Parade, ballet réaliste

Choral (Chorale)-

Prélude du rideau rouge (Red Curtain Prelude) -

Prestidigitateur chinois (Chinese Conjurer) -

Petite fille américaine (Little American Girl) -

Acrobates (Acrobats) -

Final (Finale) -

Suite au Prélude du rideau rouge (Continuation of the Red Curtain Prelude)

“Sir – dear friend – you’re just an arse, an unmusical arse.” Erik Satie’s spirited riposte to a critic who had not enjoyed his new ballet – an offence which got the composer an eight-day prison sentence – was one of the more bizarre consequences of the riotous first performance of Parade by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Paris in 1917. More positively, scandalous event though that first night at the Théâtre du Châtelet was, it established Jean Cocteau, the author of the scenario, as a new arbiter of musical taste and made the middle-age Satie the idol of a group of young composers (later to be identified as “Les Six”) who gathered round them.

That first performance of Parade has also been claimed as nothing less than the beginning of surrealism. Certainly, Guillaume Apollinaire, the prophet of the movement, used the word “surrealism” for the first time ever in his programme note for the work. Cocteau and Satie had designated it as a “realist ballet” and it is true that it is realistic in that it is set in front of a travelling show booth in a city street and that it includes such sounds of modern life as a whistle, the clicking of a roulette wheel, the tapping of a typewriter, the wail of a siren and even gunshots. But it is the highly unlikely musical situation – the unmediated mingling of such disparate material as chorale and fugue on the one hand and American ragtime and popular song on the other – that takes Parade beyond the real to the surreal. For other commentators, incidentally, it was neither “realist” nor “surrealist” but “cubist” – partly because of the costume designs by Pablo Picasso, who had been persuaded by Diaghilev to undertake his first work for the theatre, but also because of the collage of everyday sound-objects in Satie’s score.

Most epoch-making works of art – like, say, Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique or Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring – are imposing in proportion and serious in content. Parade is neither. It lasts little more than fifteen minutes and, in accordance with Cocteau’s new realist aesthetic, the music avoids romantic expressivity and impressionist illusion. It remains strictly neutral, the extensive use of rhythmic ostinatos – at the same tempo from beginning to end – making it more mechanical than graceful. Disconcertingly, as the first-night audience found, it is not always relevant to the stage image it was designed to accompany. The short opening chorale presumably reflects the setting of the ballet in Paris on a Sunday but Satie’s choice of a fugue for the Prélude du Rideau Rouge – an episode intended to give the audience an opportunity to admire Picasso’s red curtain, depicting the circus performers waiting behind it – seems positively perverse.

Anyway, the “parade,” in which three “managers” each attempt to drum up public support by presenting a number from the forthcoming show, begins with the entry of the French Manager armed with a repetitive clarinet tune and a loud whistle. He introduces the Chinese Conjurer – a part taken in 1917 by the choreographer of the ballet, Leonide Massine – whose oriental provenance is signalled by a booming pentatonic parody on trumpets and trombones but does not preclude comparatively lyrical melody on horn and woodwind. The American Manager introduces the Little American Girl, a figure inspired by silent-cinema stars like Mary Pickford and Pearl White, who makes her entry to a cakewalk tune on trumpet and whose adventures, after a little work on a typewriter, include taking a shot at a robber. In a central section called Rag-time du paquebot (Steamship Rag) based on Irving Berlin’s That Mysterious Rag she dreams she is on board the Titanic, which sounds its siren and sinks in a wave of scales on woodwind and strings.

The Third Manager, costumed by Picasso as a pantomime horse, introduces the Acrobats who dance and tumble to a music-hall waltz accompanied at one point by a “bottlephone” – a collection of bottles with varying amounts of water in them. Unfortunately, however, the public is not interested and, after one last desperate endeavour by the Managers and a concerted effort by the performers in a recapitulation of their earlier material, they give up. As though nothing had happened in the meantime, the fugue of Prélude du Rideau Rouge is briefly resumed but now with a hint of the rhythm of the opening Choral to complete the circular construction.