The Savage Parade - From Satie, Cocteau, and Picasso to the Britten of 'Les Illuminations'

and beyond
Author(s): David Drew
Source: Tempo, New Series, No. 217 (Jul., 2001), pp. 7-21
Published by: Cambridge University Press
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David Drew

The Savage Parade-from Satie, Cocteau, and Picasso

to the Britten of Les Illuminations and beyond
This article arose from the author's review of Daniel

comic opera after a play by Cocteau and

Albright's recent study Untwisting the Serpent -

Raymond Radiguet, would be his last work and

that he would then 'devote himself entirely to
the cause of young musicians', he forgot about

Modernism in Music, Literature and Other Arts

(Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press).

The review, now published in the Spring 2001 Issue of

the opera but not the young musicians, and

the Kurt Weill Newsletter (vol 19, no. 1), concen-

saved his last work - a pair of ballets - for the

trates on Schoenberg and Weill, while the article explores

year before his death.

other aspects of Modernism considered by Albright.

In 1920 Satie had composed 'Elegie', to a text

Tempo's own formal review of Untwisting the

by Lamartine, and dedicated it to the memory of

Serpent is contributed by Peter Quinn on p. 00 - Ed.).

Debussy 'en souvenir d'une admirative et douce

amitie de trente ans'. The song's craggy and
desolate harmony inhabits the same landscape of

In the Parade of 1917 - Satie's, Cocteau's, Picasso's,

and Massine's Parade - the Three Managers of a

travelling theatre advertise their show to the
passing crowd by presenting excerpts on the
platform outside. Their efforts are in vain. The
public remains indifferent, and not a ticket is sold.

That's Modernism in primary school - long

before it learned how to market itself, and

bereavement as the poem: the loss of one individ-

ual seems suddenly to have depopulated and

denuded the entire planet. 'Elegie' subsequently
became the first in a cycle of four songs, where
it is followed by settings of Cocteau and of an
18th-century verse dedicated to 'le petit trou',
and balanced at the end by an 'Adieu' - a gently

July 1922 that the reception that opened the

comical farewell to the past, on a poem by

Cocteau's protege, the 17-year-old Raymond
Radiguet.

social season in Roscoff had been 'magnificent' 70 beautiful, famous, and titled guests; and the
servants were 'perfect'. The Princess had worn

For Satie, the void left by Debussy was all the

greater for their previous painful estrangement
during the year that had remained to Debussy

her black-crepe peplum, 'a unique, wonderful

after the success and scandal of Parade. To attempt

thing, such a success that it's beyond words'; the

to fill it with his 'Cubist friends' - Braque and

Jean Gris as well as Picasso and Brancusi - was

upped the commission fees.

The Princess Ghika records in her joural of 5

strings of pearls were 'simply endless... the

fiancee of Prince Coloradi-Mansfield alone wore

wiser than attempting a Paul et Virgine that would

three million's worth'; and, yes, 'we had three

musicians: Auric, Poulenc, and Erik Satie. They
played their works'.'
Satie, the 'old Bolshevik' as he liked to call

have to find its feet in the continuing presence of

himself, belonged elsewhere but knew how to

behave in such company. For the Princesse de
Polignac, born of the sewing-machine Singers,
he began Socrate in the winter of 1918-19, and
felt he owed his return to 'classical simplicity,
with a modern sensibility' to his 'Cubist friends.
Bless them'. Through Socrate he would meet and

become friends with Brancusi; but Parade had

already brought him Picasso, whose friendship
was more important to him than the fame that
Parade had also brought him.
'Compared with Petrushka, does my little
Parade stand up?', he mused.' Having announced
in November 19202 that Paul et Virginie, a 3-act

Pelleas et Melisande. Debussy, his near-contemporary, was irreplaceable. Stravinsky, his junior by

16 years but similarly devoted to Debussy's

memory, was to become his new exemplaranother who could do no wrong.
By 1924, Satie's devotion to Stravinsky and his
music was sufficient to ensure that his two ballet

scores would in no sense compete. As if sensing

that an Apollo and a Persephone were reserved for a

future well beyond his own lifespan, he dispatches

his anorexic Mercure to other climes. Under a
starry night-sky, Apollo exchanges tendresses with

Venus, and around them dance the signs of the

zodiac. Mercury appears. Jealous of the enamoured

Apollo, he threatens his life, relents, and makes

full amends (he is, after all, Apollo's half brother).

It is the agile Mercury, not Terpsichore, who

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8 The Savage Parade -from Satie, Cocteau, and Picasso

devises the dances for Bacchus's party. Among

the guests is Persephone. In the finale, she is
abducted by Pluto and Chaos, who carry her off
to Hades to the strains of a cheerful alla marcia in

the sort of F majorish mode associated with

Mercury's first entry.

Commissioned by the Count de Beaumont,

designed by Picasso, choreographed by Massine,

Parisian high society by Count de Beaumont and

lesser hosts of the day, there was a ubiquitous
guest who made himself immediately recognis-

able by wearing above his mask the helmet of

Mercury, and moving, wand in hand, through
the crowds so swiftly and lightly that he seemed
to be airbom. Satie, the uninvited, knew him best:

'The author of Parade (J.Cocteau) was explain-

and presented at the Cigale music-hall, Mercure had

ing (for the thousandth time) the miseries which

begun life with a scandal: led by Louis Aragon

and Andre Breton, the Surrealists mounted a
demonstration in favour of Picasso, and Aragon,

bore down on him, cut him to pieces, blew him

up, rolled him flat, and raked him over while he
was writing this work - three lines long....'"

with the police close at his heels, had jumped

on to the stage shouting 'Bravo Picasso, down

after the premiere of Mercure in June 1924. Even

Thus Satie in Picabia's 391, only a month

with Satie!'. The Surrealists duly published their

more telling is the message he had published

manifesto as Hommage a Picasso. It pointedly

back in February:

ignored Massine and Satie, and proclaimed

Picasso as the true representative of Modernism.
Among the signatories were Poulenc and Auric,

the two young friends with whom Satie had

quarrelled a year before.3
Most of the missives Satie entrusts to his

messenger-god in Mercure are self-addressed. But

the one received by the Three Graces as they

are bathing is a wholly believable billet doux.
Marked 'Tres calme (sans aucune nuance)', its
limpid sequences distract their attention while the

messenger-god, who is also the god of thieves, is

stealing their pearls.4 Satie's score did at least have
that Apollonian moment to offer Picasso - eight
bars and a repeat, nothing more. The subsequent

'Polka des lettres' delivers nothing that might

interfere with Picasso's quite separate designs.
In Parade Picasso had invaded the theatre for

the first time (Cocteau would claim he pushed

him), and his popularized cubism had been

answered by Satie's. In Mercure, the paint-brushes

are put aside, while wooden and wickerwork

puppets mingle with the dancers, and the 'decor',

as Gertrude Stein describes it, 'is written, so

simply written, no painting, pure calligraphy'.5
Himselfa meticulous and inventive calligrapher,

Satie was an ideal table-companion for Picasso

wherever paper tablecloths and napkins were
available. 'Their' Mercury can only have taken
wing in the kind of cafes Satie frequented ('... to

give a moral example and appear respectable, I

say: Young folk, don't go to cafes: listen to the
solemn words of a man who has spent too much
time in them, in his opinion - but doesn't regret

it, the monster!') The Surrealists had other

haunts, and never saw the clues left on the table-

1916: That was when Cocteau was 'writing' Parade....

....Yes.... Picasso and I were onlookers (unknowingly
of course)....

The Surrealists who demonstrated against Satie

and 'his' Mercure had missed the one point that
would have appealed to them. 75 years later it's

still being missed. Cocteau, seeing himself as

discoverer of Rimbaud, would have liked to be,
and expected to be, one of the Surrealists' heroes;

but try as he might, he never became one.

Mercure put him in his place as far as Picasso and

Satie were independently concerned. But their

private demonstrations were more thoughtful
than the public ones. The pros as well as the
cons and the conneries were being weighed up:
Picasso seems to be recalling Cocteau's notable
penmanship, and preserving it, like the erasures
of a palimpsest, beneath his calligraphic rendering

of Mercure; meanwhile, and much more

prominently, Satie gives Le Coq et l'Harlequin
another hearing, and in the end acquits Cocteau
with a warning.
*

In Giovanni Bologna's ever-popular Late

Renaissance bronze, the naked and helmeted

messenger-god with raised right arm and vertically extended index finger is bearing in his left
hand the traditional caduceus or wand. Around
the wand are entwined two snakes. As 'modern'

a message as one could wish for in the bio-tech

age, the snakes' double helix lies beyond

Professor Albright's carefully delimited field in

Untwisting the Serpent. It is not the Bargello's
bronze that inspires his title, but the Vatican's

cloths by the two conspirators.

