Florent Schmitt seated at the doorway to his study at his home in St-Cloud, France. (Photo: ©1953 Lipnitzki/Roger-Viollet)
In 1953, Florent Schmitt composed Fables sans morales, settings of four fables taken from Jean de la Fontaine’s writings which the composer scored for a cappella mixed chorus.
Interestingly, several years earlier Schmitt had already produced another choral work based a Fontaine fable, titled Conseil tenu par les rats, Op. 123 (The Rats’ Council) – intended to be sung by four men’s voices (two tenors, baritone and bass) or a cappella male chorus.
The Council Held by the Rats (Illustration by Percy James Billinghurst, 1900)
Jean de la Fontaine (1621-1695). The poet and author, best-known for his nearly 250 fables, is considered one of the most prominent French literary figures. He was elected to the Académie Française in 1683.
As to the subject matter of this particular fable, it’s representative of Fontaine’s astonishing output in this genre (some 240 fables spread across a dozen books published between 1668 and 1694). The Rats’ Council comes from the second such volume, appearing in 1668.
Inspired by a medieval English fable about rats contemplating how to neutralize threats of death at the hands of a killer-cat, Fontaine’s take goes beyond the original tale to address the shortcomings of council meetings in general — more specifically, how ineffective such discussions often are.
Presented below is an English translation of Fontaine’s fable:
The Rats’ Council
A cat named Rodilard made such a mess of rats,
That hardly any could be seen anymore — so many had he dispatched.
The few that remained, not daring to leave their burrows,
Found only a quarter of their usual fare.
Rodilard was considered among the most reviled — not only a cat, but a devil.
Now one day when far away, the gallant went to find a wife.
During the sabbath he held with his lady,
The remaining rats held a council in the corner, on the present necessity.
From the outset their Elder, a very prudent person,
Opined that it was necessary – and sooner rather than later – to attach a bell around Rodilard’s neck.
That thus, when he went on the prowl, warned of his approach the rats could flee underground.
And of that he knew of no other way.
Everyone agreed with the Elder; nothing seemed more advantageous to all.
The difficulty lay in attaching the bell.
Said one: “I’m not going to do it – I’m not that foolish” … said another: “I wouldn’t begin to know how.”
So, without doing anything, they parted ways.
In my life I have known of many councils that were held in this way for nothing;
Councils not of rats, but of monks — even councils of canons.
Is it only a matter of deliberation? The court abounds with advisors;
But in the necessity to carry out the decision, one finds no one.
Conseil tenu par les rats (illustration by Gustave Doré, ca. 1870)
Schmitt’s musical treatment of the Fontaine fable is full of the trademark whimsical touches he often employed in his late-career a cappella choral works. These devices include the appearance of “nonsense” syllables in addition to the text that tells the story.
Music-wise, every “poly” aspect is utilized to create the atmosphere — polytonal, polychromatic and polyrhythmic. In the event, if the music looks and sounds difficult to sing … that’s because it is.
The first page of Florent Schmitt’s Conseil tenu par les rats, scored for four male voices (TTBB) or a cappella male chorus. Interestingly, the last page of the score denotes a performance time of approximately seven minutes — far slower than the metronome markings shown at the top of the score would suggest.
The Conseil tenu par les rats score was published by Durand in 1950, several years after the piece had been commissioned. At the top of the score is the notation “Commande de l’Etat 1948” – apparently in reference to a commission Florent Schmitt received in 1948 from the French state to create the music.
Tsuguharu Foujita (1886-1968), a noted and sometimes-controversial Japanese-French painter and printmaker, first came to Paris in the years before World War I. He achieved his earliest fame in the 1920s, when his style was perceived as melding “Oriental” and “Western” elements in an original manner. Known for painting diverse subjects including Parisian streetscapes, voluptuous women, cats and everyday objets, Foujita applied Japanese ink techniques to Western-style painting. A scene or a landscape referred to as a “Foujita” would have been understood as readily by people in ’20s and ’30s France as “Modigliani eyes” are to people everywhere in the world today. Married five times to various Japanese and French women, Foujita settled permanently in France in the postwar period. He obtained French nationality in 1955 and was made an officer of the Legion d’honneur in 1957. (Photo: Iwata Nakayama, ca. 1927)
Schmitt’s score is dedicated to Tsuguharu Foujita, a Japanese-born painter who was a sometime-resident of Paris from before World War I through the 1930s, and then again in the postwar period. Schmitt and Foujita were acquaintances dating back some 30 years to a time when the artist and his oeuvre were associated with the École de Paris and the années folles of the 1920s.
