Florent Schmitt - Suite sans esprit de suite (1937-38)

Florent Schmitt (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"

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Suite sans esprit de suite (1937-38)

1. Majeza (0:00)
2. Charmilles (Bowers) (2:54)
3. Pécorée de Calabre (Calabrian Peasant Girl) (6:26)
4. Thrène (Threnody) (8:02)
5. Bronx (11:37)

Orchestre de l'ORTF conducted by Henri Tomasi
Radio Broadcast 1953

Details by Phillip Nones
The Suite sans esprit de suite carries one of Schmitt’s humorous titles that also connotes a double meaning — in this case, the idea that the movements lack coherence to one another.

As the musicologist and author Nicolas Southon has pointed out, the music’s title is nearly impossible to translate. “Schmitt is playing with the ambiguity of the meaning of the word ‘suite’. Of course, the first reference is to a musical suite as it has existed since the Baroque era.”

Southon continues, “The second reference — ‘esprit de suite’ — is an idiomatic expression in the French language, meaning something akin to ‘striving for consistency.’ So what Schmitt is telling us, using word play, is that his suite isn’t consistent with the way people commonly think of a musical suite’s characteristics. It’s also very typical of the play on words we find in the titles of some of Schmitt’s compositions.”

In the five movements we can recognize regions of Spain, France, Southern Italy, Greece, and the New World. In fact, Schmitt had traveled to each of these places.

Majeza opens the suite in showy fashion as a kind of curtain-raiser. The title refers to a dance style popular in aristocratic circles in 18th Century Madrid … but music critic Frédéric Decaunes has written that it is also remindful of a bossa nova. It’s an interesting observation considering that in 1938, the bossa nova was still two decades away from breaking out beyond the borders of Brazil. At the top of this movement, the score includes an epigraph that translates into English roughly as follows:

“Provocative and disdainful in turn, the dancer’s supple body undulates and swirls voluptuously. Drinkers stare at her, their eyes glistening with fierce desire.”

The second movement, Charmilles, is also dancelike but in a wholly different way: It is a dreamy and tender barcarolle. The epigraph hints at this as follows:

“Dreamy young girls wander in the autumnal park: their silky trains brush against the dead leaves. They place themselves in the pool’s waters — then, in the arms of their lovers, disappear through the deep alleys.”

To my ears, the movement is similar in character to Fauré’s Pelléas et Mélisande — and wholly appropriate, too, in that Fauré had been Schmitt’s great teacher and mentor.

The province of Calabria in Southern Italy is the setting for the sassy middle movement, Pécorée de Calabre. This is Schmitt’s own take on the gossiping, chattering peasant folk in the town square that was so effectively realized in Mussorgsky’s Limoges – Le Marché movement in Pictures at an Exhibition as orchestrated by Maurice Ravel. As the epigraph for this movement says:

“Boot=heels click rhythmically; the wind lifts the colorful skirts and the high conical hats. Girls and boys leap under the bright sun.”

Jaunty, obstreperous rhythms and chirping woodwinds — they’re all here in Schmitt’s tonal picture.

The Greece of Thrène is not the one inspired by a modern travelogue, but rather by ancient times and lamentations for the dead:

“On the marble slab, a strewn lily. The cypress trees shiver against the azure sky; she sleeps eternally …”

Schmitt’s vision is beautifully realized in the form of a sarabande via delicate, ethereal orchestration, adding “tuneful percussion” such as the celesta for extra effect.

The final movement, Bronx, is a short, exuberant outburst:
“Multicolored drinks sparkle in the glasses … Nostalgic jazz rips the air heavy with alcohol and smoke.” More sassy than jazzy, we are reminded that Schmitt had visited New York City during his single journey to North America in the early 1930s. And the music does sound like a foreigner’s take on New York City — it’s hardly “authentic,” but it’s an honest reaction to the gritty, overwhelming presence of America’s largest city. To me, Bronx comes across much like Ferde Grofé’s final movement from his 1955 Hudson River Suite: a brief, primal shout — and an exclamation mark to end the work in a big way. #ClassicalMusic