Camouflage, a painting of Florent Schmitt’s longtime home in St-Cloud by French contemporary artist Mathieu Cherkit (2017).
Much has been written about the famous salonnières of Paris — the wealthy and often-flamboyant grandes dames who opened up their drawing rooms to musicians, authors and artists — facilitating not only the camaraderie of “breaking bread” together but also providing a venue for these creatives to socialize with prominent members of Parisian society representing government, business and the professions.
Names like Winnaretta Singer (Princesse de Polignac), Élisabeth de Caraman-Chimy, Jeanne Dubost and Marguerite Jourdain de Saint-Marceaux will forever be remembered for the manner in which they cultivated the arts by welcoming artistic genius, without class distinction.
6 rue de Vercingetorix, home of Le salon Molards and the studio of Paul Gauguin.
Less famous, less glamorous, yet also significant were the salons of the creative artists themselves. In the early 1900s, it was the musician William Molard and his sculptor wife who held court at 6 rue de Vercingétorix, where French artists and musicians mingled with “fellow travelers” from foreign lands – among them Delius, Vaughan Williams, Casella, De Falla and Enescu. It was also the composer Maurice Delage, who hosted gatherings of Les Apaches at his dwelling in an industrial section of Paris, where the conviviality could go on late into the night without fear of disrupting the neighbors.
Florent Schmitt’s home on Rue du Calvaire in St-Cloud, the site of countless Jeudis de Florent Schmitt gatherings from the early 1920s onward.
But it was the mid-afternoon open house events hosted by Florent Schmitt and his wife, Jeanne, at their home in St-Cloud which would become a fixture of the Parisian arts scene over the lengthiest period of time. Indeed, the Schmitt home was the venue for countless gatherings from 1920 onwards. They would happen until nearly the end of the composer’s long life — even continuing a full ten years after Jeanne’s death during World War II.
The gatherings came to be known as Jeudis de Florent Schmitt (“Florent Schmitt Thursdays”), and they were an important meeting ground for budding talent as well as established musicians. As just one example, the recollections of the Swiss tenor Hugues Cuénod, recounted late in his extraordinarily long life, give us a sense of how important and beneficial these gatherings could be:
Hugues-Adhémar Cuénod (1902-2010)
“It was in 1928 that I began singing in concerts, thanks to my cousin Virginie Cuénod who knew so many people in Paris. She introduced me to painters, composers, writers, and some people from other segments of society I probably never would have met without her … which threw me into the middle of the Parisian world of that time. I made friends a little bit with Florent Schmitt, who always had an open house on Sundays [sic] at his beautiful estate near Boulogne. He engaged me to put together a vocal trio [with Marcelle Bunlet and Lina Falk] … to perform several of his works. We sang in the large hall of the Paris Conservatoire …”
[Mr. Cuénod can be forgiven for misremembering the day of the week of the Schmitt open house events, considering that he was nearly 100 years old when he gave the recollections above!]
Fortunately, history has left us with accounts of several additional Florent Schmitt Thursdays gatherings. They have appeared in three books — a travelogue from the 1920s, a diary from the 1930s, and a late 1980s autobiography looking back to the 1950s — that are excerpted below.
The Wide-Eyed American Tourists
The Jeudis de Florent Schmitt gatherings weren’t musician-only events. Other guests were welcomed, and we have the account of one such visitor.
Regina Jais (1869-1948) was an American travel writer who authored several books in English covering historical sites in France and Germany. Her book Legendary France, Carcassonne and the Basque Country, published by Dial Press in 1931, came in the wake of the success of a similar volume authored by Jais covering the southern region of Germany.
Her France book is a collection of vignettes related to her travels through various regions of the country, in which she adopts a breezy, cheerful tone – barely suppressing a sense of “wide-eyed wonder.” In one chapter of the book, she writes about a Florent Schmitt Thursdays visit, likely dating from the late 1920s, that evidently made quite a positive impression on her.
Here is that book excerpt:
Florent Schmitt (l.) with American-born tenor Charles Hubbard at Schmitt’s home in St-Cloud. (1924 photo)
One day we had dejeuner in a small cafe with Charles [Hubbard], a tenor from America. For fifteen years he has lived in Paris; an enviable reputation as exponent of modern French songs is his.
Charles had arranged to drive out to St. Cloud with us this Thursday for tea with Florent Schmitt, the composer, whose songs he sings to the delight of musical Paris. M. et Mme. Schmitt are at home with a few hours’ leisure in the afternoon to receive friends. A pleasure indeed to meet this celebrated musician, for many years a friend of Claude Debussy.
