Premiered in May 1940 — mere weeks before the fall of France — the piece was shelved thereafter, with the unpublished score and parts languishing in the archives of the Bibliothèque national de France and Universal/Durand.
The Artiguemy Tree on the property of Florent Schmitt’s country retreat in the Haute-Pyrénées. It served as inspiration for the composer during the creation of L’Arbre entre tous (“The Tree of All”) in 1939.
Within the catalogue of Florent Schmitt’s compositions, there are a significant number of works for orchestra with chorus. Some could be classified as “miniatures,” such as Danse des Devadasis and Chant de la nuit (Ode à Frédéric Chopin), as compared to several of Schmitt’s biggest scores, most notably Psaume XLVII, Fête de la lumière and the ballet Oriane et le Prince d’Amour (the latter calling for an eight-part mixed choir).
Jean Élie Paul Zay (1904-1944) was a politician who was elected to the French parliament in 1932 as a member of the Radical Socialist Party, which later became part of the Popular Front that came to power in the 1936 national elections. Zay was appointed Minister of National Education and Fine Arts soon thereafter. In addition to planning the 150th anniversary French Revolution celebrations including the Florent Schmitt musical commission, Zay proposed creation of an annual international film event in France (which would ultimately bear fruit as the Cannes Film Festival, inaugurated in 1946). At the outbreak of World War II, Zay resigned as minister to join the French Army. Arrested aboard ship in August 1940 and charged with desertion, he was convicted and imprisoned. In June 1944, Zay was removed from Prison Riom by three militiamen and murdered at an abandoned quarry; he was just 39 years old. In 2005, a French literary prize was named in Zay’s honor, and in 2015 he was recognized at the Panthéon in Paris as a leading figure in the French Resistance.
Occupying a sort of middle ground is a piece that’s all-but unknown: L’Arbre entre tous, Op. 95 (“The Tree of All”), a 15-minute work commissioned for celebrations in 1939 marking the 150th anniversary of the French Revolution.
Florent Schmitt’s was the only musical work commissioned for the anniversary by the French Ministry of National Education, under the leadership of Jean Zay, and it was planned for performance at concerts on September 20th and 21st, 1939, at the Place de la Nation in Paris.
Zay came up with “Revolution and Intellectual History” as the theme of the 150th anniversary celebration– but with Europe moving rapidly to a war footing, it was only natural that a large dose of French patriotism and nationalism would underlie any focus on revolutionary symbolism.
Novelist and poet Jules Supervielle (1884-1960) was born in Montivideo, Uruguay. Orphaned at a young age, he was raised by relatives in his native country and in France, where he settled permanently in 1894. His first volume of poetry appeared in 1901, and novels, plays and fantasies followed. Supervielle was named an officer of the Legion d’honneur, and was elected Prince des poètes shortly before his death in Paris in May 1960.
The piece that Florent Schmitt created was a large-scale choral work set to words by the poet Jules Supervielle. Uruguayan by birth, French by choice (as well as by ancestry), Supervielle was an interesting literary figure whose body of work was described by Wallace Fowlie in his 1955 book Mid-Century French Poets as follows:
“The poetry of Jules Supervielle represents a triumph of verbal simplicity in an age when poetry is not simple … [a man] who all his life has been a poet and has written poetry as naturally as he breathes … It is a poetic voice which seems monotonous until one realizes that its tone and vocabulary match very perfectly the total simplicity of the thought and the imagery.”
An engraving by Horace Vernet depicting the Battle of Valmy in northern France (September 20, 1792).
The poem that Supervielle penned focuses on French national unity and the anniversary of the French Revolution through the symbolism of the Liberty Tree of Valmy. The Battle of Valmy that occurred on September 20, 1792 against the armed forces of Prussia in northern France was the first major French victory in the months and years following the declaration of the French Republic in 1789. The victory emboldened the newly assembled National Convention to formally declare the end of the monarchy in France the very next day. In the historiography of the French Revolution, the Battle of Valmy is considered the first victory of a citizen army, inspired by the cause of liberty and nationalism.
The Bayeux Liberty Tree in Normandy dates from the time of the French Revolution. It stands at Place de la liberté, adjacent to Bayeux Cathedral. (Photo: Donald R. Bennie)
Around this same time the French revolutionary government adopted the symbol of the Liberty Tree, which was based on a similar notion that had been spawned in the United States during the American Revolution.
In the new poem that he chose to title L’Arbre entre nous, Jules Supervielle, who believed in the “cosmic brotherhood of men,” found fertile inspiration in the Liberty Tree symbolism. As a representation of liberty and the revolutionary heritage, the Liberty Tree transcends “joys and angers” to become the common possession of the French people. Moreover, the crown of the tree is the vantage point from which all of Europe is visible.
Jules Supervielle’s verse L’Arbre entre tous appeared in the August 1939 issue of La Nouvelle revue française, barely a month before war was declared on Germany by the Western Allies. Note the poet’s notation “for the anniversary of the French Revolution” of 1789.
