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2018 Behind the Red Curtain: Nationalism and Satie's Julian Duncan

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BEHIND THE RED CURTAIN: NATIONALISM AND SATIE’S PARADE

By JULIAN DUNCAN

A Thesis submitted to the College of Music in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Music

2018 Julian Duncan defended this thesis on March 26, 2018. The members of the supervisory committee were:

Michael Broyles Professor Directing Thesis

Sarah Eyerly Committee Member

Aimée Boutin Committee Member

The Graduate school has verified and approved the above-named committee members and certifies that the thesis has been approved in accordance with university requirements.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures ...... iv Abstract ...... v CHAPTER 1: RAISING THE RIDEAU ROUGE ...... 1 CHAPTER 2: POETICS AND MANIFESTOS: THE NATIONALISM OF PARADE ...... 15 CHAPTER 3: THE AESTHETIC OF PROGRESS: ANTI-NATIONALISM AND SATIE’S “ADVANCED” ART...... 34 CHAPTER 4: THE REVOLUTIONARY IN PICASSO’S PARADE ...... 56 CHAPTER 5: CONCLUDING THOUGHTS: BEHIND THE RIDEAU ROUGE ...... 67 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 71 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 75

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LIST OF FIGURES Figure 2.1 La Famille Imperiale boche kubistée ...... 22 Figure 2.2 Dirigeable en cuivre ‘Le rapide' ...... 29 Figure 3.1 Accompaniment in Parade, mm. xx—xx ...... 40 Figure 3.2 Souvenir de l’Inauguration Excerpt ...... 40 Figure 3.3 Prelude du Rideau Rouge mm. 20—38 ...... 47 Figure 3.4 Transition out of Prestigitateur Chinois’ Section, mm 200—206 ...... 51 Figure 3.5 Ostinato, mm. 39—44 ...... 52 Figure 3.6 Acrobats’ Theme, mm. 394—399 ...... 53 Figure 3.7 Close of the Acrobats’ Theme mm. 467—471 ...... 55 Figure 4.2 Glass and Bottle of Suze ...... 57 Figure 4.2 Picasso, Self Portrait ...... 59 Figure 4.3 Rideau rouge ...... 63 Figure 4.4 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon ...... 65 Figure 4.5 Study for Cheval-Jupon Mask ...... 66

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ABSTRACT This thesis analyzes ’s (1889–1963), Erik Satie’s (1866–1925), and Pablo

Picasso’s (1881–1973) ballet Parade in the context of wartime nationalism. During the war, the

dominant aesthetic was defined by traditionalism and Classicism. This aesthetic was rooted in

the nation and opposed to the external threat of German culture and the internal threat of

subversive and revolutionary art.

Drawing on the writings of as well as on and ,

Cocteau sought to invert the dominant aesthetic, recasting as a Classicism for its own

time. Thus, for Cocteau, Parade’s avant-garde nature advanced nationalism and the war effort.

For Satie and Picasso, the ballet’s provocative aspects were anti-nationalist and subversive.

Satie’s aesthetic was rooted in the popular music of Parisian . Seeing a correlation

between progressive politics and progressive art, he incorporated the techniques of the avant-

garde and irreverently parodied wartime Classicism in Parade. In keeping with his self-image as a revolutionary, Picasso similarly parodied the dominant Classical aesthetic. His Rideau rouge suggests the wartime Classical aesthetic, but undermines it by eschewing perspective and proportion. Additionally Picasso incorporates primitivist techniques, recalling the opposition of the French Left to colonialism.

Satie’s and Picasso’s Left-wing convictions undermined Cocteau’s vision, such that

Parade retained a subversive character, and their opposition to militarism and nationalism left

Parade open to the charge that it was an assault on the cultural and political status quo. As a result,

Parade both supports and undermines wartime nationalism.

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CHAPTER 1

RAISING THE RIDEAU ROUGE

Introduction

This thesis analyzes Jean Cocteau’s (1889–1963), Erik Satie’s (1866–1925), and Pablo

Picasso’s (1881–1973) ballet Parade, and offers a new perspective on the ideological and political significance of each of the collaborators’ contributions to the work. Due to the pervasive culture of nationalism and militarism engendered by the First World War, art bore multiple levels of signification that interacted with cultural politics. Each of Parade’s collaborators inflected the ballet with their own aesthetic beliefs. For Cocteau, Parade’s avant-garde nature advanced nationalism and the war effort, whereas for Satie and Picasso the ballet’s provocative aspects signified anti-nationalist and subversive ideology. As a result, Parade both supports and undermines wartime nationalism. Each chapter examines the artistic contributions of the collaborators and offers a political reading of the aesthetic beliefs that motivated them.

The importance of Parade has been well-documented in musicology and art history.

However, few sources engage directly with the political implications of the ballet, or with the

ideological aims and assumptions brought to the table by its collaborators. Two notable

exceptions to this are Jane Fulcher’s The Composer as Intellectual: Music and Ideology in

France, 1914–1940, and Caroline Potter’s Erik Satie: A Parisian Composer and his World. This

thesis builds on the work of these authors, and pays special attention to the political, aesthetic,

and literary movements with which its collaborators were associated.

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I employ two primary methodologies in this thesis. Most importantly, I analyze source

documents to place Parade in context, and illuminate the collaborators’ political and aesthetic

beliefs. Secondly, I analyze musical and artistic style in the ballet, placing them in the larger

context of the collaborators’ other works and of contemporary artistic movements. In this way I offer a holistic picture of the ballet as its collaborators intended it, as its audience understood it, and as it can be read contextually.

Stylistic analysis is of paramount importance to this study. I contend that Parade’s political significance is rooted in its relationship to the aesthetics of wartime nationalism.

Therefore, analyses of both musical and artistic style feature heavily. Particularly, I examine

Satie’s score, noting especially the influence of popular music, Vincent d’Indy, and Igor

Stravinsky on Satie’s style. Additionally, I look at Picasso’s set and costume designs, noting the importance of Cubism and primitivism and the political associations these movements carried.

Because of Parade’s significance in the academic literature and the individual fame of its collaborators, a wealth of primary and secondary source documents pertaining to the ballet exist in publication and in online archives, some in the original French and others in English translation. These documents include Cocteau’s prolific writings about Parade in numerous publications, including articles for magazines like Vanity Fair and in his book Le Coq et l’Arlequin, as well articles and letters written by Satie which offer insight into his views on art and politics. Additionally, a considerable amount of correspondence is available between the collaborators, as well as published notebooks from Rome, where the collaborators, excluding

Satie, worked on the ballet in the Spring of 1917. Cocteau’s writings offer a clear picture of his aesthetic ideals in Parade. Immersed as he was in the Parisian art world, I also provide an

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analysis of the contemporary art movements that influenced Cocteau, and show how they

informed Parade and Cocteau’s aesthetic ideals.

Thoroughly analyzing the cultural politics and ideological atmosphere of wartime ,

Fulcher makes a compelling case that Satie’s use of style in the music of Parade bears with it

ideological implications associated with his Left-wing politics. This is contrasted with Cocteau’s politically conservative aims, the case for which Fulcher makes by appealing to the numerous writings and source documents Jean Cocteau left behind in which he discusses Parade.

Fulcher also analyzes Picasso’s contribution to Parade, notably discussing the Rideau

rouge in the context of the dominant aesthetic of classicism. Additionally, Deborah Rothschild’s

Picasso’s Parade and Patricia Leighten’s Reordering the Universe provide political readings of

Picasso’s work. Rothschild discusses Picasso’s longstanding self-identification with harlequin, a

politically subversive commedia dell’arte figure who appears throughout Parade. Leighten

demonstrates the influence of Anarchism on Picasso’s early work. Many of these techniques

appear in Parade.

Caroline Potter examines Satie’s activity in the working class suburb of Arcueil, where

he engaged in the activities of the local Socialist and later Communist parties. Potter offers a

thorough biographical analysis of Satie’s politics. Crucially, Potter examines the relationship

between the politically controversial Futurist movement and Parade, noting the similarities

highlighted by the ballet’s use of machinery and its appellation, ballet réaliste, as well as

highlighting sources that label Satie a “Futurist composer.”

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Francis Steegmuller’s and Claude Arnaut’s biographies of Cocteau discuss the political

motivations behind the riots at Parade’s premier. Additionally, Steegmuller details Cocteau’s

aesthetic motivations in bringing together the artistic Right and Left. Given the importance of the

wartime context of Parade’s premier to a political reading of the work, these sources offer

insight into the political significance of the work.

Background

The premier of Parade at the Théâtre du Châtelet on 18 was raucous and

memorable. In a 1918 Vanity Fair article on Satie, Carl van Vechten described the event, saying

“Satie’s music in ‘Parade’ appears to have created as great a disturbance as that provoked by the

original production of Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps. There was laughing, there was howling,

there were cat-calls. Nor were the critics pleased.”1 Van Vechten’s comparison of the scene to

the Ballet Russes’ premier of ’s controversial ballet four years earlier would have

certainly pleased the flamboyant Jean Cocteau, who, having enlisted Ballet Russes for the work’s

premier, took seriously Sergei Dhiagalev’s command, “astound me!”2 Most astounding about

Parade, however, was not only its aesthetic innovations, but the inescapable reality of the Great

War that shaped artistic and cultural politics and defined social divisions from the beginning of

the century until the war’s end.

Parade was an important turning point in Cocteau’s career. The ballet inspired a

generation of avant-garde artists, and Cocteau’s desire to please Diaghilev caused him to rethink his own artistic aspirations. He told the story of the ballet’s inception, saying

1 Carl Van Vechten, “Erik Satie: Master of the Rigolo” Vanity Fair (March, 1918). 2 Rosalind E. Krauss, The Picasso Papers (Farrar, Straus and Giroux New York, 1998), 100.

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One night in 1912, I see us in the Place de la Concorde. Diaghilev is walking

home after a performance, his thick underlip sagging, his eyes bleary as

Portuguese oysters, his tiny hat perched on his enormous head. Ahead, Nijinsky is

sulking, his evening clothes bulging over his muscles. I was at the absurd age

when one thinks oneself a poet, and I sensed in Diaghilev a polite resistance. I

questioned him about this, and he answered, ‘Astound me! I’ll wait for you to

astound me.’ That phrase saved me from my flashy career. I was quick to realize

that one doesn’t astound a Diaghilev in a week or two. From that moment I

decided to die and be born again. The labor was long and agonizing. That break

with spiritual frivolity… I owe, as do so many others, to that ogre, that sacred

monster, to the desire to astound that Russian prince to whom life was tolerable

only to the extent to which he could summon up marvels.

Five years after this meeting, Parade premiered. Its novelty and scandalous premier gave it the astonishing quality Cocteau was looking for. He wrote “finally, in 1917, the opening night of

Parade, I did astound him.”3

Parade is set in front of a fair booth in a Paris street on a Sunday afternoon. Three managers advertise a vaudeville supposedly taking place inside, introducing excerpts to entice the audience to enter. The French manager, dressed as a Cubist sculpture, introduces a Chinese conjuror, who mechanically performs his magic act for the crowd in the street. The American manager follows, dressed as a ten-foot skyscraper, with a megaphone in one hand and a placard announcing “parade” in the other. He introduces the Little American Girl, who performs a

3 Francis Steegmuller, Cocteau: A Biography (Little, Brown and Company, Boston, Toronto, 1970), 82–83.

5 like a character from a silent film to music, accompanied by the clacking of a typewriter, revolver shots, and a ship’s siren. The acts fail to entice the crowd inside, because they are under the impression that the foreground activity is the performance itself, unaware that the real show is to take place inside. The third manager enters the stage, performed by two dancers prancing around the stage in a horse costume. They are followed by a pair of acrobats who dance a parody of pas de deux. Failing to convey to the crowd that the real show is inside, the exasperated performers return to the stage at the urging of the managers and perform a recapitulation of their acts in a finale, which still fails to bring the crowd inside.

The ballet’s score opens with a short Choral. This is followed by a section entitled

Prélude du Rideau rouge, referencing the giant red curtain in front of which the performance takes place, and behind which the real show is supposed to occur. After this, the theme of the managers is introduced, followed by music for each of the performances. In the finale, the theme of the managers as well as music from each of the acts is reprised. 4

Cocteau was inspired to “astound” Diaghilev after the scandal of the premier of Le Sacre du Printemps. Around this time, he also began his friendship with Stravinsky, with whom he was corresponding when he had the idea for David, a ballet which, though never completed, was the ancestor of Parade. Cocteau described it, saying “on a stage, in front of a booth at a fair, an acrobat would be doing a come-on for David, a spectacle intended to be given inside the booth.

