Florent Schmitt, photographed in the garden of his home in St-Cloud, France (1950).

Several months ago, I published an article about an 80^th birthday tribute event honoring Florent Schmitt that was organized in 1950 by the town of St-Cloud, where the composer had lived for 40+ years. The festivities included a gala reception and concert featuring recent compositions created by Schmitt, presented by leading French classical musicians.

Not surprisingly, the event was attended by many people active in the Parisian arts community, including members of the press corps.

A vintage copy of the score to the piano version of Florent Schmitt’s Scènes de la vie moyenne, dedicated to the French pianist Lélia Gousseau. Schmitt wrote the piano and orchestral scores simultaneously, and the orchestral premiere was given in Paris in 1950 by the Colonne Concerts Orchestra under the direction of Paul Paray.

Shortly after my article was published, one of the subscribers to the Florent Schmitt Website + Blog contacted me to share a column that had been penned by music journalist and author Paul Locard at the time of the St-Cloud birthday tribute. As part of that column, Locard also covered the recent premiere of Schmitt’s four-movement orchestral suite Scènes de la vie moyenne.

What makes the Locard article particularly noteworthy is that it came from the pen of a music journalist who was a near-exact contemporary of Florent Schmitt, and who had been well-familiar with the composer’s artistry over many decades.

Paul Désiré Locard (1871-1952) was a onetime magistrate who, for more than three decades, wrote the music column under the nom de plume of Paul Dambly in the Parisian newspaper Le Petit journal. Locard had gotten his start as a reviewer by writing for Courrier Musical in the early 1900s.

Paul Locard’s biography of Léon Boëllmann, originally published in 1901, is now available in a bilingual edition from Crescendo Music Publications.

After World War II until his death in 1952, Locard wrote the music column for the Parisian newspaper Rolet.

As a music author, Locard was also responsible for penning the first biography of the French organ composer Léon Boëllmann. Originally published in 1901, in recent years that biography has been reprinted by Crescendo Music Publications in a bilingual edition.

Much later in his life, in 1948 Locard authored a paperback book titled Le Piano, released as No. 263 in the Que-sais-je series of exploratory books on arts and culture published by Presses Universitaires de France. Several editions of Le Piano were published into the 1960s, expanded to include additional material contributed by French musicologist and writer Rémy Stricker.

Mel Bonis’ Trois pièces pour piano were dedicated to Paul Locard.

Paul Locard didn’t only write about music; as a young man he had engaged in music composition himself, with at least one of his creations — a mélodie set to poetry by Albert Samain titled Hiver — being published by Demets in 1904.

Furthermore, as a noted critic and music author, Locard was the dedicatee of works by other composers – notably pieces by Mel Bonis and Charles Koechlin.

The Demets publishing firm was founded in 1893 by Eugene Louis Demets (1858-1923), who also was active as an impresario. Initially focused on light music, the Demets catalogue soon grew in breadth to  encompass more than 1,500 titles, including scores by a range of composers such as Ravel, Satie, Jean Cras, Mel Bonis, Rhené-Baton, Joaquín Turina and Paul Ladmirault. One of the most successful items was Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte (pictured above). At the time of Demets’ death in 1923, his company’s catalogue was taken over by Max Eschig, and ultimately Durand.

Locard’s insightful article about Florent Schmitt appeared in the November 30, 1950 issue of Rolet. It is reproduced in its entirety below. (For those who do not read French, an English translation of the column appears immediately following.)

Paul Locard’s column appeared in the November 30, 1950 issue of the Parisian newspaper Rolet. (Click or tap on the image for a larger view.)

La Musique

By Paul Locard, Rolet: Hebdomadaire indépendent, November 30, 1950

While alive, Florent Schmitt will have had his quarter with the tributes offered to a musician of whom one can say that he remains not only the pride but also, by his inexhaustible fecundity, the hope of his generation. Guy Ropartz, Koechlin and others still … what hormones in the harmonies, what vitamins conceal the twelve degrees of the chromatic scale.

Kaiser Franz Josef I look-alike: French pianist Francis Planté (1839-1934).