”The origin of the name St. Cloud is rather an interesting one,” said Charles as we neared the outskirts of this olden environ of Paris. “Ancient St. Clodoald, grandson of the great Clovis, founded a monastery here back in the sixth century!”
My Pal [Regina Jais’ husband, Jacob David Jais, born in Algiers] nodded, “And in later years the palace was the haunt of kings; Louis XIV, Bonaparte and Napoleon III all chose it for a summer residence within easy reach of Paris.”
Open, Mathieu Cherkit’s 2017 painting. Looking out from the top floor of Florent Schmitt’s home shows St-Cloud apartment buildings in the foreground that were surely not yet built at the time of Regina Jais’ visit 90 years earlier. The Eiffel Tower can be seen in the distance, some ten miles away.
The lazy little town, beloved of artists, wakes to feverish life when long green stretches of the Racecourse attract thousands of visitors. A wonderful view from this hilly suburb right across the Seine valley and the Bois de Boulogne to Paris! Arc de Triomphe, the Trocadéro — Paris! Paris! filling the whole horizon! On a plateau above the river are two of the finest golf courses near the capital. They were built, not so many years ago, in part of the Forest of St. Germain.
Ascending a slight hill, our auto stopped at a flight of steps leading to a charming garden. Under the trees tea tables welcomed, set with Sèvres porcelain, manufactured not far away. This lovely ware greets you in every corner of the globe — magnificent tall floor vases, museum pieces, presented to Eastern potentates by French Kings in the early eighteenth century.
Entre deux, Mathieu Cherkit’s 2013 painting of one of the entrances to Florent Schmitt’s home in St-Cloud.
Mme. Schmitt, gracious and smiling, moved among her guests, one of whom I found a most interesting and enthusiastic music critic — a benevolent old Abbé in black robes. The simple villa, standing back from the road, looks out over the whole of Paris. Wandering through the garden, in the clear afternoon light we distinguished one well-loved outline after another — an inspiration for Florent Schmitt!
A pleasant hour, hearing music; new compositions of mutual friends. Au revoir, à bientot! Going down the steps, we stamped forever on our memory a silhouette of Florent Schmitt, caught by our movie camera, as he graciously took us to the gate. We drove back from this sequestered spot, ideal for artistic creation!
One is left wishing that the film footage caught by Mrs. Jais might still exist to be viewed nearly a century later. But in all likelihood, it is lost to the mists of time …
The sincerest form of flattery? The sky garden of Regina Jais, located at 290 West End Avenue in Manhattan (New York City), bears unmistakable similarities to the urban gardens she undoubtedly encountered during her travels to European cities. (Photo: Jessie Tarbox Beals, ca. 1936)
Dysfunction All Around: The Nin Family Pays a Visit
The diaries of Anaïs Nin are extensive, taking up multiple volumes. Her description of a 1931 Jeudis de Florent Schmitt visit is published in Volume 4.
A far cry from the idyllic atmospherics of Charles Hubbard and the Jais family chez Florent Schmitt was the visit of a different family several years later. We have the diaries of the literary figure Anaïs Nin that provide a glimpse of another Jeudis de Florent Schmitt open house gathering – this time in April 1931 when the young Anaïs Nin and her family came to visit.
According to Nin’s diary entries, she had met the composer at a social gathering earlier in the month, and Florent Schmitt had extended the invitation. Here are Anaïs Nin’s entries as they pertain to her family’s visit, which evidently did not go very well:
April 17, 1931
My darling is away for a week. When he is not here I’m only half alive. I’ve tried to keep busy. Have gone out a great deal with Mother and Joaquín. Met the composer Florent Schmitt at the Lumleys’—a small, sharp gray-haired man with a mischievous mouth who is always flinging out direct questions like an indiscreet child, which amuses everybody. “Who are you? What do you do for a living? You’re not married? Why aren’t you married?” He took quite a fancy to my face and immediately invited us all to his house.
Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell (1903-1977) was a Cuban-born American diarist, essayist, novelist, and writer of short stories and erotica who spent her formative years in France. She lived a colorful and in many ways unconventional life — at one point revealing in her journals that she had carried on an incestuous relationship with her own father, the composer Joaquín Nin. (ca. 1920 photo)
April 30, 1931
Visit to Florent Schmitt a failure. Nobody else there who could distract Mother’s attention [singer Rosa Culmell], and so she and Florent could dislike each other freely. At such moments I get so painfully sensitive, I can only plead with my eyes, now to Mrs. Schmitt, now to Florent.
