Franz Schmidt is not to be confused with composers named Erich Schmid, Florent Schmitt, Leo Smit, Johann Christoph Schmidt, or John Christopher Smith. One writer suggests that he remains in relative obscurity because his name is the equivalent of ''Frank Smith.'' Schmidt probably would not have wanted it that way if he could have had any say in the matter, for he was three-quarters Hungarian and had a nagging Magyar feeling all his life. For example, he was born in Bratislava, which the Hapsburgs insisted was Pressburg in those days, but he told people his native city was Pozsony, which was its Hungarian name.

Schmidt's father played several instruments and decorated china, though not, I believe, simultaneously. His mother was a crackerjack pianist and taught him all she knew, especially Bach. As a youth Schmidt also studied the organ with Brother Felizian (Moczik) at the Franciscan Church (though one source gives the Cathedral organist Rudolf Mader as his first teacher). He was "discovered" by a local patroness of the arts, who sent him off to Vienna to study piano with the great Leschetizky. That worthy, who made a hobby of marrying his female pupils, and who had turned out polysyllabic pianists like Paderewski, Gabrilovitch, and Vengerova, apparently couldn't• abide the notion of being connected with a mono­syllabic Schmidt. Besides, he went on record as believing that the outlook of Germanic pianists was '' a little grey.' ' At any rate, the two got on very badly, and Schmidt, probably wisely, decided to take up the 'cello.

Admitted to the Conservatory of the Society of the Friends of Music at fourteen, he studied under, among others, Robert Fuchs and the great Anton Bruckner, whose influence he never quite shook off. His cello teacher was Ferdinand Hellmesberger, scion of a string­playing Viennese dynasty, member of the Helmesberger Quartet, and first-desk man at the Hofoper (Court Opera), whose orchestra was the Vienna Philharmonic on its days off. Helmesberger was a tyrant, but knowing him certainly did no harm, for at twenty-two Schmidt became a member of said orchestra. Eventually he succeeded to his teacher's post, but not for long.

Schmidt may indeed have known Bruckner and Brahms, but he was also acquainted with grief. In his seventeen years with the orchestra (as player, composer, and occasional conductor) he managed to incur the dislike, jealousy, or outright enmity of the concert-master Arnold Rose, the conductors Gustav Mahler and Felix Weingartner, and other powers, with the result that he was broken from first to last 'cello! In 1913 he gave it up and eventually became a much­honored music educator. Late in his life the Philharmonic appointed him an Honorary Member. Big Deal! (His wife, incurable, was committed to a mental hospital in 1917; his daughter, an only child, died in childbirth; Schmidt's own last years were racked by illness.)

Understandably, Schmidt was not a prolific composer. His reputation stands chiefly on his great oratorio “The Book with the Seven Seals" and on his four symphonies. His opera ''Notre-Dame,'' after Victor Hugo's Hunchback is still performed in central Europe, and I have recently been much impressed by a first hearing of it, thanks to a rather murky pirated recording. (Oddly, Schmidt's four big piano works -- two concerti and two quintets -- are all for left hand alone, having been written for the one-handed pianist Paul Wittgenstein.) His largest output, and his heretofore most neglected, is, however, his organ music. The neglect has been rectified by Amadeo Records, which has done an ''integral'' recording of the fifteen pieces, this being Vol. I. The performer is the well-known keyboardist Kurt Rapf, who studied with Franz Schutz, one of the dedicatees of this music.