the most challenging pieces of music to pull off.

Florent Schmitt, photographed a few years before he composed Dionysiaques in 1913.

The other is the piece’s instrumentation. When Schmitt composed this work in 1913 for the Orchestre d’harmonie de la Garde Républicaine – then as now the best wind ensemble in France – he scored the piece not only for the usual wind instruments but also incorporated unconventional or now-rare instruments such as petit bugles, sarrusophones, saxhorns and double basses.

Moreover, when played at the full complement of forces called for in Schmitt’s original scoring, Dionysiaques requires 125 players – well beyond the resources of many concert bands.

Even with these challenges, in earlier years Dionysiaques did experience a limited number of performances outside of France.  Then, beginning in the 1970s with the emergence of a revised score prepared by Guy Duker, an American band leader and music educator who was associate director of wind ensembles at the University of Illinois from 1953 to 1978, Dionysiaques began to appear with more frequency on concert programs.

Dionysiaques was just one of numerous arrangements and transcriptions Duker made for wind ensembles. As such, he was a well-known personage in the American concert band community, which likely increased interest in the Schmitt score and a willingness to prepare and perform it.

Since the 1970s, Dionysiaques’ rise has been steady and inexorable.  Today, nearly every concert band of serious intent anywhere in the world includes the piece in its repertoire.  And the work’s popularity only grows over time.

Dr. Armand Hall is an American conductor and educator. He is an assistant professor of music and also associate director of bands at the University of Memphis.  Like many concert band musicians, he is a great fan of Dionysiaques.  He is keenly interested in the evolution of the work’s popularity and has researched the topic intensively.

In March 2017, Maestro Hall made a presentation on this topic at the annual national conference of the College Band Directors National Association.  Titled From There to Here: The Evolution of Florent Schmitt’s Dionysiaques, Maestro Hall’s presentation charted the interesting musical journey the piece has made during the 100+ years since its composition.

Having read about the CBDNA presentation, I got in touch with Maestro Hall and asked him to share the salient points about his research and scholarship, which he kindly agreed to do. Highlights of our very interesting discussion are presented below.

PLN: When did you first become acquainted with Florent Schmitt’s Dionysiaques?  Have you ever performed it as part of an ensemble yourself?

AH: As a clarinet player and a band director, I have been well aware of Florent Schmitt’s tour de force Dionysiaques for a long time.  I first heard it performed by the University of Michigan Symphony Band during my undergraduate degree work there.  

At the time, I remember it being the most technically difficult piece for winds I had ever encountered, and it remained in my consciousness as an extremely challenging piece of music.

Since then I have heard some fantastic live performances of the piece – several of them extremely musical performances. I have not had the opportunity to perform it myself, but look forward to conducting it this fall with the University of Memphis Wind Ensemble.

PLN: What sparked you to investigate this particular piece of music and to trace its development over the past century?

Kevin Sedatole

AH: In 2010  I began my DMA studies at Michigan State University with Dr. Kevin Sedatole.  He programmed the work that fall and I was assigned to give a presentation on the piece in my conducting studio class.  I quickly realized that information about the composition was limited, as much of the biographical information about Schmitt is written in French.

At that time, there were roughly three major dissertations on Schmitt in English, and one by Diane Janda on Dionysiaques.  I read the Janda dissertation, went through her bibliography, acquired those texts, and researched connections between Schmitt and Les Apaches.  [The Société des Apaches was a group of French musicians, painters and writers, formed in 1900, whose members represented the more non-conformist strains of Parisian artistic society. Members of the group included composers such as de Falla, Ravel, Schmitt and Stravinsky as well as literary figures like Léon-Paul Fargue, to whom the score of Dionysiaques is dedicated.]

I became enthralled with attempting to discover the germination of this piece of music. I’ve come to believe that Dionysiaques is the natural combination of Schmitt’s Prix de Rome travels [from 1900 to 1904 across Europe, the Mediterranean region and the Near East], his military experience, and the significant time he spent and the influences he experienced interacting with the members of Les Apaches.

After seeing the poor condition of the parts Michigan State rented from the Durand publishing firm as well as the handwritten score by Guy Duker, I decided that my DMA dissertation would be on the topic of creating a critical-edition of the piece.

Everything but the kitchen sink: Florent Schmitt’s original scoring for Dionysiaques calls for the full range of wind instruments — and more.

Dr. Sedatole was in great support of this project. So I began finding and translating more research about Schmitt and Dionysiaques, while simultaneously contacting Durand in Paris to obtain the rights to create a new edition of the piece. 

In spring 2011, following many letters and phone calls to Paris, I received a final response to my request in which Durand denied my request and implied that they were not interested in my project. I assumed they did not want to invest the money to create new rental parts.

Much to my dismay, later I found out that while I was petitioning to prepare my edition, Durand was already in negotiations with the Éditions Robert Martin publishing firm for it to purchase the rights to many pieces. Therefore, the edition prepared subsequently by Felix Hauswirth [a Swiss-born band leader and former president of the World Association for Symphonic Bands and Ensembles (WASBE)] is the only legal version in the world.

PLN: Tell us how you went about conducting your Dionysiaques research?  How did you plan your activities, and how did you identify sources?

AH: For my CBDNA presentation, I wished to highlight the significant changes inherent in the new Hauswirth edition. Dionysiaques presents many challenges for a modern wind ensemble, as it was written and orchestrated for the Orchestre d’harmonie de la Garde Républicaine, the best military band in France.  

The major challenges in preparing a new edition of the score center on the instrumentation (including how to deal with obsolete regional instruments, particularly the family of saxhorns), and also the size of the ensemble.

Felix Hauswirth

I compared every measure of the three accepted versions (Schmitt’s original, Duker and Hauswirth), noting the differences. Beyond those, there are other editions – several illegal and one done for a United States military ensemble (by the harpist and arranger Lawrence Odom).

My intent was to describe Hauswirth’s approach to solving the inherent instrumentation and size-of-forces issues, as I knew these were the major issues that anyone would face in editing the piece.  [The Hauswirth edition calls for just 76 to 79 musicians – vastly lower than the 108-120 musicians called for in the Duker version or the 91-125 called for in Schmitt’s original.]

I included the Duker in the comparison because it is the version with which Americans are most aurally familiar, and it would be important to explain how the Hauswirth edition is different from it.

PLN: In your research, what did you discover in terms of how Dionysiaques has grown in fame and popularity as a concert band piece here in the United States?

The shield of the Garde Républicaine Band.

AH: Schmitt’s original orchestration is a uniquely “French” instrumentation, which posed a problem for ensembles in the United States – or so I thought.  It was written for the instrumentation of the 1920s Garde Républicaine wind orchestra. 

Prior to Duker’s 1975 adaptation for American ensembles (and other regions of Europe that did not have similar instruments), there was no way to perform the piece without compromising the ensemble tone color.

Duker’s parts and score were very difficult to read, as they were handwritten. But I could tell that Duker used as many original Schmitt parts as possible – only creating parts to cover now-obsolete instruments and to match the large University of Illinois band instrumental forces Duker had at his disposal.

Based on letters from Duker’s own archive, five university bands performed his adaptation within two years. However, I also discovered that ensembles had actually been performing the original Schmitt scoring here in the United States as early as 1935 (at the University of Illinois).  I am attempting to catalogue every performance in the United States prior to the approval of Duker’s edition.  

Despite this discovery, it remains that there were only two possible ways to perform the piece prior to Duker: leave out instruments, or employ antiquated instruments used in early American bands – the alto and tenor horn to be specific.

Dionysiaques has been long recognized as an original composition for band and I hope the new Hauswirth edition (which is available for purchase instead of rental) will mean even greater access to the piece.  

Also welcomed news is that the requisite technical facility needed by the individual players is more within reach by university and high school students across the United States.

PLN: What are the various editions of the score that exist, and in what ways do they differ from each other and from Schmitt’s original orchestration?

Harpist and arranger Lawrence Odom, who has made “enhanced” arrangements of numerous music scores for wind ensembles of the U.S. armed forces.

AH: There are a number of versions of the score, beginning with Schmitt’s own four-hand piano reduction of the music that he prepared in 1917 and that predated the Garde Républicaine’s first performance of the piece in 1925, a dozen years after its composition. 

Here are the various ones I’ve identified:

• Four-hand piano score – Florent Schmitt – 1917
• Orchestration for the Garde Républicaine Band – Florent Schmitt – 1925 [very large musical forces and specific instrumentation]
• American Adaptation – Guy Duker – 1975 [to fit the University of Illinois Symphonic Band’s instrumentation]
• U.S. Military Band Adaptation – Lawrence Odom – 1983 [not commercially available, this version has very different instrumentation including major harp parts]
• Illegal typeset version of the Duker score (supposedly with major errors fixed) – 2001 [many school bands have copies of these parts, as the original Duker parts have become increasingly unreadable]
• Modern Edition – Felix Hauswirth/Éditions Robert Martin with the blessing of Durand – 2011 [includes additional trumpet parts but with a significant reduction of instrumental forces, as well as the interpolation of optional additional instruments such as celesta]

Interestingly, the Hauswirth edition contains an admonition that “ensembles who do not have this required instrumentation (no instrument is ‘exotic’) should not play this work.”

The 2011 Hauswirth edition of Florent Schmitt’s Dionysiaques, published by Éditions Robert Martin (Paris).

PLN: In what ways do you find Dionysiaques to be a special composition in the band repertoire?  Do you see it as a pacesetting (or maybe even a revolutionary) piece?

AH: In my estimation, Dionysiaques is the first truly artistic work created for large concert band. To be sure, there were large-scale band works created before Dionysiaques.  However, no tone poem of high artistic merit had ever been envisioned for band prior to that. Generally, there had been transcriptions or other formulaic pieces written for bands (marches, overtures, song form and so forth).

We know that Schmitt wrote this piece expressly for wind ensemble, as Schmitt’s published four-hand piano part is subtitled “Poéme pour Orchestre d’harmonie”.  At the time, Schmitt was at the top of his game – at the height of Parisian musical society while still heavily influenced by his Prix de Rome travels – when he decided to compose Dionysiaques.

PLN: How is Dionysiaques regarded among conductors and performers of wind music?

AH: It is a highly respected piece, but the rental costs and requisite ensemble size have precluded many ensembles from attempting to perform it.  Due to the smaller instrumental forces it calls for, I believe the Hauswirth edition could make the piece more accessible to more ensembles.

PLN: Tell us a little about your background in music.  Did you start out as a performer?  Where did you study and who were your mentors?

AH: I am primarily a conductor. It is important for conductors to learn as much as possible about the compositions they direct, creating a bigger opportunity to develop an appropriate interpretation.  Good conductors spend a lot of time digging and making connections, using the wonderful work of musicologists to delve deeper into a composition.

I approach each composition as an educator — prepared to educate the ensemble and the audience about a piece, its place in time, and possibly its impact on society.

I received bachelor and master degrees in music education from the University of Michigan. I then taught middle and high school bands for eight years before returning to academia to earn a doctorate in wind conducting with Kevin Sedatole at Michigan State University.

I have also been extremely fortunate to participate in numerous conducting symposia, working with many fantastic conductors on technique and score-studying along the way.

PLN: Besides your study of Dionysiaques, what other major musicological projects have you undertaken?

AH: As a conductor, I’m focused on commissioning and championing new music and emerging composers.  I feel a duty to continue to push musical boundaries!

Les Apaches (1910 painting by Georges d’Espagnat.)

However, my “guilty pleasure” is the music – specifically the chamber music – of composers who were members of or involved with Les Apaches.  Also, I am always searching and trying to find more pieces for wind bands and mixed instrumentation chamber music groups.

PLN: What new plans or research activities are on the horizon for you?

AH: I hope to prepare a conductor’s guide to Dionysiaques very soon, illuminating the history of the piece and its evolution.  I’m hopeful that this will help promote the piece and its new availability.

I am also excited to be able to conduct Dionysiaques for the very first time, leading the University of Memphis Wind Ensemble this coming fall.

PLN: Are there any additional observations you would like to share about Florent Schmitt and Dionysiaques?

Regardless of how many times I listen to Dionysiaques, it always feels new and interesting. This speaks to the high level of musical invention, the technique and the artistry required to perform the piece.  

It also suggests that Florent Schmitt considered the wind band ensemble to be “without limits.”

It must be acknowledged that the membership of the Garde Républicaine Band was made up of the top students from the Paris Conservatoire – some of the most skilled instrumentalists of the time.  While instrumental technique has improved in the 100 years since Dionysiaques was created, Schmitt’s compositional technique also stands the test of time, allowing us to make great music with every performance.

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There is no question that Dionysiaques’ upward trajectory shows no sign of abating, and the new Hauswirth edition will contribute even further to this piece’s ascendancy in the wind ensemble repertoire.

With each passing decade Dionysiaques becomes more and more famous.  Lucky indeed are the musicians who have the chance to play it – and audiences to hear it.

A promotional poster for the original 1907 production of Florent Schmitt’s ballet La Tragédie de Salomé, featuring the American-born dancer Loïe Fuller, famous for her scarves and lighting effects.

Along with his concert band masterpiece Dionysiaques, La Tragédie de Salomé is French composer Florent Schmitt’s best-known score.  But most music-lovers know only the version that Schmitt prepared in 1910 for large orchestra.  Three years earlier, an original version twice as long had been created by Schmitt for the American dancer Loïe Fuller, who presented it at the Théâtre des Arts in Paris, an intimate theatre space, accompanied by an ensemble of 20 musicians led by Désiré Inghelbrecht.

The original score of La Tragédie de Salomé has never been published and the music has been commercially recorded just once.  But unlike the original conceptions of many classical pieces, this one is just as important musically as the composer’s final, published version.  Moreover, to fully understand the published version, including the music’s influence on other composers of the period (not least the young Igor Stravinsky), it is necessary to become acquainted with the original version of Salomé as well.

The revised version of Florent Schmitt’s ballet La Tragédie de Salomé was published by Durand in 1912; the original version from 1907 exists only in an autograph performance copy.

That realization is underscored by the scholarship of the American musicologist Megan Varvir Coe, who has studied Florent Schmitt’s composition and its roots in Symbolist artistry as well as investigating the circumstances of how the original production of Salomé came into being.

Recently, Dr. Coe outlined her research in an article that was published in the 1st Quarter 2017 issue of Dance Chronicle magazine.  Encountering that article, I was struck by the valuable scholarship that fills in some significant gaps in our knowledge of Schmitt’s development as a composer and the important position he held in the Parisian artistic scene during the early years of the 20th century.

Megan Varvir Coe

I contacted Dr. Coe, who was kind enough to share additional perspectives on the topic. Highlights of our highly interesting discussion are presented below.

PLN: How did your interest in the ties between Symbolist writers and music develop?  Did it start with the “words” or with the “music”?

MVC: What a fitting question for beginning this interview!  Many Symbolists did not, in their aesthetics, differentiate between words and music, and my own curiosity about this topic stemmed from my fascination with the interrelationship between words and music in one particular work.   

Richard Strauss (1864-1949), photographed at about the time of the premiere of his opera Salome (1908).

My interest in Symbolist literature and the music inspired by it began, as did my interest generally speaking in French musical culture at the fin de siècle, not with a French work but a German one – Richard Strauss’s 1905 music drama Salome.  I fell in love with this opera as an undergraduate music major; I was bewitched by the beauty of the music, of course, but even more so by how Strauss had united the text and music.   

Strauss set a German translation of Oscar Wilde’s 1893 Symbolist play, Salomé, originally written in French.  I began my research into Symbolist literature and music by going down the research “rabbit hole,” as it were, to deepen my understanding of Strauss’s Salome by learning all I could about the play and the Symbolist aesthetic that informed its creation.  Eventually my research moved further away from its starting point and towards a focus on Symbolism and French musical and dramatic culture in the early years of the 20^th century. 

PLN: Which Symbolist writers did you come to know first?  Was this in connection with your work as a vocalist?

Oscar Wilde

MVC: Though I became familiar initially with Symbolist poets through singing French mélodie, the first Symbolist writer I studied extensively was Oscar Wilde, who, with the exception of his work on Salomé, was not a writer of Symbolist works at all.   

Salomé is an outlier in his oeuvre because only in it did Wilde consciously strive to emulate the French Symbolists he admired.  These writers included Stéphane Mallarmé — the so-called “Father of Symbolism” — as well as Maurice Maeterlinck, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and others. Salomé was my first window into Symbolism and its philosophy and aesthetic as related to music and drama. 

PLN: How did you first begin to study the connections between language, literature and dance? 

MVC: Again, this was the result of the “rabbit hole” of research initiated by my love of Strauss’s opera.  From studying that opera I moved into researching Wilde’s play, then French Symbolism and its cultural and historical context, and then French musical works inspired by Symbolism.   

One of those works was Florent Schmitt’s La Tragédie de Salomé, the score for a ballet-pantomime commissioned by the Symbolist muse and dance pioneer Loïe Fuller.   

Fuller was also an inventor, and her fame as a performer rested on her ability to combine music and dance with fantastic mise-en-scène created with light, smoke, mirrors, projections and so forth.  The Symbolists had dreamed of an art form in which the boundaries between the different artistic genres blurred, and Mallarmé and others saw in Fuller’s performances the possibility of a realization of this dream.   

My research into musical works inspired, like Strauss’s opera, by Wilde’s Salomé eventually brought me to Schmitt’s ballet which, rather remarkably, led me to Fuller and the role of dance in Symbolist aesthetics, coming full circle in a way.

PLN: What sparked you to investigate this particular piece of music and to study its interrelationships with literature and dance?

Florent Schmitt, photographed at about the time he created the original version of La Tragédie de Salomé in 1907.

MVC: The popularity of the character of Salome at the fin de siècle cannot be overestimated.  The controversial nature of Wilde’s play — and of Wilde himself — fanned the flame of this so-called salomanie; the popularity of Strauss’s opera fueled it further.   

