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Florent Schmitt (1870 - 1958), Mirages Op. 70 for solo piano (1921) Performed by Vincent Larderet (2011) 00:00 - No. 1 A la memoire de Claude Debussy 06:58 - No. 2 La tragique chevauchee The first of the two Mirages numbers is titled Tristesse de Pan. Dedicated memory of Claude Debussy, the great French Impressionist composer who had died in 1918, it’s a work that is opulent and near-magical in its mood and color. Schmitt does an incredible job evoking in musical terms the themes of Fort’s ballad: “… Pan leaned on his elbows deep down in the lunar wheat fields. Then, from neighboring woods, the nightingale sings to a beautiful full moon, which, on the rising tills of its voice … it seems to be resting – better than a flower on a fountain. Paul Fort, the French symbolist poet. Pan falls silent; does not interfere … inattentive to the reed, and sad. Leaning his elbows on the ground, he feels the weight of his entire necklace made of dead moons … Is he thinking about the dead gods? Is he thinking about the works that his flute revisited: the rivers, the breeze, the forests, the dawn – all works of the dead gods? … And suddenly, Pan forever throws to the ground the supreme shout of love.” In the second musical picture making up the Mirages, Schmitt turned to a very different subject: the poem Mazeppa by Lord Byron. Based on a legend and set in the times when the Polish kingdom stretched from the Lithuanian Baltic coast all the way to the Black Sea, Mazeppa is a nobleman accused of being the lover of a rival nobleman’s wife. He is sentenced to be tied down on a wild horse that is released into the woods. Mazeppa’s tortuous ride nearly kills him, but after the steed falls exhausted, the unconscious nobleman is rescued by the local farmers, eventually becoming the leader of the Ukrainian people. Florent Schmitt titled this movement La Tragique chevauchée, and its depiction of Mazeppa’s wild ride in the orchestrated version of the piece is overwhelming in its impact. Read more at: (an awesome blog on Schmitt and his works by Phillip Nones)
