Composer of the Month
It only he had learnt to keep his mouth shut, this fine French composer might be more favourably regarded today, says Roger Nichols
Roger Nichols on Florent Schmitt, the foul-mouthed French composer of colourful orchestral scores
It’s 29 May 1913 and, in the Théâtre des Champs-élysées in Paris, the premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring is producing one of those splendid scandales in which the city specialises. In the midst of the uproar, with the aristos in their boxes shouting, hooting and blowing on their hollow door keys, a stentorian voice breaks through: ‘Taisez-vous, garces du seizième!’ ‘Shut your gobs, you posh sluts!’
It is the voice of the composer Florent Schmitt – and not the first or last time it will be heard sowing discord and aggravation. Of course, this sort of behaviour is not recommended if you want to make friends and influence people, and in Schmitt’s case it has undoubtedly gone some way to marginalising him in the field of French culture. So if his name is unknown to you, no shame is attached.
It all started quite normally. Florent was born on 28 September 1870 in Blâmont in the Vosges, near the border with Germany that would be agreed the following year after the Franco-prussian War. His father, a haberdasher, was also an amateur organist and both parents encouraged Florent’s interest in music, although the boy’s independent spirit was already demonstrated in his complaint that ‘organists are people who always play in 4/4’ (signs of things to come). Music he wrote between the ages of 14 and 17, already showing his love for complex textures, was enough to gain him a place in the Nancy Conservatoire. In 1889 his piano teacher recommended him to Théodore Dubois, the director of the Paris Conservatoire, and in September of that year he moved to the capital. Even if Dubois was unhappy with Florent’s addiction to chromaticism, Massenet recognised his ‘nature exceptionnelle’.
Massenet resigned in 1896 to be replaced soon afterwards by Fauré, and it was under the latter’s tutelage that in 1900, in his last chance as a 30 year-old, Schmitt won the Prix de Rome with his cantata Sémiramis (his typically vivid response being ‘if I hadn’t hit the bull’s eye this year, I’d have had to jump in the lake !’). So off to Rome he went.
‘If I hadn’t hit the bull’s eye this year,’ said Schmitt, ‘I’d have had to jump in the lake’
Arriving at the Villa Médicis on 30 December on the stroke of midnight, he had to climb over the fence into the garden. Similar physical activity then marked his four years there, during which he actually spent most of his time travelling round Europe, the Near East and North Africa, imbibing ‘exotic’ music that was soon to mark his own. The other major influence was César Franck, and in particular his Piano Quintet which, said Schmitt, ‘contains more ideas and emotions than the complete works of five members of the Institut, including Saint-saëns’. In Schmitt’s own Quintet, begun but not finished in Rome, the double-dotted rhythms proclaim their allegiance.
His last two years in Rome produced his first two works now in the repertoire. The symphonic study Le Palais hanté of 1904, on the poem by Edgar Allan