Evidence of this is the plethora of musical and dramatic works from this time period, both low- and highbrow, that dealt with the character Salome. Over the course of my research I discovered many of these works were written in France between 1890 and the onset of World War I, including La Tragédie de Salomé.   

A noteworthy stage and literary career cut short by the First World War: Robert d’Humières (1868-1915).

I first learned of Schmitt’s ballet-pantomime during my search for Salome-related pieces. My further investigation revealed that this particular work connected several separate strands of my study – Symbolism, Salome, music, literature (through the ballet’s Symbolist-inspired scenario written by Robert d’Humières), fin-de-siècle musical culture, and dance.  

Digging more deeply into the music of La Tragédie, as well as the historical circumstances of its conception, performance, and reception, led to my study of the interrelationships between these strands — most importantly, the interrelationships between music, dance, and literature within Symbolist aesthetics and how a composer like Schmitt might respond to these interrelationships musically.     

PLN: How did you go about conducting your research?  How did you plan your activities, and how did you identify sources? 

MVC: In conducting my research, first I needed to overcome the main obstacle in studying  Schmitt’s La Tragédie de Salomé – accessing the score.   

In 1910, Schmitt prepared a concert suite created from the ballet-pantomime music; this suite is what is performed in concert halls today and what is available as a printed score.  

Only commercial recording of the original version (so far): Patrick Davin and the Rhineland-Pfalz Philharmonic Orchestra (1991).

The music for the actual ballet-pantomime, however, has never been published. It is much longer – almost an hour’s worth of music instead of the 25 minutes of the concert suite.  The 1907 ballet-pantomime score only exists in a facsimile of an autograph performance copy used by the conductor of Fuller’s 1907 performances, Désiré-Émile Inghelbrecht.  The score, which is in Schmitt’s handwriting and contains performance markings by Inghelbrecht, is held at the Bibliothèque-musée de l’Opéra, Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris.  [There is a highly effective recording of the 1907 score performed by the Rheinland-Pflaz Philharmonic conducted by Patrick Davin, recorded in 1991 and available on the NAXOS-Marco Polo label.] 

In the summer of 2012 I journeyed to Paris in no small part to obtain a copy of this score while in the process of researching La Tragédie de Salomé in the archives of several Bibliothèque départements.   

I then continued my research as I normally do: I began by reading all of the secondary literature on La Tragédie de Salomé, including scholarship by Déborah Bonin, Catherine Lorent, Jerry Rife and Clair Rowden — all of which was indispensable to me in my initial work on the project.   

Next, I evaluated primary sources including autograph letters by Schmitt, the scenarist Robert d’Humières, and Fuller, the memoirs of those connected to the production, and, most importantly because of my interest in reception history, articles in the contemporary general and musical press about the work.  

I also analyzed the scenario and the score and began to make connections between the music, the scenario, and the possible influence of Symbolist aesthetics on La Tragédie’s creators.   

Unfortunately, the choreography for Fuller’s ballet is no longer extant; however, the press reception gives us a good idea of the technological wonders she created for her mise-en-scène.  Immersion in the primary sources enabled me to slowly pull the many threads together. 

The program cover for the original production of La Tragédie de Salomé, presented at the Théâtre des Arts.

PLN: During the course of your research into this ballet, what discoveries, if any, did you find particularly surprising — things that you might not have expected to encounter? 

From Hinsdale, Illinois to Paris, France: American dancer Loïe Fuller (1862-1928).

MVC: A composer working on commission, such as Schmitt working on Fuller’s commission for La Tragédie de Salomé, must balance the requests of the patron with his or her own vision for the project.  When I compared Fuller’s requests and d’Humières’ scenario with the finished score, I was surprised, not that Schmitt had imposed so much of his own vision on the final work (to be expected with a composer as self-assured as Schmitt was even at a young age), but how he had done so.   

In my article in Dance Chronicle, I focus in particular on Schmitt’s creation of evocative music for what d’Humières termed “Les Enchantements sur la mer” — visions that occur around (and possibly in the minds of) Herod and Herodias before and after Salomé dances “La Danse de l’Acier.”  The scenario describes symbolic visions of lights beneath the Dead Sea and the appearance of the ruined architecture of “Pentapole” (the biblical kingdoms in the Old Testament destroyed by God for their wickedness).   

Schmitt created mysterious, rhythmically rocking tremolos to signify the lights and an angular leitmotif to represent the ruins. As with Wagnerian leitmotifs generally speaking, the “Architecture” leitmotif, as I termed it, changes over the course of the ballet in relation to developments in the scenario and through its interaction with other leitmotifs; as a musical symbol in the Symbolist sense, this leitmotif is revealed over time to have multiple meanings.   

Schmitt’s decision to interpret d’Humières’ scenario in this way was very original — and completely the composer’s idea. Schmitt goes beyond musically illustrating or accompanying the scenario; like other great composers, he engenders the possibility inherent in music for multiple layers of meaning. 

Another fascinating example of Schmitt imposing his own interpretation of the scenario (in spite, in this case, Fuller’s stipulations), is the addition of the “Chant d’Aïça” as part of the reprise of “Les Enchantements sur la mer” after “La Danse de l’Acier.” Schmitt created the “Chant d’Aïça” from a Palestinian folksong transposed by a tourist on the banks of the Dead Sea and published in an article in the journal Le Mercure musical in 1906;  the composer noted the provenance of this melody in the autograph score.   

Schmitt received the commission for La Tragédie from Fuller through a letter written by their mutual friend, Jean Forestier, on August 23, 1907, and, intriguingly, Forestier specifically asks in the letter for music “ni paroles ni chant.”  Yet Schmitt inserts this haunting melody, the “Chant d’Aïça,” sung by a soprano soloist from offstage, at a pivotal moment in the narrative, immediately before Salomé’s “La Danse d’Argent,” the seductive dance she uses to convince Herod to give her the head of John the Baptist.   

As I interpret it, this exoticist melody acts as a symbol connecting multiple layers of intertextual meaning. The themes of the music of Salomé’s dance of seduction are derived from motives in the “Chant d’Aïça,” therefore connecting the seduction with the depraved “Pentapole” of “Les Enchantements.”   

In my Dance Chronicle article, I further connect this melody sung by a disembodied voice to traditional conceits in Symbolist dramatic practice and to other Symbolist interpretations of the Salome myth, including those by Wilde and Mallarmé.  Here again, Schmitt idiosyncratically interprets the scenario and contributes to the richness of the work’s multivalence. 

Tamara Karsavina as Salome in the Ballets-Russes production (1913).

A final surprising aspect of my research was the popularity of La Tragédie de Salomé as a ballet, not just as a concert suite, in the years following the suite’s appearance.  With new choreography to the shortened music of the concert suite, it was danced by Natalia Trouhanova in 1912, by Tamara Karsavina and the Ballets-Russes in 1913, and by Ida Rubinstein in 1919.  Today it really only exists in concert halls.

PLN: As you were conducting your research, did you discover other French musical works for the stage that share similarities with La Tragédie de Salomé?  What makes Schmitt’s ballet the better “specimen” in terms of the Symbolist connections? 

MVC: There are many musical works for the stage from this time period that reveal the continuing influence of Symbolist aesthetics, even though literary Symbolism was considered somewhat old-fashioned in many circles by the first years of the new century.   

An aspect of Symbolism that continually fascinates me is how it lends itself to very different, sometimes even paradoxical, interpretations. In that sense, Schmitt’s ballet is not necessarily a “better” specimen, though its connection with Fuller makes La Tragédie particularly fruitful for exploration from a Symbolist perspective.   

An often different but equally valid application of Symbolist aesthetics to music and dance can be seen in the performances of the pre-war Ballets Russes. Several musical works commissioned by or set by that troupe are, I believe, open to further viewing through the prism of Symbolism.  A specific Symbolist-influenced work written before World War I in France is the incidental music written by Debussy for Le Martyre de saint Sébastian (commissioned by dancer and dramatic actress Ida Rubinstein in 1912).   

Rubinstein herself had a deep commitment to her own interpretation of Symbolism, and perhaps her collaborations with Schmitt might be reexamined from a Symbolist perspective. 

PLN:How do you find La Tragédie de Salomé to be a special or noteworthy composition among the stage works of the period?  Do you see it as a pacesetting piece in some ways? 

The interior of the intimate Théâtre des Arts (now named Théâtre Hébertot), where Florent Schmitt’s ballet La Tragédie de Salomé was first mounted in 1907. An ensemble of just 20 musicians could be accommodated. The later version with expanded “post-Rimsky” musical forces was prepared by the composer in 1910 for both the concert hall and the ballet stage.

MVC: As many music-lovers well-know, Florent Schmitt was a master in creating new and exciting timbres, and La Tragédie de Salomé certainly demonstrates his strengths in that regard.  For this particular piece, Schmitt was limited in which instruments he could include in his orchestra because the auditorium at the Théâtre des Arts where La Tragédie premiered was so small (he later scored his concert suite for a much larger orchestra).   

Critics at the time were amazed by the variety of unique timbres he created with such a small ensemble. There is also the ostinato of highly dissonant block chords in “La Danse de la peur” (“La Danse de l’effroi” in the concert suite) which scholars like Martin Cooper have long claimed influenced Igor Stravinsky when he composed his Le Sacre du printemps.   

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

Stravinsky’s own letters prove he was instrumental in convincing Sergei Diaghilev to create a new ballet to the music of Schmitt’s La Tragédie concert suite for the 1913 season of the Ballets Russes.  So I definitely believe, based on the musical and archival evidence, that Schmitt influenced Stravinsky’s composition of Le Sacre in some way. 

I also think that it’s important to remember that La Tragédie de Salomé was originally intended to be a multimedia stage work; the combination of Schmitt’s music with Fuller’s dancing and mise-en-scène were bound to be highly influential on future dancers, directors, and stage designers.   

PLN: While it is performed fairly regularly in the concert hall, La Tragédie de Salomé has been staged only rarely since the 1950s.  I am aware of several Italian and Russian performances only.  Do you see the potential for the piece to be revived as a stage work? 

MVC: It would be very difficult to “revive” La Tragédie de Salomé as a stage work in an historically-informed way because the original choreography and mise-en-scène were so integral to it, and neither are in existence.  It would be impossible to recreate those elements.   

However, I see no reason why the music itself shouldn’t continue to inspire choreographers to create their own interpretations. Any performance that utilizes modern stage technology to create a multimedia spectacle would certainly be in the spirit of Fuller and Schmitt’s original.

The Ballets-Russes production of Florent Schmitt’s revised score to La Tragédie de Salomé (1913).

PLN: Please tell us a little about your background and how you “migrated” from being a performer to becoming a musicologist.  Where did you study and who were your mentors? 

MVC: I earned my B.A. in music and in history in 2004 from Austin College, a small liberal arts college in Sherman, TX; there I studied voice with Wayne Crannell and Sylvia Rivers.  I then pursued my M.A. in vocal performance (earned in 2006) at Texas Woman’s University in Denton, TX.  It was there in my vocal studies with Joan Wall that I began to include historical research into my preparation of operatic roles.   

Over time it became clear to me that what I enjoyed most in preparing a new piece for performance was the historical study – learning about the composer, his or her work, and the cultural context in which the music was originally created and performed. I eventually decided to turn my attention away from performance and towards musicology so that I could focus full-time on the historical study of music.   

I earned my Ph.D. in musicology from the University of North Texas in Denton, TX in 2016. The mentors I gained during that time, in particular Peter Mondelli, my dissertation advisor, and Clair Rowden, my co-editor on the Francophone Music Criticism “Salome” collection, remain invaluable to me. 

PLN: Tell us about the Francophone Music Criticism project, and in particular the “Salome” collection that has been built under its auspices.  What individuals or organizations have collaborated with you in this endeavor?

MVC: The Francophone Music Criticism network is an international group of scholars specializing in the music and culture of France during the “long” 19^th-century.  These scholars also share an interest in the musical press in France during this time period and work together, virtually and at conferences, to increase our knowledge of it.   

A key initiative of the network is the collection of transcriptions of French music criticism published between 1789 and 1914 into a searchable database that is open to all interested in learning about and working with these materials. The “Salome” collection, co-edited by Clair Rowden (Cardiff University) and myself, consists of transcriptions of contemporary articles related to the salomanie craze in fin-de-siècle France.   

The wide breadth of this topic means the collection is large and still growing. It includes articles related to many different musical and dramatic works inspired by the character of Salome including Schmitt’s La Tragédie de Salomé.  Our efforts have been supported by the Cardiff University Research Opportunities Programme and the FMC, particularly the network’s managers, Katharine Ellis (University of Bristol) and Mark Everist (University of Southampton), and its host institution, the Institute of Musical Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London. 

A newspaper clipping from the 1912 ballet production of La Tragédie de Salomé in Florent Schmitt’s new version of the score he prepared in 1910 — half the music, twice the musicians.

PLN: Besides your study of the stage works of France in the early 20th century, what other major musicological projects have you undertaken? 

Antoine Mariotte (1875-1944)

MVC: The topic of the stage works in France in the early 20^th century is so large and interdisciplinary, encompassing studies in literature, language, dance, history, aesthetics, philosophy, and theater arts, as well as music, that it has been and continues to be the focus of all my scholarly effort. 

My current research focuses on another Salome work with Symbolist overtones, Antoine Mariotte’s 1908 opera Salomé.  In particular I am exploring the nationalist rhetoric utilized by the musical press when writing about Mariotte’s opera, especially in comparisons between his opera and Strauss’s.  Both operas were performed in Paris in the spring of 1910 which led to some really colorful and intriguing criticism, to put it mildly.   

Ida Rubinstein, the Russian-Jewish dancer and dramatic actress with whom Florent Schmitt shared a particularly fruitful artistic partnership during the interwar years in Paris. (Portrait by Lado Gudiashvili, 1921.)

As a long-term project, I want to investigate musical works for the stage commissioned by Ida Rubinstein, a topic that will, happily, bring me back to Florent Schmitt. 

PLN: Are there any additional observations you would like to make about La Tragédie de Salomé, or Florent Schmitt in general?

MVC: My first exposure to Schmitt’s music was through La Tragédie de Salomé, and I am still very surprised that I had not learned of his compositions before that time.  The contrast of dynamism and delicacy in La Tragédie make it an immensely appealing and accessible work, and I believe it deserves to be included on more orchestral programs in either its ballet or suite form.   

That is also true for Schmitt’s work in general. Exposure to his music is not only pleasurable but also reveals to us the complex and highly varied world of French music at the fin de siècle, a fact often overshadowed by the (indisputably wonderful) works of Debussy, Fauré, and Ravel.  Florent Schmitt is one of a number of French composers of the early 20^th century whose music should be performed at least as often as theirs. 

______________________

As this interview amply illustrates, the scholarship of Megan Varvir Coe is very insightful, delving into aspects of Schmitt’s most famous composition in ways I doubt have been investigated ever before. As such, it represents essential new insights for anyone interested in the Salomé score — not least the conductors and choreographers who become inspired to produce the original full-length version of La Tragédie de Salomé.

Suddhaseel Sen

Musicologist, author and teacher Suddhaseel Sen comes to his appreciation of Western classical music from an interesting angle. A native of the Indian subcontinent, Dr. Sen made his first musical discoveries there, long before coming to the West for a range of music-related studies and research.

Today, Dr. Sen is back in India as Assistant Professor of Humanities at Bombay’s Indian Institute of Technology, even as he continues his extensive research into classical composers as diverse as Carl Maria von Weber, John Foulds, Emmanuel Chabrier, the Indian-born British composer Naresh Sohal, and the composer-poet Rabindranath Tagore.

Florent Schmitt has also been an abiding interest of Dr. Sen for many years — ever since discovering the composer’s music as a teenager in Calcutta. For Dr. Sen, it was “love at first hearing,” and his appreciation of Schmitt’s artistry has only deepened in the ensuing years.

I became acquainted with Dr. Sen through correspondence on the Florent Schmitt Website + Blog. As I began to learn more about his research on the cross-cultural currents between Indian and Western musicians, it struck me that Dr. Sen brings a fresh and unique perspective to the topic of “orientalism” in Western music — as well as Florent Schmitt’s prominent place among the composers who worked in that idiom.

Dr. Sen graciously agreed to be interviewed for this article, with topics touching on scholarly perspectives as well as his own personal response to Schmitt’s music. Highlights of the highly interesting discussion are presented below.

PLN: You are originally from India.  How did you become interested in Western classical music?  More specifically, how did you became acquainted with the music of Florent Schmitt in a region not known for offering great exposure to European classical music?

SS: My interest in Western music began in kindergarten in the city of Bhubaneswar, the capital of the Indian state of Orissa where I spent my early childhood. I do not know if the music I loved was “classical,” but it was instrumental music that an elderly Anglo-Indian musician, who was also our music teacher, played on the piano after teaching us nursery rhymes.  

Unlike the nursery rhymes, which bored me, the world of pure instrumental music, and especially of harmony, fascinated me no end. I would abandon everything to hear her play – sometimes even going to the back of the upright piano to hear the sounds and feel their reverberation against my cheeks as I pressed them against the soundboard.  It was the closest I could get to “touching” the music.  

I did not know then that the instrument I had fallen in love with was called the piano – but the music teacher, my parents (who are both very musical) and I felt strongly even then that I had to learn music.

When our family relocated to Calcutta (now Kolkata), I started studying Western music, though for practical reasons I had to give up the piano very early and take up the violin instead — which I didn’t like very much because I couldn’t play multiple notes on it at the same time! 

By my early teens, I had developed the habit of reading everything I could about my favorite composers in Grove [Dictionary of Music & Musicians] and devouring every new issue of Gramophone magazine from cover to cover at the British Council Library. India was just becoming a free market economy and the Internet was still years in the future, so Gramophone was the only source for the latest news in the world of Western classical music.  

