Erik Satie, Parade

The Grout textbook skimps on Erik Satie’s biography, mentioning only his “avant-garde tendencies.” It’s worth looking at Satie’s biography in Groves or the Harvard Dictionary, because he was an extremely unusual man. Trained in piano at the Paris Conservatory, he made his living for many years playing and leading orchestras in the bohemian cabarets of the Monmartre district. During this period he composed a number of successful popular songs and many enigmatic piano pieces, like the Gymnopédies, the Gnossiennes and the Vexations. The “turning point in his career,” according to the Groves article by Robert Orledge, came in 1911 when Ravel performed several pieces by Satie in concert and Debussy orchestrated and conducted Satie’s Gymnopédies. Suddenly Satie was acclaimed as the forerunner of modernism in French music.

In 1914 Satie met Jean Cocteau, the poet, playwright and propagandist of modernism, who commissioned incidental music for a productino of Midsummer Night’s Dream, and then involved Satie in a project at Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. The scenario was by Cocteau, the sets by Picasso, the choreography by Massine and the music by Satie. The result was Parade, a “ballet réaliste,” produced in 1917 and causing a scandal that gratified all concerned. In the ballet the “manager” of a traveling circus parades a few of his acts past the curious onlookers to entice them into the show. There is a Chinese magician, an American girl and a troupe of jugglers. The crowd, taking the parade for the show itself, is not interested in paying money for tickets, and the show packs up and leaves town. The scenario expresses Cocteau’s and Satie’s idea that the real world makes the best kind of art.

Critics who wanted art to be a cut or two “above” the everyday were appropriately indignant. Cocteau answered them in a pamphlet entitled “The Rooster and the Harlequin,” in which he praised Satie as the epitome of modern art:

Satie teaches the greatest boldness for our time: be simple. Hasn’t he proved that he could refine more than anyone? Now he flattens out, disengages, strips the rhythm. . . . Enough of clouds, of waves, of aquariums, of Ondines and of odors of the night; we need a music with its feet on the ground, A MUSIC OF EVERYDAY. Enough of hammocks, garlands, gondolas! I want a music built for me where I live as in a house.

After the end of World War I, Satie produced several more ballets and theater pieces, including Mercure (again with Picasso) and Relâche, and he became an icon and a leader for a brief time of a new generation of French composers, including Milhaud, Auric, and Poulenc.