During his time as a student at the Paris Conservatoire, Florent Schmitt had his share of esteemed teachers including Jules Massenet, Théodore Dubois, André Gédalge and Albert Lavignac.

But Gabriel Fauré, who along with Massenet were Schmitt’s two instructors in composition, was his favorite teacher — and also arguably the most influential one.

Time and again, we can hear evidence of Fauré’s influence — particularly in the slow movements of various compositions — stretching from Schmitt’s earliest efforts all the way until the end of his long and productive life.

Examples include the piano suite Soirs (1890-96), a set of nocturnes composed for piano and later orchestrated by Schmitt.  The second movement of the imposing Piano Quintet (1908) is a later example.  And it extends later still to the Janiana Symphony for string orchestra (1941) and to the quartet Pour presque tous les temps from 1956, composed when Schmitt was in his mid-80s.

Faure retired from the Paris Conservatoire in 1920.  Two years later, he was feted in an official ceremony led by Alexandre Millerand, president of the French Republic.

That same year, Henri Prunières, chief editor of the French monthly magazine La Revue Musicale, endeavored to pay tribute to Gabriel Fauré by approaching the most esteemed former students of the master to write original piano compositions in his honor.

Florent Schmitt was only too eager to participate in the project.  In addition to Schmitt, former Fauré students who contributed works included Maurice Ravel, Charles Koechlin, Georges Enesco, Jean Roger-Ducasse, Louis Aubert and Paul Ladmirault.

The one stipulation imposed by the magazine was for the composers to create their works based on enciphering Fauré’s name to form the musical material.

In order to accommodate all of the letters in the composer’s name, it was necessary to “convert” certain letters to notes according to the following anagram:

GABRIEL-FAURE –> GABDBEE-FAGDE

The Armenian-American pianist Andrey Kasparov has helped to explain the derivation of the anagram, writing:

“Some letters related to note names directly, while others obviously did not. For these exceptions, the alphabet was extended up the keyboard and grouped into three units of seven characters and one group of five … every white key pitch can be represented by three or four letter names in each column … which is how the pitch row GABDBEE-FAGDE was derived.”

The contributed pieces ranged widely in their structure and style. Some of them, such as Ravel’s, Enesco’s and Koechlin’s, eschewed complexity in favor of simplicity, which had always been a hallmark of Fauré’s approach to artistic expression.

By contrast, Aubert’s and Ladmirault’s contributions were remindful of Fauré’s upbeat rhythms and his elliptical harmonies.

The contributions by Roger-Ducasse and Schmitt were substantially more complex … and Schmitt’s could be considered the most complex of all. His piece — a scherzo — made extensive use of the musical anagram for Fauré’s full name. (Schmitt along with Ravel were the only composers who used both parts of the pitch row in their tributes.)

Upon hearing Schmitt’s composition, one is immediately struck by its modernity. Clearly, it is music that Fauré himself would never have created.  It is as if Schmitt is telling us that while he owes much to Fauré, he is his own man in music.

After an opening flourish, the left hand plays Fauré’s last name in octaves, with the motif appearing twice more in the next few bars before the more clearly melodic first-name theme appears in the right-hand part. This theme dominates the piece until a downward jump introduces a new theme based on the composer’s last name, which takes over until the reappearance of the left-hand version.

A brief pause from the acerbic atmospherics provides for a bit of rumination just before the end of the work, when we hear the musical line derived from the first name in the right hand, finally ending with left-hand octaves spelling out the composer’s last name.

I am aware of three recordings that exist of the complete Fauré homages incorporating Schmitt’s Scherzo — performed by pianists Margaret Fingerhut (on Chandos), Oksana Lutsyshyn (Albany) and Vladimir Valjarević (Labor Records).

Courtesy of YouTube, viewers in America can listen to those interpretations of the Scherzo here, here and here, as well as this one by the Franco-American pianist Ray Luck.

As it turned out, the Fauré tribute was a timely one as the composer would pass away less than two years later … so that the “homages” quickly turned into “memorial” compositions.

Shortly following Fauré’s death, Florent Schmitt set down these words of tribute to his master in the pages of the UK-based magazine The Chesterian, which were also published in the January 26, 1925 issue of The New York Times:

“He lived his dreams. His example leaves us hopeful that the divine torch is still flaming, in spite of a materialistic civilization which threatens to engulf all true nobility and disinterestedness.”

