Florent Schmitt

Florent Schmitt (flɔʁã ʃmit; 28 September 1870 17 August 1958) was a French composer. He was part of the group known as Les Apaches. His most famous pieces are La tragédie de Salome and Psaume XLVII (Psalm 47). He has been described as "one of the most fascinating of France's lesser-known classical composers". Born in Meurthe-et-Moselle, Schmitt took music lessons in Nancy with the local composer Gustave Sandré. At the age of 19 he entered the Paris Conservatoire, where he studied with Gabriel Fauré, Jules Massenet, Théodore Dubois, and Albert Lavignac. In 1900 he won the Prix de Rome. During the 1890s he became friendly with Frederick Delius, who was living in Paris at the time, and Schmitt prepared vocal scores for four of Delius's operas: Irmelin, The Magic Fountain, Koanga and A Village Romeo and Juliet. From 1929 to 1939 Schmitt worked as a music critic for Le Temps, where he proved controversial. He was known to shout out his views from his seat in the hall. The music publisher Heugel called him "an irresponsible lunatic". In November 1933, at a concert that included music by Kurt Weill, who had just been forced to leave Germany and was present, Schmitt led a group in shouting "Vive Hitler!", as reported by a communist journal. Though he was one of the most often performed French composers during the first four decades of the 20th century, and though he never stopped composing, Schmitt's works fell into comparative neglect. In 1952 he was admitted to the Légion d'honneur. He became the subject of attacks — both in his last years and posthumously — because of his sympathies towards the actions of the Nazi party in the early 1930s and over his willingness to work for the Vichy regime in the 1940s, as had other eminent French musicians, notably Alfred Cortot and Joseph Canteloube. Schmitt's early career was later re-examined in association with Sir Thomas Beecham's biography of English composer Frederick Delius. Beecham had known Delius in his Paris days the friend of August Strindberg, Paul Gauguin, Edvard Munch and other figures of the time.