“An extraordinary mélée of color and line, with a free canon that is not far from polytonia …”
— Virgil Thomson, American composer and music critic
Florent Schmitt photographed in 1915, the year he completed his orchestral version of Rêves.
Sprinkled throughout the catalogue of Florent Schmitt’s compositions are a goodly number of shorter orchestral pieces. They range in their moods from contemplative to joyous to stormy.
One of these orchestral miniatures that I find particularly compelling is Rêves, Op. 65 (Dreams), a work that Schmitt began composing in 1913. He prepared a piano version of the score in that year, and the orchestration was completed two years later.
Florent Schmitt as a French soldier during World War I.
The composer had just finished putting the final touches on the piano score when he was called up for World War I military service. It was a period of time in Schmitt’s life that he would later characterize, in a letter to fellow-composer Igor Stravinsky, as “two less-than-amusing years of militarism.”
Rêves is a short work, lasting under ten minutes in duration. But despite its brevity, it is a concentrated, intense piece even in its quietest moments. Indeed, the reveries in this music are not “sweet dreams” at all. Rather, it’s more like a fitful, hallucinatory experience for the listener.
Léon-Paul Fargue, photographed at about the time he wrote the poem upon which Florent Schmitt’s Rêves is based.
It helps for understanding to know that Schmitt took a poem written by the French symbolist poet Léon-Paul Fargue (1876-1947) as inspiration for this work.
Fargue and Schmitt were fellow members of Les Apaches, a group of Parisian musicians, artists and writers that was a kind of precursor to Les Six. Fargue’s verses would serve as inspiration for other Schmitt compositions as well, such as the “Solitude” movement from the composer’s piano suite Crépuscules.
Léon-Paul Fargue’s original French-language poetry, written into conductor Fabien Gabel’s score to Florent Schmitt’s Rêves. (Click on the image for a larger view.)
Fargue’s words that head the music score translate into English roughly as follows:
“Watch our days and our dreams passing;
Old accomplices show them to us, as we look at these pictures.
They distinguish the nocturnal screen;
They come forward with the suspended steps of those who love us, when mystery chimes on the threshold of feverish nights.”
I think that the essayist and music critic Benoît Duteurtre puts it well when he describes how the music in Rêves unfolds “like a free commentary.”
The November 12, 1918 edition of the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro carried an announcement of the Lamoureux Concerts Orchestra premiere performance of Florent Schmitt’s Rêves. Camille Chevillard directed the orchestra in a program that also featured the music of Mozart, Liszt, d’Erlanger and Renie.
Schmitt scored the work for his customary large orchestra, including full winds and brass, an entire battery of percussion instruments, plus celesta and two harps.
As in a feverish dream, the music swells and abates in successive waves — and is often quiet rather than loud. The writing is dense in texture — and very rich in its changing sound colors.
An original edition of the full score to Florent Schmitt’s Rêves, a tone picture the composer completed in 1915. Its premiere performance was in 1918 by the Colonne Concerts Orchestra conducted by Camille Chevillard.
In its near-suffocating mood and intensity, I find that Rêves shares similarities with Schmitt’s very next opus number, the Légende, Op. 66 for saxophone (or viola) and orchestra. That work was completed in 1919, and if you compare the two pieces of music, I think you’ll hear the same kind of intense, unsettled atmospherics.
Is it possible that World War I, and Schmitt’s experiences in it, informed the nature of these two works? There are no explicit indications to that effect. Moreover, Rêves was completed before Schmitt’s military service started (although the war had been going on for some months by then). And the Légende would not be composed until after the end of the war.
Comrades in arms … comrades in the arts: Pictured (l. to r.) in this 1915 phograph sent from the Western Front are the cubist painter Albert Gleizes, harpist Carlos Salzedo, composer Florent Schmitt and tenor Charles Dalmorès.
Moreover, we have the testimony of harpist Carlos Salzedo, who served on the Western Front with Florent Schmitt in 1914 and 1915 and who would write these words the following year:
“The nation became great overnight … and when it is all over the French people will not lose this depth and gravity. The nation has seen its soul illumined in a great light, and the sight will not be vain nor the effect of it transitory.
