The NAXOS Grand Piano recording of solo piano music by Florent Schmitt, released in 2021.
In 2021, the NAXOS label’s Grand Piano imprint issued a CD featuring solo piano music of Florent Schmitt performed by Biljana Urban. This Paris-trained pianist. now living in Amsterdam, has a particular appreciation for the piano music of French composers from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – Florent Schmitt included. (Click here to read an interview I conducted with Ms. Urban at the time of the new recording’s release.)
Jacques Bonnaure
The 2021 recording met with highly favorable reaction. The comments of author and critic Jacques Bonnaure, writing a review published in the April 2022 issue of Classica magazine, are representative:
“Biljana Urban plays a piano of rare elegance, as nuanced as possible with refined resonances — in short, everything that is needed to arouse interest in this music and this composer, who is still largely unknown.”
The selected program focuses almost exclusively on early-career compositions by Schmitt — all but one being world premiere recordings as well. One of those premieres is a particular gem: the Ballade de la neige, Op. 6 (Ballad of the Snow), which dates from 1896 when the composer was 26 years old and still a student at the Paris Conservatoire.
Pianist and composer Juliette Toutain (1877-1948) was a classmate of Florent Schmitt at the Paris Conservatoire. Encouraged by the Conservatoire’s director, Théodore Dubois, to compete for the Prix de Rome composition prize in 1902, Toutain was unable to secure a change in the rules barring women from entering the competition. (That change would happen shortly thereafter, enabling Lili Boulanger to compete and win first prize in the 1913 competition.)
The Ballade was dedicated to Juliette Toutain, who was a fellow classmate at the Conservatoire. No doubt Mlle. Toutain presented the Ballade de la neige in recital in those early years. (Interestingly, she also premiered Schmitt’s Chant du soir with violinist Georges Enescu, a piece composed two years before the Ballade.)
The Ballade is noteworthy in that it reveals the first flowering of Schmitt’s own compositional voice. By contrast, the piano works written before this one – notably the Trois préludes, Op. 3 and Soirs, Op. 5 — seem more Schumanesque than Schmittian.
Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924), Florent Schmitt’s teacher and mentor at the Paris Conservatoire.
But in the Ballade, we sense the composer blossoming into his own language, even as we can also discern a musical debt to the Gabriel Fauré of the first Nocturne or the fifth Barcarolle. (Tellingly, Schmitt had become a disciple of Fauré at the Conservatoire not long before.) But what is also very clear is that this piece points the way towards Schmitt’s future piano and instrumental music.
The Fourth Edition of the Guide to the Pianist’s Repertoire, published by Indiana University Press in 2013.
In his book Guide to the Pianist’s Repertoire, professor and pianist Maurice Hinson provides short profiles of eleven piano works by Florent Schmitt, of which the 1896 Ballade de la neige was the earliest one composed. Hinson summarizes that work’s qualities as follows:
“Expressive, two against three, parallel broken chords float through closely related harmonies.”
Alfred Cortot’s two books on French piano music, published in 1932.
We also have a more detailed explanation of the piece that is included within pianist Alfred Cortot’s monumental two-volume survey of French piano music, published in 1932. As compared to Schmitt’s earlier piano works, Cortot considered Ballade de la neige “a more serious intent with a more pronounced descriptive tendency.” Cortot’s perceptive observations about the Ballade included this description of the piece:
“Borne by a vague undulation of contrasting rhythms suggesting the slow, monotonous falling of show, a low horizon and a forlorn sky, a sorrowful melody emerges from the harmonies, expands, contracts again and is repeated — hollowing out a slow, desolate furrow in a moving substance of sound.”
The first page of the score to Florent Schmitt’s Ballade de la neige, originally published in the early 1900s by Rouart, Lerolle et Cie. — an imprint absorbed by Salabert in 1953. Notice the dedication to pianist and composer Juliette Toutain, a fellow student at the Paris Conservatoire.
A very dapper Florent Schmitt, photographed at about the time he won the Prix de Rome first prize for composition in 1900. The Ballade de la neige came along four years earlier.
In keeping with the characteristics of snowfall, the music is written in a free form, including fluctuations in tempo alternating between slowing and speeding up, as often happens during snowfall. In places the music becomes polyrhythmic – quintuplets in the left hand against six quavers in the right hand. (Such polyrhythmic treatments – along with many bars of the score being written on three staves — would become common characteristics of Schmitt’s subsequent piano writing.)
In the span of a mere four minutes there are no fewer than four “waves” of snowfall, with descriptive markings in the score ranging from “expressive and sorrowful” to “restless and impassioned.” The final moments of the piece are meditative, suggesting the visage of a frozen landscape in the crystalline night air.