The cover of the August 1939 issue of La Nouvelle revue française, in which Jules Supervielle’s poem L’Arbre entre tous appeared.
Supervielle’s poem, consisting of three stanzas, was published in the August 1939 issue of the literary magazine La Nouvelle revue française. In fact, the version that Florent Schmitt used in his composition included an added stanza, in which the patriotic sentiment is most pronounced.
It is unclear who penned the additional verse – whether it was Supervielle, Schmitt or someone else. Either way, the imagery was certainly more in keeping with the fast-moving events, considering the rapidly deteriorating geopolitical situation that would culminate in cascading declarations of war beginning in early September 1939 — with France, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand declaring war on Germany in the wake of the Nazi invasion of Poland.
The added stanza of the poem that appears in Schmitt’s manuscript score is as follows:
Demandez-le à nos bois, à nos montagnes, nos plaines,
Au silence des lointains comme à celui de nos morts.
A-t-on besoin d’une voix pour témoigner qu’on aime?
Demandez-le au grand vent de l’ avenir, au vent de liberté qui souffle, qui animé nos drapeaux.
II est si haut, il est si beau, l’ arbre de Valmy,
L’ arbre chevelu, l’ arbre géant de la famille française.
C’ est l’ arbre de liberté et de victoire!
Here is an English translation of the added verse:
Ask it of our woods, of our mountains, our plains,
To the silence of the horizon as to that of our dead.
Does one need a voice as a testament to our love?
Ask it of the great wind of the future, of the wind of freedom which blows, which animates our flags.
It is so high, it is so beautiful, the tree of Valmy,
The plenteous tree, the great tree of the family of France.
It is the tree of freedom and of victory!
Florent Schmitt’s country retreat in the Haute-Pyrénées, with the “Artiguemy Tree” pictured at left.
We know from Florent Schmitt’s letters that the general atmosphere during the time he was composing L’Arbre entre tous was one of foreboding (and that’s putting it mildly). He worked on the score at his country retreat in Artiguemy in the Haute-Pyrénées during July and August of 1939. In a July letter Schmitt wrote:
“Here it is better. First the sun came, creating the illusion – alas! – of a less tragic universe. Then I more or less finished [the piece], except for one passage to change (and perhaps a few others later). I have even started penning the large [manuscript] pages of 40 staves.”
On August 31st, with Europe hurtling rapidly towards the inevitable outbreak of war, Schmitt wrote:
“I have almost finished L’Arbre. Something must be done despite the nightmare … but will I ever hear it [performed]?”
American musicologist and author Leslie Sprout is the author of the 2000 dissertation Music for a ‘New Era’: Composers and National Identity in France, 1936-1946. Currently she is a professor of Music at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey (USA).
As for the music itself, the American musicologist Leslie A. Sprout has studied Florent Schmit’s unpublished piano-reduction manuscript which is housed at the archives of the Bibliothèque national de France. The description of the music below is excerpted from her article “Muse of the Révolution francaise or the Révolution nationale? Music and National Celebrations in France, 1936-1944,” which was published in the Spring/Fall 1996 issue of Repercussions magazine:
“Like Milhaud’s Revolutionary march, L’Arbre entre tous begins with a fanfare. Schmitt fulfills the communicative aspect of his commission by centering the musical interest of the composition around the setting of the celebratory text provided for him. In setting the first two stanzas of the poem, Schmitt varies the mood and texture of the music according to the imagery of the text. After the expository first stanza, the tempo quickens for the choral proclamation of the second stanza: ‘It is so tall that one may easily compare it to mountains.’ The contrast in metaphorical imagery for the tree — between the grandeur of the mountains and the diminutive symbol that “enters into our hearts” is represented in the text-setting.
For the second half of the second stanza, a solo soprano soars above the declaiming chorus, singing in vocalise. The composer makes the third stanza the musical climax by bringing back the fanfare from the opening. Here, the voices and instruments unite in a homophonic texture to proclaim what was the final stanza in the original poem, and what was originally its culmination in nationalist imagery. Schmitt emphasizes this latent nationalism by repeating the first line of the stanza at the end.
The harmonic language of the third stanza contributes to the sense of sheer power represented by the orchestral fanfare united with the chordal declamation of the text.
“The orchestral fanfare united with the choral declamation of the text”: A page from the score to L’Arbre entre tous by Florent Schmitt.
Schmitt uses triads in root position, leaping most often by thirds, with little recurring pattern to the harmonic progression. The lines of the stanza are set in a loose sequence — that is, the chorus declaims each line in a pattern of parallel triads, after which the orchestra responds with a chromatic flourish. With the majority of the triads in root position, there is little sense of melodic continuity in the soprano line of the chorus. Thus musical continuity is not maintained by harmonic progression or melodic line. Instead, the force of the unified chorus and the projection of the text in clear, repeated phrase patterns unites this climactic section of the piece.”
