When Florent Schmitt died in August 1958, fellow composer Henri Dutilleux wrote a memorable epitaph in honor of his older compatriot:
“Florent Schmitt was the last of that great family to which Ravel, Dukas, and Roussel belonged. He remains one of them who, by a happy assimilation of German and Central European influences, recalled the French school to certain notions of grandeur.”
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Florent Schmitt (l.) with fellow composer Louis Aubert, photographed at RTF studios in Paris in the early 1950s.
While Dutilleux was certainly correct in his characterization of Florent Schmitt’s artistry and his importance to French music, there were actually two notable composers from his era who outlived him: Max d’Ollone (1875-1959) and Louis Aubert (1877-1968). While neither of these composers achieved a comparable degree of fame as Schmitt during their livfetimes (or after their deaths), they are significant in their own right as part of France’s “Golden Age” of music.
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Louis François Marie Aubert (1877-1968) as a young man. (Photo: Courtesy of Marie-Françoise Guilhem-Redon)
The case of Louis Aubert, born seven years after Schmitt and two years following Ravel, is particularly interesting, in that Aubert’s life and career contain numerous parallels and intersections with Schmitt’s.
Like his older compatriot, Aubert was born into a family of commerce (the cloth industry in the case of Schmitt and the maritime industry in the case of Aubert). Both were families that also valued the arts, with parents who were amateur musicians. Both families hailed not from Paris but from the “provinces” (Lorraine for Schmitt and Brittany for Aubert), and both composers would later adopt the south of France as their “home away from home” after settling in Paris for their professions.
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The high altar at La Madeleine in Paris, where Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem received its first performance in 1888.
Realizing that their son possessed a pristine boy soprano voice and obvious musical talent overall, Louis Aubert’s parents sent him to study in Paris. At just eleven years old, the young man was chosen to sing the Pie Jesu in Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem at the premiere of the work at Église Ste-Marie-Madeleine in 1888.
Aubert was also invited to attend Fauré’s composition class at the Paris Conservatoire, where one of his fellow classmates was the 18-year-old Florent Schmitt.
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The logo of the Société musicale indépendante, established in 1910 with both Florent Schmitt and Louis Aubert as founding members.
Becoming acquainted with one another in Paris at an early age meant that the career trajectories of both men would be intertwined in the decades that followed. Both musicians were active in Les Apaches, the famously “outsider” group of artists, writers and musicians that flourished on the front lines of artistic expression in Paris in the years before World War I. Both men were also founding members of the Société musicale indépendante in 1910.
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A vintage copy of the score to Maurice Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales, showing the dedication to Louis Aubert.
Among their many mutual acquaintances in the arts, Aubert and Schmitt were particularly close friends with Maurice Ravel. Indeed, Ravel dedicated his 1911 piano work Valses nobles et sentimentales to Aubert, who gave the work’s premiere performance.
Aubert’s catalogue of compositions was not as voluminous as Schmitt’s, and it could be argued that he blazed no new pathways in music. He was content to write in the style of his youth — and unlike in Schmitt’s music, one doesn’t easily discern significant stylistic changes between his early and later works. But with their fine craftsmanship and inherent musical worth, nearly all of them are pieces that deserve to be known and performed.
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Two postwar orchestral pieces by Louis Aubert — Offrande (1947) and Le Tombeau de Chateaubriand (1948) — appeared on this 1956 French Columbia EMI recording along the Symphonie de numance by Aubert’s onetime pupil, Henry Barraud. The recording is now available in CD format from Forgotten Records.
Happily, Aubert has been relatively fortunate on recordings over the years in that nearly all of his major output has been recorded (with the notable exception of several ballets). His only opera, the early La Forêt bleue (1904-11) which was staged in Boston (by André Caplet), Geneva and Paris in the ‘teens and ‘twenties, has never been commercially recorded. However, a French Radio broadcast performance from 1954, featuring soloists Martha Angelici, Jacqueline Brumaire, Louis Noguéra and Raymond Malvasio under the direction of Eugène Bigot, is available on CD and in download form.