Jacques Mercier’s world premiere recording of Florent Schmitt’s Salammbô (1991).

It was in Gramophone that I read the late Lionel Salter’s glowing reviews of Jacques Mercier’s recording of Schmitt’s Salammbô and one other Schmitt CD – I can’t recall whether it was the Marek Janowski recording of Salomé/Psalm 47 or the Leif Segerstam CD of Schmitt’s Second Symphony and three other orchestral works – both of which he shortlisted among his favorite Records of the Year. That’s how I got to know about Schmitt and his music. 

I should add that Bombay and Calcutta had a flourishing Western classical music scene for the better part of the twentieth century – and Bombay has still managed to retain quite a bit of it – so before I could shoot a request to the Calcutta branch of All India Radio to play Schmitt on their weekly “Classical Music at Your Request” program, someone else had already made a request for La Tragédie de Salomé, which aired two weeks before they broadcast Psalm 47 at my request.

PLN: Were there other compositions by Schmitt that you came to know?  What was your initial reaction to the music — what particularly “spoke” to you about Schmitt’s substance and style?

The Japanese release of Erato’s 1966 recording of Florent Schmitt’s Janiana, featuring Jean-Francois Paillard — the only recording to date of this highly interesting chamber symphony.

SS: I was a member of the Alliance Française library in Calcutta, and very soon I discovered in its collection recordings of Salomé (with Antonio de Almeida) and the Janiana Symphony (with Jean-François Paillard) before the authorities suddenly decided to shut down the library.  As a result, I did not get to hear Désiré Dondeyne’s recording of Dionysiaques, which the library also had in its collection. 

What spoke to me immediately about Schmitt’s music was its tremendous rhythmic energy and the remarkable mastery of his orchestration – “Dionysian” qualities indeed! I also loved the contrapuntal textures that often alternated with textures that one would call “Impressionist.”  

I have to admit that I have typically found the large-scale works of Schmitt more interesting than the miniatures (especially the “neoclassical” miniatures).

PLN: When did you first begin to discern Schmitt’s predilection to write music based on orientalist themes?  What drew you to these works?

SS: Most of Schmitt’s best-known compositions have orientalist themes, and are also usually orientalist in Edward Said’s sense in that they do tend to evoke the “Orient” as mysterious, violent, languorous and seductive. What drew me to them were the very innovative things Schmitt was doing regarding rhythm.

Florent Schmitt and Igor Stravinsky at a 1957 reception at the American Embassy in Paris. The composer Henri Dutilleux is between both men (back to camera).

It is a commonplace to state that Schmitt’s rhythmic innovations anticipated those of Igor Stravinsky in The Rite of Spring. But I think that Schmitt was often doing something quite different – something more inspired by Middle Eastern concepts of rhythm that also inform North Indian classical music.

I do not mean to say, of course, that Schmitt’s rhythms sound like those found in North Indian classical music — or in Middle Eastern music for that matter — but that the conceptual underpinnings of Schmitt’s rhythms have to be grounded in Middle Eastern music and not so much in Stravinsky.

There are places where the rhythms of Balkan music may have influenced both Schmitt and Stravinsky, but generally Schmitt’s rhythmic complexity springs from a different – and fundamentally non-Western – concept of rhythm, and occasionally of phrasings, too.

I began to realize this when I was trying to unpack what seemed to me were unusual features in Psalm 47 (without the aid of the score, of course, since in India those publications were very difficult to get hold of in those days).

PLN: In what ways do you see Schmitt’s orientalist music as different from other Parisian composers who were also drawn to Eastern themes in their compositions — people like Saint-Saens, Massenet, Delibes, Dukas and Roussel?  Conversely, in what ways might the orientalist compositions of Schmitt and these French composers “align”?

SS: The main difference is in rhythm. In many of the interviews you have conducted with orchestral musicians for the Florent Schmitt Website + Blog, one common difficulty they have mentioned about Schmitt is his challenging rhythms. Why would they appear difficult if they are so similar to Stravinsky’s — and when the latter’s music is so much a part of the repertoire?

Furthermore, this rhythmic complexity isn’t confined to his orientalist pieces alone; it is a fundamental part of his musical language, and can be found in pieces like the Piano Quintet and the Lied et Scherzo which do not seek to evoke the Orient.           

But there are points of alignment, too. Like Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Delilah, Schmitt’s Psalm 47 sees the Biblical lands as being part of the Orient, except that in Schmitt, it is the Israelites and not the Philistines who are “oriental.”  This is quite radical, I’d say.  

One could perhaps say the same for Massenet’s Hérodiade, but I have never gotten around to listening to that wonderful opera in its entirety, and I haven’t heard Le Roi de Lahore, so I can’t say much about similarities and contrasts with Massenet (who was one of Schmitt’s composition instructors at the Paris Conservatoire).  

Albert Roussel (1869-1937)

As for Albert Roussel, the score of an opera such as Padmâvatî shows Roussel portraying the Orient – India, in this case – in terms of music of violent energy and unusual rhythms on the one hand, and seductive interludes on the other, though I think that Roussel’s level of invention in that opera is considerably lower than that of Schmitt at his best.

But Roussel also strove for musical authenticity at some level, and he has the refreshingly vital Evocations, again based on his Indian impressions and partly on Indian musical material.  I can’t think of anything similar in Schmitt – am I missing any piece here?  

For me, Roussel was generally better when he was more concise and less overtly orientalist (I have in mind his Third Symphony and “Krishna” from Joueurs de flûte), while Schmitt’s best pieces are conceived on a large canvas.  

I have never found Paul Dukas’s La Péri to be either orientalist or influenced otherwise by non-European music — although I love that piece for other reasons. To me, the 5/4 variation in Istar by Vincent d’Indy sounds closer to Schmitt’s brand of orientalism in its adroit use of an unusual meter and in its colorful orchestration.  

Emmanuel Chabrier (1841-1894)

I do feel that one crucial influential piece behind Psalm 47 as well as a good deal of Debussy – in fact, much of fin-de-siècle French music overall – is the hugely-underrated La Sulamite of one of France’s greatest composers, Emmanuel Chabrier.

Schmitt adored Chabrier’s music while Debussy, Ravel, and Dukas were particularly fond of La Sulamite — echoes of which resonate in a number of their works and at multiple levels:  modal melody, harmonic planing, and exquisite orchestration.

To me, the exhilerating ending of Psalm 47 has its parallel in the ecstatic close of La Sulamite, written 20 years earlier. 

One element that appears to unite Schmitt with Saint-Saëns, Roussel and Delibes is their desire to incorporate non-Western musical elements into their works instead of peddling the same musical stereotypes, even when the non-musical dimensions of these works were conventionally “orientalist.”

PLN: When you consider the various orientalist compositions of Schmitt, are there particular ones that you consider to be more inspired?  In what ways do you see them as working more successfully in the orientalist idiom?

SS: For me, the best ones are Psalm 47 and La Tragédie de Salomé — the latter both in its original 1907 version and the 1910 reworking.  In addition to the strengths I have mentioned earlier about Schmitt’s music generally, his invention in these pieces is consistently inspired and memorable throughout.

I’d also add to this list Dionysiaques and the suites from Salammbô and Antoine et Cleôpatre. I find them more interesting than the popular Légende or little-known pieces such as Danse d’Abisag and Sélamlik.

PLN: Are there any particular compositions by Schmitt that you feel are unjustly neglected?  Which ones are the most in need of attention?

SS: I have been following the recordings of Prix de Rome compositions made by Hervé Niquet and Palazzetto Bru Zane with great interest, and I hope that Schmitt’s Prix de Rome competition cantatas will be recorded soon in that series.  Schmitt is at his best when he writes for a combination of voices and orchestra, so these promise to be good discoveries.  

I would also love to hear a new recording of Janiana which, in my opinion, is among Schmitt’s very best works, as well as the Symphonie concertante.   

Florent Schmitt’s biography by Catherine Lorent.

As for pieces that have yet to see their first commercial recordings, I would like to hear Danse des Devadasis and the Ramayana-inspired symphonic poem Combat de Rakshasas et délivrance de Sitâ. Grove still lists the latter erroneously as a lost work, but Catherine Lorent quotes from the score, both in her four-volume dissertation on Schmitt and in her Schmitt biography.  

Recordings of Schmitt’s two settings of Cantique de Simeon suggest that his late, religious a capella choral music may be well-worth investigating, and may be of better quality overall than some of the shorter, secular choral works — some of which, to my ears, are as inferior as anything composed by Erik Satie.  

Lastly, Schmitt’s setting of Nietzsche’s Chant de la Nuit, which hasn’t yet been recorded, along with the hauntingly beautiful Chant élégiaque for cello and orchestra, of which I have been able to trace only two recordings, are pieces that we should also hear.  

Broadly speaking, the better-known pieces by Florent Schmitt should all have multiple reference recordings, since different recordings of the same Schmitt piece tend to reveal individual details that no single interpretation can bring out.

PLN: While Florent Schmitt remains a relatively unknown composer, it is also true that he is better known today than in the past half-century, and more of his compositions have been recorded in recent years than ever before.  To what factors do you credit this renewal of interest in Schmitt’s music?

American conductor JoAnn Falletta, on the stage of Kleinhans Music Hall in Buffalo, NY with her scores to Florent Schmitt’s Antoine et Cléopâtre Suites.

SS: Having witnessed the Schmitt revival from a distance, and never having interacted with the classical music recording industry, I have no idea how that came about.  But I am happy that it did!  

I think that the commitment of record labels, especially Naxos/Marco Polo and Timpani, have helped, as has the advocacy of musicians such as Leslie De’Ath and the Invencia Piano Duo as well as the conductors JoAnn Falletta and Jacques Mercier.

PLN: You have had an interesting and varied career as a musicologist.  Please tell us highlights in terms of your schooling, training, and activities since receiving your doctorate.

SS: Actually, my doctorate is in English literature and I am still working on my musicology doctorate! But I have been working as a music arranger, composer, and teacher of music theory since high school days through my years as a doctoral student. I have diplomas in violin, theory, and piano from the Trinity College of Music, London, and the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music — both UK-based institutions.

I also published peer-reviewed articles on various musicological topics before enrolling in the doctoral program in musicology. As a recipient of an Oxford University Balzan Research Visitorship for the project “Towards a Global History of Music” under the directorship of the Balzan-prizewinning musicologist Reinhard Strohm, I’ve had the opportunity to interact with specialists, organize conferences, and conduct archival research in Europe.

PLN: To what degree has Florent Schmitt’s music been part of your musicological studies or activities?  Have you included Schmitt in any projects or symposia that you have led or participated in?

SS: I did present briefly about Schmitt in a conference at King’s College in 2014, and with funding from Balzan and Stanford University I spent quite some time at the Bibliothèque Nationale and the Mediathèque Musicale Mahler in Paris, investigating everything that was available on Schmitt.

Unfortunately, it appears that Schmitt did not have direct contact with Indian music or musicians, and so his music will not feature as prominently as I hoped it would in my dissertation. Then again, my understanding is that many of Schmitt’s letters and personal correspondence are in the possession of his descendants, so it will have to be some other musicologist who can examine at length the impact of Turkish, Middle Eastern, and Balkan music on Schmitt’s creative output.

It could well be that some Indian references may be found in those archives.  Moreover, since Schmitt was a great friend of Villa-Lobos and other Latin American composers, that angle needs to be explored as well.

Had I not returned to India instead of staying on in the West as a full-time musicologist, these are topics I would have loved to explore in greater depth. But there are topics on Indian music that I would love to do, too – and hopefully some of these projects will enable me to go back to composing and arranging music as well.

PLN: What projects are you currently working on, and what future activities on the horizon are particularly noteworthy?

SS: At present I’m devoting all my research time to working on my musicology dissertation, which is focused on cross-cultural influences and exchanges between Indian and Western musicians. Last month I participated in a roundtable at the 2017 ESRA Congress [European Shakespeare Research Association] on the topic of “Shakespeare in Music.”

Poet and composer Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941).

I am also working on several articles-in-progress on a range of artists. Articles that have been accepted for publication are ones on the music of Rabindranath Tagore (better known in the West as a poet), the English composer John Foulds, the Indian-born British composer Naresh Sohal, as well as the nineteenth-century Bengali poet Michael Madhusudan Datta.  

PLN: Do you have any longer-range plans for working on Schmitt-related projects, projects involving French music, or projects involving orientalist music in general?

SS: A substantial part of my dissertation is on music that is considered “orientalist” — with all of the attendant pejorative connotations! The articles that I’m working on, with eventual publication in mind, are mostly about how Western musicians negotiated cultural differences — with the composers covered being as diverse as Weber and Borodin.

There are also two articles on Chabrier that are in the works.

I would also hope that by 2020 — the 150^th year of Schmitt’s birth — there would be at least one scholarly book published in English that covers the composer’s life and works in extensive detail.

It is quite remarkable that not only Schmitt, but also composers as important as Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov, are inadequately represented in Anglophone musicological scholarship — even as tomes continue to be produced with numbing regularity on canonical composers who have already received more than enough extensive coverage in English.

PLN: When you think of the totality of Florent Schmitt’s artistic legacy, which one or two factors stand above all in terms of his contribution to the musical arts?

SS: I love Schmitt’s music and return to it very often.  But to give a balanced view, I have to conclude that he was a great but uneven composer.  For me, his best pieces were written before 1925 or thereabouts, though there are wonderful pieces that came later, too — albeit more sporadically. 

In this regard, I would say that Schmitt’s fate was the same as many composers born in the 1860s and 1870s:  They found their styles becoming old-fashioned even before the ink had dried on their manuscript paper, as Schmitt himself put it so wittily!   

Florent Schmitt was an eclectic in the best sense of the term – a critic with catholic tastes embracing Stravinsky, the Schoenberg of Pierrot Lunaire, as well as the music of younger composers such as Heitor Villa-Lobos, Olivier Messiaen, and Henri Dutilleux (the latter three being among his greatest admirers).  

On an artistic level, his eclecticism resulted in the creation of some very impressive large-scale orchestral, choral and chamber works, characterized by the presence of contrapuntal and Impressionist textures, rhythms of compelling originality, and a remarkable mastery of form. Not only Messiaen and Dutilleux but also Arthur Honegger seem to me to be profoundly influenced by his works.   

Finally, I shall always be on the lookout for new recordings of his music – especially ones featuring compositions recorded for the very first time.

______________________

Dr. Sen is hardly alone in his wish for more of Florent Schmitt’s artistic legacy to become available through recordings. Although many more of his compositions have been commercially recorded for the first time within the past two decades, approximately 25% of his output still awaits rediscovery.

Thankfully, with advocates like Dr. Sen making the case for Schmitt so eloquently, we can be very hopeful that more compositions will see the light of day, giving them the chance to make their mark with music-lovers everywhere.

Fabien Gabel

On August 19, 2017, French conductor Fabien Gabel led The Cleveland Orchestra in a concert of mainly French music at the Blossom Music Center, the orchestra’s summer home.

Not only is Maestro Gabel a tireless advocate for the music of his native country wherever he conducts around the world, the artistry of Florent Schmitt is one of his particular passions. So it was no surprise that on the Blossom program he included one of Schmitt’s early-career works — the symphonic etude Le Palais hanté, Opus 49 (The Haunted Palace).

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.

Composed between the years 1900 and 1904, the inspiration for Schmitt’s tone picture was Edgar Allan Poe’s 1839 poem The Haunted Palace, in the French translation by Stéphane Mallarmé.

Florent Schmitt shared billing on Maestro Gabel’s Blossom concert program with the two universally acknowledged “greats” of this period of French music: Debussy and Ravel.

It is always gratifying to see this trio of composers together on the same program, as this brings us “full circle” back to the first two decades of the 20^th century when Debussy, Ravel and Schmitt were commonly acknowledged as the three most important and influential French composers of the time.

The pavilion at Blossom Music Center, the summer home of The Cleveland Orchestra.

But mirroring the very different trajectories of Schmitt versus the two other composers in the century that would follow, the Debussy Ibéria and the Ravel Boléro that appeared on the August 19^th Blossom program are staples of The Cleveland Orchestra’s repertoire … whereas The Haunted Palace was being performed by TCO for the very first time in its history.

The program for The Cleveland Orchestra’s August 19, 2017 concert at Blossom Music Center, inscribed by conductor Fabien Gabel. The program featured Florent Schmitt’s Le Palais hanté along with music of Debussy and Ravel plus a Prokofiev piano concerto.

Having been fortunate to attend the concert along with 6,000+ other music-lovers, I was also able to visit briefly with Maestro Gabel backstage following the program, at which time I asked him about the Schmitt rarity he chose to present alongside the Debussy and Ravel works. Highlights from our discussion are presented below.

PLN: Le Palais hanté is a relatively early work by Florent Schmitt, completed in 1904 during his time at the Villa Medici following winning the Prix de Rome first prize for composition. Are there characteristics of the piece that you find particularly noteworthy, considering when it was composed?

FG:  Le Palais hanté is still a post-Romantic piece.  Even if it is a “study,” we feel the heritage of the traditional Lisztian tone poem.   But in some parts of the composition, the language is very modern.

Schmitt also uses important counterpoint in the score, which is actually quite unusual in French music.  Schmitt’s writing is “horizontal”!  The composition also has a classical form, which is in four parts including a spectacular coda.

The thematic language is very developed in this piece, and some passages are very innovative in terms of the orchestration.  There are also two or three passages which foretell what’s going to happen with Schmitt in his future compositions, and that’s very interesting, too.  

In the orchestration in particular, there are elements which give us distinct clues as to how he’s going to be composing later on — the way he writes for the strings and percussion, for instance.   

The bass clarinet we hear at the very beginning of the piece is also interesting. Schmitt does exactly the same thing with Rêves, a work he composed more than a decade later.  That piece starts the very same way.

PLN: Florent Schmitt is known for his colorful orchestration.  In this piece, are there any special moments where the orchestration is particularly effective? 