We, who for more than twenty years have possessed the most original musical art in Europe, will further broaden its scope and humanize its essence. That does not mean that our present composers are going to change their methods overnight, though there has been foolish talk to that effect. I remember asking my comrade in the trenches, Florent Schmitt, if he had changed his style since the war began. He laughed at me.”
A letter from Camille Chevillard to Florent Schmitt, dated 1920. Maestro Chevillard was responsible for a number of important premieres of Schmitt’s orchestral compositions between 1900 and 1920 — including Rêves.
Still, it’s hard not to think that wartime circumstances contributed in some manner to the general flavor of both compositions. Certainly, any “resolution” that we may hear at the end of each piece doesn’t come across as anything particularly definitive or cathartic.
Considering the subject matter, literary inspiration and musical characteristics of Rêves, it shouldn’t come as a suprise that it left more than a few arts critics baffled (or perhaps even angry) when they encountered it in concert. The piece was the first Schmitt composition to elicit such a high degree of controversy — but certainly not the last, as compositions coming along in subsequent years, most notably the Sonate libre, Kérob-Shal and Symphonie concertante, would generate even more bewilderment or outright hostility.
Camille Chevillard (1859-1923)
Rêves received its first performance in November 1918 in Paris, in a combined Lamoureux/Colonne Orchestra concert under the direction of Camille Chevillard. Edgar Herbert-Cesari, the Paris correspondent for the British publication The Musical Times, was in the audience and filed these observations about the composer and the piece:
“M. Florent Schmitt is not a very young man, being now about forty-five. Thus it will be admitted that he has certain claims to distinction of technique. But [he] is a very broadminded man, and full of sympathy for the most recent musical expression. Moreover, like all truly great artists he is eager always to renew his musical vitality. He is far from being satisfied with reperforming his old musical triumphs, and his new departures have occasionally not met with the full approval of the Junkers of the art.
This description of a January 1918 performance Florent Schmitt’s Rêves at the Salle Gaveau in Paris was penned by Edgar F. Herbert-Caesari and published in the February 1, 1919 issue of The Musical Times. A highly regarded musician who had studied in Italy with Riccardo Daviesi, Antonio Cotogni and Benjamin Gigli, Herbert-Caesari (1884-1969) taught at The Trinity College of Music, mentoring up-and-coming singers such as Mary Garden, Peter Dawson and George Shirley. He also worked closely with a very young Richard Bonynge in exploring the neglected bel canto repertoire of Italy and France, which would later result in critically acclaimed premiere operatic recordings done by Bonynge and his wife, the soprano Joan Sutherland, which were released on the Decca/London label in the 1960s and 1970s. (Click on the image for a larger view.)
His last work — Dreams — was hissed by the reactionary section of the audience, while the new blood and ardent spirits were just as vigorously applauding it. As a matter of fact, this work of M. Schmitt’s is extremely interesting. He has employed the wind instruments in an entirely new manner, giving to them almost the most important part of the score, [thereby] creating an atmosphere of profundity and grandeur in so short a work.”
The music correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor was less charitable in a review that was published in the February 8, 1919 edition of that paper, which stated:
“After hearing and fully appreciating the romantic overture Benvenuto Cellini by Berlioz, the public was asked to follow, appreciate and understand Rêves (Dreams) by Florent Schmitt, who ranks amongst the most representative of modern French musicians. The program intimated to the public that it should ‘look at the days and dreams as they pass by. Old accomplices turn them toward us as one looks at pictures. They separate the nocturnal sky. They advance with the slow step of those who love you when Mystery rings at the doorstep of feverish nights.’
From the way it welcomed Dreams, the public did not seem to have fully grasped the lesson that Mr. Florent Schmitt wished to convey, and it turned in evident relief to the Mozart symphony …”
Among a number of French conductors who took up the work was Paul Paray, who introduced the piece at the Concerts Lamoureux on March 39, 1924.
Serge Alexandrovich Koussevitzky (1874-1951) programmed Rêves several times in Paris and in Boston.