Who was the fleet-footed and light-fingered
artist who had brought Satie and Picasso together
for Parade, and then made such a nuisance of him-

statue of Laoco6n (and his two sons) grappling with

self? At the masked balls so lavishly mounted for

of 1766- Laocoon, or On the Limits of Painting

the sea-serpents. Hence the central importance

for him, as for present and past generations of
scholars, critics, and aestheticians, of Lessing's essay

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The Savage Parade -from Satie, Cocteau, and Picasso

and Poetry. The qualities that distinguish

Untwisting the Serpent from other studies in the
same field are in the first place idiosyncratic and
frankly hedonistic. 'This book', declares Albright
on an early page, 'aims to please'.
And so did Cocteau. Albright's quest 'for the
fundamental units in the mixed arts' is a neo-

seen 'curling above' the groin of the Acrobat in

Picasso's costume-design is duly unveiled as the
impudent 'master emblem of the whole ballet'.
It would perhaps be sentimental to remark that
there's another and larger 'whorl' curling round
the Acrobat's heart area (master emblems should

Cocteauesque tour deforce, reconciling the timeless

aim higher than that, or lower). Take your

choice - one reader's impudent whorl could be

requirements of well-informed and intelligent

another's humdrum violin scroll, and that, after

entertainment with the intellectual demands of a

all, had been a basic element in the iconography

conscious if not self-conscious modernity, here

and now, at the dawn of a new millennium. The

of Picasso's Cubism since 1911.

quest divides into two supposedly complemen-

Cocteau's too, has many endings. Untwisting the

Serpent has another one up its sleeve, as we shall

tary strands - 'Figures of Consonance among the

The coiled tale of Picasso's Acrobat, and

Arts', and 'Figures of Dissonance among the Arts'.

discover. But the discordancies within the col-

The latter are theoretically resolved at the close

by the great Paris-American C major concord of
the Thomson-Stein opera Four Saints in Three Acts.

laboration remain the primary concern. Gide's

comment on Cocteau (at the time of the 1920
revival) is more benign than Satie's seven years

'Never to return to distinctions' sings St. Chavez,

later: 'He knows that the sets and costumes are by

fortissimo, to the (angelic) male chorus. Albright's

Picasso, and the music by Satie, but he wonders

if Picasso and Satie are not invented by him.'7

amen to that is justified by his rigorous analysis

of iterative and differentiating patterns in Stein

Greater artists than Cocteau - Stravinsky for one,

Brecht for another - were to entertain similar

and in Thomson (who understood, better than

many latter-day minimalists, how to make the
static move and be moving).
In the retrospective mirror of Four Saints it
becomes easier to understand Albright's decision

proprietory instinct may not be entirely misguid-

to begin the second part of his quest with Parade.

of the printed scenario.

Generous and well-deserved tribute is paid to

Dorothy Menaker Rothschild's monograph of
1991 and her comprehensive investigation of

provided evidence of Cocteau's wider and

Picasso's notes, sketches, and finished designs. In

the matter of design, Albright concentrates on
what he calls the 'whorls' or 'apostrophes' characteristic of Picasso's costumes for the Chinese

Conjuror and the Acrobat. Describing them as

'tantalisingly enigmatic', he promises to show
that the whorl is the 'master emblem of the

whole ballet, a veiled impudence'.

The plainer facts are these: in February 1917
Picasso and Cocteau joined the Ballets Russes
on their Italian tour to work on the forthcoming

production of Parade; they visited Pompeii and

other Roman sites; and taking the slogan 'be
vulgar!' as their motto, vied with each other in
emulating the phallic motifs common to graffiti
of every age and place. According to Albright on what authority is not clear -'they seem to
have spent a good deal of time' on this particular
recreation. In any event, when Picasso recounted
his dream of an erect penis improbably curling
back on itself (like some upended interrogation
mark), Cocteau made an inelegant sketch of it.
Reproduced by Rothschild and re-exposed in
Untwisting the Serpent, it is construed as a protosurrealist or dadaist excursion from self-fellatio

to self-buggery, and the 'whorl' that is to been

fancies about their creative partners. Yet the

ed. Satie for his part was unfair, and deliberately

so, in attributing to Cocteau only the few lines

Already in 1918, Le Coq et l'Harlequin had

deeper involvement with Parade than the final

and concise version of the scenario suggests.

That evidence has been amply corroborated by
the intensive researches that began in the early
1970s, some ten years after Cocteau's death in
1963. By then Satie's music had infiltrated the
'subculture' of the day; and as soon as its public
and commercial success was confirmed - a

process not unconnected with the expiry of

copyrights - scholarly attention was drawn to it.
Citing Steegmuller's fine Cocteau (1986) as well

as Rothschild's monograph, Albright leaves no

doubt as to the extent and suggestiveness of
Cocteau's draft scenario and its appendages. Yet
his selections of evidence are inevitably restricted
by the preemptive 'Figures of Dissonance' rubric
and its tendency - reinforced by a well-chosen

quote from Artaud - to over-determine his

conclusion that in Parade the 'constituent arts

refuse to fit together'. It therefore becomes

obligatory to argue, or rather, to assert, that
Satie 'paid little attention to the content of
Parade, as Cocteau imagined it'.
Surprisingly, there is no mention in Untwisting

the Serpent of an artist and stage-designer who

played a crucial role as intermediary between

Cocteau and Satie. Valentine Gross - later married

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10 The Savage Parade -from Satie, Cocteau, and Picasso

to the artist Jean Hugo, with whom Cocteau

was to collaborate on several ballets and stage
pieces - was held in the highest esteem and
affection by Satie. Cocteau recognized that her
diplomatic powers were superior to his. In the
edited form quoted by Ornella Volta in her
invaluable SATIE - As Seen Through His Letters,

Cocteau's letter to Gross (dated 4 September

1916) begins as follows:
Make dear Satie understand, through the haze of
aperitifs, that I do after all have some part in Parade
and that he's not alone with Picasso. I believe Parade
to be a kind of renewal of the theatre and not a mere

'opportunity' for music. He hurts my feelings when

he jumps up and down and shouts to Picasso: 'It's

you I follow! You're my master!' He seems to be
hearing for the first time things I've been telling him

over and over again.'

Later in the same letter, however, Cocteau

reports that 'Picasso is thinking up wonders and

and it's the Chinese Conjuror who begins their

outdoor show. The second turn is introduced

by the Manager from New York, wearing the

cubist skyscraper designed by Picasso; it features

the popular but hardly maternal tricks of the

American Girl - a proto-Nabokovian ingenue,
as posed for the famous photo of the original
dancer, Marie Chabelska.
According to Cocteau, the American Girl
knows all about Chaplin and the unending Perils

of Pauline. Clearly, Rimbaud's 'nice girl' songs

('chansons "bonnes filles"') won't fit the bill;
instead there's a 'Packet-boat Ragtime' that
predicts a 'future without boredom', until the
orchestral coda's sirens and submarine gurgles
remind the American Girl in her sailor-neck

shirt of the 'little song' Cocteau had intended

for her.

The last tricks are performed by the two

Acrobats, and surrealistically listed by Cocteau

Satie's American Girl is almost finished'.The

in a note for Satie that begins thus:

letter ends (in Volta's published version) with an

unexpected shaft of light that seems to indicate
something of what Satie may have grasped 'for

archangel Gabriel balancing himself on the edge of the

the first time':

at the bottom of the sea..."

The little American girl in Parade makes her entry like

this: on the 47th floor an angel has made her nest in

the dentist's office - and there's this little song: 'Tic
tic tic the ti-ta-nic, sinking lights ablaze into the sea'.9

It's a song worth remembering. Though Satie

never set it, Cocteau inscribed his text at the
appropriate point in the non-autograph copy of

Medrano - Orion - two biplanes in the morning... the

window... the diver's lantern... Sodom and Gomorrah

Already alerted to the 'master emblem for the

whole ballet' and its veiled impudence, the reader
of Untwisting the Serpent is likely to emulate the

author's dash for the diver's lamp. What connexion, asks Albright, might archangels and the
Cities of the Plain have with Cocteau's
Acrobats? An answer is found in Chabrier's and

honour, after the title page and before Cocteau's

Verlaine's circus operetta, Fisch-Ton-Kan - one

of their two jeux d'esprit of 1863-64. (Like its
companion piece, Fisch-Ton-Kan first saw the
light of day in the subfusc Paris of April 1941).

brief synopsis, comes an unheaded manifesto

with Satie's name in capitals at the start, and

his 'baton poll' - a fitting partner, it would seem,

the full score.