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Dimitri Mitropoulos (1896-1960) directed Louis Aubert’s Fantaisie for Piano & Orchestra from the keyboard (Monte-Carlo, May 1937).
During the interwar period, the works of both Aubert and Schmitt were often performed on symphony programs, directed by leading conductors such as Serge Koussevitzky, Vladimir Golschmann, Jean Morel and André Cluytens. Sometimes their music appeared together on the same program; one of the most interesting of those occasions was a Monte-Carlo concert in May 1937 that featured the Monégasque premiere of Schmitt’s Psaume XLVII (1904) along with Aubert’s Fantaisie for Piano & Orchestra (1899), with the piano part being played by the conductor of the musical forces – none other than Dimitri Mitropoulos.
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French conductor Fabien Gabel has programmed Louis Aubert’s La Habanera in recent years with orchestras in Monte-Carlo, London (BBC Symphony), Houston, Salt Lake City (Utah Symphony) and Galicia, Spain.
Unfortunately, these days Aubert’s compositions appear very rarely on orchestral programs. In fact, the only Aubert orchestral work that has been presented in concert in recent years is La Habanera (1918), thanks to French conductor Fabien Gabel who has programmed it with several orchestras in Europe and North America. Among Aubert’s vocal music, only the Poèmes arabes (1907) appears in recital, and his piano masterpiece Sillages (1908-12) does occasionally as well.
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Jean-Joseph Émile Vuillermoz (1878-1960)
Hearing most any work by Aubert, one is immediately struck by its fine craftsmanship; the composer’s talents as an orchestrator are noteworthy as well. Indeed, the Breton activist and writer Geneviève ‘Vefa’ de Bellaing characterized Aubert as “a fertile and refined composer, with elegant but rigorous music.” That description echoes the words of musician, author and critic Émile Vuillermoz, who once wrote, “You have to read the orchestral score of La Habanera to take a lesson in taste, measure, clarity and tact.”
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French music hall singer Marie Dubas (1894-1972)
Although a classically trained musician who was active in Les Apaches, the Société musicale indépendante and other arts-related oragnizations, Émile Vuillermoz was also highly involved in the film industry (among other things, he was the leading light behind the creation of the Cannes Film Festival), and in that context his connection with Louis Aubert is significant.
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A recording of Louis Aubert orchestral works, including Cinéma, released in 1994 on NAXOS’ Marco Polo imprint.
Beginning in the 1930s Aubert straddled the “pop” and classical worlds. He wrote chansons for Marie Dubas and other singers, and at the request of the Paris Opéra Ballet wrote the ballet score Cinéma in 1952, with dance numbers based on Hollywood legends including Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin and Rudolph Valentino. About this ballet, music historian Lionel Pons wrote in 2003:
“Cinéma is not a secondary anecdotal work — nor an aesthetic essay on the ever-conflicting relationships between image and music, nor a book of images devoid of depth — but instead a shortcut of contrasting emotions, like the human soul, which the composer makes spontaneous while operating within a very strict formal framework close to a classical symphony.”
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The original French Columbia release of the Aubert/Rosenthal ballet La Belle Hélène (1955). The recording was re-released on CD in 1996.
And in another postwar project, Aubert teamed up with fellow French composer and arranger Manuel Rosenthal to prepare music for a ballet adaptation of Jacques Offenbach’s operetta Le Belle Hélène. The 1955 recording of the score by the Paris Opéra Orchestra under the direction of Robert Blot is considered a worthy successor to Rosenthal’s famous 1937 creation Gaîté Parisienne — likewise based on themes from various Offenbach operettas.
As professional colleagues, Florent Schmitt and Louis Aubert found themselves serving together on various juries and committees pertaining to music composition and performance. As one example, in 1938 both men were named to the committee charged with adjudicating the Lasserre Foundation prize for music composition. And while Aubert was more involved in music education than Schmitt, teaching composition both privately and at the Paris Conservatoire, both men are credited with mentoring two important composers of the younger generation: Pierre-Octave Ferroud in the case of both Schmitt and Aubert; and Henry Barraud in the case of Aubert.