[Francis] Planté, almost ninety years old, would sit for six hours at a time at his keyboard. And the day before his departure for Algeria, from where he was to return only in a coffin, I surprised Saint-Saëns in the same attitude. Not all back-to-school days are such melancholy. On October 7, when the schoolchildren were resignedly leaning over their books, Florent Schmitt, a citizen of St-Cloud like Gounod, received an infinitely touching welcome from the municipality because the cordiality and pleasure of a musical windfall stripped him of all official character. 

I will not insult Schmitt with a biography or a commentary. At most — and I apologize for bringing this personal reference here — I will recall the study that appeared under my signature in Le Larousse mensuel about his election at the Institute [de France]. I was contemplating Schmitt, a few days ago, under the cupola during the performance of the cantata awarded at the Prix de Rome competition. He had not put on the tailcoat of the Immortals. No doubt he feels green enough to disdain the artifice of symbolic foliage. Nor did he boast of gratifying us at the Concerts Colonne with a newly created work, the Scènes de la vie moyenne, whose title alone attests that he has not abdicated his youth. 

Albert Samain, French Symbolist poet (1858-1900). Florent Schmitt and Paul Locard both composed mélodies set to words by Samain — Musique sur l’eau (Schmitt, 1898) and Hiver (Locard, 1904).

Everything has been said about Schmitt for half a century, when he crossed the threshold of the Villa Medici and when the thunderbolt of his Psaume XLVII illuminated, like a flash, his destiny. It seems that the unanimity of admiration has exhausted the litanies of his lyricism, his epigrams and his images in an attempt to convey the secret of this universal creation. 

I recite them once more: tidal wave; crater; intrusion of mystery into reality and of divine forces into the lives of men. Shall I say again — for I have nothing to refute in what I have already written — that “this musician of immensity and altitudes is no less that of the exquisite Suite en rocaille — of dreams, of tenderness, of the finest sensitivity, with an incomparable delicacy of touch. Also, what reading is more edifying than that of his catalogue, rich in 125 [sic] numbers, where there is nothing that one cannot or does not desire to explore further.” 

Paul Locard’s book Le Piano was was first published in 1948, and was reprinted several times with augmented material provided by Rémy Stricker.

And here, after the Trio [and] the Quatuor, whose sympathetic vibrations awaken, more than forty years apart, the great voices of the Quintette, Schmitt’s muse smiles once more with the grace and fantasy of the Scènes de la vie moyenne that the baton of Paul Paray has just brought to our attention. You have happened, haven’t you, to pause before the enigmas of these epigraphs, behind which Schmitt’s humor likes to hide. The three songs of Kérob-Shal, Çançunik, Sonate libre en deux parties enchaînées (Ad modem Clementis Aquae). 

The ”mundane life” is that of Colette‘s La Dame de Photographe: the march to the market; the dance of the lady with the basket; Castles in Spain — time that the housewife takes from her duties; and finally the somersault of the chicken. 

Rémy Stricker (1936-2019) was a French pianist, musicologist and France Musique/France Culture radio producer. He was also a professor of aesthetics at the Paris Conservatoire for three decades, as well as the author of important books on the artistry of Beethoven, Liszt, Berlioz, Schumann and Henri Duparc. In the 1960s Stricker contributed additional material to Paul Locard’s book Le Piano, originally published in 1948.

I wouldn’t swear that in the absence of clarification one realizes the meaning of this transposition straight away. There is a degree of transparency to which music cannot make claim. But with eyes open for those who know how to read, it is possible to discover between sound and thought — in a melodic inflection, in the movement of a rhythm and in the light of a timbre or a chord — the subtlety of a literary inspiration. 

Moreover, so-called “programmatic” music must remain — above all and in itself — music. And the treat is delectable. What do these “juvenilia” promise us, whose freshness we would be happy to find again in many pages traced by the pen of an adolescent? It is a very imminent “goodbye” that I want to say to you, O Florent Schmitt, by taking the agreement. Because it so happens that my manuscript here is just eighty lines long …