Parade was first published in Satie's own

arrangement for piano 4 hands. In a place of

Chabrier's tender lament for a fallen acrobat and

Picasso's in the second sentence. Although

for Satie's apostrophe to 'le petit trou' in his

Cocteau's name does not appear, his style and

drinking song of 1920 - leads Albright to a song

taste are omnipresent, and several formulations

are traceable directly to him. The only acknow-

ledged author, 18 years old at the time of the

premiere, is Georges Auric.
Satie's art, declares Auric, affords 'a new vision

of the individual, at the height of his powers,

pitching camp beside astonishing personages who
make one dream of Rimbaud and predict, with

some foreboding, a future without boredom'.

in which the impudence of Verlaine's text is

'even more outrageous'. So far so good. But the
trail comes to an abrupt stop: 'the homosexual
subtext of trapeze art was entirely excluded from
the finished Parade'.'2

Reading between the lines is often less

rewarding than reading the lines themselves.
One might, for instance, start with the first word

in Cocteau's memo to Satie, and somersault

In the 'Parade' of Les Illuminations the 'etonnants

backwards to 1899 and Louis Ganne's successful

personnages' are innumerable - 'Chinese,

insanities, sinister demons, all mingling their
popular and maternal tricks"' with bestial poses

operetta, Les Saltimbanques. The Circus Director,

Malicorne, has brought his circus to a field near
Versailles. In front of his box-office is an apronstage, on which he presents his artistes to the

Cocteau's Parade can only afford a cast of four,

Malicore and says he'll buy a season ticket. The

Hottentots, gypsies, idiots, hyenas, Molochs, old

and caresses'. The Managers of Satie's and

public. The local Baron has his eye on Mme.

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The Savage Parade -from Satie, Cocteau, and Picasso 11

general public is bored with the parade, and

Malicorne tells his singer to ginger things up.
Her chanson is a hit. Dispatched to collect cash
from the crowd, she rejects a generous offer from

an aristocratic young Lieutenant, and boxes the

ears of the Baron, who has propositioned her.

asked Satie to send him the score in New York

as he wanted to include it in one of his concerts.

Satie sent something else instead, and the pieces

remained in manuscript, untouched, until his

death. Subsequently completed and re-arranged

(by Milhaud), they were published as Cinq

Malicorne is beside himself. His Strong Man,

Grimaces pour 'Le Songe d'une nuit d'ete'. Not

Grand Pingouin, takes the Singer under his wing,

grimaces at all, but a set of wooden pieces for toy-

and together with the Clown and the Actress,

they abscond. After alternative employment in
Normandy - as street-singer, dog-clipper, chair-

negligible, but critically important in relation to

mender, and fortune-teller respectively - the four

return to the circus, heavily disguised as the

long-overdue Italian acrobat troupe, the

Gigolettis. When the real Gigolettis arrive,

town soldiers and huntsmen, they are musically

Cocteau's ideas for Parade only a year later.

'There we may rehearse more obscenely and
courageously', Bottom the Weaver had once
declared, 'Take pains; be perfect; adieu'.
Satie hadn't taken pains. On the contrary, he

things look bad for the impostors. The ensuing

had been cast as Cocteau's Peter Quince, and

complications are resolved by the Comte des

Etiquettes, who entertains the disappointed

seems almost deliberately to have botched what

little carpentry was required of him. By 1916 he
was not for hire on Cocteau's terms. Only in his

Gigolettis at his Chateau, and invites Malicorne

to pitch his circus in the grounds. To his great
surprise Malicome recognizes among the Count's
guests a familiar face from distant times: that of

dingy room in the suburb of Arceuil-Cachan a room from which his 'artistic' friends were

strictly excluded - could he read Les Illuminations

Mme. B., his former trapeze-artist. To the

with his own insight as well as Cocteau's, and

assembled company he announces that his errant

Singer, one of the false and recently un-masked
Gigolettis, is the long-lost love-child of Mme. B.
and the Count. Socially upgraded, the Singer is
now free to marry the Lieutenant. The Count,
overjoyed, buys the circus from Malicorne and
gives it to the Clown, the Strong Man, and the

declare, after Rimbaud, 'j'ai seul la clef.

Actress.

Other doors, other keys. Albright has many, and

one of his doors is Artaud's. Cocteau's 'flimsy antetheatre', he writes, 'advertises an unseen theatre of

dismemberment, human sacrifice, and bestiality';

but Cocteau, he continues, took Rimbaud's

goodies and put them in the foreground, while
suppressing his baddies (the Molochs, the bleeding

Innocent fun, to be sure, and further removed

from Picasso's sorrowful or threatening Saltimbanques of the early 1900s than from the Cirque
Medrano to which Cocteau clearly refers at the start
of his memo to Satie. In March 1915 Cocteau

faces, and so forth), which nevertheless 'bulge

out from behind a curtain that is never opened'.
'Never' is a matter of opinion. In the silence and
solitude of his rooms, Satie could and surely did
open the curtain. Up in colourful Montmartre,

had been planning a production (by Gabriel

Astruc) of his new version of A Midsummer

it's a different scene.

Night's Dream. It was to have been staged at the

Medrano, with real circus clowns (the Fratellinis),
and a new score specially written for the circus
orchestra. In charge of the musical arrangements
was Edgar Varese, who had returned to Paris in
1913 after several years in Berlin working with

of the piano-duet version, where Albright's

Max Reinhardt (among others). On patriotic

grounds as on others, Cocteau's circus Dream
ranged itself against Reinhardt's historic pre-war
productions in Vienna and Berlin, and therefore

against Mendelssohn's score. Satie was to provide

a five-piece framework; and additional numbers

were requested from Ravel, Stravinsky, and

Florent Schmitt.

The project came to nothing. The Cocteau

translation has vanished, and the only remnants
are the five little pieces Satie drafted in full score.

The draft is dated 2 April 1915, but the final

'Retraite' is incomplete. A year later Varese

The picture is clearer in the black and white

fanciful suggestion that 'Parade is what Erwartung

sounds like with its tongue torn out' can finally

be abandoned. The piano describes the view from

22 rue Cauchy. But up in the Montmartre

fairground, a circus orchestra larger than the
Medrano's has acquired - with help from Cocteau

and perhaps Varese - a Modernist-Futurist

array of percussion and scenic noise. Having
liberally annotated the master-copy of Satie's

score, Cocteau is able to watch the savage

parade from a new vantage-point; and he knows
exactly where it has come from. 'The noises of
war were never far from the ears of Paris', writes

Albright, 'and Parade's method of dealing with

terror through cultivated apathy makes it one

of the profoundest artistic responses to the

Great War'.

No stranger to terror, Satie found a better way

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12 The Savage Parade -from Satie, Cocteau, and Picasso

of dealing with it than providing a 'cultivated'
excuse for the defeatism, surrender, and collab-

analyses by French and Italian cineastes preceded

oration that would one day blight his homeland.t

university departments. Then came a big-screen

re-mastering with analogue recording, and finally
a digital epithalamium for endless replay.

As if drawn on the empty pages at the end of

the Goyaesque war pieces for two pianos which
Debussy called En blanc et noir (1915), the keyboard Parade is the plan and model for the
orchestra's offensive-defensive emplacement.

a non-stop run in festivals, film schools, and

In the present electronic circumstances,

Reldche remains the poor relation from a bygone
age. Regrettably but not surprisingly, Untwisting

The verticals are rigid, the horizontals are

the Serpent perpetuates the notion that the ballet

mobile platforms.

score is cut from the same matrices as the film

*

For Albright and his generously acknowledged

predecessors, Parade recommends itself as a

score' whereas in actual fact it is so direct a

development from Mercure that it could almost

be performed as its continuation. Relache is as
different from Entr'acte as Mercure from Parade.

response 'to avant-garde art, from within avant-

Combining Picasso's former functions as

garde art'. Citing Jeffrey Weiss's 1994 study

designer with Cocteau's as scenarist, the painter

Francis Picabia was an ideal partner for Satie in
1924 (as Tate Modem can show). Reldche 'doesn't
want to say anything', he declares in his fore-

The Popular Culture of Moder Art: Picasso, Duchamp,

and Avant Gardism, he notes that by 1917 Picasso

was aware that the cubist painter had 'become a

figure of fun on the popular stage', and concludes

word to the piano reduction of the score,

that he made Parade his excuse for joining the

enemy and showing that he too could 'enjoy

published a year after Satie's death. He goes on

weightlessness and frivolity'.