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The logo of the Société nationale de musique. Notice the Latin motto adopted by the organization: “Ars Gallica.”
Florent Schmitt was elected to the Institut de France in the 1930s, and Louis Aubert was likewise elected to that organization in the 1950s. Aubert also succeeded Schmitt as president of the Société National de Musique in 1958 upon the death of the older composer.
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A medallion honoring Louis Aubert. The reverse side bears the description “Createur – Pedagogue – Critique” and also lists five of his orchestral works plus his only opera, La Fôret bleue.
Similarly, both composers served as prominent music critics in Paris during the interwar years – Schmitt at Le Temps and Aubert at Le Journal. Each man is credited with having penned reviews and articles numbering in the hundreds over two decades, covering a wide range of musical content. And Aubert would later contribute his erudite commentary and analysis to music broadcasts on French Radio.
Notably, in his critical writings Aubert characterized Schmitt as “a powerful and barbaric musician,” while also noting that Schmitt “knows how to temper his excesses.” In Aubert’s view, it was essential to recognize not only the formidable power of Schmitt’s music, but also “this quivering sensitivity to which we owe some of the most moving pages of contemporary music.”
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The L’Art musical magazine issue containing Louis Aubert’s essay (January 8, 1937).
With such a history of intertwined experiences and activities, it’s fitting that when it came time for the periodical L’Art musical to select someone to write the lead article for a magazine issue devoted the artistry of Schmitt, it would turn to Louis Aubert. The younger composer responded by producing an essay that neatly captures the persona of Florent Schmitt — as well as Schmitt’s development as an artist who was famously an “independent” who attached to no movement or school, instead charting his own course.
Aubert’s essay, which appeared in the January 8, 1937 issue of L’Art musical, is reproduced below. (For the benefit of non-French readers, an English translation of the article follows immediately below the original.)
Image may be NSFW.
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Florent Schmitt: The Man, The Musician, His Influence
By: Louis Aubert
A personality as endearing as that of Florent Schmitt cannot but tempt the pen of many essayists. No one has failed to portray him in every way, to seek to bring out the broad outlines of the physiognomy of the musician and the man; to exalt the beauty, abundance and richness of his production; and finally to bring the contribution of some anecdote to the legend that has gradually formed around him.
Have I not myself, on many occasions, proclaimed the admiration that this prodigious temperament inspires in me — this surprising fecundity, this power of thought doubled by a sense of balance necessary for the durability of a work of art?
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Florent Schmitt (Medallion by Weysset)
It also seems difficult to add anything new to this literature which, already fixed in the general ideas offered by the subject, will continue to grow, as it imposes itself more and more on the attention of the general public. It remains for those who were the companions at his beginnings this privilege of having followed day-by-day his long and often painful ascension — and the joy of realizing that in the midst of his present glory, he remains exactly the same man.
This same man whom they knew to be so overflowing with enthusiasm — so ardent in combat — and who, today, continues to fight for the victory of his cadets, instead of enjoying in the peace of his own.
This same man, so frank, so imbued with the collective spirit, who made his own any success of one of his comrades, found as much joy in it as many others feel anxiety in supporting the progress of their competition.
This same man, modest among all and naturally modest, without indignation in the face of failure, happy with an almost gruff simplicity in the face of success; one of the only ones, among we musicians, who knows not to see in his music a subject of conversation.
I emphasize especially these qualities because of their rarity. How many artists — even the greatest — know how to resist the formidable test of celebrity?
Now, whether fresh out of the Conservatoire or respected member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, Florent Schmitt remains a young man among the young — an avant-garde man.
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The Institut de France, located on the Quai de Conti (6th arr., Paris) is a French learned society established in 1796 and made up of five academies, including the Académie des Beaux-arts. L’Institut is colloquially referred to as “The Parliament of the Learned World.” Florent Schmitt was elected to l’Institut in the 1930s, and Louis Aubert followed him into the organization in 1956. Currently there are 67 elected members of the Académie des Beaux-arts.