Fabien Gabel (center), photographed with two members of The Cleveland Orchestra’s brass section following the August 19, 2017 concert at Blossom Music Center.

FG: Yes, two or three passages are definitely interesting in terms of the orchestration.  In the exposition, for instance.  It’s pretty short, but it’s extremely virtuosic.  It is also complex – and quite difficult to comprehend when you read it for the first time. 

But each note has its place in the thematic material, and each timbre is extremely important.

The interaction between winds, strings and percussion is really impressive, I think.  The way Schmitt uses the glockenspiel is closer to Dukas than it is to Debussy; he probably learned from Dukas’ Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

After studying Le Palais hanté, I understand the evolution of the composer’s language leading to Rêves — a piece I adore.

PLN: The literary inspiration behind The Haunted Palace was a poem of the same name by Edgar Allan Poe in Stéphane Mallarmé’s translation. How successful do you think Schmitt was in bringing the poetry to life? 

FG: I don’t think what Schmitt is doing is a literal retelling of the poem, but the music definitely brings in all the craziness – the madness – of the poem.  That’s the inspiration, I think.

PLN: Interpretations of Le Palais hanté vary widely among the four commercial recordings made of this music to date – particularly with differences in how tempos are treated. What are your thoughts on what sort of approach to this music is the most valid?

FG: I think if a conductor is too dogmatic – following too exactly what is printed in the score – it is a little bit too safe, and not crazy enough!   

Several versions [Falletta and Tortelier] are well-crafted and very respectful to the score.  On the other hand, for those who interpret it very fast, it’s barely playable.

I’ve listened to the [Manuel] Rosenthal broadcast performance and the [Georges] Prêtre commercial recording. Both of these conductors were very strong personalities, and no doubt there is a lot of élan in those readings, which sound very impressive on the first audition.  But everything is very fast – too “approximate” – and the musicians cannot play all the notes.

Now that I’ve studied Le Palais hanté very carefully in terms of the dynamics and the tempo, it’s nice to find compromises between Schmitt’s markings in the score — while still keeping in all of this madness at the end of the piece.

The most recent performances in North America of Florent Schmitt’s Le Palais hanté are by JoAnn Falletta conducting the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra (in 2015, also making a recording of the work for NAXOS), and Fabien Gabel leading The Cleveland Orchestra (in 2017).

PLN: This concert was the first time The Cleveland Orchestra had ever performed Le Palais hanté. What was the reaction of the musicians to the score? 

FG: Their reaction was just like every other musician I know who encounters a piece by Schmitt, with any orchestra.  The first time they play the music, they don’t know where they are, or even how to make sense of it sometimes.  But then after they learn it, they like it very much.   

However, the string players in particular tell me that the way Schmitt writes for them is extremely difficult – and not that “convenient” for them.

PLN: Are there any additional observations you would like to share about this piece of music? 

FG: Only that Le Palais hanté is truly a great work – even if the composer called it just a “study.”  I definitely plan to present this piece again in the future – hopefully soon!

_________________

We share the same hope as Maestro Gabel. The Haunted Palace is the kind of composition that fairly bursts with musical ideas and wonderful sounds.  Moreover, if the reaction of the Blossom Music Center audience is any indicator, the piece should experience a positive reception wherever it is performed.

During the extraordinarily long musical career of Florent Schmitt — which spanned 70 years from the late 1880s to the late 1950s — the composer created works for many combinations of instruments.

Early on, there were vast swaths of piano music. Then came the sumptuous orchestral creations between 1900 and the onset of World War II.  Vocal music was a constant throughout Schmitt’s creative life as well.

But beginning around 1940 when he turned 70 years old, Schmitt embarked on a series of chamber compositions featuring various families of instruments.

From this late period of creativity there is a quartet for flutes and one for saxophones, a quartet for three trombones and tuba, and a sextet for clarinets, among other works.

The 1940s also produced two of Schmitt’s most important chamber works for strings: the String Trio, Opus 105 from 1946 and the String Quartet in G-sharp, Opus 112.  These were the first large-scale chamber works featuring stringed instruments to come from the composer’s pen since the Piano Quintet, created back in 1908.

The Calvet Quartet

The String Quartet is a big four-movement work, 40 minutes in duration.  Composed just after World War II, it was premiered by the Calvet Quartet in June 1948 at the Strasbourg Music Festival.  The score, which Schmitt dedicated to the Calvet Quartet, was published by Durand in 1949.

Marc Pincherle (1888-1974)

Writing at the time of the piece’s premiere, the musicologist, critic and violinist Marc Pincherle had these words of praise for Schmitt’s new composition:

“The star of the program was the first performance of Florent Schmitt’s Quartet for Strings, a monument not unlike the Quintet of his youth — by its intensity, its vast proportions, and the richness of its writing which is prone to ‘break the gates’ of chamber music to make the stringed instruments sound like an orchestra.”

Pincherle’s characterization is spot-on.

Without question, the String Quartet is one of Schmitt’s most substantive compositions.  It is also a very demanding work — both for performers to play and for audiences to encounter.  Personally, I have found it one of the most challenging of Schmitt’s works to get to know — and to understand completely.  Simply stated, this is no ordinary composition!

The Quartet is in four movements — each of them around 10 minutes in duration:

• I. Rêve (Dream)
• II. Jeu (Game)
• III. In memoriam
• IV. Élan

Perhaps the most “accessible” upon initial hearing is the second movement, with its playful phrases and ever-changing rhythms. But over time, the inventiveness and rich musical rewards of the other movements become clearly evident as well.

Like many of Schmitt’s compositions from this period, the harmonies, although rooted in traditional tonality, are chromatic much of the time, with many accidentals. There is an abundance of counterpoint as well — and as always with Schmitt, frequently changing time signatures.

In the third movement, titled In memoriam, Schmitt’s biographer Yves Hucher, sensed an homage to the composer’s teacher and mentor, Gabriel Fauré, writing, “It seems that the deep loss felt at the death of Gabriel Fauré is prevailing, and setting the tone.”

Even though Florent Schmitt’s String Quartet ranks up there with Debussy’s and Ravel’s (as well as Fauré’s late-career essay in the genre), his composition is barely known compared to these other creations by the great French composers of the era.  Indeed, Schmitt’s composition has been commercially recorded just once — in December 1956 by the Champeil Quartet at the Maison de la Mutualité in Paris.

The original EMI release of Florent Schmitt’s String Quartet, recorded by the Champeil Quartet (1956).

It’s an important document.  The artists making up this ensemble represented some of the most important string players of the time in Paris: Jean Champeil and Georges Belbon (violins), Maurice Husson (viola)  and Manuel Recasens (cello).  Moreover, the recording was made in the presence of the composer — by then in his mid-80s.

Originally released by Pathé-Marconi (EMI’s French subsidiary), the Champeil recording is considered a definitive interpretation. Such is its stellar reputation that the recording remains available today, more than 60 years later, as part of an EMI-Japan collection of French string quartet repertoire.

The Forgotten Records reissue (2010).

The recording is also available from Forgotten Records, coupled with the Champeil Quartet’s equally definitive account of the Ravel String Quartet.  Unlike the EMI-Japan issue which is a bit difficult to track down, the Forgotten Records release is easily accessible worldwide and can be ordered online.

For those wish to follow along with the score while listening, the Champeil Quartet recording has also been uploaded to YouTube, accompanied by the printed music.

Just a cursory glance at the score is all it takes to recognize music’s challenges for performers and interpreters.  But for anyone brave enough to do a “deep dive” into the music, I can’t think of a better way than watching the YouTube recording while viewing the score.

Speaking as someone who has “lived with” this piece for several decades now, I consider Florent Schmitt’s String Quartet to be a work of musical genius.  For lovers of chamber music — or any compositions in the early modern idiom for that matter — it is a masterpiece well-worth getting to know.

Steven Kruger

One of my favorite critics on the international classical music scene today is Steven Kruger, who is a reviewer for New York Arts and Fanfare magazine.  What is particularly special is Kruger’s way of tying his music criticism to broader cultural and artistic undercurrents, often making fresh and novel connections that go unnoticed by others.

Compared to most others in his field, Kruger seems to be a more well-rounded reviewer who draws on much more than simply the music before him. As a result, his reviews are not only especially insightful ones, they are quite simply a joy to read.

The 2015 NAXOS recording, reviewed by Steven Kruger.

Several years ago, the two of us struck up an acquaintance as a result of Kruger’s review in Fanfare magazine of the 2015 NAXOS recording of Florent Schmitt’s Antoine et Cléopâtre Suites, with JoAnn Falletta leading the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra.  We discovered that we had a mutual love of music from the late-romantic/early-modern period, which has resulted in many interesting and animated discussions subsequently.

Recently, I asked Steven Kruger to share his impressions about Florent Schmitt, and how he regards Schmitt’s music in comparison to other composers of the early 20^th century who were also active in Paris and France.  Kruger’s remarks – which are every bit as insightful as his music reviews – are presented below.

PLN: If I’m not mistaken, you became acquainted with Florent Schmitt’s music relatively later in life.  Tell us when that occurred, and how you happened to discover him.

SWK: Actually, it wasn’t that late in the game for an armchair musician. I was 23 years old in 1970 and serving as an assistant finance officer at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, PA, when I came across Antonio de Almeida’s RCA LP with the New Philharmonia Orchestra featuring French tone poems.  It was at the local shopping mall – a JCPenney, I think.

I had been a romantic-minded admirer of Ernest Chausson’s Symphony since my teens, and here at last was a chance to hear Chausson’s tone poem Viviane, which was on that album.  The LP also contained Henri Duparc’s Lénore as well as Florent Schmitt’s La Tragédie de Salomé. I had read about the other pieces but had never even heard of Schmitt!  

It’s probably worth mentioning that in those days, French music in record stores largely meant Debussy, Ravel, Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique and the Saint-Saëns Organ Symphony. Chausson was a daring choice. Vincent d’Indy was known only for his Symphony on a French Mountain Air. And Florent Schmitt?  He’d have been an unlikely find outside the big-city import bins.

PLN: What were the first compositions by Schmitt that you came to know?

SWK: It was that RCA LP — Almeida’s performance of La Tragédie de Salomé — which first captured me. Twenty-three is the perfect age of susceptibility for music dripping with sensuality and offering climaxes of apocalyptic violence!  

I recall that for about a year I played it nearly every day. I only wish I had known the even-better version by Paul Paray, available at the time on Mercury. But Almeida captured the creepy hyper-emotionality of Schmitt’s opening bars to perfection, and captivatingly evoked its throbbing, sickly-orgiastic atmosphere throughout.

PLN: I presume that you already had a good understanding of music of the late-romantic/early modern idiom when you first discovered Florent Schmitt.  What struck you about Schmitt’s artistry that differentiates him from his contemporaries?

SWK: The first and greatest thing I’ve noticed is a difference in sensuality.  

Among French composers by contrast, César Franck’s voluptuousness seems guilt-ridden and perfumed with church incense. Maurice Ravel’s music is ivory cool by-and-large, for all its evocation; did Ravel ever have a true romantic relationship, I wonder? 

Debussy’s music is affectionate and, as time passes, increasingly abstract.  

But Florent Schmitt seems to go in whole-hog for rich grandiosity. He’s not afraid of “sensuality-as-defilement.” Nor is he afraid to take rhythm and flesh it out in the face of Stravinsky, making it emotional – unlike Albert Roussel in this respect, who ran with it but stayed cool.

PLN: Schmitt’s musical education was entirely French and he spent his entire musical life in France, too.  With that in mind, in what ways does Schmitt strike you as a quintessentially “French” composer?  In what ways not so much?

SWK: French life is all about “the perfect moment.” It has a distilled, crystalline quality. And even though I sometimes think of Florent Schmitt as the French Respighi (Belkis, Queen of Sheba owing a lot to Schmitt’s Antony & Cleopatra), what keeps Schmitt “French” is that he never lapses into vulgarity.  

Even at its greatest complexity, Schmitt’s music is put together like a gleaming Swiss watch. But I suppose it is the very grandiosity he attempts which makes Schmitt a bit more eclectic and international-sounding than his contemporaries in France.

PLN: Of the compositions by Schmitt that you know, which ones do you find the most compelling or winsome?  What attributes about those particular pieces do you find so effective?

SWK: As you would expect, La Tragédie de Salomé is the romantic blockbuster around which I circle my Schmitt wagons.  Antony & Cleopatra is another noteworthy creation in that same genre, and when you compare that score to Respighi’s Belkis, it’s easy to see how Respighi fell in love with the exoticism and Middle Eastern curves of the music.

But I’m also especially fond of Schmitt’s gleaming, jewel-like Second Symphony [1958], which is written in a late, compressed style.  It is as close to Roussel and Samuel Barber in manner as Schmitt would ever approach.  

I love the result, but perhaps that symphony helps explain why Schmitt did not ultimately succeed so well with audiences. What I mean by that statement is this:  Scores by Schmitt are constantly turning on a dime — like film music, staring into the middle-distance for a while and then moving on.  Schmitt evokes every quivering-celesta “Ingrid Bergman moment.” But he is complex.

Schmitt’s attractive children’s ballet Le Petit elfe Ferme-l’oeil, for instance, features tintinnabulation à la Percy Grainger (think The Warriors) and bouncy climaxes straight out of Rimsky-Korsakov.  The ballet’s story purports to evoke a child’s dreams with the “Sandman’s” help. But one of the dreams features a pretty ripe mezzo, and another is a seeming meditation on nonsensical correspondence! Just how old is this child?

In the event, louche or not, loathing of bureaucracy is typically French, as is a certain kind of officious attitude, and a hatred for pots of glue and paperwork tends to pop up in the arts. Schmitt’s ballet does begin with a delightful “mouse festival” and certainly exhibits no  lack of imagination, but one comes away thinking of it as a pretty adult meditation on the child we still are. Its 40-minute length and lack of an unforgettable fairy-garden apotheosis probably ensures that it will never be as popular as Ravel’s Ma mère l’oye, but this is a joyous addition to the ballet repertory just the same.

A children’s book published at the same time Florent Schmitt’s ballet Le Petit elfe Ferme-l’oeil was staged in Paris in 1923. French- and English-language versions were printed.

Another feature of Florent Schmitt is that often he doesn’t set a rhythm and stay with it, like Roussel or Respighi do. I think his music has paid a price for that. It’s a beautifully constructed machine – as the best French music always is – but it has trouble getting somewhere. And you wonder what you’re missing “onscreen.”  

It’s too bad Florent Schmitt didn’t live into the Hitchcock era as a film composer; he would have given Bernard Herrmann a run for his money!

PLN: Some musicologists and historians have written about the influence Florent Schmitt had on the young Stravinsky, along with other artists such as Honegger, Messiaen and Dutilleux.  When you think about these composers, in what ways do you see Schmitt’s influence manifesting itself in the music they created?

SWK: Generally speaking, I don’t see much Schmitt in Stravinsky past Firebird, which has some Schmittian “swoopy” stuff in it – the fire itself.  

I see Honegger and Dutilleux going in similar directions at the outset, mostly following Stravinsky. The Dutilleux First Symphony is very Honeggerian, and both composers are spare and ultimately much more like Stravinsky than Schmitt.  Again though, unlike Schmitt, these composers keep their rhythms going.  

I see some of Schmitt’s influence in the gorgeousness of Messiaen’s approach to orchestration — and in some of his episodic concentration of mood.  

Ultimately, I do realize Schmitt is French, but I think his influences bubbled up in the same stew as Richard Strauss and Respighi.

PLN: During his life, Schmitt was generally considered nearly on the same plane as his fellow French composers Debussy and Ravel — only to be almost completely forgotten following his death.  To what do you attribute the resurgence of interest in his music that has occurred in the past 25 years?

SWK: It’s quite simple, really:  Dodecaphony failed totally.  So, we started to go back and look for neglected pieces to showcase. These days, Florent Schmitt has a fighting chance of being programmed. Thirty years ago, he would have lost out to Charles Wuorinen or the usual Orwellian “fifteen minutes of pluck-and-scratch hate” (inevitably placed at the beginning of concert programs so we wouldn’t leave before the “main event”).  

But digital sound and cheap streaming now make the “A” piece by a “B++” composer easily revivable. A look at Amazon shows a remarkable array of recently recorded symphonies by the likes of Sir Arnold Bax and Albéric Magnard – and anyone else you’d want to hear but never used to have the chance.  

It’s getting better!

PLN: You’ve had a very interesting and varied career, including in the arts management field.  Could you tell us briefly about those activities and how it informs your music criticism activities today?

Harold Shaw (1923-2014), founder and president of Shaw Concerts, which from 1969 to 1996 represented many classical musicians active on the world stage.

SWK: One day in 1975 I walked into Shaw Concerts in New York City to apply for a job translating French. In the course of my interview I happened to mention I knew something about conducting and asked if they could use me. I’d never been to a conservatory and played no instrument except the piano by ear.  

I don’t really read music, but somehow I walked out of that interview in charge of the musical life of 30 symphony conductors such as Sir Andrew Davis, Sir Neville Marriner, Robert Shaw, José Serebrier, Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos and Murry Sidlin.  

Only in America:  One week I’m standing across from Carnegie Hall in the cold, waiting to fool ushers at intermission with last week’s program rolled up and a plastic champagne glass in my pocket. The next, I’m sitting in an office negotiating the fate of my heroes. In some ways, it doesn’t get any better than that. 

Where I differed from my peers, perhaps, was not just that I came to music through recordings and always had an ear out for what I would want to hear, but I seemed to have a layman’s feel for what sort of music other laymen would want to hear. So I spent those years as an agent, persuading conductors to dare to perform Elgar and Vaughan Williams symphonies, for instance.  

