Fêtes de la lumière at the Paris Exposition, 1937.
In 1937, one of the final transnational gatherings held on the European continent before the onset of World War II occurred in the city of Paris. The International Exposition of Art and Technology in Modern Life — colloquially known as the Paris Exposition — took place between May and November of that year.
Plan view of the Paris Exposition, 1937.
Its lofty name reflected a similarly lofty goal, and yet certain telltale signs gave hints of the conflagration that was soon to come. Built on both banks of the Seine River and adjacent to the Eiffel Tower, an important component of the Paris Exposition was the zone reserved for various national pavilions representing the countries of Europe.
USSR pavilion at the Paris Exposition, 1937.
Perhaps unwittingly, the Expo planners positioned the sites of German and Soviet pavilions directly facing each other, which precipitated the construction of “dueling towers” reflecting the intense struggle the two ideologies were engaged in — albeit still only as a war of words in 1937.
The USSR pavilion featured a huge sculpture of a peasant and a factory worker atop its imposing structure, while the competing German pavilion, designed by architect Albert Speer, was even taller. The German pavilion was flanked by massive sculptures of nude figures created by Josef Thorak, the Austro-German artist who was famous for similarly grandiose monuments erected throughout the Third Reich.
A Josef Thorak sculpture at the German pavilion, Paris Exposition.
Other countries such as Romania attempted similarly grandiose statements — although the resulting edifices were not quite as impressive — whereas nations such as the United Kingdom and Switzerland participated in the Exposition with far less flamboyant pavilions designed to showcase their countries’ heritage of native crafts and industries rather than the projection of raw power.
Meanwhile, the Spanish pavilion engaged in a propaganda endeavor of its own. With the country still engaged in a bloody civil war, the Republican government, while it may have been on the run at home and in control of increasingly diminishing sections of the country, held full sway in Paris. It turned the Spanish pavilion into a celebration of the Republican struggle, including exhibiting Pablo Picasso’s iconic painting Guernica for all fairgoers to see.
Less pretentious: The Swiss pavilion at the Paris Exposition, 1937.
Against this backdrop of “prelude to war,” the Paris Exposition’s aims in the cultural arena were manifested prominently in its Festivals of Light, in which the Exposition’s planners sought to attract and thrill audiences with a series of shows in which newly created musical compositions were accompanied by tightly choreographed spectacles of light and water.
Eugène-Elie Beaudouin, French Architect (1898-1983)
Designed by the architect Eugène Beaudouin, the Fêtes de la lumière were set on the banks of the Seine River stretching from the Point de Invalides to the Ile des Cygnes.
In Beaudouin’s conception, the scheme constituted a sort of “immersive symphony” of light and water, sustained and exalted by the music. The visual spectacle was the main attraction — and the music the accompaniment — in this grand design to highlight the beauty of the effects of water and vapors, fumes and colors.
The Festivals of Light events were scheduled to be presented over a nearly five-month period, meaning that a substantial number of new compositions would be required to ensure sufficient variety over the season. Accordingly, the Exposition committee commissioned 18 composers to create musical scores in the year preceding the start of the exposition.
As the acknowledged “dean” of French composers — Paul Dukas having passed away in 1935 and Maurice Ravel, Albert Roussel and Gabriel Pierné no longer able to compose (all three would die in the year of the Exposition) — Florent Schmitt was given the honor of creating the score for the very first show, to be held on June 14, 1937. His piece, appropriately titled Fête de la lumière (Opus 88), was a substantial composition of more than a half-hour in length. Schmitt scored it for large orchestra, soprano and contralto soloists, plus an eight-part mixed chorus.
Florent Schmitt, photographed in 1937, the year of the Paris Exposition. ©Boris Lipnitzki / Roger-Voillet
The entire season of offerings included the following compositions, listed below in order of their premieres at the Festivals of Light:
- Florent Schmitt: Fête de la lumière
- Jean Rivier: Fête de rêve
- Jacques Ibert: Fête nationale
- Elsa Barraine: Fête des coonies
- Darius Milhaud: Fête de la musique
- Raymond Loucheur: Fête de la Seine
- Manuel Rosenthal: Fête du vin
- Marcel Delannoy: Fête de la danse
- Claude Delvincourt: Fête de l’automne
- Louis Aubert: Fête de l’éte
- Paul Le Flem: Fête du printemps
- Arthur Honegger: Mille et un nuits
- Désiré-Emilie Inghelbrecht: Fête enfantine
- Henry Barraud: Fête du feu
- Pierre Vellones: Fête fantastique
- Maurice Yvain: Fête du chanson
- Olivier Messiaen: Fête des belles eaux
- Charles Koechlin: Fête des eaux vives
The musical creations by these 18 composers ranged in duration from just 15 minutes (Barraud’s Fête du feu) to the grand frescos of Ibert’s Fête nationale and Schmitt’s Fête de la lumière.
