A new Erik Satie piece, in a 1919 arrangement by Hans Ourdine. Listen to an excerpt of Parade, a collaboration by Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso and Erik Satie. Find out what Truman Capote and André Gide have to do with this. And more about scandal, war, refusal as a strategy, and how you can not only overflow your epoch but also trickle into somebody's future.
For those who rather read, here is the transcription:
I am going to play for you today an excerpt of Parade, a collaboration by Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso and Erik Satie. It was performed in Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris, on 18 May 1917 by the „Ballets Russes“ of Sergei Djagilew.
This is the start of the excerpt, called Rag-Time Parade (intermezzo)
It is very short piece, only 20 minutes. it has no real plot, it is rather an anecdote. An anecdote is a short story that is amusing, told between friends and designed to entertain the listener. Often, the anecdote is made of hearsay or unreliable resources. Originally, its name comes from Greek and means “unpublished”, "not given out”. It’s private.
I can tell you anecdote about Cocteau, Picasso, Satie, the three of them all being quite egocentric individuals. At one point during the preparations of Parade, Cocteau invited Satie to travel to Rome together with Picasso to visit Diaghilew. Satie did buy travel bags but he never went. Buying travel bags was more appealing to him than to travel to Rome, so his friend, the painter Valentine Hugo, remarked in a letter. Satie was happy to get rid of Cocteau to work on his piece La vie de Socrate for which he found the perfect collaborator: Plato. He wrote to Valentine: “Je nage dans la felicité! Enfin! Je suis libre, libre comme l’air, comme l’eau, comme la brebis sauvage! Vive Platon!” (I swim in happiness! Finally! I am free, free like the air, like water, like a wild sheep! Viva Plato!)
(Intermezzo)
Parade is set at a street fair in Paris. It features two circus managers and a horse, a Chinese magician, two acrobats and The Little American Girl - with a few circus stunts, they are attempting to attract a public for the show, without success - in the end, the two managers collapse.
Among the audience of Parade was André Gide. He disapproved of it. As it is, Gide was a lifelong sceptic of Cocteau. It was the US writer Truman Capote who wrote in 1959 about the two Frenchmen and their problematic relationship. Capote quotes Gide’s journal entree of August 1914. I will read it to you in its whole, because it is worth it: “Jean Cocteau has arranged to meet me in an ‘English tearoom’ on the corner of the rue de Ponthieu and the avenue d’Antin. I had no pleasure in seeing him again, despite his extreme kindness; but he is incapable to seriousness, and all his thoughts, his witticisms, his sensations, all the extraordinary brilliance of his customary conversation shocked me like a luxury article displayed in a period of famine and mourning. He is dressed almost like a soldier, and the fillip of the present events has made him look healthier. He is relinquishing nothing, but simply giving a martial twist to his usual liveliness. When speaking of the slaughter of Mulhouse he uses amusing adjectives and mimicry; he imitates the bugle call and the whistling of the shrapnel. Then, changing subjects since he sees he is not amusing me, he claims to be sad; he wants to be sad with the same kind of sadness as you, and suddenly he adopts your mood and explains it to you. Then he talks of Blanche, mimics Mme. R. And talks of the lady at the Red Cross who shouted on the stairway, ‘I was promised fifty wounded men for this morning; I want my fifty wounded men.’ Meanwhile he is crushing a piece of plum cake in his plate and nibbling it; his voice rises suddenly and has odd twists, he laughs, leans forward, bends toward you and touches you. The odd thing is that I think he would make a good soldier. He asserts that he would and that he would be brave too. He has the carefree attitude of the street urchin; it is in his company that I feel the most awkward, the most heavy, the most gloomy.”
(Intermezzo)
On the German radio, pianist Tomas Bächli talk about Parade. Bächli is the author of a very entertaining Satie book, with the title: “Ich heisse Erik Satie wie alle anderen auch.” (My name is Erik Satie, like everyone else.)
Bächli is talking about the scandal that surrounded Parade. At the premiere, the play was interrupted by the audience. The scandal was provoked, according to Bächli, by the lack of war pathos in the piece. We are talking 1917, a very tense time, with the Germans approaching Paris and at the Westfront, the French starting a new offensive. Food was rare and the revolution in Russia was ongoing.
Bächli says there is a strategy of Verweigerung at work in Parade, which infuriated the audience.
"Die Verweigerung ist ja politisch sehr ein heikles Instrument, wenn einfach einer sagt, ich mache nicht mit, weil dann eben alle anderen, die doch irgendwo mitmachen und vielleicht auch mit Bedenken mitmachen – weil die dann sehen, es gibt auch was anderes. Und ich glaub, das ist ja eigentlich das Zentrum von jedem Skandal…"("Refusal is a very tricky instrument politically, if someone simply says, I'm not going to take part, because then everyone else who does take part somehow and perhaps do so also with reservations- because then they realise, there's also something else. And I think that's actually the centre of every scandal…")
(Intermezzo)
Gide and Cocteau met again in 1950 in Sicily. Nothing much had changed. Gide, or Il Vecchio, as they called him in Sicily, told Cocteau: “Do be still. You are disturbing the view.”
Let me read to you the last paragraph of Truman Capote’s piece on Gide and defence of Cocteau:
“Very true: Cocteau was disturbing the view. He has been doing since his debut as an opium-smoking prodigy of seventeen. For more than four decades this eternal gamin has conducted a fun-for-all vaudeville, with many flashing changes of attire: poet, novelist, playwright, journalist, designer, painter, inventor of ballets, film maker, professional conversationalist. Most of these costumes have fit well, a few brilliantly. But it is in the guise of catalytic agent that he has been most capable: as an innovator for, and propagandist of, other men’s ideas and gifts - from Radiguet to Genet, Satie to Auric, Picasso to Berard, Worth to Dior. Cocteau has lived absolutely inside his time, and more than anyone else, formed French taste in the present century. It is Cocteau’s kinship with his own epoch, his exclusive concern with the modern, that lay at the root of Il Vecchio’s aversion: “I do not seek to be of my epoch; i seek to overflow my epoch.” was Gide’s declared ambition; a commendable one, too. But isn’t it possible that a man who has so enlivened our today will, if not overflow, at least trickle into somebody’s tomorrow?"