I’m a great believer in the audience. And I benefitted from plenty of counter-examples, watching inbred one-upmanship going on among many critics and journalists. As a result, I stand ready to oppose fads — and the musical bandwagons created for their benefit and at the expense of the long-suffering patron in “Row J.”

PLN: What are your current activities as a critic?  Which media outlets and what sort of activities?

SWK: Being a resident of the Bay area, I have the luxury of reviewing the San Francisco Symphony when I want to, which I review for New York Arts, and of publishing reviews of classical music recordings there as well.  

I’m mainly a writer for Fanfare, where I review romantic and early-modern orchestral music primarily.  There is a lot of esoteric music reviewed in the publication, but I remain at heart an aging teenager who simply wants a more exciting Brahms symphony – or a performance of La Tragédie de Salomé impassioned enough to get the girl!

PLN: Any final thoughts about Florent Schmitt and his place in music history?

SWK: I think it’s fair to say that Schmitt didn’t leave us symphonies as accessible as Roussel’s or concerti as memorable as Ravel’s. He doesn’t come across as an iconic “great composer” writing in all genres.  Few do, actually; Brahms wrote no opera.  But some of the other composers managed to set a national style in ways Schmitt did not.  

As for the future, I think Schmitt’s reputation will rise further, ultimately finding its rightful place just beneath the undisputed French “greats.”

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As this interview amply illustrates, Steven Kruger is something many other critics are not – a person whose commentary compels you to think about composers and musicians in fresh and different ways – even as he challenges certain deep-seated perceptions or opinions people may hold. This makes his writings invariably interesting and insightful.

To read more of Kruger’s observations about music and musicians, you can subscribe to Fanfare magazine (fee charged) or check out his writings at New York Arts (a free subscription)

Violinist Beata Halska-Le Monnier and pianist Claudio Chaiquin perform the music of Florent Schmitt at the broadcast studies of France Musique (2016).

Even though he is justly famous for his highly colorful and opulent orchestrations, Florent Schmitt’s own instrument was the piano. And in his early years, much of what he composed were vast swaths of music for piano, as well as for voice with piano.

But roughly contemporaneous with his tenure at the Villa Medici in Rome (1900-04), Schmitt began to explore writing for a greater variety of solo instruments, groups of instruments, and full symphony orchestra.

In time, his output expanded even more with the publication of compositions featuring wind and brass instruments as well as violin and cello.

It is universally acknowledged that the most significant piece Schmitt composed for violin was his Sonate libre (1918-19), an expansive work that exceeds 30 minutes in duration.  Overshadowed by this towering sonata is a suite in three movements featuring the violin that Schmitt composed in 1947: Habeyssée, Op. 110.

This later-career work is more concise in its musical utterance when compared to the Sonate libre; taken together, the suite’s three movements clock in between 11 and 12 minutes in length, making it about one-third the length of the Sonate libre.

And what about the curious title of the piece — “Habeyssée”?

At first blush, it certainly looks and seems exotic — to such a degree that Schmitt’s biographer Yves Hucher speculated that the music was inspired by an Eastern legend.

However, I have found no definitive proof of this — nor of the existence of any specific programme or storyline for the music.

It’s when one looks closer that another explanation emerges. Habeyssée is actually a clever way of presenting the first three letters of the alphabet — ABC.

When we consider that the suite is in three movements marked simply “A”, “B” and “C”, along with Schmitt’s penchant for double meanings and employing puns in the titles of his compositions (there are numerous examples), this “ABC” seems to be a more probable explanation of the title than any elusive “Islamic lore.”

Besides, these are sounds that engage the listener as absolute music, without the need to rely on any special “narrative.”  Indeed, its three contrasting movements provide rich musical material, as follows:

A.  Assez animé — in the form of a scherzo, the first movement abounds with counterpoint melodies and syncopated rhythmic patterns.

B.  Une peu attardé — dreamy and pensive, this movement alternates passages of quiet beauty with waves of contrasting dynamics for a near-mesmerizing experience. To my ears, one of the main musical motifs appears to be a direct quotation from Schmitt’s choral work Fête de la lumière, composed a decade earlier for the Paris Exposition of 1937.

C.  Animé — the light, cheerful mood of this movement fairly crackles with playfulness, and it contains a good deal of Schmitt’s trademark rhythmic complexity and rapidly changing time signatures — often as many as three or four in a single bar of the score. There’s also a lyrical middle section … and then, with a final downward rush of notes, the movement is over in a flash.

French violinist Henri Merckel (1897-1969).

Just as in many of Florent Schmitt’s other works, the composer prepared two versions of Habeyssée — one for violin and piano and another for violin and orchestra.  I do not have information on when the violin/piano version was premiered, but we do have records that the orchestral version was first performed on March 12, 1948 by the eminent French violinist Henri Merckel, with the Lamoureux Concerts Orchestra conducted by Eugène Bigot.

Unfortunately, Habeyssée has not fared well in recordings.  To date, each version of the piece been commercially recorded just once.  But both remain available to us courtesy of NAXOS — one of several recording labels that have been particularly keen on providing exposure to Schmitt’s lesser-known compositions.

The violin/piano version of Habeyssée was recorded in February 2014 by violinist Beata Halska-Le Monnier and pianist Claudio Chaiquin, and was released by NAXOS on a recording featuring five violin/piano works by Schmitt that span more than a half-century of composition (1895 to 1947).

The Halska/Chaiquin interpretation is technically flawless. Not only that, the players bring out Schmitt’s rhythmic contrasts highly effectively, while also providing dreamy languorous melodic lines in the second movement of the piece in particular.  Adding to the recording’s attractions, the audio quality is satisfyingly full-bodied, giving listeners a front-row audio experience without sounding “in your face.”

The Halska/Chaiquin recording is available to hear on YouTube, thanks to Philippe Louis’ very fine music channel. In addition, I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing the two artists about how they investigated and prepared the repertoire for their recording, and their remarks can be found here.

The only commercial recording of the orchestral version of Habeyssée dates back several decades before, having been recorded in 1988 by violinist Hannele Segerstam along with the Rheinland-Pfalz Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Leif Segerstam.

Released by NAXOS’ Marco Polo imprint as part of a collection of four orchestral rarities by Schmitt, the recording has been in the catalogue continuously over the ensuing 30 years.

As expected, Schmitt’s orchestration of Habeyssée is highly colorful and adds further degrees of nuance and dimension to the piece.

To perform a direct comparison with the piano version above, you can listen to the orchestral version on YouTube here.

Hannele Segerstam

In my view, the quality of the Marco Polo recording isn’t quite up to the standard of the Halska/Chaiquin release, with the solo violin sounding rather thin in places and the sound of the orchestra coming across as a little tubby. Still, it is gratifying to have both versions of Habeyssée available to us.  And in the future, we can hope for more artists to turn their attentions to this fine violin suite.

Cliquez ici pour écouter l’interview de Schmitt/Charbonnier sur YouTube.

For readers of the Florent Schmitt Website + Blog, we are pleased to provide a link to a rare taped interview of the composer, done in 1954 when Schmitt was 84 years old.

Georges Charbonnier (1921-1990), long-time executive producer at France-Culture (ORTF).

The interview was conducted by Georges Charbonnier, an important executive producer at the French National Radio & Television in the 1950s and 1960s.

Charbonnier was particularly famous for his ability to ask insightful questions that resulted in some truly meaty and memorable responses. Among his interview subjects were such luminaries as the artist Marcel Duchamp, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and the composer Edgard Varèse, in addition to Florent Schmitt.

Thanks to the 1954 Charbonnier interview, we have the opportunity hear Florent Schmitt’s thoughts and perspectives on a variety of topics, expressed in the composer’s own words.

For example, Schmitt speaks about the rise of electronic music — then becoming the rage in France, Germany and other countries — as reflecting a kind of contemporary artistic “snobbism.” By contrast, in his view the true essence of music is in its ideas and emotions, rather than any scientific or technical aspects.

In his interview remarks, Schmitt also expresses a certain ambivalence about concert audiences. On the one hand, a sizable segment of the audience insists on hearing the same famous compositions by the same famous composers, instead of being open to less-familiar fare.

On the other hand, a smaller but highly vociferous group seems obsessed the avant-garde to the exclusion of nearly everything else in music, in Schmitt’s view.

Florent Schmitt, photographed in 1953 — one year before he was interviewed by Georges Charbonnier for the ORTF. (Photo: ©Lipnitzki/Roger-Viollet)

When Charbonnier asks Schmitt to define what “tradition” means in music, Schmitt responds by declaring that the term has lost its meaning — although he names several composers who he feels have been upholding a sense of tradition in music — such as Raymond Loucheur and Claude Delvincourt in France, Jean Absil in Belgium, Óscar Esplá in Spain, Goffredo Petrassi in Italy, Carlos Chávez in Mexico, and Serge Prokofiev in Russia.

When Charbonnier asks Schmitt to comment on how he feels about his own music and his favorite compositions among them, the composer has an interesting response. The pieces that interest him the most are the ones he is creating at any given moment in time, whereas little by little, he begins to feel more indifferent about his older compositions.

There is more material that Charbonnier covers in the 15-minute Schmitt interview, which will be fascinating to hear for those who can understand the French language. You can listen to the interview here, courtesy of YouTube.

But even if you don’t understand French, the interview is well-worth hearing in that it contains an excerpt from one of Florent Schmitt’s greatest late-career choral compositions, Cinq Chœurs en vingt minutes, composed in 1951.  We are treated to Schmitt’s chorus-and-orchestra version of the first of five pieces in the set:  “Le Ceresier” (“The Cherry Tree”), beginning at approximately minute marker 9:30.

We are indebted to two gentlemen for unearthing this rare interview and making it available to music lovers today: The Franco-American conductor David Grandis, music director of the Virginia Chamber Symphony and the College of William & Mary Symphony Orchestra; and Nicolas Southon, French musicologist, author, and specialist in the life and artistry of Francis Poulenc and Gabriel Fauré.

It is particularly special that the Charbonnier interview was captured just a few years before the end of Schmitt’s long and eventful life. It was a career that coincided with the most significant period in the history of French classical music — and indeed, within which Schmitt was intricately entwined.

Sakari Oramo

On October 27, 2017, Sakari Oramo and the BBC Symphony Orchestra presented Florent Schmitt’s Symphony No. 2, Opus 137 — the composer’s final orchestral work, which was completed in 1957 when Schmitt was 87 years old.

This performance at the Barbican in London was the first time the Symphony No. 2 had been presented in concert in Europe in nearly a dozen years. Its last outing had been in Paris, with Leonard Slatkin directing the Orchestre National de France.

Judging from the reviews of the concert, the piece went down well. Writing in the “Seen and Heard” column at MusicWeb International, music critic Alan Sanders reported that the BBC players delivered “a characterful, virtuosic performance” of the symphony.

BBC Symphony Orchestra players.

Sanders noted the “bouncy, intricate rhythms and pungent scoring” in the first movement, characterizing it as “highly individual in its style” and “very Gallic in mood.” He described the orchestration throughout the symphony as “brilliant,” and concluded that the symphony is “quite a piece for an octogenarian.”

Writing on the ClassicalSource website, music critic Colin Anderson reported that Schmitt’s symphony “exudes Gallic finesse as well as oodles of vibrancy … a notable ‘endgame’ piece that is also a genuine symphony and well-worth discovering.”

Regarding the first movement of the Symphony No. 2, Anderson wrote:

“It certainly made a big impression here — a testimony to the excellence of the performance — in, first off, music of elegance, martial determination and caprice, the opening movement also having a joyeux quality contrasted by an enticing lyrical side, led by an oboe, that is as bittersweet as it is rapturous.”

Anderson considers the second movement “the core of the work” — a characterization with which I completely agree. He described the movement as “beginning in the depths — soulful, introspective, yet with a big expressive heart … closing as if in the shadows of sunset (a filmic element is palpable in this haunting music).”

And over on the Bachtrack concert, opera and ballet review website, critic Dominic Lowe had this to say about the Symphony No. 2:

“Oramo made a compelling case for the piece; the quirky, rumbustious opening precisely played and the percussion writing … given full flavor. Oramo gave full focus to Schmitt’s game of contrasts, the chaotic and sometime jazz-inflected faster moments forcefully articulated against the slow, verdant playing of the orchestra in the lush slower points … The performance certainly left one with an enthusiasm to explore Schmitt’s work in more detail.”

Not all reviews were as universally positive. Peter Quantrill, writing at The Arts Desk, opined that Schmitt “tears up the symphonic rulebook and leaves the pieces to rain down like fluorescent confetti.”

In this characterization, Quantrill would seem to be in a distinct minority — at least when it comes to conductors. The American conductor JoAnn Falletta has written this about the Symphony No. 2:

“The structure of the symphony is strong and propulsive. It is an extraordinary work that manages to convey both seriousness and wit, in orchestral garb that is quintessential Florent Schmitt — shimmering with the glorious instrumentation that is one of his hallmarks.  The second movement in particular is one of the most emotionally moving expressions from any composer.”

Sakari Oramo obviously considered the piece worthy enough to resurrect for London audiences, stating in a BBC Radio 3 interview:

“It encompasses all of the different musical expressions and styles that he’d used over almost eight decades of composing. On the other hand, it’s far from being an ‘old man’s piece.’  It is really exuberant — very, very inventive, and incredibly busy for everyone.”

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

Personally, every conductor I’ve met who knows Schmitt’s Symphony No. 2 considers it to be a masterpiece … and I know at least four of them who would dearly love to present this music in concert.  One is French conductor Fabien Gabel, who stated in a recent interview:

“If there is an additional Schmitt composition that I would really like to present to the public, it is his Second Symphony.  Dating from 1957, it’s one of his very last works — a breathtaking piece positively brimming with creativity, freshness and modernity.  That it came from the pen of a composer who was well past the age of 85 is absolutely incredible.”

One of the challenges with programming Schmitt’s Symphony — beyond its relative obscurity among audiences and orchestra managements alike — is the fact that a virtuoso orchestra is needed to do the composition full justice.  Happily, consummate virtuosity was on order in the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s presentation of the symphony last week.

The 1988 Segerstam recording of Florent Schmitt’s Symphony No. 2.

Going beyond the overall polish of the presentation, I found that Sakari Oramo’s interpretation was demonstrably superior to the three recordings of the music that we have available for comparison:  the 1958 premiere live performance led by Charles Munch (Euromuses EURM 2009); a 1960 ORTF radio broadcast performance conducted by Jean Martinon (Forgotten Records FR 972), and a 1988 commercial recording led by Leif Segerstam (NAXOS/Marco Polo 8.223689).

Compared to these three recordings — all of which have their strong points) — I find that Maestro Oramo gives the music more room to breathe, and the inner voicings are much better heard. To my ears, Oramo’s generally broader tempos seem to be a very good interpretive choice as well.

But you can judge for yourself, because BBC Radio 3 has made the entire October 27th concert available to hear online from now until the end of November. I urge you to take this chance to listen to the music .  (You’ll likely find that listening to it several times will increase your appreciation of the wealth of musical invention that is inherent in Schmitt’s score.)

Beyond hearing a broadcast rendition of the music, nothing beats being present at the concert and experiencing the performance in person. And that was the case for one of the faithful readers of the Florent Schmitt Website + Blog.  British architectural expert and heritage consultant Edmund Harris was able to attend last week’s concert.

Just as he was able to provide an “eyewitness report” from the BBC Symphony’s October 2016 presentation of Florent Schmitt’s incidental music to Antoine et Cléopâtre (presented together with actors from Shakespeare’s Globe), Harris has again shared his perspectives about this latest concert for the benefit of readers.  His remarks are presented below:

PLN: I know you are quite familiar with the music of Florent Schmitt, but prior to attending the BBC concert of the Symphony No. 2, did you know this particular piece by the composer?

EH: Not enormously, I have to admit. Before setting off to the Barbican, I listened to the Segerstam recording while at work to refresh my memory of how the symphony goes, and to give me something to judge it against.  

I had purchased that CD back in 2011 when I first got interested in Schmitt’s music, but have to confess I don’t dust it off all that often.  

In any case though, listening to Schmitt when you’re doing something else, however intellectually undemanding, isn’t a great idea; it’s music that requires your full attention! 

PLN: Several musicologists have noted that the Symphony No. 2 doesn’t sound like the work of a composer who was in his late 80s when it was created. Instead, they contend that it sounds like a youthful composition.  Would you agree with this assessment? 

Florent Schmitt and Ralph Vaughan Williams, pictured together in London in 1957.

EH: I would agree with those musicologists. Compare Schmitt’s symphony with, say, the changing emotional weather in the symphonies of Vaughan Williams (I’m choosing him because I know the symphonies well, and also because he was a friend and contemporary of Schmitt).  

The first two Vaughan Williams symphonies are confident, fairly optimistic pieces by a composer who’s enjoying the fact that he’s finally found the music language which had taken him until his 30s to develop.  

But by the time we get to the 9th Symphony (written at the end of his life), we’ve entered a very different world: bleak, pessimistic, resigned (although you do get that vivid flash of what seems to me to be some sort of transfiguration right at the end).  

There’s nothing like that with the Schmitt 2nd Symphony. Although recognizably something that’s grown out of late Romanticism, the musical language is still fresh. There’s a great deal of energy driving Schmitt to push it in different directions, and to find out what else it can do.  

There’s a lot of explosive energy in the Symphony, too, which just isn’t what you’d expect from a composer of his age. Some composers wear their heart on their sleeve and you can chart their inner life through their music — including an onset of weariness and failing strength as the end of their life approaches (consider Britten’s 3^rd Quartet, or late Shostakovich generally).  

I just don’t think Schmitt was one of them. It wasn’t in his nature, and something of it comes across in photographs of him towards the end of his life – spry, dapper, and lively in a way that belies his age. 

PLN: What are your thoughts about each of the three movements of the Symphony? What aspects of each did you find particular noteworthy or memorable?