In Leslie Sprout’s view, Schmitt employs the fanfare motif in his score to refer explicitly to “militaristic idioms” in the final measures of the piece and its closing line: “It is the tree of liberty and of victory!”, observing:
“As the chorus proclaims in sustained homorhythmic chords the concluding line of text, the orchestra builds up to a final explosion of triplet sixteenth-notes to embellish the arrival on the tonic (approached with the substitution of a dominant eleventh chord on ♭VI for the dominant). The brief reference here to military music is just enough to enhance the recurring fanfare sounds with a final flourish.”
The concluding bars of Florent Schmitt’s L’Arbre entre tous.
Albert Louis Wolff (1884-1970)
Because of the cancellation of the celebrations originally scheduled for mid-September 1939 due to the outbreak of war, L’Arbre entre tous wouldn’t be presented until March 3, 1940 in a Concerts Pasdeloup performance along with the City of Paris Chorus under the direction of Albert Wolff. Present at the premiere was the Paris correspondent for Le Droit, Canada’s leading French-language daily newspaper, who reported in the paper’s March 6, 1940 issue:
“At the [Concerts] Pasdeloup, it was the revelation of a powerful and clear work for orchestra and chorus by Florent Schmitt based on a poem by [Jules] Supervielle with the assistance of the choir of the City of Paris under the direction of Albert Wolff. Curious title: ‘the tree among all’ — but also a curious formula, of rare ingenuity, and an instrumental luxury which unleashed enthusiasm.”
Jean-Joseph Émile Vuillermoz (1878-1960)
A more extensive review of the premiere was authored by the French music critic Émile Vuillermoz and published in the March 6, 1940 issue of The Christian Science Monitor, in which he compared the new composition with Schmitt‘s monumental choral work Psaume XLVII, composed ~35 years earlier:
“L’Arbre entre tous is the tree which was planted 150 years ago in the soil of France – the ‘Tree of Liberty.’ It has sent down strong roots in our soil; it has drawn from it a generous flow of sap and has never ceased to grow and flourish. Its branches extend majestically in every direction. From its topmost branches one looks across the whole of Europe and its millions of rustling leaves under a stirring symphony.
This very musical subject was admirably suited to the tumultuous and luxuriant genius of Florent Schmitt, who has always been in his element with delineations of this sort. Nobility, grandeur and dynamism are in fact fundamentals of his style.
L’Arbre entre tous approaches in inspiration and execution the splendid Psaume XLVII by the same composer; one finds in it those thrilling contrasts between the heroic opening fanfares and the glowing, sympathetic responses of the orchestra. The choruses are used with the same vigor, which does not shrink from the shrill tessitura so difficult for sopranos. Through it all reigns a magnificent serenity, and the sonority of this outpouring polyphony constantly makes one feel that the concert hall where it detonates is too small to hold it.
Technicians will be interested to compare these two scores which are fundamentally so similar, [yet] rather different in form. Indeed, it is curious to study the aural evolution which is brought about in a composer who, like Florent Schmitt, has lived through so rich and restless a period in our musical history.
Though he has a strong sense of individuality, Florent Schmitt, who was a pupil of Gabriel Fauré and a co-disciple with Ravel — and who has witnessed the Debussy revolution and the surging growth of the polytonal style — has been swayed in spite of himself by what he has heard. It is very noticeable that his writing has become progressively more biting and more aggressive, though the [thinking] remains the same.
This beautiful hymn to liberty had a tremendous and well-merited success at its first hearing. Under present circumstances the hymn took on an exceptionally moving import.”
Emile Vuillermoz’s review of the premiere performance of Florent Schmitt’s L’Arbre entre tous, published in The Christian Science Monitor (May 6, 1940).
Vuillermoz’s final sentence in his review is underscored by musicologist and author Caroline Potter in her chapter “French Music and the Second World War” from the 2006 book French Music Since Berlioz, wherein she writes of the premiere:
“During the performance, the work’s theme of freedom spoke to the public more powerfully than Schmitt could perhaps have imagined.”
… Indeed so, since war had broken out after Schmitt had completed writing his composition.
But then, in a rapid succession of events, the French armies would be defeated on the battlefield barely two months after the premiere performance of L’Arbre entre tous – followed by the fall of the French government and the city of Paris occupied by German troops.
In the grim new reality, far from resonating with the public, music such as L’Arbre was more likely a bitter reminder of the freedoms the citizens of France had just lost. Under the circumstances, it’s little wonder that the piece was never published. Instead, the manuscript was set aside, remaining among Florent Schmitt’s papers that were bequeathed to the BNF upon the composer’s death in 1958.
In the years that followed the 1940 premiere, I can find no evidence that this choral piece has ever had another hearing – either in its orchestral form or using the piano reduction. But based on news accounts of the premiere — along with consulting the manuscript held at the BNF — the piece certainly appears worthy of resurrection. Recent correspondence with Durand (Universal), reveals that the manuscript score, orchestral and vocal parts are archived there as well. Perhaps L’Arbre entre tous is a project that can be taken up someday by one of the composer’s growing number of advocates in the orchestral and choral worlds.