He is a strong character, droll, mordant, and Mother takes him seriously. And when Mother dislikes somebody she talks twice as much, dominates the conversation aggressively, and you feel her so overwhelmingly that even Schmitt was silent —poor man — and annoyed. Joaquín and I could not float; we sank. She delivered a lecture on Godoy (whose poetry of course they don’t like), she insisted on being called Mrs. Culmell and not Mrs. Nin, she would not let Mrs. Schmitt and me talk peaceably about books.
Even my passport (my face), though it smoothed Mr. Schmitt’s nerves, could not neutralize Mother. When he came with unusual affability to survey my diet at the tea table, he was confronted with Mother the dragon, who accepted the cakes he intended for me. And all the hopeless subjects: what is the best route from the station; the Spanish revolution; the awful spring weather.
Mrs. Schmitt, who is ill, painfully wasted, had forgotten her kettle on the fire. M. Schmitt reminded her: “It is always the same.” She justified herself: “Because sometimes I am thinking of something else.” When he left the room she justified him: “He is in the middle of some work – he is tired. And when he is working, he is like the water, he boils over.”
“Why don’t you put the lid on him?” asked Joaquín.
Fortunately for him, we left early.
From the tone of Anaïs Nin’s diary entry, it seems as though one could have cut the tense atmosphere at the gathering with a knife!
The New Flute Composition that (Nearly) Wasn’t
Over the years, Florent Schmitt Thursdays would act as a catalyst for hatching more than a few artistic projects — which isn’t at all surprising considering how it was a gathering spot for so many Parisian luminaries over so many decades.
We see this clearly in Hugues Cuénod’s recollections quoted above. Another such project came about in the mid-1950s, a decade after the death of Schmitt’s wife Jeanne but while Jeudis Florent Schmitt gatherings were still happening at the composer’s home. In this instance, it involved the young flute virtuoso Jean-Pierre Rampal.
The autobiography of Jean-Pierre Rampal (1922-2000), written with the assistance of Deborah Wise and published in 1989.
We’ll let Mr. Rampal himself tell the story, which he recounted decades later in his autobiography Music, My Love, published by Random House in 1989. (And there’s a story twist at the end.)
Here is the extract from Rampal’s book:
Florent Schmitt, who was born in 1870, was already an old man renowned for his choral compositions and ballet scores when I first met him in Paris in the fifties. He was very small, with a dry manner. As a young man he had been a pianist, but as his eyesight dimmed with age, so did his playing. He lived in Saint Cloud, across the Seine from Paris, and I had often been at his house for the Jeudis de Florent Schmitt, as his Thursday afternoon gatherings were called. The whole of Paris’s musical world could be found there at one time or another.
It was a tangible link with the past.
I particularly remember two venerable composers who attended these salons regularly: Gustave Samazeuilh and Henri Büsser.
Gustave Samazeuilh (1877-1967), photographed in 1937.
Samazeuilh had been a great friend of Debussy’s; he typified the cultured European gentleman — polite, well-read and with an extraordinary memory. He adored cornering some unsuspecting youngster at M. Schmitt’s and regaling him with tales of the past. Schmitt, who was good at making up clever nicknames, called Samazeuilh “l’Insistance publique,” a pun on “l’Assistance publique” – the French for public assistance, or what in the [United] States would be called welfare. When he started to talk, it was almost impossible to escape. Still, one was never bored when captured by Samazeuilh; I could – and did – listen to his tales many times over. He talked of people I revered as old masters as if he had just left their drawing room. You would think that Debussy was still living, to hear Gustave speak.
His memories went even further back; he used to tell us of the day when, as a very young boy, his parents had taken him to a house where he saw Liszt sitting in the parlor, playing the piano. The great composer had picked him up and sat him on his lap. It was incredible to me to meet someone who had actually met Liszt. The story had an apocryphal ring to it, but what did that matter?
Henri Büsser (1872-1973)
Henri Büsser told me an even taller tale of Brahms. Büsser, who was one of Massenet’s students, was refused admittance to Brahms’ house. He and a companion had set out to meet le maître in Germany, reaching their destination only after a long and arduous journey. They found the Brahms residence and rang the doorbell. A butler answered the door and, in the background, the two young men caught a glimpse of a bulky back and a head of long, grey hair. The butler asked their business.
“We are two French composers come to see le maître,” they answered.
“Wait one moment,” said the butler.
He turned to convey the information to his employer. They young men heard a grunt, and then the words, “French composers? Huh, they’re all merde.”
The butler closed the door in their faces — and, disappointed and somewhat shocked at being referred to as “shit,” the two left.