Cleverly, Schmitt’s dedication on the score reads as follows: “à Foujita, peintre du Conseil.”
Perhaps Foujita had been a member of the committee that awarded the musical commission to Schmitt. Was the composer doing a bit of a “wink-wink, nudge-nudge” in referencing the “Conseil,” inferring that Foujita was either a member of the national council — or perhaps the rat’s council? It wouldn’t be out of character for Schmitt to do so, but a clear explanation of the dedication is lost to the mists of time …
Neither Conseil tenu par les rats nor Schmitt’s later Fables sans morales have achieved any sort of toehold on the programs of choral groups in the 75+ years since their composition. The only evidence I have of programming of Conseil in the modern era have been performances presented by Chanticleer, a men’s choral group founded in San Francisco in the late 1970s.
The internationally known U.S. male vocal ensemble Chanticleer was formed in 1978 and embarked on its first concert tour in 1982. It became a full-time ensemble about the time of the 1990 St. Paul concert that included Florent Schmitt’s Conseil tenu par les rats. In addition to presenting core repertoire from the Medieval and Renaissance periods, Chanticleer performs music from other eras and has also commissioned the creation of new choral compositions. Beginning in 1988 and up to the present day, the group has released more than fifty recordings. (Photo: ca. 1985)
A review of one such Chanticleer performance that happened on February 17, 1990 in St. Paul, Minnesota. In a review of the concert appearing in the February 19, 1990 issue of the St. Paul Pioneer Press newspaper, arts critic Michael Fleming reported:
“Chanticleer is the American answer to Britain’s King’s Sings – an ensemble of twelve male voices whose repertoire stretches from the Renaissance to [the] present, with stops on many a byway in between. When heard to advantage, it can compete with the best such ensembles, but at Saturday’s concert at the World Theater, the group was stifled by the room’s vacuum-cleaner acoustics …
Michael Fleming (1949-2021) was a music and dance critic for the St. Paul Pioneer Press from 1988 to 2000, publishing more than 1,250 reviews and articles during his tenure there. Fleming’s writings also appeared in other U.S. newspapers (New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, etc.). The critic was also a practicing attorney, specializing in wills and trusts.
Acoustics were less of a problem in Ibert’s Deux chants de carnaval and Florent Schmitt’s Conseil tenu par les rats, both of them declamatory more than sustained. Each singer was sure of himself, and even those listeners who could not catch each syllable of the French texts could appreciate the ribaldry of the two Ibert chansons [and] the outright slapstick of Schmitt’s tale about the rats holding a council to bell the cat.”
The obscurity of Conseil tenu par les rats extends to recordings as well. Indeed, just as with Fables sans morales, to this day the work has never been commercially recorded. Nor is audio documentation of any of Chanticleer’s live performances of the work available to hear.
But the situation has been redressed at least somewhat with the preparation of digitally created audio files of Conseil that were uploaded recently to YouTube. For this we have the music channel of Yoichi Dake, an amateur choral singer in Japan, to thank for the endeavor.
As Mr. Dake has written:
“I think that all of Florent Schmitt’s works are quite difficult to perform, and accompanists may also have a hard time with them. Nevertheless, they are wonderful pieces and it would be splendid if they could be performed as the composer intended. Unfortunately, the skills of my local chorus wouldn’t qualify, but I am praying that competent choirs elsewhere will be able to take up this music.”
To ease the challenge of practicing and preparing Schmitt’s Conseil tenu par les rats, Yoichi Dake has prepared a numerique rendition that encompasses the full choral parts, along with further companion uploads in which each of the vocal parts is highlighted. Presented below is a YouTube upload of the “full rehearsal” version of Conseil tenu par les rats:
While the digitally generated rendition on YouTube provides just the musical notes (no text) and obviously lacks the musicality and dynamics of an actual performance, all of the notes and rhythmic elements are precisely presented – and in that sense the upload goes a long way to providing choir directors and singers with useful practice tools to learn the score and prepare the music for performance.
As such, it is a useful stop-gap until such time that a skillful ensemble sees fit to record this intriguing choral work from Schmitt’s late period. Who’s ready to take up the challenge?