The French composer played a major role over four decades as both a host and a participant in Paris’ salon culture.
The house and gardens of Florent Schmitt in St-Cloud were the venue for countless Jeudis de Florent Schmitt open house events held from the 1920s to the 1950s. (ca. 1956 photo)
We know from history that in addition to being a composer and music critic, Florent Schmitt was a salonnier. From the 1920s on, he and his wife Jeanne hosted regular Thursday afternoon open house events in the gardens of their home in St-Cloud. These gatherings would continue even after the death of Schmitt’s wife — all the way up until the mid-1950s, in fact.
These so-called Jeudis de Florent Schmitt events were important for musical Paris, providing a venue where famous and not-so-famous musicians and other cultural personages could gather and interact. From time to time, significant artistic collaborations resulted from these gatherings and interactions. I’ve written a full article about the Florent Schmitt Thursdays, and you can read about them here.
The score to L’Eventail de Jeanne. This 1927 ballet was a collaborative effort by ten French composers including Florent Schmitt that came about as a direct result of the salon gatherings of Parisian educator and arts patron Jeanne Dubost. Details on the fascinating “back story” of this ballet are covered in this article.
The house and gardens of Florent Schmitt in St-Cloud, France. (ca. 1950 photo)
Schmitt’s open house events were somewhat unusual in that they weren’t organized by a solo host, but rather by a couple. While we encounter other instances of couples as salon hosts – Cipa Godebski with Zofia Servais plus William and Ida Molard spring to mind – in most cases salons were hosted by women, with any husbands that might be present remaining discreetly in the background.
Cyprien Xavier Léonard ‘Cipa’ Godebski (1875-1937), was a French salonnier of Polish origin. He was the son of sculptor Cyprien Godebski as well as the half-brother of pianist Misia Sert. Godebski was a member of Les Apaches along with Florent Schmitt, Maurice Ravel and other young luminaries of artistic Paris. They would meet at the salon of Cipa Godebski and Zofia Servais on rue Saint-Florentin, later at rue de Chartres, and lastly at rue d’Athènes. The Godebskis’ young children Jean and Mimi were the dedicatees of Ravel’s piano duet suite Ma mère l’oye. (1896 portrait by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.)
In addition to being a salonnier, Florent Schmitt was an active attendee who was a regular guest at a number of Parisian salon venues – including some with a distinctly literary bent.
[One of the hallmarks of Parisian salons was that while each may have had its own particular focus, often they embraced multiple facets of culture – literary, visual arts, musical or otherwise. At the typical Parisian salon in the 1920s and 1930s, it wouldn’t be uncommon to find painters rubbing elbows with politicians – or philosophers with philologists.]
Evangeline Bell Bruce (1914-1995). The society hostess and author lived in a dozen countries and spoke six languages. She was married to Baltimore-born David Kirkpatrick Este Bruce, who served as U.S. ambassador to France in 1949-51 and later was U.S. ambassador to NATO in the mid-1970s. Evangeline Bruce’s Georgetown salon was a fixture of Washington, DC society for decades, being described as “at once properly old-fashioned and glitteringly up-to-the-minute.” Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis once sent Evangeline Bruce a note praising “the bright path you cut through an age where so few people have grace and imagination and the virtues of another time.”
Many (though not all) salonnieres were women of means who indulged their passion for the arts — and often for progressive social causes also — by creating gathering spaces conducive to furthering their interests and aims. In this regard, the mid-century American celebrity hostess and author Evangeline Bruce once noted that women were typically better than men at hosting salons because they were better able to suppress their own egos and “take the time to be sure that everyone shines.”
Those familiar with Florent Schmitt’s catalogue of compositions know of the prominent presence of vocal music that he set to secular texts. With few exceptions, the words came from contemporary writers rather than from poets of yesteryear. Schmitt was a voracious reader of the important Parisian literary magazines; likewise, he was personally acquainted with many of the contemporary poets and writers active in Paris during the first half of the twentieth century.
There is little doubt that Schmitt’s predilection for setting contemporary verse to music was a fortunate by-product of his personal interactions at the salons in addition to the inspiration that he found in the French literary magazines. Robert de Montesquiou, Henri-Gauthier Villars, Charles Vildrac, Robert Ganzo, René Chalupt – these and other writers whose words he set to music were the very people he encountered at the salons of Paris.
American heiress, author and salonnièrre Natalie Clifford Barney (1876-1972), photographed in 1910. (Photo: Courtesy of George Wickes)
Of the various salons that Schmitt frequented, one of his favorites were the weekly Friday events hosted by Natalie Clifford Barney, an Ohio-born heiress who was educated in France and who ended up settling in Paris.