The memory of Claude Debussy’s death in 1918 still being fresh, Schmitt went on to assess the musical legacy of both composers in his tribute:

“Two examples happily remain before us — two hearths that cannot be extinguished: Fauré and Debussy. Like Debussy, Fauré is a pure genius of our soil. Let us admire them both with all the fervor of which we are capable.

Perhaps the sensibility of the imagination will always lean more towards the genius of Debussy, while the sensibility of the heart will always be attracted by that of Fauré, [who] has less … of the restless picturesqueness of impressionism. But perhaps his art will appear less dated later on because it expresses not so much the aspect of nature as the unchanging feelings and passions of mankind.”

Ten years following Fauré’s death, at his country retreat in Artiguemy high in the Pyrenees Mountains, Schmitt completed an orchestral composition in memory of his mentor — the diptyque In Memoriam, Opus 72 in which the 1922 Scherzo, now orchestrated, formed the second portion.

The new piece received its first performance in November 1935 under the direction of Paul Paray, the conductor who would lead more premiere performances of Schmitt’s orchestral compositions than any other director.

The first part of In Memoriam, titled Cippus Feralis, has been described by the British pianist and music educator Lionel Salter as “a long, often-beautiful threnody evoking an austere antique atmosphere.” The music begins quietly but gradually becomes more agitated, rising to several powerful climaxes before subsiding again, ending with an air of resignation.

Seeing a January 1937 performance of the piece performed in Paris by the Orchestre des concerts Poulet-Siohan, New York Times reporter E. C. Foster declared it “a magnificent tribute to the memory of Gabriel Fauré.”

René Dumesnil, music critic at Le Monde, identified a clear Fauréan musical reference in his review of a February 1956 performance of Cippus Feralis by Pierre Dervaux and the ORTF:

“Being inspired by themes from Pénélope, Schmitt has offered his master the most profound testimony of gratitude and tenderness imaginable.  The music conveys great sensitivity with a purity and nobility that very few composers have achieved.”

Cippus Feralis has attracted the attention of several important conductors in the decades since it was composed. Roger Désormière, Pierre Dervaux and Jean Martinon presented the music at various times times with the ORTF during the 1950s and 1960s.  Marek Janowski presented the work in concert in 1991 with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio-France. Today, one of the artists particularly interested in the music is the American conductor JoAnn Falletta.

Janus-like, the orchestrated Scherzo couldn’t be more different in mood.  To quote the French historian and musicologist Michel Fleury:

“… Schmitt’s highly original approach testifies to the strength of his personality — and to his intransigence. Unlike many composers, he avoids platitudinous imitations of the style of the ‘composer remembered.’ To the contrary, Schmitt demonstrates his acknowledgement and veneration of Fauré by showing what he has become as a consequence of the master’s instruction … any reference to the spirit of Fauré’s music is quite absent.   

Indeed, the pupil vehemently asserts what is most different in his personality — and whose individuality flourished thanks precisely to his master’s teaching.”

As for the Scherzo movement of In Memoriam, Lionel Salter characterizes the piece as “short, noisy and dissonant” while considering Schmitt’s orchestration of the original 1922 piano piece “rather awkward.” But the American violinist and conductor John McLaughlin Williams has a different take on the music, sharing this intriguing observation about Schmitt’s orchestration of the piano score:

“It’s fascinating to hear how Schmitt translated the original into orchestral terms because listening to the piano version, it sounds to me to be quite resistant to the transformation — so completely conceived as it is in pianistic terms. Yet, Schmitt finds a way. The orchestral result is identifiably the same piece, but still seems very different.”

In his book La Musique en France entre les deux guerres, René Dumesnil reports that early orchestral performances of the Scherzo, perhaps not surprisingly, “provoked protests from portions of the audience.” But speaking for myself, I find the orchestrated Scherzo movement to be one of Schmitt’s most fascinating scores.  Opulently scored, it throws the listener off-balance right from the start, and a sense of unpredictability carries through its entire four-minute duration. Even the brief plaintive passage near the end of the movement seems unsettled, before plunging headlong into a final orchestral outburst.