The new generations consider him one of their own; when he enters l’Institut, the young music celebrates its own triumph and commemorates it according to the best tradition by the offering of a wooden saber. Either I do not know Florent Schmitt well, or I don’t doubt that this gesture was close to his heart.
As for the official solemnities, he undergoes them with a sort of startled surprise. In fact, he has perhaps not yet realized that he is a great man and, accustomed to so much resistance on his path, he would almost lack an element of balance due to the unanimous support if he were not still allowed to fight for others, no longer having to do it for himself.
Because he had to fight for a long time, stubbornly. The curve of his career does not show this sudden rise which, suddenly, could raise certain musicians to a world reputation.
His [journey] was arduous, thankless. As well as an artist sincere to this point could not make the slightest concession to a hoped-for success. And music as nonconformist as his could not impose its law on the general public at once.
It is therefore step by step, crossing the degrees one by one, sometimes stopped at a plateau, sometimes breached as he was during the first years of the postwar period — not the only one, but perhaps the most targeted of his generation — it is with this slowness, but also the surety of the needle of a barometer rising towards high pressure, that he has reached the coveted place that he occupies today. The pace of the progression is a guarantee for us of the definitive character of his present success.
No more than he made aesthetic concessions to public tastes or to the movements of fashion, he was incapable of submitting to those human comedies by which so many ephemeral reputations are made and unmade.
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The longtime residence of Louis Aubert at 139 Boulevard Péreire (17th arr., Paris), where he lived with his first wife Suzanne Mairot (1878-1954). The composer remarried at age 90 in 1967, less than a year before his death. (2022 photo)
Certainly one couldn’t say that Florent Schmitt was brought to honors by his talents as a diplomat! The roughness of his approach is in no way inferior to that of his music, although it is ultimately quite deceptive. For if the impetuosity of his reflexes often translates into formidable blows, there is in him an inexhaustible depth of goodness that rarely misses the opportunity to manifest itself with surprising delicacy.
Do we not find this dual character in his work, where the most frenetic accents often give way to melodic episodes of the most moving sweetness?
I was saying above what affectionate respect young musicians show their glorious elder. Does this mean that Schmitt is seen as a pathfinding leader, or at least that his personality has had an influence on the generations that followed him? This is extremely difficult to determine, and I have often come to notice how this problem of “influences” is a shifting ground for criticism.
At a given moment in musical evolution, contemporaries are always extremely struck by certain thematic analogies that are easy to establish between the works of young people and those of a composer in the spotlight. Now, such analogies have no importance whatsoever. When we consider them with the benefit of hindsight, we realize that they belong to a certain common fund, which is found at all times and which all musicians use more or less consciously and with more or less happiness, without losing anything of their personality for that.
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French composer, teacher and mentor Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924). Of Fauré’s star pupils, historian and archivist Michel Fleury has written: “While the beginning of the 20th century — a veritable ‘Golden Age’ of French music — is beginning to be restored to the spotlight, the neglect of Louis Aubert’s work remains an inexplicable injustice: He must indeed be ranked, along with Charles Koechlin or Florent Schmitt, among those few ‘giants’ whose rediscovery should allow us to appreciate the evolution of 20th century French music in a fairer perspective. Like his two great contemporaries, Aubert was one of Fauré’s students; the high standard of his work, with its marked and easily recognizable individuality, attests to the value of a teaching [method] that was able to reconcile the acquisition of a craft of unstoppable perfection with the blossoming of each student’s personality …”
It is necessary to distinguish between good and bad influence. An influence is good when it arouses in a young artist a personal creation — but it is bad when it incites him to a simple imitation. It must be recognized, for example, that the influence of Wagner on a very large number of composers was clearly deplorable; on the contrary, that of Fauré on most of his students was of the best.
In this last sense, it seems significant to me that, among the leading lights of young French music, the two French composers who perhaps benefited the most from the knowledge of Florent Schmitt’s work were two natures as dissimilar as Pierre-Octave Ferroud and Henry Barraud.
The first of them — alas, tragically deceased — did not have the time to carry out the solid principles of his master to their final consequence. We find in his music a dynamism, a sense of balanced discourse, a mastery in the handling of the orchestra for which Schmitt had, without a doubt, instilled in him the taste.