A clown, who is later transformed into a box (theatrical pastiche of the phonograph played at fairs-modern form of the ancient mask), was to celebrate David’s exploits through a loudspeaker

4 Thomas DeLio, “Time transfigured: Erik Satie's Parade.” Contemporary Music Review 7/2 (Fall, 2009) pg. 142.

6 and urge the public to enter the booth and see the show. In a way it was the first sketch for

Parade but unnecessarily complicated by biblical references and a text.”5 Cocteau hoped to enlist Stravinsky to compose the score for David. Although Stravinsky displayed some interest, he decided against the project, nearly leading Cocteau to give up.

The next inspiration that was to lead Cocteau to Parade was his discovery of Cubism.

Juliette Roche, a family friend of Cocteau who later became Juliette Roche Gleizes after marrying the Cubist painter Albert Gleizes, wrote in her memoirs about seeing Cubist pictures at the Exposition des Independants with Cocteau. “A few days later, Cocteau was talking of nothing except Duchamp-Villon, Jacques Villon, and Albert Gleizes; and Misia Godebska reproached me sharply: ‘why did you put Jean in touch with the Cubists? He is a man of the

Right, not the Left… He’ll be ruined among such people as that.’”6 It was true that Cubism was associated with the anti-bourgeois Bohemianism, and that many artists and intellectuals in Paris sympathetic to Cubism and modernism in general had anarchist and other Leftists leanings.

Cocteau, however, despite his Conservative politics, was attracted to the audaciousness of avant- garde aesthetics. One of Parade’s most characteristic features is its adaptation of Cubism on the ballet stage, a feat for which Cocteau took credit for the remainder of his life.

Cocteau met Erik Satie, who was to compose the music for Parade, while working on a staging of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The music for the production was borrowed from

Satie’s Gymnopédies, and Cocteau felt he should meet and make a good impression on the composer. Valentine Gross, a mutual friend of Cocteau and Satie, wrote to Satie in October,

1915, saying that Cocteau wanted to meet Satie, and that he had some ideas for a ballet. “Of

5 Steegmuller, Cocteau. 94. 6 Steegmuller, Cocteau. 115.

7 course! I shall be delighted to see Cocteau…” Satie replied. Gross wrote “I did not tell him that

Cocteau had been unable to come to an agreement with Stravinsky about David.”7 Cocteau and

Satie met at Gross’ house in October of 1915, and talked about A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

However, by the time of their second meeting in November, Cocteau had apparently given up the project, and discussed a more daring project with Satie, which sounded to Gross like a revival of

David.

Cocteau had apparently begun to conceive of Parade earlier in 1915, and Satie had consistently been a central figure of its inception. “I first had the idea of it during a period of leave in April 1915 (I was then in the army), on hearing Satie play his ‘Morceaux en forme de poire’ for four hands, with [Ricardo] Viñes,”8 wrote Cocteau to Paul Dermée, editor of the review Nord-Sud. The symmetrical formal organization of Parade, prefigured in Satie’s

Morceaux en forme de poire, suggests that this piece was an ancestor for Parade for Satie as well as for Cocteau. In the same year, Cocteau befriended Picasso. “I have said that Stravinsky was one of my greatest encounters,” Cocteau said. “Picasso was the greatest encounter for me.”9

Cocteau was proud to have brought Picasso to Diaghilev. “It was I who led him,” he boasted, reflecting the bridge Parade was to form between the bohemian painters of and

Montparnasse with the Ballet Russes at the Théâtre du Châtelet.10

Cocteau announced to Valentine Gross that Picasso had agreed to participate in the project on August 12,1916 in a telegram signed Cocteau-Satie, and requested that she encourage

7 Steegmuller, Cocteau. 135. 8 Jean Cocteau, “Cock and Harlequin” in Cocteau’s World: An Anthology of Writings by Jean Cocteau. Edited and translated by Margaret Crosland, (New York, Dodd, Mead and Company. 1972), 327. 9 Steegmuller, Cocteau. 137. 10 Krauss, The Picasso Papers, 100.

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Diaghilev to give his full assent to the project.11 Satie and Picasso took to one another well, which at first pleased Cocteau, though it caused him jealousy when Satie and Picasso began to voice their opposition to the ballet’s dialogue and the use of extra-musical noises. “Does he even hear my voice?” Cocteau asked Gross, exasperated with Satie. In the end, it was agreed that the airplane noises and Morse code sounds, as well as the dialogue would be eliminated but other noises would remain, including the typewriter, meant to “remind the audience that a writer is behind the ballet.”12 Claude Arnaut notes that “it is very much in spite of himself that Satie passes today for one of the ancestors of musique concrète…” Cocteau then met with Diaghilev and Leonide Massine, who had replaced Nijinsky as Diaghilev’s choreographer for the project.

On Diaghilev’s suggestion, Picasso and Cocteau went to Rome, where the Ballet Russes

was performing their spring season, to work on the ballet. Satie stayed behind in Paris, because

he hated to travel. Here Cocteau met with Guillaume Apollinaire, who wrote the program notes

for Parade. Cocteau was hurt by Apollinaire’s program notes, which praised Satie and Picasso

while only mentioning Cocteau in passing as having conceived of the ballet. “If even a man like

you cannot distinguish my profound depths, then no one will ever do so,”13 he wrote to

Apollinaire. However, Cocteau greatly respected Apollinaire’s literary achievements, and was

later to draw heavily on his aesthetics in crafting his own nationalistic aesthetic based on Parade.

Parade's Premier at the Théâtre du Châtelet

Cocteau, who served as a Red Cross ambulance driver on the Belgian Front, described

the premier colorfully, saying “they wanted to kill us…I have heard the cries of a bayonet charge

11 Claude Arnaud, Jean Cocteau, A Life (Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2016), 178. 12 Arnaud, Jean Cocteau, A Life.181 13 Arnaud, Jean Cocteau, A Life. 196

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in Flanders, but it was nothing compared to what happened that night at the Châtelet Théâtre.”14

Although Cocteau’s bellicose description of the premier is characteristically hyperbolic, it is

revealing both of Cocteau’s desire for his boisterous ballet to create a scandal matching

Stravinsky’s and of the proximity of the Great War, whose reality affected artistic reception and discourse. Cocteau remembers an audience member grumbling “If I had known it was going to be so stupid I’d have brought the children,”15 a reminder that for many audience members, the

ballet’s lightheartedness was offensive to the sensibilities of the patriotic Frenchmen whose

concern was with the soldiers dying en masse at the Front, just a few miles away.

Parade’s premier and the critical response that followed are symptomatic of the tense

atmosphere prevailing in 1917. The influence of American popular music echoed America’s entry

into the war just weeks earlier. Additionally, Russia’s tenuous commitment to remaining in the

conflict after the overthrow of the Czar three months before inflamed the anxiety over revolution

on the part of the Ballet Russes’ aristocratic patrons. This fear was heightened when the Ballet

Russes unfurled a red flag over the stage in the final scene of a week before Parade’s

premier, signaling support for the Bolsheviks in Russia, who agitated for Russia’s withdrawal from

the War.16 Cocteau had tried to mitigate what was sure to be an angry reaction to the ballet by

publishing an article in L’excelsior emphasizing the ballet’s patriotism as well as the value of laughter, which he described as “homegrown,” and a “Latin weapon” against “heavy German

aestheticism.”17 Additionally, Diaghilev filled the theatre with Russian brigade soldiers from the

front, and the manager of the theatre announced that the proceeds would be donated to wounded

14 Steegmuller, Cocteau. 187 15 Steegmuller, Cocteau. 186–187 16 Zoe Anderson, The Ballet Lover’s Companion (Yale University Press, New Haven, Ct, 2015). 175 17 Steegmuller, Cocteau. 197

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soldiers.18 Still, the hall was filled with cries of boche [kraut] and accusations that the ballet’s

collaborators were draft-dodgers, putting out frivolity while heroic soldiers had been dying in the

trenches for three years. The outcry was such that Cocteau later claimed that Diaghilev thought

the large chandelier in the hall would come crashing down.19

In one of the most memorable incidents, the critic Jean Poueigh wrote in a review of

Parade printed in Les Carnets de la Semaine that the ballet “outrages French taste.” This review angered Satie, not because of its negativity, but because Poueigh had congratulated Satie and shaken his hand after the premier. Satie responded with a series of belligerent postcards to

Poueigh, saying in one, “…you are an ass-hole and, if I dare say so- an unmusical ‘ass-hole.’

Above all, never again offer me your dirty hand…” Because the card arrived unsealed so that

Poueigh’s butler could see its contents, Poueigh sued Satie for slander, resulting in a fine and a brief prison sentence for Satie, despite Apollinaire’s advocacy on Satie’s behalf at his trial.20

Nationalism and Political Tensions

The political tensions that had inflamed Parade’s premier were prefigured in the years

leading up to the war. Arnaud writes “Parade didn’t look very promising: the Left suspected

Cocteau of being an arriviste fraud, while the Right held Satie as a shirker and Picasso as a

swindler.”21Parade’s blend of the artistic Right and Left brought these tensions, which were exacerbated by the war, to the fore. As the Great War had been long foreseen, however, divisions between many on the Right and Left had begun to solidify decades earlier. The increasing

18 Steegmuller, Cocteau. 19 Steegmuller, Cocteau. 199 20 , Satie Seen Through his Letters (Marion Boyars, , New York, 1989). 132-133 21 Steegmuller, Cocteau. 196

11 militarism leading up to the war was addressed by conferences held by socialist and anarchist organizations on the radical Left. At a conference in Amsterdam in 1904, working class people were urged not to fight on behalf of the imperial powers.

When they command you to fire your guns on your brothers in misery…

workers, soldiers of tomorrow, you will not hesitate, you will not obey.

You will fire, but not on your comrades. You will fire on the gold-braided

old troopers who dare to give you such orders… When they send you to

the border to defend the coffers of the capitalists against other workers,

abused as you are yourselves, you will not march. All war is criminal. At

the mobilization order, you will answer with an immediate strike and with

insurrection.”22

Soldiers did not mutiny, however, and the war took place at a tremendous cost to France and the other European powers. Yet it was not forgotten that many of the artists and critics sympathetic to Cubism in the early days of the twentieth century had been sympathetic to Leftist causes. Picasso’s art dealer, Daniel Henry Kahnweiler, a German who took refuge in Switzerland during the war, remembered the early years of the twentieth century.

As for my political ideas, I was a leftist. For example, I took part in a

demonstration on the grave of Zola, who had just died [1902]-… I was

still, you remember, a very young man, so the only way I could show my

interest was to participate in demonstrations and meetings, which I did. I

22 Patricia Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe: Picasso and Anarchism, 1897–1914, (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1989). 123.

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heard Jaurès, Presensé, all the great socialists of the day. I took part in

demonstrations. The Dreyfus case was fairly recent, and the political

atmosphere was still very unsettled. The right wing was very restless, and

the left wing was full of enthusiasm.23

Satie and Picasso were themselves committed Leftists, uninspired by the calls for patriotism that permeated wartime culture. As the war progressed, culture was increasingly politicized with militarism, nationalism, and the war forming the backbone of the divisions within society.

The scandal of Parade’s premier was certainly a success for Cocteau, who had hoped for such a spectacle so that he might “astound” Diaghilev and earn his place as an important figure within the Parisian modernist scene. Yet the response Parade received was prompted by years of tensions inflamed by war, militarism, and nationalism, issues on which Parade’s collaborators did not see eye to eye. As I will show in later chapters, Cocteau’s mission in Parade was to bring together the artistic Right and Left, both literally, as he did materially with Parade, and aesthetically, by reinventing artistic nationalism. Satie and Picasso, who agreed with one another far more than they did with Cocteau, did not share this goal, though both enjoyed the prestige in the Parisian art world they increasingly gained. Instead, both were committed Leftists for whom the war was an unfortunate blunder. Parade, despite (or perhaps because of) its lightheartedness, is a turning point in French modernist aesthetics, and the social and cultural divisions in French society, undergirded by the challenges of a new century that brought with it a new kind of war.

Metaphorically, my aim in this project is to look behind Parade’s Red Curtain, or Rideau rouge, in front of which the ballet’s action takes place. This curtain, further discussed in chapter

23 Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe. 124.

13 four, lays bare the backstage interactions of theatre performers. These depictions lend the foreground activity a casual, everyday vitality far removed from the lofty music–dramas of

Wagner, or even the ballets of Stravinsky, themselves rooted in folk–lore and legend. Yet despite being intimately revealing of the performers’ casual interactions, the Rideau rouge conceals the ballet’s most important element; the neglected performance for which the entire ballet is only an advertisement. This absence, more than any action on the stage, is crucial in Parade, and thus the

Rideau rouge its most important component. Behind the Red Curtain lies the aesthetic ideas

Parade manifests, including its collaborators’ often conflicting beliefs on the relationship between art and the nation.

