"Parade" by Erik Satie (Audio + Sheet Music)

Something a little different today...

pf: Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra cond/Antal Doráti

Year/Date of Composition: 1917

First Performance: 1917-05-18 in Paris. Théâtre du Châtelet

Satie was born in 1866 at Honfleur, on the coast of Normandy. His father was at the time a shipping broker, while his mother was of Scottish origin. Something of his later eccentricity seems to have been derived from his paternal uncle, Adrien Satie, known in Honfleur as a character. The family moved to Paris but on the death of Satie's mother in 1872 he was sent back to Honfleur to the house of his grandparents. Six years later he returned to Paris, where, in 1879, he entered the Conservatoire. There he proved an unsatisfactory pupil, lingering on, as a friend alleged, to avoid the obligatory five years of military service, reduced for students to one year, which, in his case, was reduced still further by illness deliberately courted.

After his discharge from the infantry, Satie had his first pieces published by his father, who now had a small publishing business and stationer's shop. In the early 1890s he came under the influence of Joséphin Péladan, self-styled Sâr Merodack of the Rose+Croix, breaking with him by 1892. Eclectic medieval preoccupation led him to establish his own mock religion, the Metropolitan Church of the Art of Jesus the Conductor. Of this he fancifully described himself as Parcier et Maître de Chapelle, the first title sheer invention, and now published Le cartulaire, a vehicle in which he might pontifically inveigh against those of whom he disapproved. At the same time, paradoxically, he was involved with the bohemian cabaret of Rudolf Salis at the Chat Noir. The same years brought contact with Debussy, with whom he remained on good terms, in spite of the latter's tendency to patronise him.

In 1905, after a period earning his living as a café pianist, Satie enrolled at the Schola Cantorum, where his teachers included Vincent d'Indy and Roussel. Here for three years he tried to remedy his perceived technical defects as a composer, particularly by the study of counterpoint. It was through Ravel's performance in 1911 of the Sarabandes of 1887 that the original nature of Satie's genius began to be acknowledged. Still further public recognition came through his association with Jean Cocteau and his collaboration with Dyagilev and others. In the years after the war, thanks to Cocteau, he became the centre of attention of a group of young composers, Les Six, originally known as Les nouveaux jeunes and then, in 1923, on the prompting of Darius Milhaud, of a group that took the name l'Ecole d'Arcueil, called after the relatively remote district of Paris where Satie chose to live in stark simplicity. Here his room was barely furnished, with a chair, a table and a hammock, the last heated in winter by bottles filled with hot water placed below and looking, according to Stravinsky, like some strange kind of marimba. Satie died on 1st July, 1925, after an illness of some six months.

Parade was the inspiration of Cocteau. It is described as a Ballet réaliste en un tableau (A Realist Ballet in One Scene). The curtain, costumes and décor were by Picasso and the choreography by Leonid Massin and it was first performed at the Théâtre du Châtelet on 18th May 1917 by Dyagilev's Ballets russes, with Lydia Lopokova, Massin, Leon Woizikovsky and Nicholas Zvereff. Cocteau's idea was to offer a stage-work that represented the principles of Cubism, and in this he succeeded. The scene is outside a fairground booth, where barkers and performers try to attract an audience. The work opens with a Choral, followed by a fugal exposition, Prélude du Rideau Rouge (‘Red Curtain Prelude’) and the entrance of the first Manager. The Chinese conjuror does tricks with an egg and eats fire, with imminent danger to all around as sparks scatter and have to be stamped out, the whole achieved by the use of unusual percussive effects from flaques sonores (water noises) and lottery-wheels. The Petite fille Américaine (‘The Little American Girl’), which is derived from the films, imitates Charlie Chaplin, is accompanied in a silent film episode by the sound of typewriter, shoots a thief, dances to the Ragtime du paquebot, is wrecked on the Titanic and enjoys a spring morning. The Acrobats are introduced, sad clowns, as it were, of Picasso's blue period, accompanied first by the xylophone and then by what the score describes as a bottle-phone. The harsh sound of a siren is heard with the return of reminiscences of what has passed, and the show comes to an end, merely a Parade, a poor representation of the real thing, now closed by a short reference to the Red Curtain Prelude.

Sources:
http://www.naxos.com/mainsite/blurbs_reviews.asp?item_code=8.554279&catNum=554279&filetype=About+this+Recording&language=English
http://imslp.org/wiki/Parade_%28Satie,_Erik%29

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