In Henry Barraud, with a more vehement sensitivity, it is still the sense of the rich instrumental material that will mark this common lineage.
We will know only later which musicians of the following generations will have in turn followed the movement.
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Florent Schmitt standing at the front entrance of his St-Cloud home in 1937, the year that Louis Aubert’s essay was published.
There is no doubt that they will be numerous, and perhaps even, in some twenty-five years, when the Schmitt festivals will follow one another on the programs at the same pace as the Wagner festivals of our day, new generations, eager to make their voices heard, will begin to find in their turn the personality of our musician singularly cumbersome. Perhaps some composer will proclaim that Psalm XLVII was not written to be played every Sunday.
It is the lot of very great artists to fight fiercely to make their place — and then, one day, to block in their turn the passage of all those who come after them. Because Florent Schmitt is a very great artist, this fate will not be spared him. Image may be NSFW.
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Louis Aubert, photographed in 1928.
It is interesting to note that Louis Aubert’s essay about Florent Schmitt contains a sort of premonition about what the fate of Schmitt’s music in the decades immediately following his death would be. That same fate could be ascribed to Aubert’s own legacy as well. In 2009, the author Jean-Alain Joubert wrote these poignant personal reflections of meeting Louis Aubert a half-century earlier:
“It was 1956 or 1957, at Petites Brandes near Périgueux. The old man no longer enjoyed the same notoriety that had been his. We know the bitterness that Jean Roger-Ducasse and Florent Schmitt felt about it. The great Fauré was the beloved master of a cohort of inspired students; our country experienced a period of unequalled musical splendor at that time, a fact that [later] became suspect.
Musical impressionism was battered by successive gusts of modernist currents, and this galaxy of talents, with the exception of Maurice Ravel who had been cut short in the prime of his glory by an untimely death, was destined to experience a long purgatory from which they have still not reappeared today.
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An Aubert family outing in the country: Louis and Suzanne Aubert with their three daughters (Michèle, Suzy and Jacqueline). (Ca. early 1920s photo, courtesy of Marie-Françoise Guilhem-Redon)
Aubert was surely saddened by this, but he had lost neither his dignity nor his distinguished gravity. We were in the presence of the most perfect of gentlemen.
I had not come across any others until that day during the summer holidays when I was walking alongside my grandfather on the path through the woods, returning to the farm where he lived with my grandmother.
Louis Aubert came forward to greet him and ask about his life and his family. He asked him about me … I was quite intimidated … fortunately my grandfather was there!
But I have a fond memory of this man who was already old, thin, a little stooped and dressed as if he were in the city, with great distinction. He was full of reserve and kindness. How these people of such courteous education are lacking in our lives today. Meeting them was like a ray of human sunshine on our modest trajectories.
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A caricature drawing of Louis Aubert (1942).
So, quite naturally, I agree with the very evocative portrait that Bernard Gavoty and Daniel-Lesur made of him in 1957:
‘This busy little gentleman wears on a short, slightly stooped torso an extraordinarily characteristic head. A shock of white hair surrounds his halo. A curved nose, like a saber, forms the prow of his face. Two eyes with the liveliness of a bird serve as his headlights. He walks, always in a hurry, with a student’s step. Three quarters of a century have hardly aged him; Louis Aubert, the eternal youth.’
The child, with a soprano voice ‘which caused a sensation among church choirs,’ became a man — ‘a little dry, but with a fine and benevolent gaze, a distinguished, sensitive composer, whose vigor is wrapped in poetry’ …”
And perhaps the last word can come from the composer himself, who admitted during a 1953 Radio France interview with arts journalist Georges Charbonnier:
“For me basically, music is above all human; I won’t hide that from you …”
Indeed, Aubert’s music proves the point in every phrase.
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The gravesite of Louis Aubert is located in Vaugirard Cemetery (15th arr., Paris). Aubert’s second wife, Louise Sieyès (1897-1988) is buried with him. The couple were married in 1967, less than a year before the composer’s death at nearly 91 years of age.