French composer Florent Schmitt, age 83, photographed in 1953, three years before his interview with Bernard Gavoty at Jeunesses Musicales de France. (Photo: ©Boris Lipnitzki/Roger-Viollet)
For devotees of the Florent Schmitt Website + Blog, we are pleased to provide a link to a rare taped interview of the composer, done in 1956 when Schmitt was 86 years old.
The interview was conducted at the Jeunesses Musicales de France by Bernard Gavoty, the famed French organist, author and music critic who interviewed many musical personalities during the 1950s and 1960s.
Listening to the discussion, which was conducted in French, one can easily tell that Florent Schmitt, always known for his sense of wit and irony, had lost none of those qualities even after more than eight decades.
It is fascinating to hear the composer speak about La Tragédie de Salomé, his most famous work, as well as the notorious 1913 premiere of Stravinsky’s ballet Le Sacre du printemps, about which Schmitt wrote so convincingly (and scathingly) in the newspapers at the time.
Here is a link to the spirited interview, conducted in the presence of a lively audience that clearly found the discussion highly interesting and — judging from the amount of laughter and applause — thoroughly engaging.
We are indebted to Nicolas Southon, French musicologist and a specialist in the music of Francis Poulenc and Gabriel Fauré, for unearthing this rare taped document that gives us the opportunity to hear Florent Schmitt in all of his witty glory.
It’s even more wonderful that the Gavoty interview was captured just two years before the end of Schmitt’s long and eventful life — a career that spanned the most glorious era in all of French music — as it gives us the chance to hear Schmitt’s perspectives based on the benefit of hindsight that comes from “a life well-lived.”