Can you imagine talking to someone who had been – or claimed to have been – that close to Brahms? It was as thrilling as playing concerts in halls that echoed with the great names of the past …
I have always sensed links to the past very strongly, and because of this tried to attend as many of Florent Schmitt’s jeudis as possible. One afternoon I asked him if he was interested in writing a flute concerto. He wasn’t what you’d call an avant-garde composer, being more closely allied to the style of the past — the style of Ravel, for example, who was his contemporary. He was less modern than Jolivet or Boulez, but he was as modern as Poulenc, and he had a fine reputation. I always believed, not only for my own benefit but for the benefit of future flutists, that it was my duty to try to develop the repertoire as much as possible. I always regretted that the previous generation of great flutists did not push the composers of their time to write concerti or sonatas for the flute …
Florent Schmitt was not very well-known internationally, but I felt convinced that he could, and should, write something for the flute. We corresponded about the project, and one day I received a letter asking me to come to his Saint Cloud apartment [sic] to go over the music.
“Voilà! My concerto, which I shall call Suite for Flute and Orchestra,” he said when I arrived. Then he suggested we play it through together.
The score to Florent Schmitt’s Suite en quatre parties. (Photo: James Strauss)
I stood between him as he sat at the piano and I tried to read over his shoulder. Even though his nose was just about touching the score, he wasn’t having much luck. And he was blocking my view almost entirely. He played an approximation of a tightly written score, and I played what I could see of the extremely complicated music. We must have presented a very funny picture: a tall flutist bending over a small grey man squinting at an almost-illegible score.
“That’s very good,” he said at the end. “Very good.”
I wasn’t quite so convinced. I had barely been able to see the music, let alone play it.
“Maître, could I please keep the music so that I can work on it?” I asked, rather embarrassed at my performance.
“You played very well, very well,” Schmitt reiterated, keeping a firm hold on the music.
“But I was just sight-reading, and the flute part is written so small I can hardly tell if it’s playable,” I protested.
“I think you played very well, but I’ll make you a copy if you wish,” he answered.
Several weeks later the music arrived. I had my copy – but the notes had already been published! There wasn’t a chance of changing a single note, and some of it was excruciatingly difficult. Nevertheless, I agreed to give the premiere with the Orchestre National. I had to be on tour prior to the concert, but spent all my evenings working on the new music.
I arrived in Paris three days before the event and expected to go into immediate rehearsal. My manager called me at my home.
“The concert with the Orchestre National is canceled.”
“Why? What happened?”
“They couldn’t locate the orchestra score. Mr. Schmitt is accusing the publisher of having lost it, and it was his only copy. He’s absolutely livid, and he’s threatening to sue.”
“Well, we’ll just have to reschedule the concert when they come up with the music,” I said.
I never did get to play the Schmitt concerto. The music never turned up. Many years passed, and just before Schmitt’s death it was discovered that he had forgotten to orchestrate the piece, and then forgotten that he’d forgotten. Only the flute and piano parts exist.
The recording session for the Florent Schmitt Suite en quatre parties, featuring flautist James Strauss and the Lithanian National Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Laércio Diniz (2012).
… And now the story twist which comes with the realization, discovered decades later, that “old man Schmitt” actually had orchestrated the Suite en quatre parties. In 2002, the noted Brazilian flautist James Strauss discovered the original manuscript hidden away deep in the archives of Durand (Universal). The publishing company had indeed lost it – or more accurately, had misfiled it all those years ago.
Strauss notes:
“There never was a premiere with orchestra; the flute part with piano accompaniment was performed for the first time on October 29, 1959, a little more than a year after the death of Florent Schmitt …
It is, without doubt … one of the most difficult works for flute and orchestra composed in the 20th century. The Suite is within the impressionistic universe of Debussy and Ravel; the orchestration is quite transcendental. It really does sound like a Debussy or Ravel concertante piece. And the ending is remindful of Daphnis et Chloë, with a dance in 5/8 time.”
The first — and to-date only — recording of Florent Schmitt’s Suite en quatre parties for flute and orchestra.
And so it was that more than a 50 years following its creation, the orchestrated suite was finally presented in front of an audience – as well as a fine commercial recording made in 2012. It featured James Strauss in a performance that does complete justice to Schmitt’s score — just as surely as Rampal would have done had circumstances turned out differently. Strauss has kept the Suite in his repertoire ever since, hoping for opportunities to perform it in more places in future years.
These three accounts of Jeudis de Florent Schmitt gatherings help conjure up the atmospherics of what was an important gathering place for musicians and other creative artists over many decades. Perhaps not quite the vaunted salons of the grandes dames of Paris – but surely the next-best thing.