EH: In the first movement, there’s a huge amount of musical material going, and a lot to try and take on board. It’s not an immediately ingratiating sound world; the music sounds jerky at first — especially with the glissando-like figures — until you get onto Schmitt’s wavelength.  

The opening passages are arresting, especially the way that the themes are thrown around the orchestra. A lot of the orchestral coloration here is dark — reinforced by the way Schmitt uses the low brass. 

The second movement is the one that really made me wish I knew the music better when I was at the concert. The movement unfolds slowly. Schmitt knows exactly where the music’s going, but to appreciate that you need to know it well and to be able to follow the argument. 

In the third and final movement Schmitt turns the temperature back up, and the explosive orchestral outbursts and rhythmic vivacity are really invigorating — especially that three-note signature. You also hear some of the material from the opening of the first movement brought back.  The orchestra was really on fire; I was glad I was sitting as far back as I was in the dress circle, because the sonics were loud!

The BBC Symphony Orchestra program featuring Florent Schmitt’s Symphony No. 2.

PLN: When you compare the Symphony No. 2 to the better-known orchestral works of Schmitt — most of which date from 40 or 50 years before the later piece was composed — in what ways do you sense a continuity in the style or flavor of the music? In what ways is it different?

EH: As a late composition, it’s much more angular, spiky music with all of the sudden changes of meter. Even though Schmitt uses a fairly big orchestra, the orchestration is leaner than what we typically hear in other large-scale works by him. 

Here, every section tells. Nothing is there just for the sake of instrumental color, and it doesn’t glitter in quite the same way as in the composer’s earlier works. There isn’t the same plush, rich and opulent “cosmic” sound that you hear in pieces like Psalm 47, or the tender lyricism of some of the passages in Le Petit elfe Ferme-l’oeil. 

PLN: How about the style of this symphony as compared to the music of other composers?  Were you reminded of other composers — or perhaps other specific pieces of music?

EH: That’s an interesting question. I was thinking to myself as I listened to the performance, “Suppose I switched on Radio 3, not knowing what was programmed, and came across this piece by chance — would I guess who had written this piece and when?”  

And I concluded that I probably wouldn’t be able to guess. I’d assume it was written in the 20^th century, but I don’t think I’d place it in the 1950s and I don’t think I’d necessarily be able to tell that it was French, either. It’s highly individual stuff.  

It does remind me ever so slightly of some of Havergal Brian’s later symphonies — especially the slightly clunky rhythms and low brass. But I could never say, if someone asked me to describe it, “Oh, think a cross between so-and-so and so-and-so.” 

PLN: How would you rate the performance of the BBC Symphony Orchestra musicians — all of whom were likely playing this music for the very first time?

EH: To me, it seemed that they took a little while to hit their stride.  I’m not sure all of the musicians were totally at ease initially — but to be fair to them, I don’t think this is music that flows naturally, and it’s clear that its execution requires a great deal of skill and concentration.  

But once they were over that, it went very well. The energy and bite of the final movement in particular were really gripping. 

PLN: What was the audience reaction to the Symphony?  Did you get the sense that they were “with” the performance, or not particularly engaged with it? 

EH: There was generous applause from the audience — which is about as much as you can expect when it’s a piece of music in a relatively modern idiom that few have ever heard before.  I imagine there were at least a few people in the audience who were there specifically to hear the Schmitt in concert, but I’m not sure how numerous we were!  

Given that the two concertante works [Ravel and Franck with pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet] had to be done in succession, I suppose there was no other way you could have arranged the evening’s programming, but I think ideally the piece shouldn’t have been first on the program – it would have helped if there had been something to warm up the audience.  

PLN: Based on your experience in this concert, do you think this symphony would make an effective piece for other conductors and orchestras to program?

EH: It should do.  It’s a cracking piece, it’s a chance to show off orchestral virtuosity, and it’s long enough to fill up half of a concert program.  

I imagine you’d need to choose the rest of the program carefully, though — and I suspect the choice of the other musical items — all of which must have been well-familiar to the BBC Symphony — was a deliberate one in this case.  

The big problem is that unfortunately, Schmitt still suffers from a lack of name recognition here in the UK, and I imagine in the USA also. I get the impression that with the exception of warhorses like La Mer or Boléro, late 19^th and early 20^th century French music in general doesn’t tend to draw big audiences.  

Speaking locally, tastes in London seem to be awfully skewed towards Germany and Russia. By contrast, turnout was poor for an excellent concert during this season’s Proms, presented by François-Xavier Roth and ‘Les Siècles’ that featured 19^th century French music. All of it was very approachable stuff [Lalo, Delibes, Franck, Saint-Saëns], and all of it was thoroughly enjoyable. I’m really at a loss to understand why more people didn’t come to it.

Schmitt is a bit more challenging than that — but no more than Shostakovich. And Shostakovich seems to be guaranteed to fill concert halls these days.  

I really wish we heard Schmitt more often (also Roussel, Koechlin, the “non-pops’” Milhaud – the list could be extended a long way), but I’m not holding my breath waiting for those days to arrive.

PLN: You aren’t a professional musician, but music is a very important part of your life and has seeped into your career at times, as well.  Please bring us up to date on your music-related activities since being interviewed last by the Florent Schmitt Website + Blog.

EH: Music is hugely, hugely important, yes! There were some excellent concerts at the Proms this year. Besides the Les Siècles performance, Gurre-Lieder and The Damnation of Faust stick in my mind, as does a really interesting concert of Czech music illustrating how the Hussite chorale used by Smetana in “Tábor” from Má Vlast has been used by other Czech composers as a badge of national identity.  

Also, thanks to Vladimir Jurowski’s inventive and original programming at the London Philharmonic, there have been some very interesting concerts at the South Bank. A recent highlight was a concert performance of Enescu’s complete Oedipe which was extremely impressive.  So, although a lot of concert programming in London is somewhat unadventurous, there have been some glorious exceptions.  

I’m also exploring new music all the time on the Internet, thanks to the huge amount of material that kind people have uploaded to YouTube. Recently I’ve been further exploring the music of Marius Constant – a wonderful composer who is badly under-recorded and under-appreciated. His score for the ballet Éloge de la folie has been a revelation and I’d love to know more about it.  

Because I’ve now taken a new professional position in my field, I am leaving London for Canterbury. I have to say that despite all the frustrations of this city, I’m going to miss the London music scene a great deal when I move. But one compensation of living in a cathedral city is that I’ll have plenty of good choral music to enjoy! 

PLN: Are there any other observations you would like to share about Florent Schmitt’s music? 

EH: My main hope is that record companies will pay him more attention! My heart sinks when I see yet another release of a Mahler or Sibelius symphony cycle, although I can understand the desire of conductors to tackle these works and to show their mettle that way.  

Let me say straightaway that I’m suspicious of attempts to play up as “forgotten geniuses” composers who really are marginal figures — as happens with a lot of 20^th century English minor masters, for example.  

But Florent Schmitt is in a different league than that, and I’m sure it’s a lack of decent recordings of all but a few of his pieces that has prevented him getting his due. It staggers me that there are still no decent modern recordings of something as impressive as the Janiana string symphony. Let’s hope that gets put right soon!

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We can only echo Edmund Harris’ wish. We’re grateful for the news that the Chandos label is making the first new commercial recording in more than a quarter-century of Florent Schmitt’s Symphony No. 2 — and that it features Sakari Oramo and the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

We hope it will be the first of more new recordings of Schmitt’s lesser-known compositions that become available.

Their designation of Paul Paray’s classic reading with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra as the best overall recording is echoed by France-Musique’s listener audience.

As part of its popular broadcast series La Tribune des critiques de disques, in October 2017 the French national public radio channel France-Musique aired a two-hour program in which a roundtable panel of eminent French music critics — Séverine Garnier, Emmanuelle Giuliani and Christian Merlin — evaluated six currently available recordings of Florent Schmitt’s most famous composition.

The 1910 version of Schmitt’s ballet La Tragédie de Salomé, Opus 50 has been fortunate in both the quantity and quality of its recordings — more than 15 of them, beginning in the early 1930s and continuing up to the present day.

Amazingly, today most those recordings remain available in CD or download form. Six of them were selected for comparative listening by the panel:

• Paul Paray/Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Mercury (1958)
• Jean Martinon/Orchestre National de la Radio-Télévision Française, EMI (1972)
• Marek Janowski/Orchestre National de France, Erato (1988)
• Thierry Fischer/BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Hyperion (2006)
• Sylvain Cambreling/Southwest German Radio Symphony (Baden-Baden u. Freiburg), Hänssler (2007)
• Yan-Pascal Tortelier/Sao Paulo Symphony Orchestra, Chandos (2010)

The program, moderated by France-Musique broadcaster Jérémie Rousseau, included generous audio excerpts presented “anonymously,” followed by reactions and opinions solicited from the panel by Mr. Rousseau.

Among the reactions to the six recordings were the following observations:

Cambreling/Hänssler: The ballet’s dark Prélude exudes almost-metaphysical dimensions, and the conductor’s incisive and authoritarian gestures never release the tension.  It is a dark and dramatic vision of the score — even in moments which would have benefitted from more lightness and sensuality.

Fischer/Hyperion: While emphasizing the “modernisms” in the score, there is plenty of drama in certain places, while in others — particularly in the Enchantments sur la mer section — the interpretation devolves into caricature of “orientalism.”  Neither is the orchestral playing particularly impressive.

Janowski/Erato:  Fuzzy orchestral tuttis, dull solos and a persistent lack of personality characterize this thoroughly prosaic reading.  Florent Schmitt’s orchestral magic is suppressed rather than brought forth in this interpretation.

Martinon/EMI: The interpretation offers a “too sequential”  reading of Schmitt’s composition, and the atmospherics aren’t particularly seductive.

Paray/Mercury: In sparkling sound, this recording exults in the jewels of Florent Schmitt’s score.  Following a moiré-colored Prélude, the Danse des perles is playful, menacing, and iridescent in its opalescent hues.  The Enchantments sur la mer is full of color, followed by a Dionysian Danse des éclairs and the concluding Danse de l’effroi.  A magnificent sense of the story is conveyed in this recording, which emerges as the essential one for anyone discovering this masterpiece for the first time.

Tortelier/Chandos: The musicians exude a certain languor, and the overall orchestral ensemble is achieved at the expense of clarity and drama.  It is a wholly predictable “standardized” interpretation — no more and no less.

France-Musique has made the two-hour program available online. To listen to the entire broadcast — including the lively repartee and insightful comments made by the panel members, you can click here.

Incidentally, France-Musique also invited listeners to vote for their own personal favorite among the six recordings comparatively reviewed — and by a substantial margin these music-lovers agreed with the panelists. The Paray recording received 44% of the audience votes, with the Cambreling recording a distant runner-up at 25%.

That the Paray recording would be given such accolades by musical scholars is particularly fitting, I think, in that it was the first stereo recording made of Schmitt’s score.  As a poignant side note, Maestro Paray was able to personally present a copy of the newly released recording to Schmitt at his home St-Cloud in the summer of 1958, only a few weeks before the composer’s death.

A Grand Prix du Disque winner, the Paray recording has stayed in the catalogue nearly continuously ever since its release — and certainly merits its continuing praise even after six decades.

Recently, the online magazine MusicWeb International published a feature article about the French recording label Timpani Records and its commitment to bringing out recordings of the music of Florent Schmitt.

Encompassing a range of works including solo piano, chamber music, vocal and orchestral selections, this enterprising label has released six recordings devoted exclusively to Schmitt’s compositions — including several important world premiere offerings.

The author of the full-length feature article was Rob Barnett, a British-based contributing writer at MusicWeb International who for more than a decade also served as the website’s music review editor.

I was impressed with the article, which exhibited a solid understanding of Florent Schmitt’s music as well as obvious affection for the composer’s artistry. Through the intercession of the American conductor JoAnn Falletta, I made contact with Mr. Barnett and was able to interview him about his long-time interest in Schmitt’s music. Highlights of our discussion are presented below:

PLN: How did you first become familiar with the music of Florent Schmitt?  Which pieces did you encounter first?

RB: It would have been in about 1979, when I purchased the famous Jean Martinon/Voix de son Maitre recording of Psaume XLVII and La Tragédie de Salomé at a second-hand record shop just outside Bristol. Prior to that, I am fairly sure I heard the occasional Schmitt work broadcast on BBC Radio 3’s morning record program.  

Members of the Music Group of London, which performed a studio broadcast of Florent Schmitt’s 1908 Piano Quintet on BBC Radio in June 1989.

I also recorded a studio broadcast ‘on spec’ of Schmitt’s huge Piano Quintet. The performers were the Music Group of London. It was certainly an adventurous thing for Radio 3 to put on the air back in 1989.

I had cause to play that cassette again to transfer it to CD-R recently, and the performance is every bit as good as the Werner Bärtschi first commercial recording [on the Accord label]. The only downside was that I’d had to flip the C-90 cassette over to accommodate the full work — and lost some of the music in the process!

PLN: When you first heard Schmitt’s music, what struck you in particular?  What aspects of his music jumped out at you as particularly interesting or noteworthy?

Florent Schmitt and Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958), photographed in London in 1956.

RB: What captivated me was the sheer unbridled barbaric magnificence of Psalm XLVII — but the decisive factor was the mysterious and almost nonchalant melody that weaves in and out of The Tragedy of Salome. It manages simultaneously to brood, and to seduce the listener. It’s potently atmospheric in much the same way as Griffes’ Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan, Bax’s Northern Ballad No. 2 and Balakirev’s Tamara.  

It was about this time that I bought a “pictorial biography” of Ralph Vaughan Williams and was surprised (not sure why, given that RVW had studied with Ravel) to find a picture of Vaughan Williams alongside his friend Schmitt. It’s a pity we do not have access to their letters.

PLN: How would you characterize Florent Schmitt’s style of composition — in comparison with other French composers of his time, as well as classical music in general? 

RB: Florent Schmitt strikes me as an impressionistic melodist with a lavish orchestral palette. Clearly, he enjoys “high drama,” and that rescues him from any tendency towards the static or a mere wash of sound.  

Florent Schmitt with composer Louis Aubert (1877-1968), photographed at the ORTF’s studios in Paris in the early 1950s.

Schmitt is closer to Ravel than he is to Debussy. He also has a kinship, I think, to another master French composer, Louis Aubert — particularly in his orchestral work Le Tombeau de Chateaubriand, to my mind one of the most seductive marine works in the classical repertoire.

PLN: What do you consider to be special about Florent Schmitt and his place in French music?  Are there things that he was doing in his music that were unique among his French compatriots?

RB: It’s difficult to pin this down, actually. Certainly, Schmitt had a taste for the exotic — a little like his contemporary and champion Henri Tomasi (another composer whose music we need to hear more often).  

But until we can hear all that Schmitt created, it is difficult to give a verdict — and I am not sure that one is required. It is more than enough that his music draws people (it certainly draws me) to hear his compositions again, and to want to hear more and more.  

It’s such a pity that quite a few works seem to be inaccessible, even today.

PLN: Are there certain compositions by Florent Schmitt that are particular favorites of yours? 

La Tragédie de Salomé — in both of its versions — is compelling. Maybe the clue is in Schmitt’s adoption of the word ‘tragedy’ in the title. The juxtaposing of tragedy and beauty is a powerful one, and one that seems to be in the warp and weft of this piece.

It’s a universal truth that is also embraced by many British composers including Finzi, Hadley and Bax — especially Bax who celebrates evanescent beauty, but always with a sense that it is fleeting and crumbling away almost as soon as it is embraced.

There’s a sense of that in much of Schmitt, I think.

André Navarra

I am also a particular fan of the Introït, récit et congé for cello and orchestra. What won me round to this work was a utterly “possessed” aircheck performance by the work’s dedicatee, the cellist André Navarra, which I was privileged to hear courtesy of a French friend. It was played by Navarra with a sort of “Mravinsky-meets-Golovanov” volcanic fury that the music deserves.

PLN: For someone who might be coming to Florent Schmitt’s music for the first time, which compositions would you recommend that they sample first?

RB: That’s easy: Go for the Tragedy of Salome — for all the reasons mentioned above.

PLN: The music of Florent Schmitt has been undergoing a renaissance in recent years.  To what do you attribute this development?

RB: Since the mid-1970s, tonal and melodic music has been making a comeback after the music establishment’s self-destructive infatuation with atonality.

The success on record (if not in live concerts) of Bax, Lloyd, Moeran, Nystroem, Schoeck, Ivanovs, Hovhaness and many others is some measure of this. Perhaps things will change back in years to come, but for now Schmitt’s music “makes hay.”

Schmitt always strikes me as an intelligent and sincere composer. He is not a showman, nor does he go for “easy victories.” I suspect that his audiences will rarely be as numerous as those for Ravel or Debussy. He does tend to suffer because he seems never to have had a short ‘hit’ (like Ravel’s La Valse and Pavane for a Dead Princess or Satie’s famous Gymnopédie).

That said, for those in sympathy with the masterful creation of works that represent a meeting-place between melody and brooding atmospherics, Schmitt’s music is one of the finest places to go.

PLN: Have you had opportunities to see any of Florent Schmitt’s music in concert? 

RB: Sad to relate, I have never heard any Schmitt compositions in concert; my acquaintance has only ever been with recordings or broadcasts. I continue to value hearing his music on CD and digitally.

It always amuses me that while others are enjoying the latest rap and rock music thundering away in their cars, I am listening to Schmitt, Bax, Arnold, Schmidt, Nystroem and a host of others!

PLN: You have been a music critic for quite a few years now.  Briefly describe your background in music and how you came to be a critic.

RB:   have no technical musical training and cannot play an instrument. I do not come from a musical family, although my father had a few classical LPs and relished the mainstream of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert.

That said, I did not come to classical music via Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. What has become a dominant theme since my early 20s dates back to my years in technical college in 1969-71. Critically, this involved a friend’s record collection which centered on Janacek, Stravinsky, Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, Martinu, Bax and Vaughan Williams.

