When Florent Schmitt died in August 1958 at the age of nearly 88 years, his fellow composer Henri Dutilleux penned this memorable epitaph: “Florent Schmitt was the last of that great family to which Ravel, Dukas, and Roussel belonged. He remains one of them who, by a happy assimilation of German and Central European influences, […]
Tag Archives: Bernard Gavoty
“Florent Schmitt will not have left this earth without taking away, like a viaticum, the certainty of his genius.” — Bernard Gavoty At the time Florent Schmitt passed away on August 17, 1958 at the age of nearly 88 years, he was considered by many to be the doyen of French composers. One of the […]
“I’ve learned a good deal in terms of structure by listening to classical music — and particularly to music created by a person like Florent Schmitt. In fact, I think that a well-structured text, including a share of the predictable and unpredictable, should be modeled on a piece of Schmitt’s music!” — Julien Columeau, novelist […]
Cliquez ici pour écouter l’interview de Schmitt/Gavoty sur YouTube. For devotees of the Florent Schmitt Website + Blog, we are pleased to provide a link to a rare taped interview of the composer, done on February 20, 1957 when Schmitt was 86 years old. The interview was conducted at the Jeunesses Musicales de France by Bernard […]
All his life, Florent Schmitt was an inveterate traveler … but we think of his globetrotting primarily in connection with Europe, the Mediterranean Region, the Middle East, South Asia and Brazil, rather than North America. And in fact, the composer was to travel to the United States only one time his life – in 1932 […]
Here we have it, ladies and gentlemen: France’s missing symphony from the 1950s … It is almost impossibly beautiful, with some of the most kaleidoscopic sound-staging and effective bass sonorities you will encounter. Florent Schmitt’s Second Symphony was never precisely lost, to be sure. It’s actually the Francophone fifties which seemed to disappear and turn […]