Is the movement Dionysian … or diabolical?  Perhaps it is a bit of both. But in the end, it’s an extraordinary “inverted homage” to Fauré, offered up by the composer who was perhaps the most anti-conformist of the master’s disciples.

It’s rather rare to encounter both parts of In Memoriam presented together in concert.  One such performance happened in September 1962, featuring the Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg under the direction of Tony Aubin — a concert that was broadcast over French Radio.

To date, just one commercial recording of the complete In Memoriam has been made.  Released in 1986 on the Cybelia label, it features Pierre Stoll directing the Rheinland-Pfalz State Philharmonic Orchestra.  Although the recording appeared in both LP and CD incarnations, it has been out of print for years.  However, thanks to Philippe Louis and his fine music channel, it has been uploaded to YouTube and can be heard here.

Commenting on the Cybelia recording of In Memoriam at the time of its release, the composer and music critic Paul Turok wrote these words in an August 17, 1986 article in the New York Times:

“Schmitt’s In Memoriam, dedicated to the memory of the great French composer Gabriel Fauré, is a work that repays repeated listenings with an ever-increasing sense of extraordinary power — all the more because the concluding Scherzo, seemingly out of place for such a serious purpose, lends a masterful air of optimism to the work.”

It’s rather curious that the Cippus Feralis portion of In Memoriam hasn’t fared any better on recordings, because the piece has been programmed by some of France’s best-known conductors over the years — at least “back in the day.”  Radio France has broadcast live concert performances by no fewer than four conductors leading the Orchestre National de l’ORTF:

• Tony Aubin (January 1948)
• Manuel Rosenthal (November 1956 and March 1960)
• Georges Prêtre (November 1960)
• Jean Martinon (April 1970)

As for the Scherzo movement, Sir Neville Marriner included it on a recording featuring music of Fauré along with three of his pupils:  Koechlin, Ravel and Schmitt.  That recording, released in 1995 on the Philips label, remains available today.

For readers wishing to hear In Memoriam, each of the two movements are uploaded on YouTube, featuring different artists:

• #1 (Cippus Feralis) — the 1970 ORTF concert performance conducted by Jean Martinon
• #2 (Scherzo sur le nom de Gabriel Fauré) — from the 1995 Philips recording by Sir Neville Marriner and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields.

If you give In Memoriam a listen, I’m quite sure you’ll find both movements of the piece — highly contrasting though they are — to be equally inventive and intriguing “memorial” music.

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Update (3/21/20):  Recently, a private recording of Florent Schmitt’s piano reduction of the first movement of In Memoriam has surfaced, and it has interesting historical and artistic value in that it is very possible that the composer himself is playing the music.

The piano in the recording sounds very much like Schmitt’s own, and the ambient outdoor sounds of a rapidly suburbanizing St-Cloud can be heard occasionally in the background.  By my reckoning, the piece was probably recorded in the early- to mid-1950s, perhaps at the same time when Schmitt was filmed in and around his home.

The recording has been uploaded to YouTube and can be heard here. Special thanks to Max Valley and his fine Private VJ music channel on YouTube for finding and uploading this rare audio documentation.

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Update (4/20/20):  Another historical broadcast performance of Cippus Feralis has now been released. It features the French National Radio/Television Orchestra conducted by Georges Prêtre, and was recorded at a concert on November 22, 1960.

I consider this performance to be the most impressive interpretation of this music I’ve yet heard.  It is available from Amazon as a high-res download, and has also been uploaded to YouTube (which may be accessible only to viewers in the United States and Canada).  Regardless of how you access it, the recording is well-worth seeking out and hearing.

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Update (7/11/22):  After a performance hiatus of several decades, it’s been announced that In Memoriam will be presented in concert during the upcoming 2022-23 season. The piece will be performed on November 12 and 13 by the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of JoAnn Falletta.

Maestra Falletta and the BPO have made the music of Florent Schmitt something of a specialty over the past decade including producing two discs devoted to Schmitt’s music, released on the NAXOS label to great critical acclaim. The presentation of In Memoriam continues these musicians’ exploration of the composer’s rich and varied repertoire — and promises to be an equal artistic success.  More information about the upcoming BPO performances can be found here.