Colston Hall in Bristol.

This developed further in two ways during my years studying for a law degree at Bristol Polytechnic during 1971-75. Firstly, I started to go to concerts at Bristol’s Colston Hall — usually the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra.

Secondly, this university town had a good record library and was at that time not short of second-hand record and book shops. I would spend far too much time riffling through their LP stocks and occasionally buying. (This was in the days when you could live very cheaply as a student, and full subsistence grants were available.)

Such knowledge as I gained came from a delight in listening to music, linkages with poetry, novels and even sci-fi, as well as a questing attitude. Couple this with many years of miraculous discovery (and some disappointments) through exchanging recordings with contacts and friends in the UK, USA and Scandinavia. This was supplemented by avidly listening to BBC Radio 3 and eagerly sifting through Radio Times every week.

I have also devoured the content of such magazines as Records and Recordings (long defunct), Gramophone (now a very different voice from its glory days in the 1960s and 1970s) and Fanfare (still going strong and still well-worth reading). 

I am a life member of British Music Society (BMS) and have been so since 1981. I was editor of the quarterly BMS Journal from 1995 to 2012. (I should stress that, as may be obvious, my interests are not exclusively in British music.) 

In 1997 I was approached by Dr. Len Mullenger, the Founder of MusicWeb International, to be his volunteer Classical Editor. For my money, Len is one of the unsung heroes of the classical music world. His dedication and diplomacy in channelling top-quality voluntary writing for a site that remains free-access should have been cheered to the rafters years ago. I owe him a great deal, musically speaking.  

My own part, balancing family life and work in the legal department of a local authority involved devoting many midnight and early-morning hours to editing the site’s CD reviews and writing my own. This also gave me access to review copies of classical CDs.

The editing side largely came to an end earlier this year after almost two decades. I am still the site’s Founding Editor, but this major change of emphasis has allowed me to review more discs and the occasional DVD. 

I relish the challenge of attempting to bridge the vast gap between words and music. If I fail, then at least I do try — if crudely — to encourage people to make the same journey of discovery that I have made.

Florent Schmitt is part of that evangelical mission as much as Bantock, Nystroem, Hovhaness, Dale, Bax, Louis Glass and so many others.

PLN: In addition to your activities at MusicWeb International, what other activities are you involved with on the music scene?

RB: Retirement from professional employment in 2013 has opened up time for many long-cherished projects and activities. Who knows — I might even complete some of them!

I’m pleased to be an adviser in an informal way on the Lyrita Recorded Edition project, which has laid paths for my interest in Sir Arnold Bax and Sir Granville Bantock. I have assisted in small ways with the issue of off-air recordings made by Lyrita’s guiding hand, the late Richard Itter.  

At long last, I’ve been attending and writing about concerts of unusual and often-deserving music. My reviews appear on Seen and Heard International.

Joseph Holbrooke (1878-1958)

My research into the life and music of Joseph Holbrooke, pursued since the early 1980s, has finally borne fruit as a contributor to a published symposium on that composer.

I have also contributed a few articles and revised work-lists for the New Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians, and before that there were articles about Stanley Bate and Arthur Benjamin that I wrote for the BMS Journal.

There has also been time, in a small-scale way, for rescuing rare recordings from battered LPs, audio cassettes and tape reels and transferring them to CD-R. I am keen to do this without charge as a service to other collectors whose shelves of cassettes, reels and the like will otherwise disappear to landfills when they are no longer with us.

PLN: Looking to the future, what would you like to see in the way of new Schmitt recordings?  Are there any pieces in particular that you think are in need of new (or first-ever) recordings?

First edition of Florent Schmitt’s cantata Sémiramis, which won the Prix de Rome first prize for composition in 1900.

RB: For me, one major gap is Schmitt’s Prix de Rome cantata Sémiramis. It’s typical subject matter for Schmitt, and this very early and probably gloriously indulgent work may well promise a major musical experience!

PLN: What other observations would you like to make about Florent Schmitt and his music?

RB: Koechlin, Aubert, Witkowski, Marriotte and Schmitt seem to suffer the same problematic neglect as their counterparts in the UK:  Bax, Bantock, Brian, Dale, Moeran; and further afield Roy Harris, Griffes, Farwell, Klami, Raitio, Pingoud, Ivanovs and Skulte.

While the music of the French composers I mention has clawed its way into accessibility through recordings, the route to repeated and regular performances in the concert hall remains elusive.

We need to persist and remember that recordings, no matter how ancient, can serve to enthuse musicians — not to mention inveterate enthusiasts and the general listener as well.

Gerard Schwarz

I recall reading about the deep impression certain recordings made on the young Gerard Schwarz, and how these bore fruit later in the inventive concert programs of that fine conductor.  

In the same vein, there are musicians who are — or will be — captivated by Florent Schmitt’s music.  

I should add that the work of those who make scores and parts available is also crucial to this process; those who wish to make Schmitt’s music a concert-hall reality will need to have performing materials and sympathetic financial treatment from trusts and publishers to go with their will to perform.

____________________

We can only echo Rob Barnett’s wish that more opportunities to hear music in concert by Florent Schmitt and similarly underrepresented composers will surface in subsequent years. We share a common hope that more of Schmitt’s compositions will make the transition from “rarities” to “regular repertoire” in the coming years.

Osmo Tapio Räihälä

Osmo Tapio Räihälä is one of Finland’s better-known composers of today. He has created music in many forms, from vocal and chamber pieces to large orchestral works.

Mr. Räihälä’s highly active career includes fulfilling numerous composition commissions.  His works have been performed by important European orchestras and ensembles, interpreted by leading artists such as the conductor Sakari Oramo.

Like any composer, Räihälä derives inspiration for his music from numerous sources, not least the great musical talents from earlier generations.  This interest has compelled him to study not only the creative legacy of these artists, but also to visit the homes and graves of many of them.

Being one of the major cultural capitals of the world, Paris has long been a place that has attracted the composer. In fact, it’s a city to which he returns each year for an extended visit, indulging in its rich cultural offerings.

Last month on his annual visit to Paris, Mr. Räihälä attended a concert presented by the Orchestre de Paris conducted by Jonathan Darlington. Florent Schmitt’s ballet La Tragédie de Salomé was the featured item on the program.

The entrance to the Cimétiere de Bagneux, the cemetery where Florent Schmitt is buried.

Subsequent to that event, Räihälä took the opportunity to seek out the final resting place of the composer, who died in 1958 just shy of his 88th birthday and is buried at the cemetery in Bagneux.

I happened to see a tweet and photo that Mr. Räihälä sent out during his visit to Schmitt’s gravesite, which led me to get in touch with him to learn more about his visit there.

That contact resulted in a friendly and highly interesting exchange of information and insights. Highlights of our discussion are presented below:

PLN: Please tell us about your interest in the final resting places of composers and others in the arts.

OTR: Yes, this is a particular interest of mine.  I’ve been a “grave spotter” for many years — and what could be a better place than Paris to find the graves of remarkable composers, artists, authors, actors and actresses, playwrights, filmmakers and chanson singers?

A plaque commemorating the Carmelite nun victims at Picpus Cemetery in Paris.

Although I live in Helsinki, Finland, I travel to Paris and stay there for a month or two every year. Among the many sights and activities there, I always find time to visit  its beautiful cemeteries.

My favorite one is the small, quiet and private Cimétiere de Picpus, where the poet André de Chenier and sixteen Carmelite nuns (of whom Poulenc wrote his wonderful opera) lie headless in a mass grave. 

PLN: What sparked your interest in seeking out Florent Schmitt’s gravesite on your most recent Paris visit?

Jonathan Darlington

OTR: As a composer myself, I pay particular attention to composers’ graves, and I have visited many of them in Paris. 

On my most recent visit to the city, I had the pleasure of seeing the Orchestre de Paris perform Florent Schmitt’s La Tragédie de Salomé at the Philharmonie.  It is such a strong and beautiful piece of music that influenced many other composers — including being inspiration for Stravinsky’s Russian ballets!

Besides my work as a composer, I have worked for nearly three decades as a music journalist as well, so I’m very aware of Schmitt’s importance to French music of the early 20th century — both as a composer and as a teacher of other composers.

That knowledge plus seeing the Philharmonie concert motivated me to search for Schmitt’s grave, which I assumed would be in Paris.

PLN: And … were you successful?

OTR: As it turns out, Florent Schmitt’s grave happens to be located at the Bagneux Cemetery, outside the Péripherique. Because of that, I hadn’t visited this particular cemetery in my travels to Paris before.

The easiest way to travel there is via Metro nr. 4 to Mairie de Montrouge, and then take a walk of about 15 minutes from there.

PLN: What did you find?

OTR: To find the tomb of Florent Schmitt and his wife wasn’t as difficult as some others have been for me. Although I did not see his gravesite listed on the Find a Grave website (I now plan to add it there myself when I have the time), I did find a French-based website that gave out the right cemetery and the division there.

However, it turns out that Bagneux is a huge cemetery! I think it spreads out across an even larger piece of land than Père Lachaise.  For that reason, people move around the cemetery in their cars. 

But being without a car, naturally I had to walk around. But this isn’t a bad thing actually, because few things are better than taking a promenade on the paths of a Parisian cemetery!

Florent Schmitt’s grave is located in the 54th Division, which has hundreds of tombstones — many of them nearly forgotten or in bad condition.  Fortunately for me, as an experienced grave spotter I was able to find Schmitt’s grave without going around the place time after time, which has happened to me in some other instances.

PLN: What you say about the condition of the graves in the 54th Division sounds a little disconcerting!

OTR: Indeed it is.  I’m afraid I don’t have the best news to report, because Schmitt’s gravestone is not in good condition, unfortunately.

Florent Schmitt’s gravestone at Bagneux Cemetery, photographed by Osmo Tapio Räihälä in November 2017.

PLN: I wonder if that situation could be rectified somehow.  Have you encountered similar situations with other composers or artists?

OTR: The only way for gravesites to be well-maintained over the years is for family members or devotees of the artists to take it upon themselves to tend to the sites. 

As for who could restore Schmitt’s tombstone, one might look to a Florent Schmitt estate or trust that could take care of that — if one existed. But I’m guessing that might not be the case.

Montmartre Cemetery, with one of the famous attendant “caretaker cats.”

As it turns out, I have seen the same situations with other composers, but at least one of them has a happy ending. Last year I had searched for the gravesite of Florent Schmitt’s near-contemporary composer, Mélanie Bonis, at the Montmartre Cemetery.  Boy, was it difficult!

Mel Bonis (1858-1937)

From my research, all I knew was that the gravestone was situated in the 24th Division. I searched and searched but just couldn’t find it — until a cat living in the cemetery quite literally started showing me the right direction.

I know this sounds like a fairy tale, but it’s absolutely true; the cat took me there! Upon arriving, I saw a gravestone that was nigh-on derelict.  In the end, I started feeling the stone and the inscription with my fingers, and with this Braille-like method I finally became certain that I had found her name, written as “Mel Bonis,” on the bottom right corner of the stone.

The gravestone of Mel Bonis (1858-1937) at Montmartre Cemetery, photographed by Osmo Tapio Räihälä in 2016.

I uploaded a photo of the derelict Bonis tombstone to the Find a Grave website.  Surprisingly, when I revisited Montmartre cemetery in October — just a year later — I found that someone had restored the tombstone! There was even a laminated photo of Mélanie Bonis placed there.

Who had done this? I have no idea — but obviously someone had seen my posting on Find a Grave and had put some work (and money) into restoring it to a good condition. 

Of course, I took a new photo of the Bonis gravestone in order to have a “before/after” record of what had happened. It proves that there are people in the world who cherish the legacy of these composers, and who are motivated to keep that legacy alive in various ways.

I hope someone, or some group of people, would be inspired to do the same with Florent Schmitt’s tombstone.

PLN: What you have reported does give us hope — and perhaps also a template for figuring out a similar happy ending to the story of Florent Schmitt’s gravesite. 

The gravesite of Mel Bonis, photographed one year later (2017).

OTR: Yes, I think so.  Every action is significant — whether it’s tending to the final resting places of artists like Florent Schmitt, or maintaining websites like yours that help make mainstream classical music audiences more aware of the music of composers whose works aren’t the ones being programmed in concerts every week.

___________________

We are thankful to Osmo Tapio Räihälä for sharing his experiences. While some of the news he reports about Florent Schmitt’s final resting place is distressing to hear, it is also inspiring to know that there’s the potential for something positive to be done to rectify the situation.

With thousands of Florent Schmitt devotees not just in France but all over the world, hopefully things can be set right for a composer as important and as influential as Schmitt was in his day — and whose rich and inventive music continues to captivate music-lovers now and into the future.

Bruno Belthoise (Photo: Patrick Devresse)

In 2013, one of the earliest interviews I conducted for the Florent Schmitt Website + Blog was with the French pianist Bruno Belthoise.  I had discovered him from YouTube, where several movements of Florent Schmitt’s piano four-hand suite Une semaine du petit elfe Ferme-l’oeil, Opus 58 had been uploaded from a performance he gave at the Schola Cantorum in Paris with the late, great pianist Claude Maillols.

This suite of seven piano pieces draws its inspiration from a Hans Christian Andersen book called The Songs of Hialmar.  In the tale, a boy (Hialmar) is visited each night of the week by a sandman-like character (Ferme-l’oeil – freely translated it means “sleepy-eyes”), who helps the boy to sleep while conjuring up a series of “dream sequences” – one for each night of the week.

Like several of his other piano duet works, Schmitt intended this suite for students to perform with their piano instructors.  The student plays the simple primo part and the teacher performs a far more elaborate and complex secondo part.

Pianists Claude Maillols and Bruno Belthoise perform Florent Schmitt at the Schola Cantorum in Paris (2013).

The Maillols/Belthoise performance at the Schola Cantorum (with Mr. Belthoise playing the challenging secondo part) is one that I found quite fetching.  After making contact, he graciously agreed to be interviewed, resulting in an article that was published on this site in August 2013 which you can read here.

Since that time, I’ve followed the pianist’s career with interest, as he has embarked on a number of interesting activities and project, including an intensive exploration of piano and chamber music created by Portuguese composers.

These more recent activities have resulted in the release of a NAXOS recording devoted to the chamber works of three Portuguese composers, with Bruno Belthoise joined by two other musicians that make up the Trio Pangea.

But even with these and other projects focused on Portuguese music, the music of Florent Schmitt has continued to be an abiding interest of Mr. Belthoise, and he has always kept Le petit elfe in his repertoire, joining forces with several other pianists at different times to perform this music in various venues across Europe.

Most recently, in celebrating 20 years of his focus on Portuguese classical music, special double-CD recording (along with a concurrent digital download release) was issued in conjunction with several arts organizations, including MPMP (Movimento Patrimonial pele Musica Portuguesa), Fundação GDA (Portuguese Foundation for Interpreters’ Rights), and the Portuguese National Broadcasting Company.

The set, titled Lisboa-Paris, consists of one CD devoted to Portuguese music and second one featuring French musical selections.  All of the performances are taken from Mr. Belthoise’s concert or radio broadcast performances.

Considering his obvious affection for the piece it’s no surprise that Florent Schmitt’s Une semaine du petit elfe Ferme-l’oeil occupies a prominent position on the Lisboa-Paris set’s French disk.  To my ears, the 2005 live performance, played by Mr. Belthoise along with fellow-pianist António Rosado, is one of the freshest and most idiomatic interpretations of this music ever issued.

I have stayed in touch with Bruno Belthoise over the years, and so was very happy to be able to extend my congratulations on his latest recording. This was also an opportunity to ask him some follow-up questions based on our original interview four years ago.

The latest interview paralleled several social events held in Lisbon in late October to celebrate the release of the new recording, at which time Messrs. Belthoise and Rosado performed Schmitt’s Le petit elfe, among other musical selections, for the appreciative guests.  (Mr. Belthoise’s remarks below are translated from French into English.)

PLN: It has been a number of years since you started performing Une semaine du petit elfe Ferme-l’oeil, and I’ve noticed some subtle changes in your approach to the music over that time. Can you please tell us how your conception of the music has evolved?

BB: First of all, I would like to thank you for your interest in my work, and I congratulate you for your efforts to promote French music, and that of Florent Schmitt in particular.

For me personally, I must say that this composer is astonishing and so full of surprises on many levels. Thanks to your website and blog, I’ve been discovering new works by Schmitt that are rarely performed — even in France.

For my part, I’ve kept Une semaine du petit elfe Ferme-l’oeil in my repertoire over a pretty long time. By interpreting the music with different piano partners, I continually see how full of surprises the music is — particularly in terms of how Schmitt composed the two parts. There’s real genius in how he was able to “mask” difference of writing that exists between the very simple primo (student) and very elaborate secondo (teacher) parts. At the same time, he captures the harmonies in a very personal way.

My evolution in this music over the years is due not only to the experience of playing the music with different partners, also my harmonic analysis of this work. You could say that Schmitt has a hyper-developed sense of harmonic language, and in this cycle it’s obvious that he was already thinking of orchestrating it, which indeed he did about a decade later.

What Schmitt manages to do in Le petit elfe is to take the melodic part which is reduced to a mere five notes of the primo part, and then vary the colors dramatically in the secondo part. Only a great master of writing could meet such a challenge so well.

The result is so rich and so successful, it is nearly impossible for listeners to realize the great difference in the writing between the two piano parts.

All of these observations helped me to evolve in my knowledge of the music, keeping my interest in the piece ever-fresh even over many years.

The original edition of Florent Schmitt’s piano four-hand composition Une semaine du petit elfe Ferme-l’oeil (1912), inscribed by the composer.

PLN: There is such a rich variety in the seven movements of Schmitt’s set of pieces.  Which ones do you find the most interesting and inventive?  Do you have a favorite movement?