In today's fashionable context of a modernist

critique of modernism by way of anti-elitist

to recall that Satie had 'loved' Relache much as

he had 'loved kirsch and gigot of lamb'. There

is no mention of Entr'acte - ostensibly because it

not. Whatever the claims for Picasso's 'calligraphy',

was published separately in Milhaud's piano-duet

arrangement, but also, surely, because neither
love nor kirsch, nor slices of lamb, belong in the

they are spoiled by the subject and its suspect

neo-classicism; and even if the Cocteau satire is

machinery of a score that ignores the film

images and montages even or especially at the

popularism, Parade is a vote-winner and Mercure is

recognized for what it is - a joke for insiders,

two junctures where it pretends to follow them:

and one that explains why Satie and Picasso went

to such lengths in keeping their choice of subject

the dancer whose pasjetes on plate-glass are filmed

a secret even from the Count de Beaumont - its

funeral procession with the runaway hearse.

point is now lost beyond recovery. Moreover,

Satie himself dispenses with it in the final scene's

from below in slow motion, and the 'hilarious'

Detached from the film and heard with full

musical attention as a quite un-Schoenbergian

'Accompaniment to an Imaginary Film Scene',

'Nouvelle Danse', where an almost Faure-like

chamber-music (and late Faure at that) pays
sincere tribute to Bacchus's choreographer and
Satie's message-bringer. Mercure is that notable

boredom' that's also without a musical culture

rarity, a mixed-art collaboration from which one

worth hanging on to. Blocks of static harmony

of the principals is absent throughout.

and vestigial melody are repeated, juxtaposed, and

In Untwisting the Serpent there's a jump-cut

from Parade to Satie's last work, Relache - whose

re-arranged according to a rhythmic and tonal

programme whose purpose is to create an effect
of randomness while raising the expectation of an

title is the conventional billboard notice indicating

Entr'acte reveals itself as Satie's most radical

score - the one closest to a 'future without

that the theatre in question is closed. Which

unforeseeable denouement. The abrupt change

theatre did Satie and Picabia have in mind?

of gearing at mid-point coincides with the start

Cocteau's road show of 1917, once its Managers

had been bankrupted or arrested? Etienne de
Beaumont's, now that Mercure and other treasures

had been sold to an unenthusiastic Diaghilev?

Or just the theatre that will soon re-open as a
cinema and eventually end up as a bingo-hall?
Relache resisted closure by embracing the movies.

Rene Clair's Entr'acte cinematographique is much

longer than Act 1 of the ballet, and the same

length as Act 2. Not only did it outlive the
ballet itself; after its rediscovery in 1945, solemn

of the film's funeral procession, and of the

music's expansion and extension in quite another
direction. For the second time in his life, Satie is
recalling Chopin's great funeral-march, but this
time he is in earnest: there's an orchestra to

prove it, and harmonized plainsong to re-affirm

it. As if summoned from his own cathedrale

engloutie, memories of the Angelus and the Messe

des Pauvres - the quotidian and the spiritual - are

thrust aside by the last repeat of the familiar

ritomello, with a new continuation leading to its

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The Savage Parade -from Satie, Cocteau, and Picasso 13

own annihilation: a harmonic/rhythmic blackout supposedly synchronized with Clair's parting
shot and end-title.

Only the inane logic of the final A major triad

The score of Tiresias remains in manuscript to

this day, and with good reason: after a promising

start - well matched by the original backdrop

depicting a massive Cretan bull, before which the

supports the pretence that such a music celebrates

female athletes performed the gymnastics devised

the resurrection of the top-hatted dancer and

choreographer who has finally emerged from the

by Frederick Ashton - the score already begins

to fall apart. Despite an assertively 'masculine'

helter-skelter coffin. The second act of Relache is

motto-theme that has its corresponding inversion,

due to begin. Yet Entr'acte is a 'last work' to end

there is little integration and no sign of any lessons

them all; and its proper place is after the D major

curtain-music for Reldche, in which Satie returns

Reldche or indeed from the highly successful Opera-

to Act 1 and its threefold reminder, crescendo, of

bouffe - a form Lambert appreciated - which had

the motif for the Chinese Conjuror in Parade.

The Reldche that 'doesn't wish to say anything'
has actually been saying something quite simple
about a complex question: fixed identity, binary

before the inception of Tiresias.

Poulenc had composed Les mamelles de Tiresias
in 1944-45, the year of the Liberation. A land-

that might profitably have been learned from

had its premiere in Paris less than three years

opposition, and the familiar stereotypes of gender.

The variation-techniques that distinguish Relache
from Mercure are precisely those which in the
later score quietly subvert the traditional masculine/feminine typologies of the Conservatoires.
Figures identified in Picabia's scenario as L'Homme

mark piece without being intended as such, it

now has a special place in the affections of its
composer's countless admirers, and rightly so.
Apollinaire had written his so-called 'drame
surrealiste' of the same name in 1903, but it had

and La Femme are encouraged to exchange

Parade. A friend and vociferous supporter of Satie

musical roles in which dressing, undressing, and

cross-dressing are so effortlessly accomplished
that a staging could be superfluous or worse. A
climactic and wholly serious pas de deux in 5/4

(his senior by 14 years), Apollinaire was chosen

by Diaghilev to write an introductory note on
Parade - there's a fine sketch by Larionov of
them sitting together at a rehearsal. The note
duly appeared in the Paris press a week before
the premiere on 18 May 1917. A month later
Apollinaire's Les mamelles de Tiresias was staged

time is laconically identified as 'Dance of the

Wheelbarrow'.

In 1949, two years before his death, Constant

Lambert included Mercure in an all-Satie programme he conducted for the BBC. Yet it was
Reldche and its gender-poetics that related more

closely to his own forthcoming project: the

ballet Tiresias (1950-51).

According to the version of the myth

remained unpublished until 1917, the year of

for the first time - without the incidental music

by Satie he had originally been hoping for.

Around that time, or soon after, Poulenc was

introduced to the poet by Valentine Gross.'4

The first of his posthumous collaborations with
the poet was Le Bestiaire (au cortege d'Orphee).

Lambert drew upon, Tiresias encounters two

Not quite the last, but much the most ambitious,

snakes as they are mating, strikes the female one

was Les Mamelles de Tiresias.

and finds himself transformed into a woman.

Seven years later she meets the same copulating

For Albright's purposes in Untwisting the Serpent,

the play and the music are a godsend worthy of

snakes, strikes the male, and becomes a man again.

Four Saints in Three Acts. (Bernanos and

Zeus and Hera call upon him to settle a dispute

Dialogues des Carmelites don't rate a mention -

as to the relative pleasures of sex for woman and

for man. By a factor of nine, Tiresias declares in

but neither does the Cocteau of La voix

favour of women. Hera, who had argued the

contrary, strikes him blind; Zeus compensates
him with the gift of prophecy.

Lambert had composed nothing substantial

since the Horoscope ballet of 1937, and was in poor

health by the late 1940s. Tiresias was planned in

1950 as a satirical piece lasting half an hour. It
ended as a serious and confused one lasting more
than twice as long - most of it orchestrated at
the last moment by a team of faithful friends and

colleagues, including Elisabeth Lutyens and Denis

Aplvor. The premiere in July 1951 was poorly

received, and Lambert died a few weeks later.

humaine). Technically, his reading of the play

lives up to his description of it as 'the ideal
Saussurean drama'. In itself a bravura exercise, it

fulfils a higher purpose on the musical level,

where a form of double hearing and reflective
memory acutely sympathetic to Poulenc's own,

leads to the very heart of what makes Les

mamelles de Tiresias so much more than the

entertainment it undeniably is. 'Ma blessure'

(my wound) groans the tree in Ravel's L'enfant
et les sortileges; 'bois meurtri' (murdered woods)
reply the a cappella chorus in Poulenc's setting
of Eluard's wartime and war-damaged poems,
Un soir de neige (1944). Beyond question, Poulenc

