Grove Koger
It was a bracing convergence of talents: composer Erik Satie, painter Pablo Picasso, impresario Sergei Diaghilev, Diaghilev’s conductor Ernest Ansermet and his new choreographer Léonide Massine, and—that jack of all cultural trades and master of more than a few—Jean Cocteau.
The year was 1917 and the scene was Paris. There was no better time and place for a scandal.
It seems that Diaghilev, the founder of the Ballets Russes, had asked the ambitious young Cocteau for an idea for a ballet. Cocteau, in turn, set down a vague scenario involving music-hall numbers at a fairground and featuring a Chinese magician, an American girl, acrobats and a pantomime horse. He had picked the title Parade after reading a definition of the word in the Dictionnaire Larousse: “a burlesque scene played at the door of a fairground theatre to attract customers.”
After Cocteau shared his ideas with Satie, Picasso designed several cubist costumes and, in something of a contrast, a fanciful backcloth featuring, among other images, a ballerina balanced gracefully atop a winged horse. (At almost 24 by 35 feet, it would prove to be his largest work.) After further consideration, Cocteau added three more characters to his scenario, barkers who strive unsuccessfully to entice the audience into attending the “real” show. He then set off for Rome, where Diaghilev and his company were rehearsing and performing. Joining them, Picasso got to work with Massine in aligning the choreography with the odd costumes. “We created Parade in a cellar in Rome,” remembered Cocteau.
Parade opened at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris on May 18, 1917, in what the distinguished audience assumed would be an afternoon devoted to high culture, another highly romanticized and carefully manicured excursion into unreality.
What they got, however, was … something else. Parade turned out to be an anarchic spectacle that defied easy comprehension. Satie’s score was fragmentary, a seemingly random sequence of circusy tunes and wistful, elusive refrains. Against the composer’s wishes, Cocteau—who was hoping to precipitate a scandal— had enlivened the score with airplane propellers, a lottery wheel, and sirens, although most of these “instruments” don’t seem to have made it into that night’s production. It was as if daily life, in all its unpredictable sweetness and sorrow, had invaded the concert hall.
Sirens or no sirens, Cocteau got his scandal. The production began drawing howls of protest and outrage well before its conclusion. There were insults and whistles. One woman shouted “Opium smokers!” Others accused the troupe of being “dirty Germans” (France was still at war with Germany, remember) and “Bolsheviks.” At the ballet’s conclusion, fistfights broke out, and another woman apparently attacked Cocteau with a hatpin. “I have heard the cries of a bayonet charge in Flanders,” he wrote later, in obvious appreciation of the uproar, “but it was nothing compared to what happened that night at the Châtelet Theatre.”
Subsequently, Satie sent an insulting postcard to a music critic who panned the production. In turn, the critic sued, with the result that the composer was fined and sentenced to a week in jail. Fortunately, a wealthy supporter paid Satie’s fine and his sentence was suspended. Cocteau himself was fined and apparently beaten up by the police for shaking his cane at the critic’s lawyer.
For all its notoriety, the production of Parade apparently generated only a modest profit. As eccentric a composer as has ever lived, Satie spent his share adding more umbrellas to his already large collection.
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For more about Satie and Cocteau, see my post for April 5, 2018, “Paris When It Sizzled.”
I’ve drawn my information primarily from James Harding’s Ox on the Roof: Scenes from Musical Life in Paris in the Twenties (Macdonald, 1972) and Roger Nichols’ Harlequin Years: Music in Paris 1917-1929 (Univ. of California, 2002). The image at the top of today’s post is Picasso’s backcloth. The second image shows Cocteau and Diaghilev in 1924 at a dapper moment, and the third is a self-portrait of Picasso from about 1917.The final image is Picasso’s sketch of Satie. There are several videos of Parade on YouTube, and while I haven’t found any that try to duplicate the original production, this recording is representative.
World Enough 