“Florent Schmitt likes our imperfect planet; the planet reciprocates.”

— Nicolas Slonimsky, musicologist, composer and conductor

In 1932, French composer Florent Schmitt made his first and only journey to the United States. The reason for the trip was to perform as soloist in the composer’s own Symphonie concertante, Op. 82 for orchestra with piano, which he had been commissioned to write for the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s 50^th anniversary. Serge Koussevitzky, the BSO’s music director at the time, was both a professional and personal acquaintance of Schmitt, dating from the years following World War I when Maestro Koussevitzky had made a name for himself in Paris through his own series of concerts.

Koussevitsky had already directed a number of Florent Schmitt’s works – among them La Tragédie de Salomé, Psaume XLVII, Rêves and Ronde burlesque – both in North America and Europe.

The Symphonie concertante would turn out to be the most challenging of them all – both from the players’ and audience’s perspectives. History has left us numerous reviews of the Boston premiere performances held in November 1932. Some critics were shocked, some were mystified and some even angry at what they heard. You can read several of the most interesting reviews in this feature article about the Symphonie concertante.

In the days leading up to Schmitt’s journey to the United States, a number of news pieces about the composer and his artistry appeared in leading American newspapers and music publications.

Notable among them, the French music journalist and author Paul Landormy was commissioned by Musical America to pen an extensive profile of Florent Schmitt that was published in the March 25, 1932 edition of the magazine under the headline “Colorful Art of Florent Schmitt Links East and West.”

Several months later, Leonard Liebling, the editor-in-chief of Musical Courier magazine, met with Florent Schmitt in Paris and shared his observations of this meeting in the July 16, 1932 issue of his publication.

But perhaps the most insightful article came from Nicolas Slonimsky, whose essay about Florent Schmitt was published in the November 26, 1932 issue of the Boston Evening Transcript newspaper at the time of the premiere of the Symphonie concertante.

The extraordinarily long-lived polymath Nicolas Slonimsky has been described variously as a conductor, pianist, composer, musicologist and lexicographer. And indeed he was all of these — and more.

Born in Imperial Russia in 1894, Slonimsky studied piano in his youth with Isabelle Vengerova, a maternal aunt who would later be one of the founders of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. In the wake of the 1917 Russian Revolution, Slonimsky’s family followed the trail of other White Russian intelligentsia by fleeing first to Constantinople and later to Paris.

It was in Paris that Slonimsky began working with Serge Koussevitzky, along with serving as a collaborating pianist with noted solo instrumentalists and vocalists. One of them – the tenor Vladimir Rosing – was appointed director of the operatic performance studio at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York in 1923. Slonimsky would soon join Rosing in Rochester, continuing his composition and conducting studies with Albert Coates and Sir Eugene Goossens there.

After Koussevitzky was named music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Slonimsky was invited to Boston to become Koussevitsky’s pianist and bilingual secretary.  Additionally, the younger musician began teaching music theory at the Boston Conservatory while also writing music articles and reviews for the Boston Evening Transcript, the Christian Science Monitor, and other newspapers and magazines.

Slonimsky’s attentions were drawn particularly to contemporary music, and he would become an ardent champion of the works of American composers such as Henry Cowell, Carl Ruggles and Charles Ives. Notably, he conducted the premiere performance of Ives’ Three Pieces in New England at Town Hall in New York City in 1931, and later presented the score in concert in Paris, Berlin and Budapest.

Slonimsky also directed the 1933 world premiere performance of Edgard Varèse’s landmark all-percussion work Ionisation.

As might be expected of someone who was so in touch with contemporary music trends of the day – not just in America but also in Europe — Slonimsky’s profile of Florent Schmitt is extraordinarily insightful. It’s chock-full of interesting and sometimes unexpected observations. Right from the outset, Slonimsky notes:

“Florent Schmitt belongs to the golden age of French music, which culminated in the first performance of Debussy’s Pelléas. It was Aldous Huxley who, in one of his ‘brief candles,’ set down this date as marking the maturity of a generation. Within a brief two years the premiere of Florent Schmitt’s Forty-Seventh Psalm took place in Paris and marked another date – the advent of studied barbarity.”

Furthermore, Slonimsky makes this trenchant claim:

“Schmitt offended the public more than Stravinsky did seven years afterward [in Le Sacre du printemps], for Stravinsky was a Russian, a Scythian, a Sarmatian — and anything could be expected of a nomad like him. But Schmitt was a Frenchman of Meurthe-et-Moselle, born during the Franco-Prussian War, native of a border state saved for France after the debacle. He was brought up in the pure Latin tradition, cultivating grace and measure, not vehemence and  abandon. Upon examination of the score of the Psalm, one must admit, even in 1932, that the objectors had sufficient cause … “

In characterizing Schmitt’s style of writing, Slonimsky observes:

“He has a keen sentiment for modality and, in studying his writing, one cannot get away from the thought that he thinks in hexachords rather than in full-octave scales. He seems to abhor the inexorable landings at standardized tonics, preferring to build in free alternations of tones and semitones akin to Greek and Ecclesiastical modes.”

In his profile article, Slonimsky touches on other, broader aspects of Schmitt’s musical ethos as well, noting that “Schmitt seems to be the master of the entire gamut of human musical emotions – from barbarity to austerity.”

Fortunately, Nicolas Slonimsky’s daughter, Electra Slonimsky Yourke, elected to include the full essay on Florent Schmitt in a curated anthology of articles penned by her father over the course of multiple decades as a writer on music.

The essay about Florent Schmitt, which appears in the 2003 book Writings on Music (Vol. 1), is presented below in its entirety:

It’s interesting to note that when he penned his essay about Florent Schmitt in 1932, Nicolas Slonimsky was already a well-known music professional of nearly 40 years of age. He would go on to flourish for another six decades – living a life full of music and its intersection with the broader culture. Among Slonimsky’s myriad professional activities, in 1958 he became editor of Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians – a position he held until 1992.

After the death of his wife in 1964, Slonimsky relocated to the more hospitable climate of Southern California, where he lectured on music topics at the University of California-Los Angeles.

He had already become famous in the world of jazz through the publication of his Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns in 1947. The handbook would become something of a bible for a host of noted jazz composers and musicians, and remained in print for nearly 80 years.

Furthermore, it was through this connection that Slonimsky became personally acquainted with Frank Zappa, who credited the older musician as a major influence in his creative development. You can hear Slonimsky describing his musical friendship with Zappa in this audio interview remarks given to the electronic music composer Charles Amirkhanian in 1983:

Topping things off, Slonimsky’s well-known sense of humor was never on display more than in his 1953 Lexicon of Musical Invective – Critical Assaults on Composers since Beethoven’s Time – a book that would set tongues wagging for decades to come.

By the time he made a return visit to Saint Petersburg in 1992 at the age of 98 – nearly nine decades since he’d last set foot in that city – Nicolas Slonimsky was a living legend in music: Not only was he the bridge to a glorious past, but also very much a keen observer and participant in the contemporary scene.

In both respects, we are fortunate that his perceptive insights into Florent Schmitt’s musical artistry remain available to us today.