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14 The Savage Parade -from Satie, Cocteau, and Picasso

was at some level recalling Ravel - though

comes we hope [...] they will give a perfor-

question. In any event, the intertextual reference

mance of a big work or works by you, in which

case perhaps you would accompany them on the

proves revelatory in relation to the passage

following the Husband's expostulations about
the male figure who has seemingly usurped the

cher Francis', wrote Britten on 14 July 1954, at

the end of the Festival, 'Je suis tres desole de lire

whether that constitutes a 'theft' is another

role of his wife. Tiresias concedes that although he

is no longer a woman, he remains Th6erse. Here

(as a music example unerringly demonstrates)

the voices of Ravel's wounded tree and
Poulenc-Eluard's murdered woods are an audible

background, with implications deeper than even

Albright suggests. Were Therese simply 'to insist

on her injured dignity', Poulenc's gesture would

be disproportionate; for dignity and its injuries

have been the stuff of comic opera since its

beginnings. In the blind but prophetic eye of
the classical Tiresias, and surely in Poulenc's
understanding, Th&erse's loss of her rights and
satisfactions is a real injury, a deep wound.
* * *

piano[...]'." The plan didn't materialize. 'Mon

que vous etes si malade'. In the same letter, he

commends to Poulenc 'un grand ami de moi',
John Cranko, and mentions the ballet project
that would become The Prince of the Pagodas.
Work on the ballet began early in 1955, very
soon after Poulenc's 2-piano concerto - with its
Balinese daydreams - had reunited Britten and
Poulenc in a performance conducted by John

Pritchard (at the Royal Festival Hall on 16

January).
It was not until 1956 that Poulenc was able

to attend the Aldeburgh Festival, deliver his

talk, and appear on the concert platform- as
soloist in a performance, under Paul Sacher, of
his 1929 Aubade for piano and 18 instruments.
After the Festival, Britten wrote to express his

The British premiere of Les mamelles de Tiresias

appreciation on behalf of all concerned: 'Both

was given by the English Opera Group at the

Aldeburgh Festival on 13 June 1958, in a production designed (like its EOG predecessors) for

your talk and the Aubade were a great pleasure

and excitement for all concerned, and your

the tiny Jubilee Hall. The director and translator

presence was both a delight and an honour'. He

went on to say that he had asked his publishers

was John Cranko, who had recently been

to send Poulenc a score of The Turn of the Screw.

responsible for the scenario and choreo-graphy

of Britten's full-length ballet The Prince of the

Pagodas (Royal Opera House, Covent Garden,

January 1957). Poulenc's quite lavish orchestration was replaced by an arrangement for two

pianos, prepared for the occasion by Britten,

who was also one of the pianists. Poulenc was to
have partnered him, but had had to withdraw,
and was unable to attend the Festival.

Poulenc's and Britten's friendship dated back to

their first musical collaboration in January 1945,
when they appeared together on the platform of

the Royal Albert Hall (London) as joint soloists

in Poulenc's 2-piano concerto (1932) - the centrepiece in one of three concerts sponsored by de
Gaulle's French National Committee. Three
months later Britten and Pears visited Paris for

the first time since the liberation, and gave three

concerts under the auspices of the British

Council. One of their programmes included the
French premiere of Britten's Les Illuminations -

the cycle he had begun in England in March

1939, and completed in Amityville, Long Island,
in October 1939.

On 21 January 1954 Britten wrote to Poulenc

'Your words about this opera', he continues,

have touched me deeply; praise from you is something really to be treasured! May I say also that I have

had tremendous pleasure from the record of "Les

Mamelles". Last night after a tremendous day of work,

feeling very depressed and exhausted, I played it

through, and it made me laugh aloud, and also
touched me (a rare combination)."

The idea of an English Opera Group production

of Les mamelles de Tiresias germinated for nine
months or so. In a tentative form it was then

conveyed to Poulenc by a mutual friend, the

cellist Maurice Gendron. On receiving a
favourable report from Gendron, Britten wrote
to Poulenc (2 July) explaining that there was no
room for an orchestra in the Jubilee Hall, and
adding 'I am sure you & I can make up for that

with our 20 nimble fingers! We could fix the

piano arrangement ourselves, couldn't we?'7
Poulenc replied on 1 August:
YES, YES, YES, withjoy, for Les Mamelles, both of them.
I want Peter for the husband (there is a tenor version).

I shall try to make a brilliant transcription!!!!'"

On 25 September Poulenc wrote to Britten

inviting him to that year's Festival: 'I have heard

saying that he had just finished the orchestration

so much about the wonderful lecture of [sic]

'Les Six' that you give with exquisite illustrations on the piano [...]. If the Couraud Choir

of La voix humaine, and was going to Venice to

hear Stravinsky's Threni. The 'marvellous photos
of Tiresias' had just arrived.

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The Savage Parade -from Satie, Cocteau, and Picasso 15

The well-known photo of Pears as nightgowned Husband staring aghast at his transformed wife - Jennifer Vyvyan bearded like
Baba the Turk - is a worthy companion to the

one showing the befrocked and lorgnetted

Husband, wearing a frilly apron and interviewed

still have liked to hear, and been encouraged to

see, Therese and her Husband through the eyes
and ears of a middle-aged and thoroughly bourgeois Albert Herring repatriated to the land of
Maupassant and undergoing some of the trials
of marriage, Britten himself was by that time

by his son, The Journalist, against a backdrop

by Osbert Lancaster after the manner of Dufy.

already on his way to A Midsummer Night's

Understandably, perhaps, these photos have

retained their place in the popular operatic
imagination, while their immediate and wider

Monteverdi double bill, the levity of the opera

Dream and Curlew River. In the Poulenc-

belonged to a postwar past, the gravity of I Ballo

to a still uncertain future.

contexts have tended to be overlooked. For

In music as in the other arts, the momentum

Britten, the summer of 1958 was marked in the

of the time was inexorable. Britten's awareness

first place by the composition of the Sechs

of that is perhaps less evident in the public

Holderlin-Fragmente and the Nocturne (finished in

statement of War Requiem than in the relative

seclusion of the Shakespeare opera and Curlew

September); for the audience that came to the

Jubilee Hall to see and hear Tiresias (that being
the announced title) there had to be and there

River. After three decades of intensive research

by Britten scholars, his path to Noh theatre and

was a double bill. Unmentioned in Humphrey

Carpenter's Benjamin Britten - A Biography,

Motomasa's Sumidagawa can no longer be mistaken for a detour, still less a flight from the
unexpected success of War Requiem. Irrespective

'was to take the part of a husband who has a sex

is the fact that the second work in the programme was Monteverdi's not inconsiderable I

of the courses and discourses of Modernism,

Curlew River is inseparable from the arterial
systems of his own work since the late 1930s and from music-history in general since that

Ballo delle ingrate.

work's Aldeburgh Festival premiere in June 1964.

where the reader is informed that Peter Pears

change and gives birth to a multitude of babies','9

The ingrate of the title are identified by

Rinuccini's courtly Italian as inflexible and stony-

hearted in matters of love; in Carl OrfFs 1931

version they are translated as die Sproden,
which adds an appropriate hint of primness or
prudishness. Whereas two world wars and their

massacres are the implicit background of

Britten's first and tenuous link with Noh-

theatre came about through Ronald Duncan

(1914-82). A dedicated pacifist, Duncan had
visited Gandhi soon after his graduation. His
collaboration with Britten, and his long if uneasy

friendship with him, began in the autumn of

1936, when he provided the text for Britten's

Poulenc's 'comic' opera and the 1917 version of

Apollinaire's play - hence the cheerfully philoprogenitive message with which they both
end - the marriage of Duke Francesco Gonzaga

Pacifist March - a 4-minute piece for chorus and

orchestra, completed in January 1937 and published by Peace Pledge Union. From Ezra Pound,

to Margarita of Savoy, and the subsequent

obtained an introduction to Stravinsky, with a

festivities in the Mantuan court, were the only

pretext for II Ballo and for the opera Arianna
which preceded it. But when Pluto orders the

view to his participating - as composer and

whom he had visited in Rapallo, Duncan

conductor- in an anti-war concert in London.

ingrate to return to Hades - after the brief respite

In January 1938 he published the first issue of

Townsman, a quarterly to which Pound - who

on earth which Venus, with the encouragement

of Amor, has secured for them - one of their

venture - contributed articles on music. In return,

number begins a farewell to the world, its light

and its serenity, 'Aer sereno e pura, Addio per

in Notting Hill Gate for Pound to give a reading,

sempre'. Closely akin in style and tone to the

famous Lamento di Arianna, her solitary farewell

had encouraged and supported him in this

Duncan secured the loan of the Mercury Theatre

in October 1938, of one of his Noh-play translations, with help from a female dancer and a

becomes a madrigalian lament when the other

gong-player sought and found, at Duncan's

ingrate take up the burden: 'Si ch'io vorrei morire'.

request, by Britten. Despite a further personal

It was surely to the composer of (for instance)

'Linien des Lebens' in the Holderlin cycle and

the Owen-setting (with its Lucretia-like cor anglais

obbligato) in the Nocturne that Monteverdi's

great valediction was thinkable by way of

introducing a staging of Les mamelles de Tiresias.