Paris Exposition Poster (1937)
Because it was considered impossible to present the Festivals of Light shows featuring live music, it was decided to pre-record each of the scores, and then broadcast them via amplifiers and specially-engineered potentiometers mounted on barges on the Seine River to enhance audio fidelity and limit any distortion.
In the months leading up to the opening of the Exposition, all of the major Parisian orchestras were mobilized to record soundtracks to the 18 shows. Among those ensembles was the newly formed French National Radio Orchestra; its recording of Koechlin’s Fête des eaux vives, conducted by Roger Desormière, is very likely among the very first recordings ever made by this ensemble.
In the case of Florent Schmitt’s Fête de la lumière, the Lamoureux Orchestra under the direction of Eugène Bigot did the honors.
Pre-recorded soundtracks played by France’s best orchestras meant that the musical component of the shows was universally strong. Unfortunately, as recounted by Koechlin and others, although the recordings themselves were impressive, it was disappointing to hear the music frequently drowned out by fireworks and water sounds when performed live in front of crowds that sometimes numbered as many as 250,000 people.
Fêtes de la lumière at the Paris Exposition, 1937.
Unfortunately, because these 18 scores had been created for a very special purpose, most of the compositions written for the Festival of Lights have never been published. Florent Schmitt’s score is no exception; it is one of just a small handful of his opus-numbered compositions to remain unpublished today.
But because the music was pre-recorded, we have audio documentation that has been well-preserved over the ensuing eight decades. Thanks to Philippe Louis’ very fine YouTube music channel, music-lovers finally have the opportunity to hear Florent Schmitt’s phantasmagorical score in all of its splendor.
You can listen to the music here. The 1937 sonics are surprisingly clear and fine, with conductor Eugène Bigot coaxing committed performances from soprano Marie-Louise Deniau-Blanc, contralto Irina Kedroff, the chorus and the Lamoureaux Orchestra musicians.
Listening to this endlessly fascinating music, it’s quite easy to imagine the play of water, lights and fireworks that accompanied its presentation at the Festivals of Light. But the music works equally well on its own, conjuring up those very images in the imagination — often with ecstatic, even delirious abandon.
Schmitt’s large orchestra includes important quasi-solo parts for the alto saxophone and — most intriguingly — ondes martenot. Not leaving it at that, the composer employs soprano and contralto soloists along with an eight-part mixed chorus in the final third of the piece, making the music positively visionary in its breadth and spirit.
No wonder Schmitt’s biographer Yves Hucher characterized Fêtes de la lumière as “a dazzling composition” — and he is absolutely correct.
In an interesting historical sidebar, the Festival of Lights provided the young music journalist Olivier Messiaen with one of his earliest composing opportunities. His contribution — Fête des belles eaux — is among a very few of the 18 works ever to be commercially recorded in subsequent years. Still working as a journalist in 1937, Messiaen wrote in rhapsodic terms about the festival:
“Fêtes de la lumière take place beside the Seine, with synchronized fountains and fireworks surpassing in splendor all previous spectacles of this kind, accompanied by musical scores composed on clearly established scenarios in close synchronization with the arabesques of fire and water.”
Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992)
Three decades later, Messiaen would write the following words to Eugène Beaudouin, the architect who had brought the Festivals of Light from vision to reality:
“You must remember that I have not forgotten the Fêtes de la lumière, nor the enormous timed and colored plan of the moments of water and light that I accompanied with music. It was so large that I had to spread it out on the carpet in my drawing-room, and that I lay on the ground to read it — or even at night by boat on the Seine with the streams of water. The colorful projections that fell from the sky, the orchestras, and the martenot waves. 1937: It was a happy time; thank you for enabling me to live it.”
What have been the fortunes of Florent Schmitt’s Fêtes de la lumière since those distant-past days of 1937? We know that the piece was presented again by Eugène Bigot and the Lamoureaux Orchestra on March 19, 1938 — this time in a concert performance without the accompanying choreography of lights and water.
But since the work was never published, there is no evidence that it has been performed ever since — which is a shame because it is a substantial and highly worthy composition among Schmitt’s body of work. Unmistakably a product of the master, it delivers the widest possible range of emotions and atmospherics, along with endlessly interesting musical ideas.
The richness of Schmitt’s colorful orchestration, augmented by the fullness of the mixed chorus and the ecstatic solo voice passages, are remindful of other large-scale Schmitt compositions, particularly Psaume XLVII, La Tragédie de Salomé, Salammbô and Oriane et la Prince d’Amour.
Indeed, one could argue that Fêtes de la lumière deserves a rightful pride of place alongside those lauded compositions.