Known as Natalie Fridays, Mlle. Barney’s weekly gatherings at rue Jacob in the 6th arrondissement were among the most notable and longstanding of their type – with gatherings that were first held in the early 1920s and continued regularly until the 1960s (suspended only during the years of World War II which Barney spent away from Paris in Florence, Italy).
To be invited to a Natalie Fridays gathering was an honor indeed, and the list of international literary personages who were attendees at Natalie Barney’s so-called “Temple of Friendship” over the years is impressive – including Americans Ernest Hemmingway, Thornton Wilder, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Bernhard Berenson. (Even Truman Capote was a guest in the later years of the salon.)
James Joyce, W. Somerset Maugham and Ford Madox Ford hailed from the United Kingdom and Ireland. From Italy, Gabriele d’Annunzio.
Even Otto von Habsburg, eldest son of the last sovereign of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was an occasional guest at Barney’s salon – not to mention a whole constellation of endlessly fascinating cultural icons including Robert de Montesquiou, Paul Valéry, Colette, Isadora Duncan and Ida Rubinstein, to name just several.
Wanda Landowska (1879-1959), photographed at the harpsichord in 1937.
In his 1984 book The Women of Montparnasse, author Cody Morrill noted that while Natalie Clifford Barney preferred writers to composers, she welcomed musicians to her salon as well. A violinist of some skill in her own right, doubtless she harbored an appreciation for classical music. The soprano Emma Calvé and harpsichordist Wanda Landowska were regular guests, along with an international gallery of composers including George Antheil, Virgil Thomson, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Alexis Roland-Manuel … and Florent Schmitt. Often the hostess would incorporate music into her Fridays gatherings, hiring instrumentalists to play discreetly in the background.
Virgil Thomson (1896-1989) pictured with Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) in an undated photo. (Courtesy: Bancroft Library/Virgil Thomson Foundation Ltd.)
As an example of the way that salons could help further the careers of budding composer talents, occasionally Barney would provide the venue for important musical presentations, such as when Virgil Thomson presented his composition Four Saints in Three Acts, featuring a libretto by Gertrude Stein. (The official premiere of the full opera happened in the United States in 1934, and featured an all-black vocal cast.)
American composer George Johann Carl Antheil (1900-1959), photographed with one of the “noisemakers” specially constructed for the premiere of his Ballet mécanique. The self-described “bad boy of American music” arrived in 1924 in Paris, which Antheil described as the “green tender morning,” from the “black night of Berlin.” Antheil was introduced by American writer Ezra Pound to Natalie Clifford Barney, at whose salon his Symphony for Five Instruments was premiered in 1924. (Florent Schmitt, who attended the premiere, could find only one word to describe what he’d heard: “Interesting.”) Barney would later underwrite the creation of Antheil’s radical String Quartet No. 1, premiered at rue Jacob on New Year’s Day in 1926 — the polar opposite of the kind of music that typically constitutes New Year concert programming. Back in the USA, during World War II George Antheil gained a different kind of notoriety in collaborating with Austrian-American actress Hedy Lamarr to develop a radio guidance system for torpedoes via the use of frequency-hopping spread-spectrum technology. (1925 photo)
The young American composer George Antheil was championed by the American writer Ezra Pound, who convinced Barney to host the debut of Antheil’s Symphony for Five Instruments at a Fridays event in January 1924.
In the January 19, 1924 edition of the Chicago Tribune, a reporter described the Antheil composition as “a weird mixture of jazz and discords – almost barbaric in the effect it produced” – and which “baffled” the Americans and Parisians at the gathering.
Late in Natalie Clifford Barney’s extraordinarily long life, she was interviewed in the garden of her rue Jacob home, in which she explained her commitment to the notion of the salon. Her remarks are perceptive and poignant — and they make it clear why so many found her salon gatherings so interesting and worthwhile:
In his 1931 book Back to Montparnasse, author Sisley Huddleston described the atmosphere of Natalie Fridays events as follows:
“One was ushered into that crowded, dim-lit salon by a soft-footed Oriental servant. When one became accustomed to the gloom, one picked out the distinguished guests. Paul Valéry was a frequenter of that salon; Dr. [Joseph Charles] Mardrus, the translator of A Thousand and One Nights; Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, the novelist, Salomon Reinach, archeologist; Isadora Duncan, the dancer; Alan Seeger, the American poet …Guillaume Apollinaire, who has been called the Father of Montparnasse; Florent Schmitt, the composer; [Charles] Seignobos, the historian; Edouard Herriot, the politician; Marie Laurencin, the painter; Kees van Dongen, Paul Morand, Fernand Divoire, Gomez de la Cerna, Valery Larbaud; and in fact nearly everybody in Paris who had done notable things in the arts, were her guests …
Her salon, famous as it is, is not guided by any prejudice. ‘Nothing reigns there, and least of all myself.’ Her real salon, she says, is the tête-à-tête.”