Though the audience at the Jubilee Hall may

connexion through Henry Boys (who had

recommended the dancer), there is no evidence
that Britten attended the Pound evening. Moreover, his letter to Elizabeth Mayer of 6 August
1944 - some six years later - refers to Pound as
a very remarkable poet, whom I only started on the
other day.20

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16 The Savage Parade -from Satie, Cocteau, and Picasso

To Duncan on 13 September of the same year,

he writes (from his Old Mill at Snape, Suffolk)

Pound had excelled himself with Antheil during

the Paris saison of 1923-24 - sponsoring his Paris

that 'Since reading Pound's A.B.C.' - the ABC

debut as composer-pianist, commissioning two

violin sonatas for Olga Rudge (Pound's lifelong

of Reading, published in 1934 I've gone all Chaucerian [...] can't anything be done
about helping Pound - he's obviously a great man, &
we haven't so many that we can go around spilling
their blood?

Since the fall of Mussolini and especially since

the Allied advance on Rome, Pound had been

in increasing personal danger on account of his

propaganda broadcasts to the USA. American

troops finally caught up with him in Genoa in
May 1945. After a period of incarceration near
Pisa - where he wrote his Pisan Cantos - he was

taken to the USA, stood trial for treason, and

began his 12-year confinement in St Elizabeth's
Hospital in Washington, D.C. Released in 1958,
he was allowed to return to Italy. It was there
that representatives of BBC's Third Programme

re-established the lines of communication that had

been severed in 1939. The BBC's production in

1930 of Pound's self-styled 'opera' Le testament billed as The Testament of Franfois Villon - had been

one of the early triumphs of creative broadcasting in the UK. It was a classic example of the kind

of achievement that had helped define the aims

and cultural priorities of those responsible for
establishing the BBC's Third Programme in 1946.
A new production of Pound's Testament was

commissioned by the Third Programme and

broadcast on 28 June 1962. The producer was
D.G. Bridson, one of the outstanding talents in
radio drama and 'features', and already recognized as such in the late 1930s - though Britten
had a poor impression of Bridson's King Arthur,
for which he wrote music in 1937."2 A new

performing edition of Pound's score had been

commissioned from the Canadian composer and
editor Murray Schafer during his extended
residence in England.2 It replaced the one made
for Pound in December 1923 by his protege of
the time, the then 23-year-old George Antheil.
Le testament was not Villon's 'will', but Pound's;

and in the Paris of December 1923, Antheil

was a useful witness to it. Having successfully
launched his European career in Germany, he
had moved to Paris in June 1923, firmly set on
making his name as composer and pianist in the
city where Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Satie and
Cocteau were the arbiters, and the first generation

of Nadia Boulanger's American pupils had yet to

emerge (with Copland as acknowledged leader

but Virgil Thomson more closely identified
with Left Bank moderism). As an artist-manager
in the best American style, and Parade's style too,

friend) to premiere at the same concert, and last

but not least, simultaneously publishing, in a

magisterially exclusive edition limited to 40 copies,
a volume sonorously entitled Antheil and the Treatise

on Harmony. Only one of its four sections is

centred on Antheil.

Like the actual Treatise - a significant if eccentric document best read in the context of the

early writings of Henry Cowell - Le testament was

Pound's means of positioning himself in relation

to the Parisian musical avant garde. More

importantly, it was a development by other means

of his and Yeats's overwhelming discovery of

Noh theatre in the year before World War 1. In
the 'Parisian' Villon of the testaments (the 'small'

and the 'great'), Pound had an ideal travelling

companion for his further explorations of the
poetry and music of the 15th-century troubadours.

Cocteau got the giggles, Albright tells us, when

Pound sang Le testament to him; but the little
white-note song for 'l'me due bon feu, maistre
Je(h)an Cotard' was an affectionate enough tribute

in its day.2 It was quite another day to which

the Third Programme's Testament belonged; and

Antheil, who had died in Hollywood in

February 1959, had not been taken 'seriously'
since he entered the penumbra of Hollywood
film studios, only to emerge with his symphonic

glosses on the wartime Shostakovich (perhaps

more interesting nowadays than his notorious
Ballet Mecanique - despite the attendant Dudley
Murphy/Femand Leger film, made with Pound's
blessing and running still at Tate Modern).
Even were it true that 'Pound actually introduced Britten to the Noh theatre in 1938'2 it

would be misleading to say so without adding

that the introduction had little or no point for
Britten at that time, except in so far as Duncan
was the intermediary. Duncan's affiliations were
with Paris and its theatre (Cocteau's included),
Britten's with the Group Theatre, via Auden and
Isherwood. Their theatre had its roots in Weimar

Germany and its contemporary affiliations with

the emigre Left, and particularly the postExpressionist Ernst Toller. Auden's Paul Bunyan
was to turn its giant's back on most of that while

Britten was composing it (November 1939 to

April 1941); and when Britten resumed his collaboration with Duncan in the early months of

1946, the choice of Andre Obey's Le viol de

Lucrece as the basis for their first and only operatic collaboration was in effect an affirmation of
an essentially French form of anti-realist theatre -

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The Savage Parade -from Satie, Cocteau, and Picasso 17

the form associated with the ideas of Jacques

Copeau and the work of Michel Saint-Denis,
whose tours with his Compagnie des Quinze
had made a considerable impression in pre-war
England, even before his 1936 London production of Obey's Noah (with John Gielgud in the
title role).

By comparison with that indisputable link, it

nary dialogue between Keller and Britten has

been concocted from a single well-accredited
source which in this instance happens to be
unreliable.

The source is Humphrey Carpenter's Benjamin

Britten. In Carpenter, a substantial quotation from

Keller's 1952 Britten essay on 'The Musical

Character' ends with a full stop where Keller is

is simply a matter of record that in 1948 Britten

still in mid-sentence. The silent omission of

turned to John Gay's Beggar's Opera in 1948 with-

Keller's complementary clause seems to have

out overt reference to Brecht's and Weill's Die

two purposes - first in relation to Imogen Holst

Dreigroschenoper - an English version of which he

and her partially quoted diary entry of 4

had heard and been profoundly unimpressed by

December 1952, secondly in relation to the

when Edward Clark conducted it in 1935 in

statement that 'Ten years later Britten was asked

one of his BBC contemporary music concerts.26

As for Weill's 'school opera' DerJasager - based
on Arthur Waley's free adaptation of the Noh
play Taniko, via a strict German translation by
Elisabeth Hauptmann and a few refinements by
Brecht - it was virtually unknown in England

by an interviewer what he thought of Keller's

until Jacques-Louis Monod conducted its professional premiere at a BBC Invitation Concert
in December 1965. Curlew River was composed
in the early weeks of 1964, and Sumigadawa had
been in Britten's mind since William Plomer
first discussed it with him in 1957.

Usefully overriding chronology while doing

so under a misapprehension regarding the Pound
connexion, Untwisting the Serpent introduces

remarks'.

The 'interviewer' was none other than Murray

Schafer, author and editor of British Composers in
Interview, published in 1962, the same year as the
Third Programme's broadcast of his performing

edition of Pound's Testament. Though brief,

Schafer's quotation from Keller is as scrupulous
as Britten's response:
SCHAFER: You are a pacifist. In an absorbing article on
your music Hans Keller has written: 'What distinguishes Britten's musical personality is the violent repressive
counter-force against his sadism; by dint of character,

musical history and environment, he has become a

musical pacifist too.' How does Keller's observation

Curlew River in the immediate context of the

strike you?

Pisan Cantos, and after considering The

BRITTEN: It is difficult, if not impossible, to comment

Threepenny Opera with reference to Brecht's

'embezzlement' of Villon, concludes 'Figures of
Consonance among the Arts' with an impressive
account of DerJasager. Given that the actual and
effective disputes between drama, sources, text,
and music in Der Jasager are as extreme as any
under consideration in the region of 'Dissonance',

objectively on what is written about oneself. But I

admire Keller's intelligence and courage enormously,
and certainly about others he is very perceptive!8'

By interrupting Keller's sentence at its semicolon,

Carpenter (p.317) allows 'sadism' to become the

subject of his own continuation:

Curlew River might seem relatively harmonious.

But not to Albright:

Imogen Holst wrote of this in her diary that Britten

... Britten was a Christian; indeed, his work can be

What Holst actually wrote in her diary was:

taken as a profound meditation on the theme of orig-

inal sin. In 1950 Hans Keller described in print

Britten's musical personality as a dialectic between
sadism and repression of sadism; and Britten commended

Keller's perspicacity [editorial italics] What is frighten-

ing about Britten's many representations of abused

children is the feeling that the composer sometimes
seems as sympathetic to the child abuser as to the
child: Britten's children are often knowing, brutal,
beautiful, good to kiss, good to beat.2

For a clear and balanced account of these topics,

and a perspective that extends from Britten to
the Noh-related music-theatre of Alexander

'read out a terrible sentence about "sado-masochism"'.