BB: In truth, each of the seven movements is special in its own way. The composer moves from one “day” to another in the “week” by varying his type of writing, his rhythmic formulae and his timbres, to approach the various chapters of Hans Christian Andersen’s tale in very inventive ways.

La Noce des souris presents a popular dance in the renaissance style — but it’s also baroque with Schmitt’s use of hemiolas. The movement opens the entire set in a very lively way, with rustic accents.

Next, La Cigogne lasse takes us into an elegant and captivating dream; it’s one of my favorite pieces because Schmitt opens the entire range of the piano and gives it full resonance. There’s real lyrical emotion felt when one plays this piece, as if we were following the flight (and plight) of this magnificent migratory bird.

Le Cheval de Ferme-l’œil is an irresistible gallop where the richness of the chords goes hand-in-hand with the incessant repetition of their harmonies — all juxtaposed on a very lively tempo. This movement is one of my particular favorites because of its great and incessant momentum.

By contrast, Le Mariage de la poupée Berthe makes wonderful use of the swaying of very rich chords upon which the melody is placed — at once sweet and sparkling in the treble of the piano. What we find here is the presence of a melodic timbre à la française, but also pastel colors, in a peaceful atmosphere that seems almost suspended in time. The piece is deceptively difficult to bring off in that it requires a very controlled depression of the keys on the keyboard.

Lastly, there is the Le parapluie chinois movement which completes the set in dramatic fashion. It owes the peculiarity of its theme to the pentatonic scale, along with a picturesque “orientalism” that is very pronounced.

Overall, this composition is a triumph of dramaturgy in formal evolution. But it is also a big challenge for players — particularly the secondo part which is what I typically play.

I love this piece — and yet dread it every time I play it, because it is necessary to figure out the precision-regulated crossings of hands between myself and my partner. Even with concentrated practice together, it is never easy to get just right!

PLN: You have worked with a number of collaborators when performing Le petit elfe. On your new recording of this music, you have teamed up with the pianist António Rosado.  When did the two of you start performing together?  Who are the other pianists with whom you’ve presented this music in recital?

António Rosado

BB: Actually, the pianist António Rosado was my first partner in this work, and it is with him that I played the work in recital for the first time. The recording that has just appeared in the Lisboa-Paris set is a result of that collaboration back in 2005.

António is a well-known and highly-regarded pianist in Portugal. He has a very extensive repertoire; he gives many concerts and recitals with orchestra and with chamber music players. He has just recorded a piano-cello disc where he presents a beautiful transcribed version of César Franck’ Violin Sonata, coupled with the Cello Sonata of Luiz de Freitas Branco.

In addition, António and I were invited to perform this work at the Cistermúsica Festival in the city of Alcobaça (Portugal). Le petit elfe had been choreographed on this occasion by the contemporary dance company CeDeCe.

As you know, I have enlisted several different piano partners to play this set with me over the years, including Christina Margotto (for a series of narrative concerts at Porto Conservatory), Claude Maillols (for a recital filmed at the Schola Cantorum in Paris), and most recently, with pianist João Costa Ferreira for a concert at the RDP Portuguese Broadcasting studios.

There are also plans for preparing a new recording that will present Le petit elfe to young audiences along with narrative text adapted from Hans Christian Andersen’s tale; that recording will be released soon.

For the release event concerts António and I gave in connection with the official release of the Lisboa-Paris recording in Lisbon on October 27-28, 2017, we featured the Schmitt work among other pieces. Not only was the audience very receptive to the music, it was also a great pleasure to relive the experience of playing this fine score with António once again after more than a decade’s time.

Musicians perform at a social gathering celebrating the official release of the new Lisboa-Paris recording in Lisbon, Portugal in October 2017. Performers included pianists Bruno Belthoise (pictured at far left) and António Rosado (far right).

PLN: In recent years, in addition to the music of your native country France, you have been spending much time in Portugal, exploring and presenting the music of Portuguese classical composers.  In fact, your latest recording devotes equal emphasis on both countries.  How did this “French-Portuguese connection” develop?

BB: My attraction to the music of Portuguese composers is related to my taste for this culturally rich country. I am very close to its poetry, literature, history, language, but also close to the country in general and the dignified and respectful personality of the Portuguese people.

My deep interest in the country and its culture actually goes back to my childhood experiences with Portugal, which I discovered from the age of 14 on.  

Francisco de Lacerda (1869-1934)

It’s now been 20 years since my first recording dedicated to the work of Francisco de Lacerda, who was a friend of Claude Debussy. In the two decades since, I have explored Portuguese music in multiple directions and ways. Among these is exploring the cultural links that Portugal has had with France since the beginning of the 20th century. The new Lisboa-Paris recording celebrates my 20 years of musical activity in Portugal as well as my continuing on Portuguese and French music in parallel with each other.

Portugal has a rich repertoire of music composed for the piano, but also for symphonic music as well. There are many very beautiful works to discover. I invite all music-lovers to listen to the orchestral works of Luiz de Freitas Branco, Joly Braga Santos, Frederico de Freitas, and from more recent times, Luís Tinoco and António Pinho Vargas. Their compositions are readily available on disc or downloads at NAXOS.

The first volume in Trio Pangea’s recorded survey of Portuguese piano trios, released on the NAXOS label in 2016.

In addition, Portuguese chamber music is also very interesting. I am a founding member of the Pangea Trio, which is in the midst of recording an anthology of Portuguese trios. The first volume of this project has already been released by NAXOS, and the second volume will be recorded in 2018.

I’m very grateful to report that the press has widely praised our first recording, not only for the quality of the playing and the sound but also because of the interesting pieces featured, written by the composers Luiz Costa, Claúdio Carneyro and Sérgio Azevedo.

PLN: Who have been your “musician collaborators” in exploring and programming Portuguese repertoire?  How did you team up?

BB: At the very beginning of my “performing adventure” with Portuguese music, I played sonatas with the cellist Teresa Valente Pereira, who along with violinist Adolfo Rascón Carbajal and me were the founding members of the Trio Pangea. Teresa is an exceptional musician. Following that, I joined up with other performing partners such as violist Alexandre Delgado (he is also a noted composer whose music I love) as well as the pianist João Costa Ferreira.

Projects are underway for presenting an event with The Impromptu Concert and pianist João Vasco. My collaborations with contemporary composers such as Sérgio Azevedo, Fernando Lapa and Carlos Marecos are ongoing. I also commission new works, and several new creations are being created for our trio by the composers Nuno Corte Real and António Chagas Rosa.

In parallel with these activities, I am making a personal effort to invite French interpreters to investigate Portuguese repertoire. As a result, several French musicians have explored and taken Portuguese works into their repertoire: Yves Charpentier (flute), Anne Chamussy (oboe), The Impromptu Concert (woodwind quintet), plus also my daughter Clara Belthoise (cello) and my son Léo Belthoise (violin).

PLN: In addition to playing in instrumental ensembles, you continue to perform repertoire for two pianists.  Florent Schmitt composed many such pieces — all very wonderful sets of music.  Have you investigated these other works?

BB: Yes, for sure! I am very interested in performing Reflets d’Allemagne for piano four hands, and there’s an interesting series of developments pertaining to that possibility — and it goes back more than a century!

The American dancer and choreographer Isadora Duncan (1877-1927), photographed in about 1915.

In 1914, the American dancer Isadora Duncan choreographed three items from the eight-movement set (Lübeck, Dresden and Nuremberg) during her period spent in Bellevue, near Paris, shortly before her relocation back to the United States. These and other creations are a testament to Duncan’s instinctive taste and her ability to inform her art from various sources of inspiration.

It was not until 1994 that a dancer of a younger generation, Julia Levien (who had studied with Isadora Duncan’s daughter, Anna Duncan) reconstituted these three sections which were danced as a set.

Francesca Todesco

Francesca Todesco, a friend of mine who is a freelance dancer in New York City, is an Isadora Duncan specialist. In 2011, in her presentation Dances by Isadora she performed these three movements from Reflets d’Allemagne; it was the first time they had been presented in dance form in more than 15 years.

And now, plans are in the works for me to play these pieces in a show about Isadora Duncan that Francesca Todesco is now creating with several collaborators.

Musical sophistication on full display: Florent Schmitt’s highly engaging Reflets d’Allemagne (1902-05) has been turned into several dance creations over the years, including an Isadora Duncan production in 1914 and a staging by the Paris Opéra Ballet in 1932.

As for other piano four-hand works by Schmitt, the Trois rapsodies in particular are brilliant and beautiful. But because of how those are scored for two pianos, it is a problem to find venues which have two instruments — not only to prepare the interpretation but also to present it in concert.

But for sure, those sophisticated national rhapsodies would be some of the first new pieces I plan to add to my repertoire just as soon as I am able to do so.

PLN: Your activities are now taking you beyond the European continent.  For example, you were recently in New York City to present a set of concerts of Portuguese music.  What other performance activities or projects are in the planning stages for you at this time?

Manoel de Oliveira (1908-2015)

BB: Since 2016, I have been doing a large number of solo concerts with repertoire centered on the connection between French and Portuguese classical music. One of these is a tribute to the great filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira, who died in 2015 at the incredible age of 106.

In this recital, which gathers events related to the life and spirit of this exceptional artist, there is footage from his first film of 1931 that I accompany on the piano with my own music.

This program was presented at the Tribeca Film Center in New York City in October 2016, and also in Montréal, Sydney, Warsaw, Vigo (Pontevedra) and Vienna, as well as various cities in Switzerland and in France.

I have several other touring projects planned for Madrid coming up in March 2018, as well as tours in Turkey and in Morocco.  In addition, I continue to develop my piano four-hand repertoire with João Costa Ferreira. We are preparing a new program consisting of music by José Vianna da Motta, Georges Bizet, and a new creation of Carlos Marecos.

I also have numerous concerts planned with the Trio Pangea; we will play in several Portuguese music festivals during 2018 featuring the music of Haydn, Schumann, Beethoven and Debussy along with several Portuguese composers, including the premiere performance of a new work by Alexandre Delgado (the Camoniano Trio).

Lastly, I am working with The Impromptu Concert (a woodwind quintet) and the soprano Capucine Keller to present a tribute to Hector Berlioz in 2019, which will commemorate the 150th anniversary of the death of this great French composer in 1869.

PLN: I would like to thank you for championing the music of Florent Schmitt — particularly Une semaine du petit elfe Ferme-l’oeil. The composer’s popularity seems to be on the rise.  To what do you attribute this renaissance of interest in Schmitt and his artistry? 

BB: First off, I would like to say that I am taken aback by the misunderstandings on the part of some French interpreters concerning Florent Schmitt and his music. Quite a few musicians have never heard any of his music — and even if they have, often they don’t have the curiosity to investigate it further.

Contributing to this environment here in my home country, at least until very recently, is that some of the radio commentators at France-Music have not valued Florent Schmitt and have been somewhat dismissive of his legacy. The stupidity that expresses itself in that way has always seemed to me to be a form of intellectual laziness.

What really should be at the center of any discussion about Florent Schmitt is the incredible quality of this creator’s artistry and of his musical output.  It is a legacy that absolutely deserves a place of high honor within French music of the past 100 or 150 years.

JoAnn Falletta

But you’re correct in that there are more and more recordings of Schmitt’s music being made these days, including some of the master’s compositions that have fallen into oblivion.

More conductors around the world like JoAnn Falletta and Fabien Gabel are now programming his works, too, and that is very encouraging.

Fabien Gabel

Personally, I look forward to seeing regular programming of the greatest Schmitt orchestral creations in the season of every Parisian orchestra. Psaume XLVII, La Tragédie de Salomé, Antoine et Cléopâtre, Salammbó, Oriane et le Prince d’Amour … these incredible masterpieces should be repertoire that’s familiar to all, and should appear often on our orchestras’ concert programs.

Like many other music-lovers, not only will I attend those concerts, I will encourage all of my friends and relatives to do so as well!

___________________

It is gratifying to know of Bruno Belthoise’s abiding passion for Florent Schmitt’s music, and his efforts to give it exposure wherever and whenever he can. With musicians like Mr. Belthoise advocating for Schmitt’s music so strongly, it can only mean good things for audiences everywhere.

During his lengthy career, the French composer Florent Schmitt would periodically turn to the subject of children for musical inspiration – often involving pieces written for piano.

In the early 1900s Schmitt composed four collections of piano duets featuring easy primo parts for young pupils. Sur cinq notes (1906); Trois pièces récréatives (1907); Huit courtes pieces (1907-8); Une semaine du petit-elfe Ferme-l’oeil (1912):  These charming (as well as musically substantive) collections have been recorded in their entirety by the Invencia Piano Duo and are available on the Grand Piano label in a boxed set or as separate CDs.

Each of them are well-worth investigating. Florent Schmitt played these duets with his son, Jean, no doubt deriving great pleasure from those shared experiences.

One of the collections – Le petit elfe – was even turned into a ballet, similar in manner to Maurice Ravel’s Ma mère l’oye.  In both instances, the composers orchestrated their original piano duet score in an opulent post-Rimsky style, adding transitions between the movements (and in the case of Schmitt, adding a prelude at the beginning of the ballet).

Le petit elfe was mounted at the Paris opera in 1923, where it made quite a splash.  Resurrected in recent years by the conductor Jacques Mercier, the ballet received its recording premiere by Maestro Mercier and the Orchestre National de Lorraine in 2013, and was released on the Timpani label to widespread critical acclaim.

Following the publication of Schmitt’s four piano duet collections, nearly 20 years would go by before the composer returned to the topic of children. This time, it was the creation of a suite for solo piano he titled Enfants, Op. 94.

Florent Schmitt dedicated his composition Enfants to the French pianist Monique Haas.

Schmitt began work on the piece during the “dismal summer of 1939.” By this time, son Jean was no longer the little boy; he was serving in the French military – soon to be captured by the Nazis at the outbreak of World War II and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany for the duration of the conflict.

None of the uncertainty of the times is evident in Schmitt’s composition, which the pianist Laurent Wagschal has described as “a new escape to the world of childhood” by the aging composer – by then 70 years old.

Schmitt dedicated Enfants to the French pianist Monique Haas.  Eight short movements make up the set of pieces, which taken together lasts fewer than 15 minutes. Each miniature – the lengthiest movement is less than three minutes in duration – bears a descriptive title that gives clear clues as to what the listener will be experiencing:

• Enfant de chœur (Choir Boy)
• Enfant de troupe (Soldier Boy)
• Enfant gâté (Spoilt Child)
• Turbulent (Rowdy Child)
• Enfant do (Tender Lullaby)
• Moustique (Mosquito)
• Petit Moïse, sauvé des eaux (Little Moses, Saved from the Waters)
• Enfant terrible (The Little Terror)

Florent Schmitt, photographed in 1928 with Arthur Hoérée (1897-1986), the Brussels-born actor and film music composer. Hoérée collaborated with Arthur Honegger on a number of film scores created in the 1930s and ’40s.

The music is in turns tender, lively, whimsical – and always fresh. Actor and composer Arthur Hoérée speculated that the last movement, which he described as “prickly as a cactus,” might well be “a portrait of the young Florent himself.”

Indeed, that movement ends the piece in a characteristically “Schmittian” manner with a bit of a wink, a nudge – and a big, fat raspberry.

A charcoal drawing of Florent Schmitt by the artist André Aaron Bilis (1955).

As an interesting side-note concerning Enfants, this music was among the last of his pieces that the composer was able to witness in concert.  As recounted by Schmitt’s biographer, Yves Hucher, the occasion was an evening at the Cité internationale universitaire de Paris, where sitting amidst an audience of young people, Schmitt heard his Enfants performed alongside the poetry of Jacques Prévert.  It was in May 1958 – less than three months before the composer’s death.

Alain Raes

Despite the music’s obvious charms, Enfants has been blessed with only a few commercial recordings.  To my knowledge, the first recording was made in 1985 by the pianist Alain Raës and was released on a double LP album presenting six of Schmitt’s sets of solo piano pieces.  Most of the contents of that recording, originally released on the FY label, was later reissued on CD by Solstice (including Enfants).

Laurent Wagschal

Two decades later, in 2005 the pianist Laurent Wagschal recorded Enfants for the Saphir label, in a stunning interpretation that has now been reissued by Timpani, a classical label which, along with NAXOS, has done much to bring Schmitt’s music to the public.

Happily, both the Raës and Wagschal interpretations are idiomatic, atmospheric, and technically flawless, and both are supported by quality recorded sound.

But there’s more to the story of Enfants.  As he was to do with many of his instrumental scores, Schmitt orchestrated this music.  The composer once noted that the piano was “a convenient but disappointing substitute for the orchestra,” so it is hardly surprising that he was inspired to create a version of Enfants for orchestral forces.

The orchestral version was premiered in 1943 by the Lamoureux Concerts Orchestra under the direction of Eugène Bigot, and the orchestral score was published in 1951 by Durand.

To the best of my knowledge, Enfants has been commercially recorded in its orchestral version just once.  The recording came from an unlikely source – emanating from the Soviet Union and featuring the Moscow Chamber Orchestra conducted by Anatoly Knorre.

Recorded in the 1960s, the Knorre/Moscow reading was available in the West on a 10-inch Melodiya LP, coupled with music by Schmitt’s fellow French composer Henri Tomasi. I own this recording and can report that it is a very decent one – both interpretively and in its sonics (quality audio not always a given with Soviet releases from this period).

Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that this orchestral recording of Enfants has ever been released on CD or as a digital download.  It’s a pity, because the music is fresh, always interesting, and completely worthy of being brought to a new generation of music-lovers.

Indeed, it’s high time for today’s eminent conductors who advocate for the music of Florent Schmitt to investigate Enfants and give the world a modern recording.  Alain Altinoglu, John Axelrod, Leon Botstein, Lionel Bringuier, Jonathan Darlington, Stéphane Denève, JoAnn Falletta, Fabien Gabel, Jacques Mercier … who’s ready?