Biljana Urban’s recording of Ballade de la neige was recently uploaded to YouTube accompanied by the score, in which one can “see as well as hear” the music along with the composer’s markings:
Note that the Schmitt’s concluding notation is marked á peine effleure (“with the lightest touch”), which correlates to two ascending phrases separated by a pause, as if a recollection of final snowflakes.
It’s rather surprising that Ballade de la neige had to wait more than 125 years to receive its first-ever commercial recording. Consulting various recital programs and concert reviews published in the European and American musical press from the turn of the century reveals that the piece was, if not a recital staple, certainly a composition that was known and performed. As just one example, a review in Guide musical covers a February 4, 1901 presentation of the piece by pianist Jane Darmand at the Salle Pleyel in Paris.
The French pianist Alfred Cortot (1873-1952), photographed with Florent Schmitt in the early 1950s.
Pierre Carrive
Happily, the work has a new champion today in the person of Biljana Urban, who fell in love with the piece while investigating repertoire to include in her 2021 Schmitt recording. That she should be drawn to the piece makes complete sense, because Urban’s pianism is ideally suited to this particular type of score. As music critic Pierre Carrive wrote in his review of the NAXOS Grand Piano recording in the August 22, 2022 issue of Crescendo magazine:
The full Jacques Bonnaure review of the 2021 Biljana Urban recording, published by Classica in April 2022.
“Biljana Urban’s interpretation is perfect in every way. The delicate alchemy between the simplicity and subtleties of this music suits her perfectly; she remains disciplined — never overdoing it and always with care and elegance. She knows how to underline each intention — whether rhythmic, harmonic, melodic or dynamic.”
Since the release of her Schmitt piano recording, Urban has made it a point to feature repertoire from the CD in her recitals – including Crépuscules but most especially the Ballade, which has appeared on various programs she has presented in several European countries. As she stated to me:
“Nearly all of my recitals since 2021 have included Ballade de la neige. It is a remarkable pianistic treasure to explore – and to introduce to audiences to help them discover it. It’s a masterfully crafted piece of music that resonates with me on so many levels.”
Christian Bobin, French author and poet (1951-2022).
According to Urban, the theme of snow is one that has inspired some of the most poignant musical numbers – including Debussy’s The Snow is Dancing and Poulenc’s An Evening of Snow. As Christian Bobin has written nostalgically, “Le neige c’est une enfance” (“Snow is a childhood”).
I asked Ms. Urban to give me her further impressions of the music, having now “lived with” the piece for several years. Here are her insightful observations:
Ernst Wilhelm ‘Wim’ Wenders, German filmaker and playright. (Photo: Elena Ternovaja, Berlinale, 2024)
“I recorded the Ballade during a sorrowful time in my life [the death of Ms. Urban’s mother], which is one reason why this piece is even more deeply etched in my mind. I can’t help but recall a poem from the Wim Wenders film The Sky Over Berlin [Wings of Desire]: ‘When a child was a child, it awaited the first snow … and it waits that way even now.’
Written in a free-form with the marking Expressif et douloureux (‘Expressive and sorrowful’), this composition reaches deep into the intimate, the vulnerable, confessional and personal layers of the soul. Here we find Schmitt’s intensity dwelling in the realm of the senses to capture the instantanée – the ‘immediate.’
An anouncement promoting Biljana Urban’s March 1, 2024 piano recital in Amsterdam, which included Florent Schmitt’s Ballade de la neige.
There’s a kind of spatiality to the music – a hallmark of subtle-yet-major musical transformations that will inform Schmitt’s future music, just as it had done with Debussy before him.
The rhythmic element is mostly a polyrhythm that perfectly characterizes the falling of snow. In a brief span of time Schmitt speeds up to agitato and passionate fortissimos – and then just as quickly slows down to the lightest touch of pianissimo. In his marking at the end of the piece à peine effleure (‘with the lightest touch’), Schmitt gives us a notation that only Scriabin was doing at the time. Moreover, the pauses and fermatas that occur after climaxes aren’t stasis, but instead are long resonances that remain until the last overtone vanishes.
A photo of Biljana Urban taken following her recital in Osijek, Croatia that included Florent Schmitt’s Ballade de la neige (December 2022).
It’s a very poetic piece that I am playing these days whenever and wherever I can.”
… And that is most certainly the case; in fact, Biljana Urban has performed Ballade de la neige in recital each year since her recording was made — including at the Concertgebouw in October 2021, Osijek (Croatia) in December 2022, Maastricht in October 2023, and again in Amsterdam in March 2024. Several French outings are in the planning stages, too.
We are indebted to Ms. Urban for becoming an indefatigable champion of this very worthy composition — and for her advocacy to help bring the music back to life in the best kind of way.