Showed me the copy of the book about him, and then

read out a terrible sentence about "sado-masochism".

The sentence can only be the one in the paragraph preceding the paragraph from which
Schafer quotes. Referring to Schoenberg's concept

of'a new sound symbolizing a new personality',

Keller asks what this 'new personality might be',
and continues:

It does not show Bart6k's straightforward sadism. It

does not show Stravinsky's equally uncomplicated

sado-masochism.... [cf. Adorno, 1949]

Goehr, the reader is referred to W. Anthony

The 'new personality' for Keller- not supplanting

California Press, 2001). Meanwhile, an imagi-

sexualization of music' - was of course Britten.

Sheppard's Revealing Masks (University of

but complementing Schoenberg and his 're-

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18 The Savage Parade -from Satie, Cocteau, and Picasso

But 'Britten is a pacifist', he continues, not

because he himself was opposed to pacifism

to Wyss, is 'to be found' in the last line of

(though indeed he was), but because he is prepar-

'Parade' - 'J'ai seul la clef de cette parade'. This

line, he goes on to explain, occurs three times:

ing for the crucial phrase which Carpenter omits:

first at the end of the opening 'Fanfare', then at

...by dint of character, musical history, and environ-

ment, he has become a musical pacifist too. This, I

think, is the solution to the manifold solutions he has

the end of the interlude following 'Marine', and

finally in 'Parade' itself. As he well knows, finding

a clue is not synonymous with solving it. That he

effected upon our war-worn and war-weary musical

scene, to the paradox of his ruthless, yet beauty-con-

leaves that to his fellow musicians. The real ones.

scious search for the truth.

contributed a characteristically elegant musical

manuscript to the symposium On Britten and
Mahler - published as a Festschrift for Britten's
musical executor, Donald Mitchell, on the

In 'real' life, pacifism (as distinct from scientific

research into, and consequent peaceful organization of,
aggression) is an illusion. In art, and especially in our art,

pacifism is realism par excellence, producing as it can the

quickest possible communicability of new discoveries.

The only guarantee, to be sure, that pacification will
not degenerate into compromise is genius.29

No wonder Britten was only able to commend

'Keller's perspicacity' with regard to others:
courtesy and modesty also had a place in his
(musical) character. Sure enough, the nominal
purpose of Untwisting the Serpent has become
nugatory at exactly the point where Curlew River

might profitably have encountered DerJasagerin certain superficial respects, by far the cruellest

work of one who was, at the time, an ardent

pacifist.

Early in October 1939 - approximately a month

after the outbreak of war in Europe - Britten
mentions, in a letter to Ralph Hawkes from his
temporary haven in Amityville, New York, his
plan for a work to be called Sinfonia da Requiem.

On the 19th of that month he writes again to

Hawkes saying he has completed his Rimbaud
cycle Les Illuminations for high voice and strings,

and that 'instructions as to how to sing it' would

now be sent to the Swiss-born soprano Sophie

Wyss, for whom it was written. That same day
he sends a long and affectionate letter to Sophie

Wyss, giving a song-by-song account of the

cycle, with no 'instructions', but tactful sugges-

tions where appropriate.30 The conclusion is

representative:
BEING BEAUTEOUS. No one in the world could

tell you how to sing this one.

PARADE you will enjoy, because it is a picture of the

underworld. It should be made to sound creepy, evil,

For instance Oliver Knussen. In 1995 Knussen

occasion of his 70th birthday." Knussen calls his

deceptively simple but almost self-explanatory

musical text 'The Key to the Parade'. Since

Britten's 'clue' is in fact the rebus, the solution
to the rebus is elsewhere, though close at hand:
precisely in the 'Fanfare' that ends with the
setting of Rimbaud's 'clef. Knussen's solution
duly embraces every number in Les Illuminations,

ending with 'Depart' and the setting of 'Assez

vu/La vision s'est rencontree a tous les airs' -

'airs' understood not only as expressions or aspects,

but also in the musical sense.
Rimbaud's 'Assez vu' becomes 'Assez eu' and

finally 'Assez connu'. Britten's visionary comprehension of 'tous les airs' is likewise - as
Knussen's 'Key' implies - an extension from
thematic-motivic demonstration and (pacific)
remonstration to a 'purely' musical experience
whose essence is a profound belief in the possibility of reanimating functional tonality rather
than merely disinterring the relics of its previous
incarnation. That belief is inconsistent with

modernist criteria of any sort, including those

flexible enough to find a place for Poulenc. Aside
from his present and understandable popularity,
and irrespective of his close affiliations with fig-

ures whose Moderist credentials are impeccable, Poulenc earns his keep in the grace-andfavour homes of modernism by virtue of his
stubborn disregard for the kind of compositional
resources and continuities that were fundamental

to (say) Britten and the greatest of his musical

friends, Shostakovich.
Poulenc died in 1963. Curlew River was first

performed at the 1964 Aldeburgh Festival, in

Orford Church on 12 June. A month or so later
Britten travelled to Aspen, Colorado, to receive

dirty (apologies!), and really desperate. I think it is the

the first Robert O. Anderson Award which had

most terrific poem and at the moment I feel the music

been established 'to honour the individual any-

has got something of the poem!! After this,

DEPART should be sung quietly, very slowly, and as

sweetly as only you know how. [...]

The 'clue to the whole work', Britten suggests

where in the world judged to have made the

greatest contribution to the advancement of the

humanities'. The Citation read: 'To Benjamin

Britten, who, as a brilliant composer, performer
and interpreter through music of human feelings,

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The Savage Parade -from Satie, Cocteau, and Picasso 19

moods, and thoughts, has truly inspired man to

the death of the avant-garde' than the sense that

understand, clarify, and appreciate more fully his

'there's an actually existing common culture [...]

own nature, purpose and destiny'.

Britten's acceptance address has stood the test
of time, a test implicit in his arresting thought
that 'the richest and most productive eighteen
months in our music history is the time when
Beethoven had just died, when the other great
nineteenth-century giants, Wagner, Verdi, and

to which an actually surviving avant-garde

belongs'33 began to assert itself. Whereupon
Vulgar Postmodernism - a genuinely popular

Brahms had not begun.' The period he had in

mind was that of Schubert's Winterreise, the C

form and none the worse for that - struck back.

Only to find that Adoro had been rehabilitated.

Whether it was called Ballet Mecanique 75 years

ago or as-you-like-it the other day, the opportunistic twaddle of modem-minded persons is
all of a piece, and mercifully buries itself until

major symphony, the last three piano sonatas, and

eager academics need to unearth it. The same

the C major quintet. It is in that light that there

is nothing finite about his final and undoubtedly

goes for the trivia of much larger figures who

can't be recognized as such lest they upset the
value-free apple-cart (read Albright on Le boeuf

sincere disclaimer - 'I do not write for posterity

[...] I write music, now, in Aldeburgh, for people
living there, and further afield, indeed for anyone who cares to play it or listen to it'.32 Yet his

last thought was of the next and after-next

generation of British composers.

In 1965 the English Opera Group commissioned from the 30-year-old Harrison Birtwistle

sur le toit). It's all too easy to forget that even the
finest critical and academic work is at best a

side-show, not the show itself. Whether it's

just a parade of vanities or whether it's about
(for instance) matters of some musical or poetic
import, it remains a parade. Inside the theatre
there's a real show, still going on.

an opera for performance at a future Aldeburgh

David Sawer's opera From Morning to Midnight,

Festival. The result was Punch andJudy, 'a tragical

and the production of it which Richard Jones

has directed for the English National Opera,
have scored a notable public and critical success.
The opera is based on a Modernist 'classic' by
Georg Kaiser that was precisely contemporary

comedy or a comical tragedy', to a libretto by

Stephen Pruslin. 'This tale is told, the damage
done', sings Choregos in the Epilogue, 'The hurly-

burly's lost and won'. The battle lost and won

by Punch andJudy at the Jubilee Hall, Aldeburgh,

with Pierrot Lunaire and Picasso's cubist violins.

in 1968 was not against Britten (though it was

widely thought to be). It was against the world

Dramaturgy, composition, and direction skilfully

represented by Poulenc's gentrification of

film era. Relevant enough. But why this particular Kaiser play rather than another and better
one? Why Kaiser at all?