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CHAPTER 2

POETICS AND MANIFESTOS: THE NATIONALISM OF PARADE

In the program notes for Parade, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) praises the ballet for its inauguration of a “nouveau esprit” in art. For Apollinaire, the alliance of painting and dance with the clarity and simplicity of Erik Satie’s score on the ballet stage marked the

“advent of a more complete art,” that was “a kind of sur-réalisme.”24 This characterization drew

from Jean Cocteau’s subtitle for the ballet, “un ballet réaliste,” and later leant its name to the

Surrealist movement. For Apollinaire, Parade was a model for this “nouveau esprit,” which was

to define a distinctly French modernism. In the context of wartime nationalism and the literary

atmosphere of the Parisian avant-garde, the theoretical writings of Apollinaire and Cocteau show

how Parade inaugurated this “nouveau esprit” by embodying a philosophy of art that was both

nationalistic and progressive.

The Culture of Wartime Nationalism

Antonio Gramsci wrote that nationalism is the popular religion of modern societies, "the

particular form in which the hegemonic ethico-political element presents itself in the life of the

state and the country.”25 Nationalism had taken a definite modern shape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in France. With the outbreak of the First World War, nationalist

rhetoric intensified, infusing cultural politics and providing the ideological backdrop against

which Parade emerged. The seeds of modern French nationalism were planted in the late

24 Guillaume Apollinaire. “Parade et l’esprit nouveau,” Parade Program Notes, (1917). 25David Cottington. “What the Papers Say: Politics and Ideology in Picasso's Collages of 1912,” Art Journal 4/350 (Winter, 1988): pg. 351

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nineteenth century, when a nationalist ideology developed that transcended the civic nationalism

of bourgeois democracy. As Zeev Sternhell has shown, this ideological nationalism, rooted in

blood, soil, and race, conceived of the nation as an organic unity, in which the individual was

sublimated to the collective.26

Like war and industry, the concept of the nation was totalized. Nationalism, infused with

populism, became modern, and thus the cultural sphere was deeply politicized. The humiliating

defeat suffered by the French during the Franco-Prussian War from 1870-1871 and the Dreyfus

Affair, which spanned twelve years from 1894-1906, were two catalyzing events that spurred

French nationalism to take on its modern characteristics. Following the Franco-Prussian War,

Georges Ernest Boulanger initiated a populist political movement called Revanchism that strongly opposed German political dominance. This movement transcended Left and Right and was the high mark of political nationalism, but Boulanger’s defeat in the 1889 elections brought it to an end. Five years later in 1894 Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery officer, was accused of treason. Although evidence of his innocence emerged, Dreyfus was convicted and served time in prison before being pardoned. He was later exonerated and reinstated in the military in 1906. The affair created a divide among pro-Republican “Dreyfusards,” and mostly pro-Catholic “anti-Dreyfusards,” and had lasting effects on French cultural politics, radicalizing both the Left and the Right and highlighting the anti-Semitism that was to be a frequent component of nationalist rhetoric in the cultural sphere. Sternhell argues that “During the

Dreyfus Affair, nationalism defined itself, taking a form that would be its own throughout the

26Zeev Sternhell, “The Political Culture of Nationalism” in Nationhood and Nationalism in France. Edited by Robert Tombs, (London, Eng., Harper Collins Academic, 1991). 36.

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first half of the twentieth century.”27 This conservative, pro-Catholic element of French

nationalism, as well as the memory of the Paris Commune during the Franco-Prussian War made

many nationalists wary of revolutionary politics, as well as of art that was subversive and

therefore associated with revolution.

Liberal democracy outlasted Boulanger’s Revanchism and Dreyfus’ exoneration signaled

a win for Republicanism, but in cultural politics the ideological legacy of these two events was

lasting. Sternhell notes that “It was precisely from the moment when political nationalism grew feeble that cultural nationalism began to play an increasing role in the life of French society.”28

As former anti-Dreyfusard and Boulangist elements coalesced in the cultural sphere, the rhetoric

of blood and soil nationalism became ubiquitous in cultural production and criticism on the Left

and the Right. It became increasingly important in many artistic circles to identify uniquely

French characteristics in art, and to use this to legitimize French culture and the political aims of

nationalism. This drive for self-definition led to a politicization of art, with Germany acting as

the primary cultural Other to French ideals.

To distinguish the culture of France from that of Germany, artists and critics embraced

the ideals of Classicism. Classicism became a vehicle for expressing the cultural values of

collectivism in the face of the common threat of German militancy, as well as a return to

quintessential values of order, beauty, balance, and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. This

view linked the clarity and balance of artistic Classicism with the French intellectual tradition,

27Zeev Sternhell, Maurice Barrès et le Nationalisme Française, (Paris, Armand Colin, 1972), 248. Translation mine.

28 Sternhell, “The Political Culture of Nationalism” in Nationhood and Nationalism in France. 23

17

embodied by René Descartes. French culture was viewed as rational, and in stark contrast to the

decadence and emotionalism of German represented by .

In music, Classicism was characterized by an emphasis on melody, simplicity, and clarity

of harmony. Vincent d’Indy, a staunch nationalist, Catholic, and member of the anti-Dreyfusard

Ligue de la patrie française, was one of the foremost advocates for musical conservatism. His

Schola Cantorum curriculum emphasized a thorough grounding in music history, with a focus on plainchant, Renaissance polyphony, and the works of Beethoven. D’Indy firmly rejected the modernism of Stravinsky, and even of musically conservative composers such as Ravel and the young members of , excepting Honnegar, who studied conducting with him.29 D’Indy

justified his veneration of Beethoven and his embrace of Viennese Classicism more broadly by

arguing that Classicism was originally French, dating back to eighteenth century composers such

as Rameau and Couperin, and that this legacy had been passed from France to Austro-Germanic composers through the export of the ideals of the French Revolution. The efforts of the proponents of nationalistic and patriotic French music were then to “reclaim” this tradition, and to repudiate the boche [kraut] tendencies endemic to modernism and Wagnerian Romanticism.30

Similarly, ’s music became increasingly connected to musical

nationalism in the years leading up to and during the First World War. Institutionally favored by

the under the direction of Gabriel Fauré, Debussy’s influence served as a

counterweight to the Schola Cantorum and the veneration of simplicity in musical style. As

Debussy’s music was increasingly politicized, especially in the years leading up to the War,

29 Glenn Watkins, Proof Through the Night: Music and the Great War (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 160 30 Jane Fulcher, French Cultural Politics and Music : From the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999), 205

18

critics connected his innovative style to the French Classical tradition passed down from Rameau

and the clavecinists of the eighteenth century.

The politicization of Debussy’s music was in part due to his own nationalist views, about

which he became progressively more vocal after the outbreak of war.31 Unable to serve in the

military due to illness, he instead focused on patriotism in his artistic output. The modernist style

pioneered by Debussy thus came to signify art that was novel and, most importantly, distinctly

French. Barbara Kelly notes that during the War, “[Debussy’s] music had acquired a purpose beyond experimentation as an end itself.”32 Critics connected his style with French musical

antiquity, effectively lending the cultural value placed on Classicism within nationalist discourse

to Debussy’s stylistic legacy. The critic argued that Pelléas et Mélisande, despite the

shock caused at its premiere, had drawn on ideas from the distant past, and that it was “both

French and natural,” serving as a nationalistic to Wagnerism.33 In addition to the

nationalist implications of this characterization, the term “natural” connects Debussy’s music to

both Classicism and the intellectual tradition of France by suggesting Rameau’s intention to

prove that music theory was rooted in nature in his Traité de l'harmonie. Likewise, in a review published in the conservative l’Action française, Jean Darnaudat compares Debussy’s music to the clavicinists of the eighteenth century, noting its “sincerity, freshness of feeling and invention, solidity and perfection of execution”34 This characterization suggests a veneration of values not

all that different from d’Indy’s admiration of the clarity and simplicity of Viennese Classicism.

31 Barbara Kelly, Music and Ultra-Modernism in France: A Fragile Consensus, 1913– 1939 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, Eng: Boydell Press, 2013), 15. 32 Kelly, Music and Ultra-Modernism in France. 15. 33Kelly, Music and Ultra-Modernism in France. 15. 34Jean Darnaudat. “Claude Debussy.”Action française: organe du nationalisme integral. 1915. Translation mine.

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As Jane Fulcher notes, these values were considered endemic to “Latin” cultures, and

were threatened by the Romanticism, individualism, and of the Germanic “Huns.”

Thus, “art, like intellect, had a patrie.”35 The embrace of pan-Latin culture broadly was an

important element of modern nationalism. It allowed for a clear dichotomy between anarchistic

Germanic culture and ordered pan-Latin culture, according to which Italian, Spanish, French, and

other Romance cultures had inherited the Greco-Roman legacy and the Classical tradition, with

France acting as the symbolic leader of the Latin cultures. Counter-intuitively, this supra-

nationalism was not an internationalist threat to French nationalism, but rather served the

immediate political needs of French nationalists, and the ethnic solidarity between Romance

cultures contributed to the “blood and soil” characterization of modern nationalism. Amotz

Giladi describes the dichotomous relationship between the Germanic and Latin cultures found in

the writings of nationalist critics and literary figures, noting that it distinguished between

“Classicism versus Romanticism, rationalism versus irrationalism, clarity versus obscurity, order

versus disorder, ‘masculine’ versus ‘feminine.’”36 Romanticism in particular became a synonym

for Germanic, and therefore a target for xenophobic and often anti-Semitic criticism. Giladi points out the prevalence of the idea that the decadent and feminizing aspects of Romanticism were of Oriental origin, and had compromised Germanic culture through the influence of Jews and Protestants.37 Classicism, on the other hand, displayed the masculine qualities of simplicity

and rationality that were linked with Latin sensibility, as well as Greco-Roman order and beauty.

35 Jane Fulcher, “The Composer as Intellectual: Ideological Inscriptions in French Interwar Neoclassicism,” The Journal Of Musicology 2/197 (Spring, 1999): Pg. 200 36 Amotz Giladi, "The Elaboration of Pan-Latinism in French Intellectual Circles, from the Turn of the Nineteenth Century to World War I." Journal Of Romance Studies 14/1 (Spring, 2014) pg. 60 37Giladi, "The Elaboration of Pan-Latinism in French Intellectual Circles, from the Turn of the Nineteenth Century to World War I," 60.

20

In contrast to Classicism, modernism and the avant-garde were depicted as subversive,

foreign elements. Cubism in particular was associated with Germany, and often given the

derogatory label, boche. This is in part due to the presence of German (and often Jewish)

purveyors of Cubist art, such as Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Wilhelm Uhde. Patricia Leighten

notes that “during its public life from 1908 until after the War, the Cubist movement never

escaped charges that it was purposely attacking the social facade in violating artistic

traditions.”38 Cubism faced the charge of being eclectic, elitist, and individualist, and thus

transgressing the collectivist and anti-enlightenment values of wartime nationalism. In a 1917

article entitled “L’Art français après la Guerre,” appearing in the Revue Hebdomadaire, André

Michel wrote that “one could go further and, by uniting the excesses of individualism and the

abuse of reason, sketch out a theory of Cubism.”39 The charge of individualism in Cubism both

associated it with Germanic Romanticism and ascribed to it a nature that challenged the

dominant Latin order, thus giving it a subversive and even revolutionary quality.

Cubism’s association with the subversive and foreign is exemplified by an illustration by

the illustrator Léka. His series of portraits of Germans entitled La Famille Imperiale boche kubistée, created during 1914-1915 is drawn with an angular style, intended to mock Cubism.

The use of the letter “K,” far more common to the German language than French, unmistakably

identifies Cubism as a German art form, and thus questions the patriotism of French Cubists.

Additionally, the angularity of “K” in contrast to the soft, curvaceous letter “C,” more common

38 Leighten, “Picasso’s Collages and the Threat of War.” 662 39Kenneth Silver, Esprit De Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914-1925, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 1989), 198.

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to French spelling, distinguishes the harsh and linear qualities of modernism from the softness

and subtlety of French .

Figure 2.1 La Famille Imperiale boche kubistée 40

Re-Inventing the Wartime Narrative

Despite the subversive and foreign qualities ascribed to Cubism, many commentators were aware of the irony that Cubism was not Germanic, but was of French and Spanish origin.

Madame Aurel, a popular critic, referred collectively to Cubism, Futurism, and as “this convulsed art, for which Gleizes, Metzinger, Apollinaire, and Boccioni, and not long ago

Severini, established the rules with the most erudite malice, this art which, although born in this

40 Silver, Esprit De Corps, 10

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country, is no more French for that…”41 However, as the First World War progressed, some

critics saw in modernism a formal rigor and historicism that linked it with Classicism, as well as

a forward-looking progressive nature that was an asset for asserting national pride in the cultural

sphere. Consequently, many thinkers began to reclaim modernism and assert its place within the

nationalist and Latin Classical tradition. Paul Dermée, a self-proclaimed advocate of the avant-

garde, argues in an article entitled “Un prochain age classique,” published in Nord-Sud in 1917

that “an art is in decadence when it creates no new subjects.”42 This connection between the progressive in art and the ushering in of a new Classicism indicates a shift in perceptions of modernism. For Right leaning advocates of the avant-garde, modernism was no longer anathema to the Classical impulse and the desire for a national spirit in art. Rather, the novelty of modern forms, notably Cubism, embodied the spirit of Classicism and invigorated the French tradition.

Apollinaire was one of the most vocal critics who sought to invert the wartime narrative in favor of the avant-garde. Seeing in modernism an opportunity to realize the “nouveau esprit” of French art that he had indicated in his program notes for Parade, Apollinaire’s advocacy for modernism appealed to pan-Latinism and an inversion of neo-Classical ideals. Apollinaire was himself a foreigner to France, born in Rome to an Italian father and a Polish mother, and had joined the French military at the outbreak of the First World War. Pan-Latinism legitimized

Apollinaire’s patriotism and offered an avenue for a nationalistic defense of the avant-garde. He used this line of reasoning to disassociate modernism from its foreign, Germanic associations and claim it for Latin culture in an article published on 9 December 1916 in the Parisian newspaper Paris-Midi.

41Silver, Esprit De Corps,11. 42Paul Dermée. “Un Prochain Age Classique.” Nord-Sud 2/11 (Winter, 1917). Translation mine

23

Indeed, Germans have rarely excelled in : there isn’t even one

German name worth citing within Cubism, to mention only the most

innovative faction of the modern school of painting. This is a coincidence,

because there were many unskilled Boche painters in Paris before the war.

None of them has succeeded in achieving the least reputation within the

modern school that flourished in France. Indeed, Cubism and its brother,

Futurism, stem so naturally from Latin civilization that the small number

of artists forming these schools, or rather this school, all belong to three

nations: France, Spain and Italy. The contentious censors, who wrongfully

use the epithet Boche, could have seen that the modern school had

victoriously fought, with the most admirable courage, against academism.

The latter, whose origins are indeed Boche, will never get over this

Modernist attack.43

Noting that Apollinaire’s use of the term “academism” is an attack on both Germany and

Neo-Classicism, Giladi observes that “he asserted that the damages of German cultural influence were represented not by Modernism, but rather by traditionalism, and that the greatness of

French civilization was based on its innovations rather than on a rigid imitation of the past.”44

This indicates the primary line of attack by critics who, rather than opposing the dominant

Conservative narrative, sought to integrate the avant-garde within it. Instead of subverting

43Giladi, "The Elaboration of Pan-Latinism in French Intellectual Circles, from the Turn of the Nineteenth Century to World War I," 62. 44 Giladi, "The Elaboration of Pan-Latinism in French Intellectual Circles, from the Turn of the Nineteenth Century to World War I," 62.

24

French culture and the connection established by critics to Greco-Roman Classicism, the avant-

garde was a path to a new Classicism, and the uplifting of uniquely Latin values in art.

In addition, Apollinaire’s invocation of Futurism as the “brother” of Cubism highlights

the impact of that movement on his thinking and on the literary atmosphere of the Parisian avant-

garde. His use of the term “academism” further suggests the iconoclasm of the Futurists, most

notably Filippo Tomasetto Marienetti. In his “Manifesto of Futurism,” published first in Italy,

then in Paris in Le Figaro on 20 February, 1909, Marinetti outlines a philosophy of art that

advocates for bellicose nationalism and a radical break with the past. He writes “we intend to

glorify war- the only hygiene of the world- militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of anarchists… we intend to destroy museums, libraries, academies of every sort, and to fight against moralism, feminism, and every utilitarian or opportunistic cowardice.”45 Instead of

finding beauty in serenity and the sublime, Marinetti glorified virility, speed, and machinery as

the hallmarks of modern life and the basis for a modern aesthetic. Marinetti’s ahistorical vision

for Futurism differed from Apollinaire’s historical pan-Latin approach. However, Giladi points

out that the pan-Latinism and the political expediency afforded by the Futurist support for Italy’s

entry into the First World War made Futurism the only foreign avant-garde movement recognized by Apollinaire.46 Apollinaire’s own manifesto, “The Futurist Anti-Tradition,” published on 29 June, 1913, displays similar disdain for academic antiquarianism. Under the heading “shit to,” Apollinaire includes a long list that includes historians, professors, Wagner,

Beethoven, and many nineteenth century authors. He contrasts this with another list, designating

45Filippo Marinetti, “Manifesto of Futurism” in Futurism: an Anthology edited and translated by Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press: 2009), 52. 46Giladi, "The Elaboration of Pan-Latinism in French Intellectual Circles, from the Turn of the Nineteenth Century to World War I," 63.

25

“a rose for” a number of avant-garde figures, including Picasso, Braque, Marinetti, ,

and of course, himself.47

Marinetti further details his artistic theories in another tract entitled “The Variety

Theater.” In it, Marinetti looks to the Variety Theater to rejuvenate contemporary theater by

emphasizing speed, and prioritizing the primal and vulgar rather than the exalted pretensions of

high art. Marinetti claims that “the Variety Theater is absolutely practical, for it proposes to distract and amuse the public with comic effects, erotic stimulation, or imaginative astonishment,” and that it is “destroying the Solemn, the Sacred, the Serious, the Sublime of Art with a capital A.”48 The affirmation of the everyday and the commonplace as the basis for an

aesthetic that was both modernist and ethnically nationalist due to pan-Latinism provided a

counter for nationalists within the Parisian avant-garde to the charge of anti-patriotism. Nancy

Perloff argues that the tenets set forth in “The Variety Theatre” exemplify the most influential aspects of Futurism on Cocteau.49 This influence is apparent in Cocteau’s theoretical writings in

Le Coq et l’Arlequin, as well as in the multi-media display of the everyday found in Parade.

Cocteau’s vision for Parade was defined by his advocacy for the avant-garde within,

rather than in opposition to the dominant wartime narrative. Picasso’s contribution brought

Cubism to the fore in the ballet, and the inclusion of Cubist imagery bore with it the politically

and philosophically charged significance of Cubism. For Cocteau, Picasso’s designs were an

asset in furthering his aesthetic agenda. The original scenario envisioned by Cocteau included a

47Guillaume Apollinaire, “The Futurist Anti-Tradition” in Futurism: an Anthology,154. 48Marinetti, “The Variety Theater” in Futurism: an Anthology, 159–62 49Nancy Perloff, Art and the Everyday: Popular Entertainment and the Circle of Erik Satie (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991), 7.

26

nod to the letter “K,” as the American manager was to have proclaimed during the American

Girl’s dance “Enter! Enter! DEMAND THE K!”50 This line appears again at the end of the ballet

as all three managers try desperately to entice the audience to enter. The tantalizing

advertisement is not a treasonous invitation to throw one’s lot in with the German invaders but

rather an inversion of critics’ distrust for modernism. Just as the foreground activities in Parade

are an unsuccessful attempt to entice the public to view the real show inside, Parade is a

metaphor for Cocteau’s advocacy of his artistic agenda.

From this point of view, Parade is partly a nationalist work. Cocteau worked deliberately

to disassociate the avant-garde from Left-wing internationalism and anti-patriotism by publically

exhorting the marriage of the avant-garde’s cultural libertarianism to nationalistic aesthetics on

the renowned ballet stage. Himself a politically conservative champion of the artistic avant-

garde, Cocteau saw in his ideas for Parade the possibility of reconciliation between the

Conservative aristocracy and the artistic avant-garde, and wanted to disassociate Cubism from

the connection it had with “boche” art at the time. Hoping to endear it to a nationalistic audience

as a genuine French style, Cocteau explains,

I understood that there existed in Paris an aristocratic Right and an artistic

Left, which were ignorant of and distrustful of each other for no valid reasons,

and which it was perfectly possible to bring together. It was a question of

converting Diaghilev to modern painting and converting the modern painters,

especially Picasso, to the sumptuous decorative aesthetic of the ballet; of

coaxing the cubists out of their isolation, persuading them to abandon their

50Daniel Albright, Untwisting The Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 199.

27

hermetics. Montmartre folklore....the discovery of the middle-of-the-road

solution attuned to the taste for luxury and pleasure, of the revived cult of French

“clarity”…such was the history of Parade.51

Cocteau elaborated Apollinaire’s championing of Cubism as a nationalistic style,

reversing the narrative of Cubism’s detractors by associating Conservative styles with

Romanticism, while arguing that Cubism was a kind of Classicism. “Make no mistake here,”

Cocteau argued, “Cubism was a classicism after the Romanticism of the Fauves.”52 By arguing

that the Classical aesthetic of reason and clarity was found not in Impressionism or , but

in Cubism, Cocteau attacked the foundation for the Conservative denunciation of the avant-garde

as foreign and subversive. He furthered his assault on Impressionism, writing in a 1919 letter to

Gleizes “more and more I’m against Impressionist decadence… Yes, of course Renoir [is good],

but I say down with Renoir the way I say down with Wagner.”53 By associating Impressionism

with Romanticism and Wagner, Cocteau applied the nationalist reaction against the foreign

cultural encroachments of Romanticism and the cult of Wagner to Impressionism, depicting the

movement as a decadent extension of Romanticism. His invitation in Parade to “Demand the K,”

asserts that the new, Latin Classicism for the modern age is not to be found in the soft, gentle,

colorful revolt of the Impressionists, but in the austerity and rigor of the Cubists.

The use of extra-musical noises is one of Parade’s most unique features, and further

reveals the influence of Futurism on Cocteau. Cocteau makes clear in Le Coq et l’Arlequin that

he considered the soundscape of modern life to be an important feature of modern art. This

51 Jane Fulcher, The Composer as Intellectual: Music and Ideology in France 1914-1940, (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2005), 72. 52Kenneth Silver, Esprit De Corps. 211. 53 Kenneth Silver, Esprit De Corps. 212.

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deliberate implementation of the everyday features of modern life supported Cocteau’s

characterization of Parade as “un ballet réaliste,” and paralleled the Futurist desire to

encapsulate modern, everyday life in art. Cocteau writes “the function of art consists in seizing

the spirit of the age and extracting from the contemplation of this practical aridity an antidote to

the beauty of the Useless, which encourages superfluity.”54 The spirit of the modern age in the first years of the twentieth century was best represented by the mechanical, a state highlighted by a collective fixation on aviation, as Glenn Watkins has pointed out by noting Cocteau’s desire to use the sounds of airplanes and sirens in Parade, and pointing to drawings of airplanes by

Satie.55

Figure 2.2 Erik Satie, “Dirigeable en cuivre ‘Le rapide'"56

54 Cocteau, “Cock and Harlequin” in Cocteau’s World: An Anthology of Writings by Jean Cocteau. 312. 55Glenn Watkins, ProofThrough the Night, 186–187. 56Glenn Watkins, ProofThrough the Night, 187.

29

Although practical difficulties as well as disagreements between the collaborators prevented some of the noises Cocteau had intended to include in Parade, he discusses the significance of them to his theory of art in Le Coq et l’Arlequin. He writes, “The score of Parade was meant to supply a musical background to suggestive noises, eg. of sirens, typewriters, aeroplanes and dynamos, placed there like what so aptly calls ‘facts.’”57 Luigi

Russolo’s “The Art of Noises: A Futurist Manifesto” expresses a similar desire to foreground the sounds of modern life. In it, Russolo argues that noise is a central component of modern life.

“Every manifestation of life is accompanied by noise,” writes Russolo. “Noise is therefore familiar to our ears and has the power of immediately reminding us of life itself… we are convinced that by selecting, coordinating, and controlling noises we shall enrich mankind with a new and unexpected pleasure of the senses.”58 He delineates six families of noises that should exist in the Futurist orchestra, to be produced mechanically. These range from explosions to percussive noises to screams, sobs, and whispers. Noises, according to Russolo, should not be simply imitations of the sounds of everyday life, but instead should be abstracted and combined at the artist’s discretion. This description parallels Braque’s description of the sounds in Parade as “facts.”

The foregrounding of mechanical noise supported by music prefigures the Futurist composer ’s synthesis of music and mechanical noise in Ballet Mécanique, and his description of the score as the background to the noises applies Satie’s fascination with

“,” or background music, which Satie used in several of his works. Citing a quip from Satie directed at Wagner, Cocteau writes “be on your guard… a scenery tree is not upset

57Jean Cocteau, “Cock and Harlequin” in Cocteau’s World: An Anthology of Writings by Jean Cocteau, 313. 58Luigi Russolo “The Art of Noises: A Futurist Manifesto” in Futurism: an Anthology, 137.

30 because somebody comes on to the stage.”59 Music acting as background (or scenery) to the realistic sounds of modern life was, for Cocteau, an important aspect of the realism of Parade.

Cocteau’s Musical Aesthetic

Cocteau’s philosophy of music is laid out in detail in Le Coq et l’Arlequin. He states that

“Satie teaches what, in our age, is the greatest audacity, simplicity. Has he not proved that he could refine better than anyone? But he clears, simplifies, and strips rhythm naked.”60 He denounces Debussy, along with Wagner and Stravinsky, as a “first-rate octopus... Whatever goes near [him] is sore to escape from [his] tentacles.”61 By contrast, he claims that Satie “leaves a clear road open upon which everyone is free to leave his own imprint.”62 Cocteau’s denunciation of Debussy together with Wagner implies a correlation between Debussy’s musical

Impressionism and Wagnerian Romanticism.63 Like his association of Renoir and the

Impressionist painters with Romanticism, this criticism denounces the claim of Debussy’s music to represent a way forward in French music. “The music I want must be French, of France,”64 stated Cocteau. It is clear that for Cocteau, Impressionism was little more than a dead end offshoot of Romanticism. Rather, Cocteau found a model of genuine French taste in Satie’s emphasis on clarity and simplicity.

59Jean Cocteau, “Cock and Harlequin” in Cocteau’s World: An Anthology of Writings by Jean Cocteau, 309–10. 60 Cocteau, “Cock and Harlequin” in Cocteau’s World. 311. 61 Cocteau, “Cock and Harlequin” in Cocteau’s World. 310.This criticism of Stravinsky, whom Cocteau greatly admired, led to a quarrel between the two that resulted in Cocteau’s publication of an appendix to Le Coq et L’arlequin, in which he makes clear his admiration for Stravinsky. 62 Cocteau, “Cock and Harlequin” in Cocteau’s World. 310. 63 Cocteau uses the term “Impressionism” despite Debussy’s distaste for it 64 Cocteau, “Cock and Harlequin” in Cocteau’s World. 310.

31

On the surface, the qualities Cocteau admired in Satie’s music seemed an endorsement of d’Indy’s Classicism at the Schola Cantorum. Both composers emphasized a clear style that repudiated the density and complexity of both Romanticism and Impressionism. Satie had been a student of d’Indy at the Schola Cantorum from 1905-1908, and while his own aesthetic and political ideology differed vastly from d’Indy’s, they had had a friendly professional relationship.65 However, Cocteau’s writing suggests that he approached musical aesthetics from a very different paradigm than d’Indy. Where d’Indy saw in clarity and simplicity a nationalistic aesthetic rooted in tradition and connection to an artistic past that was French by birth, Cocteau saw a progressive and forward looking Classicism for the modern age that, like Cubism and

Futurism, left behind the overstated pretensions of the nineteenth century. Satie’s inclusion of ragtime and jazz idioms in Parade, a nod to his work as a cabaret pianist, pointed to the importance of the everyday in Cocteau’s aesthetic. For Cocteau, Satie’s Classicism was not legitimized by history and juxtaposed with popular culture and the banal. Rather, the understatement of Classicism and the portrayal of the everyday were the defining features of an art that was progressive, Classical, and French.

Parade’s collaborators did not see eye to eye on politics and the philosophy of art, and each brought aspects of their own ideology to the ballet. However, as the author of the scenario for Parade, Cocteau had an important influence on the final product. Cocteau’s prolific writings about aesthetics and his own intentions with Parade make it clear that one significant aspect of the ballet was its realization of Cocteau’s theory of art. Engaged as he was with the literary and artistic scene of the Parisian avant-garde, Cocteau freely borrowed and exchanged ideas, drawing

65Caroline Potter, Erik Satie: A Parisian Composer and His World. (Woodbridge, Suffolk, Eng: Boydell Press, 2016). 62

32 especially from Apollinaire, Futurism, and Cubism. Apollinaire’s description of Parade’s

“nouveau esprit” was influential in shaping the work, which inspired an affinity for the everyday in Parisian art exemplified by Les Six. The theoretical apparatus behind Parade allowed

Apollinaire and Cocteau to co-opt the wartime Conservative narrative and reframe the avant- garde as nationalistic, progressive, patriotic, and above all, French.

33

CHAPTER 3

THE AESTHETIC OF PROGRESS: ANTI-NATIONALISM AND SATIE’S “ADVANCED”

ART

Parade was a significant work in Satie’s career. It was his first ballet and his first performed orchestrated work. Additionally, his collaboration with Cocteau marked an important milestone in his career in the world of high art, as he began to establish himself separately from Ravel, who had highlighted him in 1911 and introduced his music to the Parisian art world through concerts at his

Société musicale indépendante.66 For Cocteau, Satie’s background as a cabaret pianist and the

clarity and simplicity with which he composed were invaluable characteristics for his variety

theatre invasion of high art, and his idealization of French clarity. However, Satie aligned himself

decidedly with the anti-war, anti-nationalist Left, and his music reflects his Leftist beliefs.

Parade’s score, rooted in the populism of the cabaret, the technique of the Schola Cantorum, and

the progressivism of Stravinsky, simultaneously undermines Cocteau’s nationalist vision for

Parade and subverts the traditionalist aesthetic of wartime nationalism.

Satie’s Cultural and Political Affiliations

Satie began his formal study of music at the Conservatoire de Paris in 1879, studying piano

and solfege, and graduating to the study of harmony in 1885. In 1886 however, he was forced to

leave Paris for his mandatory military service in the Thirty-third Infantry division, but exposed

himself purposefully to the elements so that he became sick and received a discharge.67 He began

to frequent in 1887, and became its pianist in 1891. There he befriended Dynam–

66 Fulcher, French Cultural Politics and Music. 203. 67 Fulcher, French Cultural Politics and Music. 195.

34

Victor Fumet, a pupil of Cesar Franck who lost his scholarship for his “advanced musical and

political ideas,” including anarchism.68 Satie’s work as a cabaret composer affected a great deal of

his later compositional output. His satirical quotations of historical compositions, such as his

quotation of the Funeral March from Chopin’s Second Piano Sonata in Embryons desséchés and

the running verbal commentary written between the lines throughout his piano works were

elements of cabaret humor that Satie included frequently in his published scores.69 In 1905, Satie

made the somewhat surprising decision to enroll in d’Indy’s Schola Cantorum at the advanced age

of 39, hoping to improve his compositional technique, and received a diploma in counterpoint in

1908.

Satie’s political involvement indicates his mistrust of wartime militarism. In 1914, he

joined the internationalist French Socialist Party in response to the assassination of the socialist

leader Jean Jaurès on July 31, 1914. As Fulcher points out, this decision was a reaction to “the simultaneous victory of the Traditionalist and the nationalist factions in the intertwined realms of

French politics and art.”70 More broadly, the division of the French Left over the First World

War and Satie’s allegiances within that division indicated his commitment to anti-militarism.

Tony Judt notes that the legacy of Jacobin nationalism meant that at the outbreak of war, a significant number of French socialists were ready to take up arms to defend the Republic, viewing the achievements of the Republic as the workers’ inheritance, and worth defending.

Others, including Jaurès, were opposed to the war. Judt says “Jaurès himself came increasingly to the radical and in some ways more properly marxist [sic] view that the socialist movement should oppose any war brought about by and fought in the interest of competing capitalist

68 Fulcher, French Cultural Politics and Music. 196. 69 Fulcher, French Cultural Politics and Music.199. 70 Fulcher, French Cultural Politics and Music. 204.

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powers.”71 Satie’s decision to change his party affiliation from the center-Left, pro-Republican

Radical Party to Jaurès’ anti-war French Socialist Party at the outbreak of war suggests that he

shared this mindset.

Additionally, Satie’s subsequent decision to join the in 1920

after the Congrès de Tours destroyed the tenuous union of the French Left, aligning himself with

the faction that joined Vladimir Lenin’s Third International, demonstrated Satie’s aversion to the

political nationalism that characterized cultural production during the war. Satie apparently had a

high opinion of the Russian Revolution, saying in a card written to Leon-Louise Veyssiere in

1921, “I am an old Bolshevist and cannot be on your side. But I like you all the same and hope

we will not be on bad terms because of this.”72 Caroline Potter points out the emotional

attachment Satie had to the Revolution, saying that Satie could not hold back tears when he

heard of Lenin’s death on January 21, 1924.73 The scandal of Parade’s premier was further

inflamed by the tenuousness of Russia’s commitment to remaining in the war after the abdication

of the Czar in February, and the Bolshevik agitation against the Provisional government’s

attempt to maintain the war effort. In light of this, Satie’s support of Bolshevik socialism is a

clear indication of his own anti-militarism, and thus of his opposition to the nationalist aesthetic

agenda prevalent in France at the time.

Satie expressed his mistrust of jingoistic militarism more directly on the front cover of a

sketchbook dating from around the time of the war. Satie writes “certainly, the Germans are

unpleasant & repeat themselves. So, why would we want to kick them in the backside? What

71Tony Judt, Marxism and the French Left: Studies on Labour and Politics in France, 1830-1981 (New York University Press, New York and London, 2011). 117. 72 Potter, Erik Satie. 199. 73 Potter, Erik Satie. 203

36

century [are we in]? All this [the war] is just a sort of end of the world, but more stupid than the

real one. Let’s have indulgence, even for our enemies; & let’s not forget to turn the other cheek,

always the other cheek. With this gesture, we will be morally stronger.”74 Despite his brief stint

in the socialist militia of Arcueil at the outbreak of the war, Satie saw little value in the

nationalist enthusiasm for the war, aligning himself instead with the anti-militarist Left.

Satie’s Wartime Aesthetic and the “Everyday” in Parade

As Fulcher has shown, Satie’s wartime music exemplified an emphasis on politics and

subversion of the dominant aesthetic order.75 Satie states the relationship between his Leftist

politics and his philosophy of art clearly in a 1919 contribution to the Parisian Communist daily,

L'Humanité. Criticizing Debussy, Satie poses the question; “isn’t it natural for an ‘advanced’ artist to be ‘advanced’ in Politics? [sic] Isn’t yes the answer?”76 This predilection for the “advanced” in

art and politics indicates a crucial parallel in Satie’s thinking about politics and aesthetics. Satie

admired the progressive nature of the avant-garde in the same way he admired the Revolution in

Russia. His tendency to undermine traditionalism in his musical parody and in his prose was as

much a reaction to wartime nationalism as it was an expression of his aesthetic preferences.

Yet Satie’s admiration for “advanced” art did not extend to the iconoclasm of the Futurists.

Correspondence during the writing process of Parade reveals disagreement between the

collaborators over Cocteau’s desire to use words extra-musical sounds, a concept Cocteau drew

from Italian Futurism that was to serve as one of the ballet’s most important “realist” elements.

Cocteau’s stated intention in Le Coq et l’Alrelquin was for the score to serve as a background to

74 Potter, Erik Satie. 190. 75 Fulcher, French Cultural Politics and Music. 204. 76 Erik Satie, “Some Notes on Modern Music” L'Humanité (1919). In The Writings of Erik Satie. Edited and translated by Nigel Wilkins, (London, Ernst Eulenberg. 1980). 82.

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his extra-musical noises. However, Satie and Picasso felt the noises would detract from the music,

choreography, and décor.77 In a letter to Valentine Gross dated September 14, 1916, Satie wrote

“if you knew how sad I am! Parade is changing for the better, behind Cocteau’s back! Picasso has

ideas that I like better than our Jean’s!”78 Years later, he expressed a similar stance to Diaghilev

before a performance of Parade in 1923 saying “I don’t much like the ‘noises’ made by Jean, but there is nothing we can do here. We have before us an amiable maniac.”79 Most of the noises were suppressed at the premier of Parade, and only in subsequent performances did many of them find their way into the ballet.

Despite having been labeled a “Futurist composer” by a number of contemporary critics because of his artistic progressivism, Satie shared virtually none of Futurism’s ideological tenets, such as the glorification of violence, nationalism, or anti-historicism. In light of the connection between Cocteau’s aesthetic and Parade’s Futurism, most obviously represented by the extra- musical noises, this disagreement highlights the fact that the influence of Italian Futurism in the

music for Parade had much to do with Cocteau, and little to do with Satie. Steven Whiting writes

“the ‘realism’ so cherished by Cocteau had already been built by Satie into the very structure and

substance of the score, which rendered superfluous the addition of noises to imitate the

everyday.”80 Whereas for Cocteau the music-hall was an ideological and aesthetic abstraction,

informed by Italian Futurism, for Satie it existed directly in the score of Parade, derived from the

popular Bohemianism of Le Chat Noir.

77Steegmuller, Cocteau. 168. 78 Steegmuller, Cocteau. 167. 79 Steven Moore Whiting, Satie the Bohemian (Oxford University Press Inc, New York, 1999). 482. 80 Whiting, Satie the Bohemian. 482.

38

A number of critics have also described Satie’s compositional style in Parade as a kind of

musical Cubism. Wilfred Mellers observed in 1942 “Satie’s music to Parade is the most ‘cubist’

of all his compositions.”81 More recently, Daniel Albright has identified musical “cubes” in the

repetitive motivic figures in the Acrobats’ scene.82 Like the contemporary labeling of Satie as a

Futurist composer, this criticism misses the mark of Satie’s agenda. Rather, Parade is rooted in

popular music prefigured by Satie’s work as a cabaret composer, and is elaborated by techniques

from the Parisian musical avant-garde, especially Stravinsky, and by Satie’s studies in

counterpoint at the Schola Cantorum. Each number of Parade is characteristically short, and

contains the jaunty rhythms of popular circus and cabaret music. Additionally, the four hands piano

demonstrates the ubiquity of the accompaniment figure in which the melody is

supported by bass octaves with chords on the offbeat, a standard technique of cabaret writing

(figure 3.1). Steven Whiting’s analysis of Satie’s posthumously published cabaret collaborations

with Vincent Hyspa exemplifies the presence of the same technique in a number of cabaret works,

including Souvenir de l’Inauguration (figure 3.2).

Additionally, Robert Orledge has demonstrated the meticulousness with which Satie structured Parade as a symmetrical mirror image.83 He notes that, in the original score with which

Parade premiered, the start of the memorable “Ragtime du Paquebot” began at bar 277, making it

central to the 560 bar total work. This placement centralizes the role of American popular culture,

the novelty of ragtime rhythms, and the everyday in Parade.

81 Robert Orledge, Satie the Composer (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990). 172. 82 Albright, Untwisting the Serpent. 206. 83 Orledge, Satie the Composer. 172–173.

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Figure 3.1 Cabaret Accompaniment in Parade

Figure 3.2 Souvenir de l’Inauguration84

84 Steven Moore Whiting. “Musical Parody and Two ‘Œuvres posthumes’ of Erik Satie: The Rêverie du pauvre and the Petite musique de clown triste” Revue de Musicologie 81/2 (1995): pg. 222

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Satie, the Schola Cantorum, and the Subversion of the Classic

Satie’s complicated relationship with the Schola Cantorum is also prevalent in Parade. His

decision to join the Schola Cantorum during the Guerre des Chappeles, in which advocates of

Debussy’s “vertical,” harmonic musical style and d’Indy’s “linear,” contrapuntal style vied for

control of national artistic institutions was politically and aesthetically significant. However, it was

clear that Satie’s artistic beliefs resisted classification into either ideological camp. Satie made his

distaste for the Debussyism abundantly clear, turning his upon the Debussyist Conservatoire

de Paris with the publication of his 1914 “Conservatory Catechism,” a sarcastic list of nine rules

beginning with “Dieubussy alone shalt thou adore and copy most perfectly.”85

To a degree, Satie’s aesthetic ideals seemed to align with those of d’Indy and other

advocates for the Schola Cantorum. Asked in a 1921 questionnaire by La Liberte to name France’s

foremost composer, Satie answered “[d'Indy's] age, his musical ‘surface,’ his authority as teacher

and the comprehensive sweep of his ideas mark him out as being the true leader of the

contemporary school of French music. For me, he has been its leader for many years.”86 Satie and d’Indy shared an emphasis on harmonic clarity and perfection of craftsmanship, and both metaphorically described melody as music’s central “idea.” Satie elaborates this in an uncharacteristically lengthy and serious statement about his own aesthetics on the cover of a notebook (BN 9611) written toward the end of 1917 while he was composing , which is worth reproducing in full.

85Erik Satie, “Conservatory Catechism,” S.I.M., (1914), in The Writings of Erik Satie, 81. 84 Brian Hart. “Vincent d'Indy and the Development of the French Symphony” Music and Letters 87/2 (Spring, 1995): pg. 238.

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“Craftsmanship is often superior to subject matter.

To have a feeling for harmony is to have a feeling for tonality.

The serious examination of a melody will always make an excellent harmonic exercise for the student.

A melody does not imply its harmony, anymore than a landscape implies its colour. The harmonic potential of a melody is infinite, for a melody is only an expression within the overall Expression.

Do not forget that the melody is the Idea, the outline; as much as it is the form and the subject matter of a work. The harmony is an illumination, an exhibition of the object, its reflection.

* * *

In composition, the various parts, between themselves, no longer follow

‘school’ rules. ‘School’ has a gymnastic aim, nothing more; composition has an aesthetic aim, in which taste alone plays a part.

Make no mistake: the understanding of grammar does not imply the understanding of literature; grammar can help or be set aside as the writer pleases, and on his responsibility. Musical grammar is nothing but grammar.

One cannot criticize the craft of an artist as if it constituted a system. If there is form and a new style of writing, there is a new craft.

To speak of ‘craft’ requires great care and– in any event- great learning.

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Who possesses such learning?

The error arises in that a great many artists lack ideas in general, and even

specific ideas.

Great masters are brilliant through their ideas, their craft is a simple means

to an end, nothing more. It is their ideas which endure.

What they achieve is always good and seems natural to us.

The craft of Bach is not a contrapuntal exercise. Craft, in an exercise,

should be defective; in composition, it is perfect.

Who established the Truths governing Art? Who?

The Masters. They had no right to do so and it is dishonest to concede this

power to them. Everyone has had professional cases to complain about.

Look at Rodin, Manet, Debussy, etc. But the Masters are not seized by the

police, nor by the ushers or other magistrates.

* * *

Become artists unconsciously.

The Idea can do without Art.

Let us mistrust Art: it is often nothing but virtuosity.

Impressionism is the art of Imprecision; today we tend toward

Precision.”87

87 Orledge Satie the Composer. 68–69

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As Orledge has noted, this credo is a reaction against the Conservatoire tradition, and expresses most obviously the high value Satie placed on melody and precision contrasting it with the colorful and watery harmonies of the Impressionists.88 It is clear that Satie held d’Indy in high regard as a teacher and shared many of his ideals. Additionally, Satie’s invocation of Bach’s craftsmanship, in light of his decision to enroll in the Schola Cantorum to develop his own contrapuntal technique, indicates a respect for history and the rigorous technique that the Schola

Cantorum valued.

Crucially, however, this passage also highlights the importance Satie places on the preservation of originality within the development of such meticulous craftsmanship. In tandem with his rejection of “schools,” this suggests that Satie also valued novelty and progress in aesthetics, and rejected the rigid historicism of the Schola Cantorum. Satie’s and d’Indy’s approaches to composition differed radically in a number of important regards. While d’Indy placed high importance on tonal formal structure and contrapuntal development, Satie shows little regard for either of these values, except to invoke them satirically, as in his 1917 Sonatine

Beaurocratique, in which he parodies 's Sonatina in C (op. 36 no. 1). As Orledge has shown, Satie’s early sketches for this work showed him experimenting with bitonality, with which he had been interested since 1913.89 While the final printed score was tamer than the original drafts, Satie’s experimentalism contrasted with d’Indy’s characterization of bitonality as

“style boche.”90 Satie often took an idiomatic approach to formal structure, as exemplified by his

Trois Morceaux en Forme de poire of 1903, which Fulcher characterizes as “a facetious response

88 Orledge Satie the Composer. 68. 89 Orledge Satie the Composer. 28. 90 Michel Duchesneau. “La musique française pendant la Guerre 1914–1918: Autour de la tentative de fusion de la Société Nationale de Musique et de la Société Musicale Indépendante” Revue de Musicologie 82/1 (1996): pg. 139.

44 to the charge that [Satie’s] work had no form.”91 This piece was to be the germ from which

Parade grew, and Satie used the same symmetrical, mirror-like structure in Parade.

Parade’s Prelude au Rideau Rouge reflects simultaneously the points at which Satie both derived and deviated from his Schola Cantorum training (figure 3.3). Serving as the opening of

Parade at its premiere before the composition of the opening , which was first included in a 1919 performance of Parade, the number begins with a simple theme in the bassoons and cellos. It unfolds in the manner of a , with the original theme answered tonally a perfect fourth up in the violas. The texture is dominated by the strings and the traditional rules of counterpoint are closely adhered to, lending the number a softness and consonance that is rudely contrasted by the frenzied circus ground music that is to follow. However, after the theme has been exposed in each voice, the number ends suddenly, with no contrapuntal development, and is instead followed by a dreamlike descending passage and a transition into the French Manager’s theme. The glaring forfeiture of contrapuntal development sets Satie’s approach to counterpoint apart from d’Indy’s veneration of classical counterpoint and the symphony. While Satie and d’Indy shared the belief in the centrality of melody, for d’Indy melody was to be rooted in tonal development, lending the ideal of unity and organicism to the whole.

Additionally, Satie’s invocation of the consonant Classical style advanced at the Schola

Cantorum appears to pay homage to the traditionalist aesthetic that supported nationalistic traditionalism and in the cultural sphere. However, by rejecting contrapuntal development, which for d’Indy and other advocates of traditionalism was crucial to the Classical aesthetic, Satie rendered this tribute to Classicism superficial. By opening the ballet with an elegant and

91 Fulcher, French Cultural Politics and Music. 199.

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deceptively traditionalist number, the rude entry of circus music is made even more jarring. The humorous effect this has ridicules the expectations of traditionalist audiences, and emphasizes the populism of Parade’s score. In this way, Parade’s score is anti-authoritarian. By parodying the pretensions of high-art and traditionalist culture, itself rooted in the wartime nationalist values of collectivism and a nationalist view of music history, Satie effectively undermines the hierarchical and collectivist social order represented by this aesthetic. In tandem with his rejection of anti-German militarism and his affinity for Jaurès’ Marxist denunciation of French participation in the war, Satie’s score incorporates his mistrust of wartime culture. Additionally, the suddenness with which popular circus music dominates and overwhelms the gentle classical opening represents a Leftist identification with common people with whom Satie associated in his work at Le Chat Noir distinct from Cocteau’s nationalization of the everyday through

Futurism.

Stravinsky’s Influence on Satie and the Aesthetic of Progress

Satie’s approaches to texture and formal structure were far more influenced by the modernist approach of Stravinsky than by his Schola Cantorum training. While the influence of popular music and Satie’s Schola Cantorum training represent an affinity with popular music and subversion of wartime culture, Satie’s admiration of Stravinsky demonstrates the importance for him that art, like politics, be “advanced.” Parade’s incorporation of high avant-garde techniques, most notably influenced by Stravinsky, made Parade not only iconoclastic but progressive.

“Progress has always seen its way barred by violent opponents who, it can be seen, do not necessarily have an exceptional ‘nose’ for things of value, or even ordinary common sense,”

Satie writes in an article about Stravinsky, printed in Feuilles Libres in 1922. Referring to the defenders of artistic progress, a category in which he includes himself, Satie writes in the same

46

Figure 3.3 Prelude du Rideau Rouge mm. 20—38

47

Figure 3.3 Continued

48

Figure 3.3 Continued

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article “for us scurvy troublemakers, Igor Stravinsky is one of the most remarkable geniuses ever

to have existed in Music [sic].”92 Given Satie’s equation of the “advanced” in art with the

“advanced” in music, his championing of Stravinsky as a hero for “progressive” music reveals the conscious progressivism in Parade, a feature that contrasts it from the traditionalist aesthetic expected by the culture of wartime nationalism at the time. Stravinsky’s style of orchestration and use of ostinato evidenced in Le Sacre du Printemps profoundly influenced Satie in his composition of Parade. Satie expresses clearly his admiration for Stravinsky’s instrumentation in a 1923 article published in Vanity Fair. He writes

[Stravinsky’s] method of orchestration is new and bold. He never orchestrates in a

‘wooly’ way, avoiding ‘orchestral pot-holes’ and ‘haze’–which causes the loss of

more musicians than sailors- he goes where he wants to. Note that Stravinsky’s

orchestration is the result of a deep and precise knowledge of how to write for

instruments. The whole of his ‘orchestra’ is based on instrumental timbre. Nothing

is left to chance, I tell you. What is the source of his sumptuous ‘Truth?’ Regard

him as a remarkable master of logic, sure of touch and full of energy; for he alone

has composed with such magnificent force, such positive assurance, such constant

spirit.”93

This characterization of Stravinsky’s style of orchestration echoes Jacques Rivière’s 1913

review of Le Sacre du Printemps, in which Rivière praises the ballet as the first great work to

oppose Impressionism, and highlights Stravinsky’s clarity of orchestration, including his reliance

92 Erik Satie, “Propositions Proposed About Igor Stravinsky.” Feuilles Libres (1922). In The Writings of Erik Satie, 95–96. 93 Satie, “Igor Stravinsky” Vanity Fair (1919). In The Writings of Erik Satie, 105.

50 on the dry texture of woodwinds instead of strings.94 Stravinsky likewise praised Parade in 1934 for “opposing the vagueness of a decrepit Impressionism with a precise and firm language stripped of all pictorial embellishments.”95 Parade’s instrumental clarity and Satie’s reliance on woodwinds over strings exemplify Satie’s indebtedness to Stravinsky.

Stravinsky’s use of ostinato proved a far more important structural model for Satie than d’Indy’s insistence on classical formal development. After all fugal voices have been exposed in the Prelude du Rideau Rouge, a short transition is followed by the introduction of a simple ostinato in the strings, harp, and piccolo, consisting of a leap up a perfect fifth followed by a leap down an octave in triple meter (figure 3.5). This ostinato leads into the Prestigitateur Chinois’ section, underlying the French manager’s theme.

The ostinato returns transformed at the end of the number in the flutes alone, again serving as a transition, leading to a boisterous finale (figure 3.4). This time, a similar rhythmic character maintains, but the direction of motion is reversed, and the intervals are different so that the melody moves down a major third and up an augmented fourth.

Figure 3.4 Transition out of Prestigitateur Chinois’ Section, mm 200—206

This ostinato bears remarkable similarity to the acrobats’ theme, presented in the xylophone at the introduction of the acrobats’ number. The original motion by perfect intervals

94 Perloff, Art and the Everyday. 9. 95 Perloff, Art and the Everyday. 6.

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Figure 3.5 Ostinato, mm. 39—44

52 maintains, but this time stretched to the distance of a twelfth between the first and second subdivisions to parallel the flight of the acrobats (figure 3.6).

Figure 3.6 Acrobats’ Theme, mm. 394—399

The ostinato makes its final appearance at the conclusion of this number in the low instruments and clarinets, bringing the number to a close before the frenzied finale, in which the themes of each of the managers return as they make their final desperate attempt to usher the audience inside the pavilion (figure 3.7). The original perfect intervals are retained, but the ostinato moves upward between both intervals this time, outlining an octave. In this appearance, this ostinato is far less graceful than its first appearance. The upward motion is more insistent and the low instruments are louder and brasher than the original melodic instruments on which the ostinato was presented. Additionally, it undergirds a sudden and jarring meter change from 2/4 to 3/4 depicting the chaotic final attempt of the managers and performers to capture the attention of the audience.

Several prominent ostinati appear throughout the ballet, but the one described above is the most transformed and performs the most transitory role between numbers. Satie’s use of ostinato gives Parade’s score a holistic sense of continuity. The individual music-hall style numbers are self-sufficient, but the motivic continuity along with Satie’s mirror structure unifies the work and gives it the element of objectivity. Rather than simply juxtaposing popular music with Classicism and the avant-garde, Satie fused them inseparably. This is a key component of Satie’s originality.

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Satie’s aesthetic of originality and progress paralleled his rejection of nationalism. In the opening numbers of Parade, Satie undermines the traditionalist aesthetic designed to reinforce the collectivist and nationalist aims of wartime culture. His admiration of the forward looking and revolutionary qualities in Bolshevik Socialism and his opposition to the First World War, itself a symptom of the breakdown of an outdated political order, mirror his desire to encapsulate the “advanced” and “progressive” in art. At the same time, Satie’s music is down to earth and markedly unpretentious. Very little of his music is so difficult that it needs to be reserved for an elite class of performers. Any dedicated amateur can learn to play most of Satie’s works, which lends his output the qualities egalitarianism and anti-elitism. It is entirely possible that this is the motivation for Satie’s championing of simplicity and clarity in his music, starkly contrasting the nationalist justifications of Cocteau and others for advancing these qualities. In Parade, Satie expertly maintains populism of the cabaret and music-hall while drawing on the “advanced” techniques of Stravinsky and the avant-garde. Satie’s score for Parade was, like socialism as he saw it, egalitarian, anti-nationalist, and progressive.

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Figure 3.7 Close of the Acrobats’ Theme mm. 467—471

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CHAPTER 4

THE REVOLUTIONARY IN PICASSO’S PARADE

Pablo Picasso’s work on Parade’s set design and costumes is best understood in light of his self-cultivated image as a revolutionary artist. As Patricia Leighten has demonstrated throughout several books and articles, Picasso’s early identification with Anarchism motivated much of his political and artistic output. During his early years in Barcelona, Picasso frequented

Els Quatre Gats, a café popular with avant-garde artists and intellectuals sympathetic to the

Anarchist writings of figures such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, and Peter

Kropotkin. The influence of Anarchism on the Bohemian avant-garde artists in both Barcelona and Paris, which Picasso made his home in 1904, was sizable, rivaling Marxism, and the aesthetic and revolutionary approaches to art fostered by the Anarchist movement imprinted themselves on Picasso. Picasso’s Leftism, strongly influenced by Anarchism, played an important role in his contribution to Parade that both complemented and subverted Cocteau’s vision for the ballet, as well as the dominant militarism and nationalism engendered by wartime culture.

Picasso’s Pacifism

As Leighten points out, “art and the role of the artist were central issues for the anarchists in a way that distinguishes them from the Marxists.”96 For Kropotkin, art was important for

affecting social consciousness, such that the artist was an inherently revolutionary figure. Artistic

primitivism and glorification of the peasantry were revolutionary, in their contrast to and critique

96 Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe. 15.

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of bourgeois culture. Thus, it was critical to rebel artistically against bourgeois art and

morality.97

Perhaps the most notable characteristic Picasso shared with anarchists was his

unambiguous opposition to nationalism and militarism. This he maintained, even after many in

his avant-garde circle such as Guillaume Apollinaire and Georges Braque became swept up in the frenzy of nationalism and support for the war that followed the outbreak of World War I. As

Leighten demonstrates, Picasso carefully chose newspaper clippings in his collages of 1912-14

that highlight the horrors of the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913. In addition to the artistic

commentary Picasso makes by using everyday objects in a disjunct manner, Leighten argues

convincingly for a political reading of the works which advocates pacifism on the eve of World

War I.98

Figure 4.1 Glass and Bottle of Suze99

97 Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe. 15. 98 Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe. 121–142 99 Picasso, Pablo. Glass and Bottle of Suze. 1912, charcoal, collage, gouache, cardboard, 64x50 cm. Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art. From: Albrecht Kemper Museum of Art. Digital Image.

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With the outbreak of the First World War, Picasso’s Parisian modernist circle dissipated.

After seeing Braque and Derain board the train in Avignon on August 2, 1914 to join their units,

Picasso remarked “we never saw each other again.”100 Picasso did, in fact, meet the two artists

again, and so it is likely that this comment reflected metaphorically the destructive effect the war

had on Picasso’s pre-war avant-garde circle. Picasso claimed to have not enlisted because he was

in poor health, but as Leighten points out, photos of him from that period cast doubt on that

being his motivation.101 Alternatively, Picasso may have chosen not to fight because he was from

a neutral country. But this did not stop Apollinaire, whose citizenship was Polish, from changing

his citizenship in order to join the French military and fight in the militaristic frenzy that swept

France in 1914. A more likely reason for Picasso’s decision to stay in Paris, which was emptied

of its artists and able-bodied men, was pacifism, tied to his earlier Anarchist roots.

In a 1915 drawing, Picasso shows himself standing alone in a deserted Paris except for an

overweight man with a cane and a dog in the distance.102Picasso felt his loneliness acutely during

this period. Most of his friends had joined the military or left France, his mistress, Marcelle

Humbert (“Eva” in several of his paintings) died of tuberculosis in a Paris hospital in 1915, and, as an able-bodied man who had not enlisted, he was embarrassed when passing soldiers on leave in the street.103 It was in 1915 that Picasso met Cocteau, to whom he took a great liking.

Leighten writes that “in 1917 Picasso was helped out of this situation by Cocteau’s offer to work

for Diaghilev…working for Diaghilev meant working communally– as Picasso had with Braque

Accessed February 11, 2018. http://www.kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu/collection/explore/artwork/1105 100 Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe. 144. 101 Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe. 145. 102 Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe. 145. 103 Steegmuller, Cocteau. 137

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before the war and with his friends in Barcelona before he came to Paris- with a group of artists

who seemed in ways more outrageously modern, or at least more outrageous, than even the

Cubists.”104 Picasso’s association with Cocteau, Satie, and the Ballet Russes is in some ways a

bridge between his earlier association with the Cubists and the avant-garde painters of

Montmartre and , and his later association with the Surrealists.

Figure 4.2 Picasso, Self Portrait105

Revolutionary Self-Image

Both the Cubists of Picasso’s early years and the Surrealists of his later years were associated with revolutionary politics. The former was far more influenced by Anarchism, and the latter bore a close, if often tense, relationship with the French Communist Party. Despite the

great ideological differences that separated Marxism and Anarchism, Picasso conformed to

ideals represented by each, and during his Cubist and Surrealist periods he threw his lot in with

104 Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe. 145 105 . Self Portrait, 1915. Pen and ink on paper, 15x11.5 cm. From Leighten, Re- Ordering the Universe. Figure 105.

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the revolutionary politics that characterized each movement respectively. After the liberation of

Paris from Nazi Germany in 1944, Picasso said “my joining the Communist party is the logical

outcome of my whole life, my whole work… I am conscious of having always struggled by

means of my painting, as a true revolutionary.”106 Picasso saw continuity between his earlier

Anarchist sympathies and later Marxism, as both formulated a revolutionary self-image, and a higher purpose according to which his work as an artist was oriented.

As Mark Antliff has shown, many of the avant-garde artists with whom Picasso was associated between his move to Paris and the outbreak of the First World War espoused a theory of art that, following Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson, sought to undermine bourgeois values by glorifying Dionysian vitality over Apollonian elitism and restraint, and by fashioning an art that was of its day.107 This impulse inspired modernists of many stripes, and its impact is

apparent in Parade. As Cocteau famously remarked, “from [Picasso] I learned to waste less time

gaping open-mouthed at things that are of no use to me, and to understand that a ditty sung by a

street-singer, if listened to for what one can get out of it, may prove more rewarding than

Götterdämmerung.”108 Thus, for Picasso, as for Cocteau, the revolutionary in Parade was in its

glorification of the everyday, the mundane, and often the vulgar. “SOYONS VULGAIRES [BE

VULGAR],” wrote Cocteau across two full pages of his Roman notebook during production of

Parade, echoing the provocative character at which the collaborators aimed.109 As Deborah

106 Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe. 148. 107 Mark Antliff, “Cubism, Futurism, Anarchism: The 'Aestheticism' of the ‘Action d'art’ Group, 1906-1920” Oxford Art Journal, 21/2 (1998): Pgs. 101-120. 108 Steegmuller, Cocteau. 137–138. 109Deborah Menaker Rothschild, Picasso’s Parade (Phillip Wilson Publisher’s Limited, London, NJ, 1991). 61.

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Rothschild has shown, the source of Parade’s originality was its eschewing of the sublime in

favor of the everyday and the bawdy.110

For Picasso, Parade’s unpretentiousness was a reflection of his own revolutionary and subversive self-image. Picasso, like Braque, tended to wear factory-made worker’s clothes, and was considerably more comfortable around working people than the aristocratic elite.111

Additionally, much has been made of Picasso’s self-identification with the harlequin figure of

the Commedia dell’arte. Before Parade, Cocteau played on this to solidify his friendship with

Picasso, showing up to visit him dressed in a harlequin costume, which pleased Picasso so much

that the costume shows up in his harlequin drawings of 1923.112 The status of the Commedia

dell’arte characters as social outsiders is an important theme in Parade, but Picasso’s

longstanding identification with harlequin is especially revealing of his own self-image and

artistic mission.

The Rideau Rouge

The commedia dell’arte troupe is placed in the foreground in Parade’s massive curtain or

Rideau rouge, to which Satie dedicated the opening prelude. On the right, the curtain depicts two

harlequin figures, two peasant women, an Italian sailor, a Spanish guitarist, a black Moor, and a

dog, and on the left it shows a winged horse, a suckling fowl, and a monkey climbing a ladder

painted the colors of the French flag. Jane Fulcher argues that Picasso used the red curtain to

undermine Cocteau’s nationalist vision for Parade. “Significantly,” argues Fulcher, “despite

their association with ‘the Latin,’ these figures are either socially marginal or, within the

110 Rothschild, Picasso’s Parade. 71. 111 See Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe. 143., Rothschild, Picasso’s Parade. 47. 112 Steegmuller, Cocteau. 138

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dominant discourse of the period, considered to be ‘un-French.’”113 Visually, the red curtain

appears the most neo-classical aspect of Parade’s design, and, like Satie’s Prelude du Rideau

rouge, thus appears to contrast the ballet’s general frivolity by upholding the expectation of

Classicism and traditionalist aesthetics called for by wartime nationalism. However, Rothschild

considers the curtain to be a “more substantial Cubism” than the costumes. According to

Rothschild, the flatness of the figures against a three-dimensional space represents a

“juxtaposition of different styles within a single painting [that] had interested Picasso since the

early .”114 This stylistic collage suggests that, rather than assenting to traditionalism,

Picasso is advancing modernism through parody and collage.

Additionally, the curtain seems to obviously represent the alienation of the artist, one of

the ballet’s most important themes for Cocteau. However, Fulcher argues that Picasso instead

inverts this theme. Noting the allusions to Christian iconography the ladder invariably suggests,

she claims that the monkeys climbing the tri-color ladder represent another parody of

nationalism. “Picasso appears to be making a trenchant comment not only on the myths of

wartime, but on the role of certain artists (monkeys) climbing the patriotic ladder to official

rewards, with a quasi-religious justification.”115 Thus, Picasso shared with Cocteau an emphasis

on the subversive social status of the commedia dell’arte figures, but for Picasso, their “Latin”

origin did not bear the nationalistic implications they did for Cocteau.

Rather, Picasso inverted this aspect of Cocteau’s vision for the ballet, using them to offer a much more straightforward Left-wing populist commentary. Rothschild writes that “also

113 Fulcher, The Composer as Intellectual. 76 114 Rothschild, Picasso’s Parade. 212. 115 Fulcher, The Composer as Intellectual. 76.

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noteworthy from the standpoint of Picasso’s involvement with the theatre (as well as his politics)

is the fact that from antiquity to the present, Harlequin has been the product solely of popular

entertainment as he is always of low status. He is dedicated to flouting authority, shaking up the

status quo and undermining entrenched beliefs. The trickster’s singular potential is to underline

the absurdity of social structures in such a way as to open up a more expansive, creative reality,

marked by delight in the uniqueness of self.”116 In contrast to the managers, who stomp

awkwardly in a parody of authoritarianism at the expense of the artists who they exploit for

profit, harlequin represents Picasso’s own identification with populism and revolutionary

aesthetics. Parade’s vulgarity and unpretentious identification with popular entertainment of the

Théâtre forain lent it a sense of modernist populism, which for Picasso, was in line with his

Leftist political leanings.

Figure 4.3 Rideau rouge117

116 Rothschild, Picasso’s Parade. 229. 117 Picasso, Pablo. Rideau rouge. 1917, Canvas, tempera. Georges Pompidou Center, Paris, France. Digital image. Available from: WikiArt, https://www.wikiart.org/en/pablo- picasso/curtain-for-the-ballet-parade-1917. Accessed February 11, 2018.

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Primitivism and the Cheval-Jupon

Another anti-nationalist symbol in Parade is Picasso’s treatment of the cheval-jupon, a

horse costume worn by two dancers, atop which a dummy was to sit representing the negro

manager. The dummy was removed for the premier, as it kept falling off during rehearsal, and

only the cheval-jupon was premiered. The cheval-jupon was a common music-hall joke, and was

seen as a rather cheap gag by the patrons of the Ballet Russes at the premier of Parade. However,

while the horse costume itself was a direct transposition of the music-hall and circus humor, its mask was unique. Deborah Rothschild notes that its antecedents in Picasso’s work date back to

1913 “in the many elongated heads that narrow at the bottom to terminate in a chinless mouth which contain unquestionable references to Fang masks, and Senufo and Bambara animal masks.”118 While studies resembling the mask for Parade’s cheval-jupon date back several years

before Parade, primitivism and Africanism in Picasso’s oeuvre date back even further. This

element of primitivism in Parade alludes to Picasso’s pre-war aesthetic and political

environment, out of which this inspiration developed.

Romanticized images of the primitive in Europe go back at least as far as Jean-Jacques

Rousseau, and its influence on pre-war modernism and the political Left is noteworthy. As the violence of French and Belgian colonialism in Africa became publicized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, socialists and anarchists decried colonial policy, while artists practiced social commentary through Africanized art. Though often reductive and essentializing,

the fascination with primitivism in modernist art reveals an often sympathetic stance on the part

of modernists with anti-colonialism. Additionally, as Leighten notes, “they [modernists] wanted

118 Rothschild, Picasso’s Parade. 186.

64 to subvert Western artistic traditions - and the social order in which they were implicated - by celebrating a Nietzschean return to those imagined ‘primitive’ states whose suppression they viewed as having cut off a necessary vitality.”119 As Leighten demonstrates, Picasso’s use of allusions to Africa, its art, and its people in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon of 1907 raises the unavoidable associations of colonial cruelty, while simultaneously satirizing and subverting the

Western art tradition.120 This assault on the comfortability of bourgeois art and traditionalism was a self-conscious goal of both Cocteau and Picasso in Parade, and for Picasso was additionally revolutionary.

Figure 4.4 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon121

119 Patricia Leighten. “The White Peril and L'Art nègre: Picasso, Primitivism, and Anticolonialism” The Art Bulletin 72/4 (Winter, 1990): pg. 610 120 Leighten. “The White Peril and L'Art nègre: Picasso, Primitivism, and Anticolonialism.” 610. 121 Picasso, Pablo. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. 1907, oil on canvas, 243.9x233.7 cm. Available from WikiArt, https://www.wikiart.org/en/pablo-picasso/the-girls-of-avignon-1907. (Accessed February 11, 2018).

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Figure 4.5 Study for Cheval-Jupon Mask122

Picasso and Cocteau shared an emphasis on the anti-bourgeois, everyday aspects of

Parade. For Picasso, however, this populist emphasis in the ballet was a subversive take on the nationalism and traditionalism that dominated Parisian wartime discourse. His longstanding commitment to pacifism and mistrust of nationalism contrasted greatly with Cocteau’s nationalist impulse in Parade. This reveals a Leftist motivation in Picasso’s contribution to the ballet that connects his early Anarchism and later Marxism, and was at times subversive to

Cocteau’s desire for the work. Thus, for Picasso, like Satie, Parade is both revolutionary and anti-nationalist.

122 Picasso, Pablo. Study for Cheval-Jupon Mask. Digital image. Accessed February 11, 2018. http://www.faisceau.com/pablo-picasso-theatre-parade-peinture.htm

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CHAPTER 5

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS: BEHIND THE RIDEAU ROUGE

The Rideau rouge is perhaps Parade’s most enigmatic and iconic feature. Curtains are designed to conceal, but Parade’s giant red curtain depicts the otherwise private interactions of backstage performers. It serves an important function to Parade’s plot by suggesting that the real performance, about which the audience is either ignorant or disinterested, is taking place behind it. In a sense, I have tried in this project to look behind the Rideau rouge by considering the aesthetic and political beliefs of the collaborators’ in order to read Parade. The ballet’s premier was a scandal because it poured salt on wounds inflicted on Paris by the First World War. In light of this, neither its reception nor its artistic statement can be properly understood apart from wartime nationalism.

In part, Parade’s statement was a call for a new direction in modern art, defined by the simplicity and populism that offended the audience at its premier. This emphasis on the everyday inspired generations of artists, as exemplified by Cocteau’s close involvement with Les Six in the

1920s and 30s. The Cubist artist wrote “I like Parade because it is unpretentious, gay, and distinctly comic. Picasso’s décor has lots of style and is simple… It is not figurative, has no fairy-tale element, no lavish effects, no dramatic subject. It’s a sort of musical joke in the best of taste and without high artistic pretensions...”123 Parade’s influence on later artists was immense.

Apollinaire coined the word sur-réalisme in the program notes for Parade, inspiring the

Surrealist movement, with which Picasso was heavily involved. Nancy Hargrove has argued

convincingly that T.S. Elliot saw a performance of Parade, and that the work influenced his

123 Rothschild, Picasso’s Parade. 71.

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seminal poem, The Wasteland. Like Parade, this poem juxtaposed the commonplace with the

artistic tradition, and deeply influenced modernist aesthetics throughout the twentieth century.124

Even more than Le Sacre du Printemps, Parade signaled a new direction in modern art, inspiring

a modernist aesthetic that emphasized the performance of everyday life and rejection of the

sublime.

This aestheticization of the everyday was to be one of Cocteau’s most important

achievements, and it was the centerpiece of nationalism in Parade. Cocteau’s contribution to

Parade has often been overlooked, as reflected from the very start in Apollinaire’s program notes. However, his role cannot be overstated. Through an engagement with the literary and artistic environment of wartime Paris, Cocteau forcefully synthesized Cubism, Futurism, and popular culture and presented it in the medium of ballet, forming the aesthetic basis for a new,

distinctly French modernism. Politically, Cocteau nationalized the avant-garde, discarding its revolutionary qualities and supplanting traditionalism with a national style that was vibrant and forward looking.

Satie’s and Picasso’s left-wing convictions undermined Cocteau’s vision, such that Parade retained a subversive character. Their opposition to militarism and nationalism left Parade open to the charge that it was an assault on the cultural and political status quo, which was defined by a single-minded hatred of the nation’s wartime enemies and commitment to the struggle against

Latin civilization’s detractors. Satie’s admiration of progress in aesthetics and politics defined his contribution to Parade. By borrowing from Classicism in the opening numbers, Satie seemed to be fulfilling the expectations of the culture of wartime nationalism, glorifying the nation’s history

124 Nancy D. Hargrove. “The Great Parade: Cocteau, Picasso, Satie, Massine, Diaghilev—and T.S. Eliot” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 31/1 (Spring, 1998): pgs. 83-106.

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and exalting the unifying and uplifting national style. However, by eschewing tonal development,

Satie undermined the core tenets of Classicism. In hindsight, these numbers seem to parody this

high traditional aesthetic after the boisterous sounds of the music-hall and circus take over. Satie subtitled Parade’s Prelude du Rideau rouge “Hommage à Picasso.” It is fitting that this number,

which at first seemed a dutiful homage to the aesthetic of wartime classicism, was instead an

homage to Satie’s revolutionary, anti-nationalist friend and collaborator.

Like his opposition to the French participation in the First World War and the collapse of

an outdated political order it represented, Satie’s art was characterized by an emphasis on progress,

and an aversion to decay and stagnation. In Parade, Satie relies primarily on motivic techniques

absorbed by the avant-garde, demonstrating his preference for “advanced” art. By subverting the

aesthetics of nationalism and glorifying progress and the egalitarianism of the music-hall, Parade

reflects Satie’s “advanced” politics, characterized by internationalism and anti-militarism.

Similarly, Picasso’s iconoclastic attack on bourgeois artistic norms through his artistic

innovations looked forward to a modernism defined not only by opposition, but by intention to

build a new society in which the possibilities for social transformation were exemplified by the

immediate construction of a new aesthetic. Echoing Kropotkin, his desire to live the revolution

aesthetically pointed to a larger revolutionary possibility that motivated his political

engagements. Consciously or unconsciously, Picasso’s contribution to Parade subverted the

status-quo at every turn. Like Satie’s Classical opening numbers in Parade’s score, the Rideau

rouge gives the impression that it is going to pay homage to the expectations of wartime

Classicism. Instead, it undermines these expectations by implementing modernist techniques that

assault the quintessential Classical values of perspective and proportion. Additionally, through

primitivism, Picasso recalled the opposition of pre-war socialists and anarchists to French

69 colonialism, further suggesting irreverence for wartime nationalism and its aesthetic. These aspects reflect Picasso’s lifelong self-image as a revolutionary, which was crucial to his relationship to Parade’s rebelliousness.

Conclusion

Although their opinions differed on nationalism and the war effort, the collaborators’ oppositional intentions merge on the point of Parade’s rebelliousness. Cocteau, like Satie and

Picasso, was fascinated by novelty and the freedom of the individual. Despite his desire to promote a “French” aesthetic, his nationalistic opposition to Germanic culture, and his devotion to the war effort, Cocteau’s aesthetic is just as much rooted in the principle of the freedom of the artist to revolt against social norms and collective values. Parade conveys an anti-authoritarian desire for progress shared by all three collaborators. However, in light of their differing aesthetic intentions and the tense atmosphere in which it premiered, Parade’s iconoclasm is revealing of the aesthetic question of art’s relationship to the collective and to the individual, as well as the duty of the artist to the nation. Each of Parade’s collaborators was also highly committed to their own artistic originality. Yet each of the collaborators, along with their critics, also saw their work in relation to broader social concerns. Behind Parade’s Red Curtain lies an aesthetic statement about the role of art and the artist that both supported and undermined French nationalism.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Julian Duncan is from Atlanta, Georgia. In 2016, he received a Bachelor of Music degree in Piano Pedagogy and Performance with minors in French and German from

Shorter University, where he was named “outstanding senior” in music performance. He studies European modernism in the early 20th century, focusing especially on political and cultural nationalism, and is broadly interested in aesthetic trends across the arts.

Julian has presented on his research for the Southeast Regional Division of the American

Musicological Society. In addition to his work in musicology, Julian has worked as a collaborative pianist, church musician, and music teacher.

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