Three years earlier, Serge Koussevitzky included Rêves as part of his 1921 concert season at the Paris Opéra. Regarding that performance, the Christian Science Monitor reported favorably on both the composition and the interpretation, noting that the presentation was “truly excellent — solid and firm and beautifully expressive.”
But when Maestro Koussevitzky programmed the work with the Boston Symphony Orchestra on October 17-18, 1924, Philip Hale, the arch-conservative music critic for the Boston Herald newspaper, seemed irritated by the music, churlishly writing:
Philip Hale (1854-1934)
“[Florent Schmitt] has been called ‘the wild boar of the Ardennes’ … hearing his Rêves, one was tempted to spell ‘boar’ differently. For this music … purposing to illustrate rhapsodic sentences of a French writer that dangerously approach ‘hifalutin,’ is swollen, preposterous, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. There is a mighty struggle to express dreams and clouds. And what dreams! Possibly the ingenious Herr Freud of Vienna could explain their meaning, but this explanation might be unfit for publication except in a journal devoted to medicine or psychology.”
Another critic who reviewed the 1924 Koussevitzy performance, Jeannette Cox, wrote dimissively in the October 23, 1924 issue of Musical Courier magazine:
“Mr. Koussevitzky is to be thanked for adding this charming score to the orchestral repertory [El Amor Brujo suite by Manuel de Falla], for it will surely stand rehearing. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Schmitt’s Dreams, which, while expertly written, might more aptly have been named ‘Nightmares.'”
As for Koussevitzky himself, his high regard for the music was underscored by the fact that he chose to program the piece again with the Boston Symphony in 1932.
[In Chicago, conductor Frederick Stock acquired Schmitt’s score with the intention of presenting it with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra during the 1921-22 season. While Musical America reported on those performance plans in its October 22, 1921 issue of the magazine, consulting with the CSO archivest has revealed that no performance of the piace actually happened.]
In the United Kingdom, Sir Henry Wood introduced Rêves to London audiences on October 16, 1919. Reviewing that performance in the November 1, 1919 issue of The Musical Times, critic Alfred Kalisch revealed his disdain for “new” music by writing:
Sir Henry Wood (1869-1944) (1906 painting)
“[Rêves] is interesting chiefly because it shows that Mr. Schmitt has now sworn allegiance to the modern French School, from which he had held aloof, preferring more solidity of structure and melodic outline. He has learned all that can be taught about the idiom, but he hardly seems to talk it with conviction yet.
As a man who speaks a foreign language perfectly yet generally betrays an accent when he gets excited, so Mr. Schmitt reverts to his old ways in his clamaxes. It is to be hoped, too, that his subsequent dreams may be more comfortable.”
[Mr. Kalisch was similarly uncomprehending of Florent Schmitt’s Sonate libre when it was presented in London the following year.]
The reviewer for The Athenaeum magazine was clearly more “in tune” with Schmitt’s music, even if not unreserved in praise, writing in the October 24, 1919 issue:
As with so many of his orchestral compositions, Florent Schmitt prepared a piano version of the Rêves score. Pianist Madeleine Fourgeaud Grovlez played the premiere performance of that version in a February 1920 Paris recital. Born in 1889, she was the second wife of composer Gabriel Grovlez. Her concert career took her to the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, as well as a recital tour of the United States in 1931-32. A specialist in contemporary music, she premiered Sir Lennox Berkeley’s Violin Sonata #1 in 1932 (with violinist Yvonne Astruc).
“Florent Schmitt is a musical architect who is always casting a coquettish eye at Impressioniam. Rêves is really a remarkable study in method; there is little about it that could be called formal structure, and the design depends mainly on stress-distribution and on the instinct of the composer — happily justified — for leaving off just at the right moment. Yet underneath all this you feel the texture of the work moving in a curious, consistent order of its own, subtly conveying to you a sense of that absurd mock-logic which is so persistent in our dream-thinking — a coherence that is incoherent just because it is more preposterously rational than anything in real life.
