Interview, Sakari Oramo on Florent Schmitt

Several weeks ago my colleague James was singing the praises of Florent Schmitt’s ‘wonderfully evocative and sumptuous’ music for André Gide’s 1921 translation of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, coupled with the Second Symphony (completed in the final year of his long life) and championed for all its worth by Sakari Oramo and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. I spoke with the conductor earlier this month about Schmitt’s complex posthumous reputation in the wake of his complicity with the Vichy regime and explicit support of Adolf Hitler, his synthesis of French and German influences, and the cinematic sweep of his music for Antoine et Cléopâtre…

Though he enjoyed prominence in the early part of his career, Schmitt’s music really fell off the radar from the 1940s onwards, with interest only slightly reigniting over the last couple of decades. Do you think the composer’s political views (and indeed his actions during World War Two) played a role in his neglect?

I’m almost certain that his politics were quite a big factor, yes. Of course the whole issue about the southern part of France and the Vichy government is a very difficult area of history, and I personally don’t find what he said and how he acted very sympathetic: I’m certainly not doing the music because I think he’s a good guy! But musically speaking, I really think he had a lot to offer. He composed over quite a long stretch of time, and is almost the missing link between Ravel and Milhaud or Honegger: he was embracing the old so-called Impressionist style at the same time as venturing into harmonically and rhythmically very complex worlds. Another factor in his fall in popularity was the eclectic nature of his style, as there are so many different elements that you can’t really place him: he’s a bit of a modernist, a bit of a romantic, a bit of a colourist…There’s so much to take in that many people feel that the music somehow suffocates under all of these different influences.

How would you sum up the appeal of Antoine et Cléopâtre to someone new to Schmitt's music?

He wrote a couple of pieces of this nature (particularly earlier on in his career) which either belong to a theatre-piece or are purely symphonic poems, depicting Biblical or mythological events. Antoine et Cléopâtre was originally conceived as incidental music for Gide’s play, but that version’s actually lost – we only have these two suites which Schmitt organised from the music afterwards, but it really is very evocative music. It has a wonderful sense of being old and new at the same time: in a way you can almost imagine that music of this kind would have been played in Cleopatra’s court (although we don’t actually know what kind of music happened there, I think we can be certain that there was music of some description). He somehow manages to create this atmosphere which is almost Hollywoodesque in a way, depicting this environment and region in its glory-days and also the complex drama of Antony and Cleopatra’s love-affair – the human aspects as well as the surroundings. It’s really quite rare, I think, to come across music which simultaneously sounds so old and so new.

You mentioned Debussy earlier on – where does this score sit in relation to other French music of the early twentieth century?

Well, Debussy had died two years before this particular piece was premiered, but Ravel was still very much writing – his style was something so crystalline and so evocative. In a sense it’s not that far from Schmitt, but in terms of orchestration I think [Schmitt] was also heavily influenced by Richard Strauss. Schmitt’s orchestration is quite different from Ravel’s: where Ravel has this incredibly well-defined way of writing, Schmitt is maybe more lush, with more dark colours and even slightly mixing up different colours together more than Ravel did. And I think that definitely comes from the influence of Strauss, who was of course writing at the same time.

When I auditioned the recording ‘blind’, I found myself constantly questioning whether I was listening to French or German music…

Indeed. Schmitt was Alsatian, so it’s an area which has historically belonged to both countries, and culturally it’s quite unlike the rest of France – it’s a different esprit there somehow.

The Symphony dates from around 40 years later than Antoine et Cléopâtre – how different is the musical language?

Schmitt was a composer who continued to change his style right until the very end of his life, and I think the Second Symphony was probably the last piece he finished. (I can’t recall if he actually heard the first performance or whether it was done shortly after his death). He’s almost showing off his virtuosity as a composer, by juxtaposing these really quite bitterly harsh dissonant harmonies and a rhythmic pattern that is quite irregular and very quirky in many ways. The Second Symphony is him telling people: ‘I may be frail, I may be over 80 years old - but just listen to what I can do!’

Do you get a sense of Schmitt consciously resisting stereotypes about 'late' works ie the trope of the ageing artist either looking back over their career with affection or raging against the dying of the light?

To me, it’s a piece of defiance: he’s defying his age, and he’s defying his position (as an outcast) in the French musical scene as well. It’s very virtuosic and rhythmically difficult, especially the last movement: you need ‘schwung’ in exactly the right way, and that’s not easy! But the slow movement has some really gorgeous depth, colour and imagination.

Schmitt was a fairly prolific composer, and a great deal of his music remains relatively unknown: are there other works of his which attract you, and do you have plans to programme more?

There is a beautiful piece which I’ve never done but which should be played more often, which is The Tragedy of Salome, based on the same story as Strauss’s opera. It’s like a symphonic poem: beautifully written, and in a similar style to Antoine et Cléopâtre which was composed around the same time. And Psalm 47 is extremely effective - it’s got a big organ part, and requires a huge orchestra and choir. It’s the sort of thing that would work very well as a Proms piece…