Apollinaire - funny and touching, certainly, but

none the less a gentrification. Punch and Judy

was a predictable yet unexpected eruption of the
volcanic modernism whose origins went back to

the Cirque Medrano of Varese and Cocteau in

1915, to Parade in 1917 (though not to Mercure,
of which Birtwistle was to make an arrangement
in 1980), and especially to the farmyard vanities

and violence of Renard.

A theatre of dismemberment but a musically

constructive one, Punch and Judy was sure to
weather well, and it has. Like other notable
achievements of its time - Maxwell Davies's
Taverner for instance, or Goehr's masked theatre -

it had the good luck to be born before the era

that was to exploit and vulgarize the most

comprehensive cultural and critical revolution
since the dawn of Modernism. It was in a

supposedly post-Modem world - the careful

incorporate techniques drawn from the silent

From Morning to Midnight deserves a long run,

and reflects credit on all concerned. Yet the neo-

Modemism it dispassionately espouses is not so

much a new phenomenon as a new development

- a fifth terminal for popular postmoderism.

Landings and departures will continue unabated
out there. Meanwhile it takes an ever-young
Elliott Carter to show where true learning,
mastery and invention can lead. From him, an
opera buffa called What Next? was sure to amount

to more than a characteristically pithy and

reasonable expostulation. In the event, it leaves

Poulenc's Apollinaire standing - unharmed of

course - by the wayside.
Carter remains the outstanding representative

in any of the living arts of an inclusive and

eminently rational Modernism whose culture

orthography is Albright's - that the Pretty-Poll

songs and tic toc pendulum of Parade may have

was at once classical and Franco-American. Punch

seemed to be making a lustier noise than The

heritage of irrationalism; and now Gerald Barry's

The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit (1995) restores

Triumph of Time or Worldes Blis. But no sooner

had it become possible to imagine what Karl

Miller has called 'a generally stoical response to

and Judy had waged war with the alarming

the Reason of Handel's time in order furiously

to denounce and obliterate it before finally

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20 The Savage Parade -from Satie, Cocteau, and Picasso

making peace under the banners and blankets of
Pleasure and Beauty. And where are the Acrobats

Mitchell, Donald and Keller, Hans (ed.). Benjamin

Britten: a Commentary on his works from a group of special-

of yesteryear if not on the high wire of Andrew

ists, London 1952

Toovey's recent orchestral piece of that name,

Orledge, Robert. Satie, the Composer, Cambridge 1990

suspended as it is between the heritage of

Feldman and the current work of the painter
John Davies?
Britten in one way, and his quizzical friend
and colleague Michael Tippett in another, lent
their support to younger composers as generously

as they themselves had once been supported. It's

a tradition that needs to be fought for, daily,
fiercely, always and everywhere. 'In recent times
the bestiality of the music industry has extolled

the performer over the composer'. That was

Pound. In Meridiano di Roma. In 1941.34

Oulette, Fernand. Edgard Varese, London 1968

Rothschild, Deborah Menaker. Picasso's "Parade", From
street to stage, New York/London 1991
Satie, Erik. The Writings ofErik Satie, edited and trans.

Nigel Wilkins, London 1980

Satie, Erik. Correspondance presque complete, reuni et
presentee par Omella Volta, Paris 2000
Schafer, Murray. British Composers in Interview, London
1963

Schafer, Murray. Ezra Pound and Music - the Complete

Criticism, edited with commentary, London 1978

Sheppard, W Anthony. Revealing Masks - Exotic Influences
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author expresses grateful thanks to the following:

and Ritualized Performance in Modernist Music Theater,

California 2001

Andrew Kurowski and Stephen Plaistow for assistance

Varese, Louise. Prose Poemsfrom the Illuminations, New

with data regarding BBC Third Programme broad-

York 1946

casts; DrJenny Doctor, Director of the Britten-Pears

Library; Rosamund Strode, formally Benjamin

Britten's assistant; and the Editor of Tempo, for kindly

Volta, Ornella. Satie, Seen Through His Letters, trans.

Michael Bullock, London 1989

making available relevant passages from his forthcom-

Whiting, Steven Moore. Satie the Bohemian - From

ing book on Varese (London: Kahn & Averill).

Cabaret to Concert Hall, Oxford 1999

The quotations from the diaries and letters of

Benjamin Britten are ? copyright the Trustees of the

Britten-Pears Foundation and may not be further

reproduced without the written permission of the
Trustees.

SOURCE NOTES

'Volta, pp. 165-166; 'Compared with Petrushka...' p. 143

2Wilkins, p. 84

Volta, pp.186-187
See Whiting pp.522-523, and Orledge, p.39 and p.339,
note 2, for accounts of Mercure in terms of the erotic tableaux

REFERENCES & SOURCES

Albright, Daniel. Untwisting the Serpent,

Chicago/London, 2000
Britten, Benjamin. On Receiving the First Aspen
Award, London 1964
Britten, Benjamin. Lettersfrom a Life - Selected Letters

and Diaries of Benjamin Britten, Volume One 1923-39,

Volume Two 1939-45; ed. Donald Mitchell and Philip
Reed, London 1991, revised paperback edition 1998

vivants of music-hall revues, with particular reference to the

description of Massine's ballet as 'poses plastiques' and to the

fact that his Three Graces were danced by men in drag.

5 Gertrude Stein, Picasso, London: 1946, p. 37-38.

Wilkins, p.72; below, '1916 etc', p.74

' Andre Gide, Journal 1913-22, Rio de Janiero 1943, p.375.
Gide begins: Avant mon depart, ete voir Parade - dans on ne
sait ce que'il faut admirer le plus: pretention ou pauvrete.

8Volta, p.120

Britten, Benjamin. A Catalogue of the Published Works,

Volta, p.121; song-text correlated with version inserted by

Cocteau himself in the ms copy of Satie's full score - see

compiled and edited by Paul Banks, Aldeburgh 1999

Rothschild, p.89, for original text.

Britten and the French Connection, programme book of

'?'ils melent les tours populaires materels'. Albright (p.199) has

the Aldeburgh October Britten Festival, 20-23 October

1994

'they all mingle their popular, maternal circus-acts' which adds

a twist to 'tour' in the sense of turn or rotation; 'tricks' is the

generally accepted rendenrng of'tours' - see e.g. Varese, who

Carpenter, Humphrey. Benjamin Britten, A Biography,

London 1992

Cooke, Mervyn. Britten and the Far East - Asian influences

in the music of Benjamin Britten, Woodbridge, Suffolk

1998

justifiably translates 'parade' as 'side-show' both in the title and

the key line (p.97).

Rothschild, pp. 83, 85

2 Albright, p.214

t See Satie's remarkable letters to Dukas in Correspondance,

Gillmor, Alan M. Erik Satie, London 1988

Hell, Henri. Francis Poulenc, London 1959

pp.211-223; eg. those of 18 August 1915 ('Pour moi cette

guerre est une sorte de fin du Monde plus b&te que la veritable')

and 5 October 1915 ('Les "braves militaires" sont 6tonnants').

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The Savage Parade -from Satie, Cocteau, and Picasso 21

3 Albright, p.225

and mandolin'.

4 Hell p.10

24 See Shafer, Ezra Pound and Music, p.244, for evidence that

the 'lecture' of Villon (as Cocteau calls it) took place in

5 Britten and the French Connection, p.9

September 1922. Cocteau's message to the poet-musician is

', ibid, p.12

extremely cordial.

7 ibid, p.12

25 Albright, p.88

ibid, p.13

Bntten's diary entry of 8 February 1935 refers.

'9 Carpenter, p.384

7Albright, pp. 93-94

3C Britten, Lettersfrom a Life, Vol 2, 1998 edition, p.1217

2 Shafer, British Composers, p.117

ibid, p.1222

Mitchell/Keller, Benjamin Britten, pp.350-351

22 Britten, Lettersfrom a Life, Vol 1, 1998 edition, p.486.

'0 Britten, Letters from a Life, pp.713-716

2See Shafer, Ezra Pound and Music, p.465. Shafer visited

Pound in the summer of 1960, having already elicited the

3 On Mahler and Britten, ed..Philip Reed, Woodbridge/

Aldeburgh 1995, pp.170-171

interest of the Third Programme. Pound was then staying in

the castle near Merano (Italian Tirol) owned by his daughter

and her husband. According to Shafer (pp.243-245), Antheil
had 'assisted the poet in the notation and orchestration of Le
Testament, substituting for the "two tins and wash-board" an
idiosyncratic little orchestra of brass, winds, a couple of strings,

32 Britten Aspen Award, p.22

33 Karl Miller, Dark Horses, London 1998, p.214 (originally

from one of three Northcliffe Lectures given at University

College London, February-March 1996).

4 Schafer, Pound, p. 462.

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