All this Mr. Schmitt contrives to indicate by contrapuntal audacities and free thematic combinations. Rêves is a diabolically clever piece of work — but it comes too near being a pathological study to be quite convincing as music.”
Bartolomé Pérez Casas (1873-1956)
Elsewhere, Rêves was introduced to Spanish audiences in 1926, presented by the Madrid Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Bartolomé Pérez Casas.
But for a composition whose premiere performance happened as far back as 1918, the first recording of the piece wouldn’t come along until nearly 70 years later.
First recording: Leif Segerstam and the Rhineland-Pfalz State Philharmonic (1987).
To my knowledge, there have been just two commercial recordings ever released of Rêves. The first one, made in 1987 by Leif Segerstam and Rheinland-Pfalz State Philharmonic Orchestra, originally appeared on Cybelia, a short-lived French record label with only limited distribution in the United States.
That performance was later reissued by NAXOS/Marco Polo, and it remains available today.
Second recording: David Robertson and the Monte-Carlo Philharmonic (1993).
The second recording was made in 1993 by David Robertson and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo, and was released on the Valois label.
Compared to the Segerstam interpretation, Robertson’s is a more broadly expansive reading — adding a full minute to the recording time. I find that both interpretations serve the music quite well, even if my own personal preference goes to the slightly more taut Segerstam approach.
French conductor Fabien Gabel rehearses the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester (Berlin RSO) for a December 2016 concert performance of Rêves.
You can hear the Segerstam recording for yourself, as that one has been uploaded to YouTube. Give it a listen. Better yet, you can follow along with the score in this upload of the Robertson recording.
See if you don’t agree that Schmitt has conjured up a highly effective hallucinatory dream-sequence — one that contains a healthy dose of ominous foreboding to go along with the magical atmosphere.
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Update (1/28/18): Florent Schmitt’s Rêves has found a new champion in French conductor Fabien Gabel, who became acquainted with the score several years ago. He performed it first with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester (Berlin RSO) in December 2016. Maestro Gabel was interviewed in the days leading up to that concert about how he discovered the score and the impact the music had on him; those remarks are presented in this article.
A vintage copy of the score to Florent Schmitt’s Rêves, inscribed by conductor Fabien Gabel.
In 2018, the conductor brought the piece to the United States, leading the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra in several performances in late January. It was the first time the score had been presented in America in many decades.
I was privileged to attend one of the Milwaukee concerts. It was a rare opportunity to see and hear this fascinating score in the immediacy of the concert hall — and an unforgettable experience it was.
The first page of the score to Florent Schmitt’s Rêves. This score belongs to Fabien Gabel, the French conductor who has presented this music on three continents since 2016: Europe, North America and Australia.
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Update (6/1/22): Fabien Gabel continues to champion Rêves around the world. He has now performed the piece in four countries on three continents — including his most recent performance with the Orchestre National de France at Maison de la Radio in Paris, a concert I was privileged to attend on May 12, 2022. I found that this particular Rêves performance benefited from the fact that the conductor has now “lived with” the music for nearly five years — and with each subsequent performance his interpretation gains from fresh insights into the score.
The May 2022 ONF program inscribed by conductor Fabien Gabel.
The ONF performance is noteworthy in another respect as well: It was filmed by France-Télévision — the first video documentation ever for this composition — and that video has now been released and can be viewed here. Having the opportunity to “see as well as hear” the music being made adds even more to being enveloped in the extraordinary dreamscape of Schmitt’s Rêves.
Gilles Couderc
It’s also interesting to note that, more than a century after its creation, the piece continues to surprise or baffle music critics. Writing on the Première Loge website, critic Gilles Couderc characerized the music and Fabien Gabel’s 2022 performance as follows:
“Begun in 1913 and finished in 1915, Schmit’s work is more of a sticky nightmare and a hallucination … Short motifs appear in successive waves and die in paroxysms punctuated by slience, and it is better to ward off the moving plasticity of the dream that Fabien Gabel directs without a baton — this mysterious and intense work with changing colors, which leaves you suffocating, pale and perplexed as to the meaning of the musical experience lived.”