This “map” was drawn up by Natalie Clifford Barney for publication in her 1929 book Aventures de l’esprit. Showing a map of Barney’s house, garden and “Temple of Friendship” on Rue Jacob, it displays the most frequent guests at her Natalie Fridays gatherings. Florent Schmitt and other composers/musicians are notated in the upper right-hand section of the map drawing.
Natalie Clifford Barney standing at the front of the “Temple of Friendship.” The Doric structure, dating from the 18th century, and its surrounding garden courtyard was the centerpiece of Natalie Fridays gatherings of prominent literary and cultural figures from all corners of the world. The last salon gathering, hosted in May 1968 by the then 92-year-old Barney, was held amidst the so-called Mai 68 student riots in Paris. Jean Chalon, a young writer who attended the salon, wrote afterwards that “the corks popped, keeping time with explosions in the streets.” The pavilion survives to this day, and has been designated an historic monument by the French government.
In a sense, Sisley Huddleston could have been writing about any number of other salon venues as well. Natalie Clifford Barney’s Fridays may have been among the most notable and influential of them but there were numerous others — barely remembered today — that played their own role as well.
In her 1967 book A Travers deux siècles, souvenirs, rencontres, 1883-1967, writer Camille Marbo recalled the 1920s Paris salon scene with this touching description of independent, widowed and divorced hostesses and their contribution to that world:
Gabriel Grovlez (1879-1944). The French composer met soprano Mary Mantelin when she was engaged to perform his music in recital in 1907. The couple was married the following year, but the union would not last. Florent Schmitt was a friend of both musicians and was a regular guest at Mantelin’s salon on rue du Bac in the 7th arrondisement of Paris.
“These women opened their apartments … which usually had only two rooms, to their friends. For example, the divorced wife of the musician [Gabriel] Grovlez, Mme. [Mary] Mantelin on rue du Bac, welcomed her guests in a mauve tunic, her grey hair warn à la garçonne above an androgynous body. In each of the rooms there was a large divan covered with black, yellow and blue cushions. The furniture consisted of a Norman wardrobe, a round table and wicker chairs, and a piano reserved for the composer Florent Schmitt.”
[As a parenthetical aside, historian Leora Auslander notes that the kind of salon hostesses Camille Marbo describes in her memoir were ones who lived modestly, surrounded by furniture and trappings whose quantity, style and color scheme would have been considered wholly inappropriate for the haute-bourgeoisie or upper-class venues that characterized French salons of the previous generation.]
A vintage menu card prepared for a banquet held at Rotisserie Peredourdin in Paris on December 12, 1927 honoring Florent Schmitt. Inscribed on the card is a musical “puzzle” penned by fellow-composers Florent Schmitt, Gabriel Grovlez and Louis Aubert. (Click or tap on the image for a larger view.)
It should be acknowledged that the Parisian salons weren’t uniformly “sweetness and light.” Like so much else in human nature, at times they could be places that brought out the worst rather than the best in people. American author Suzanne Rodriguez claims as much in her 2002 book Wild Heart, a biography of Natalie Clifford Barney, in which she writes about the salons of Paris as follows:
Natalie Clifford Barney was herself an author, with more than a dozen books to her credit (nearly all of them written in French). In December 1952, a Paris event was organized in Barney’s honor at Le Pullman on rue des Petits Champs (2nd arr.). The program opened with a mini-recital of Florent Schmitt musical selections, followed by readings from Barney’s works presented by Fanny Robin, Jeanne Sully, Guy Squares and André Picot. Among the readings were selections from Pensées d’une Amazone, Barney’s 1921 feminist treatise (pictured above).
“Companionship, laughter and wit had characterized these gatherings from the beginning and continued to star, but increasingly, power and factions played important roles. Under the polished manners and polite smiles, the lances were out, with people jousting for ascendancy and recognition. Cliques, gossip, repartee — all could be savage.”
Writ large, however, Parisian salons did much to contribute to the cultural richness of the city and country, as they provided a consequential nexus whereby various branches of the arts could congregate and where attendees could draw mutual inspiration from one another. Notably (and somewhat uniquely), Florent Schmitt, acting as both salonnier and salonist, played a role on both sides of the equation.