At the age of 19 he entered the Paris Conservatoire, where he studied with Gabriel Fauré, Jules Massenet, Théodore Dubois, and Albert Lavignac.

[2] 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!

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,[5] 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.

[6] Beecham had known Delius in his Paris days – the friend of August Strindberg, Paul Gauguin, Edvard Munch and other figures of the time.

[7] Assisting Sir Thomas Beecham, Felix Aprahamian identified Florent Schmitt as having been one of Delius's few French musician-friends.

On the occasion of his visit, Ralph Vaughan Williams telephoned to say that he had not met Florent Schmitt since before the First World War, when he had been a pupil of Ravel's in Paris, and would like to see him.

Aprahamian's recollections of his encounters with Florent Schmitt were later included in his introduction to the revised edition (Severn House, 1975) of Beecham's biography of Frederick Delius (Hutchinson, 1959).

In 1907 Schmitt composed a ballet, La tragédie de Salomé, to a commission from Jacques Rouché for Loie Fuller and the Théâtre des Arts.

The suite is much better-known, with recordings conducted by Schmitt himself, Paul Paray, Jean Martinon, Antonio de Almeida, Marek Janowski and others.

The rhythmic syncopations, polyrhythms, percussively treated chords, bitonality, and scoring of Schmitt's work anticipate Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring.