erik satie
dada works and entr'actes (1917-1924)

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In May 1917 the 'realist ballet' Parade was staged in Paris by Diaghilev's celebrated Russian Ballet, with music by Erik Satie and costumes and decor by Pablo Picasso. Parade was largely the creation of the polymath auteur Jean Cocteau, who intended the piece to represent the principles of Cubism on stage. This high concept was much enhanced by the use of striking scenic sound effects within the music score, including typewriter keys, gunshots, sirens, aeroplanes and lottery wheels. Was this a nod by Satie towards Italian Futurism and the Art of Noises?

Apparently not. Certainly Satie was aware of the several Futurist manifestoes on music and noise published in Italy between 1911 and 1913, although the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 had prevented Luigi Russolo and other Futurist composers from performing in Paris at this time. If the scenic sound effects in Parade can be said to owe any debt to Futurism, it is because Diaghilev imposed these elements on Cocteau, very much against Satie's wishes. According to Cocteau, Satie commented: "I have composed a background to throw into relief the various noises the playwright considers indispensable for giving each of his characters the right atmosphere. These noises are, in music, of the same character as the pieces of newspaper, painted wood-grain and other everyday objects that Cubist painters frequently employ in their pictures, in order to localize objects and masses in nature." Cocteau was speaking to Vanity Fair, however, and quite probably the sentiments are his. Indeed Satie seems to have been disinclined to write about either Cubism or Futurism himself.

Just as early Futurist serata between 1909 and 1914 triggered disturbances in theatres in Milan, Genoa and London, so too the gala premiere of Parade at the Théâtre Châtelet provoked predictable hostility and outrage. As the German author Thomas Mann recorded in his novel Doktor Faustus: "In Paris, where the world's pulse beats, the path to glory is through scandal. A proper premiere must take place in such a way that during the evening most of the audience stands up several times, shouting "Outrage! Impudence! Ignominious buffoonery!', while five or six of those in the know exclaim from their box. 'How right! What wit! Divine! Superb! Bravo bravo!' For all this, no such evening has been halted before the end. Not even the most indignant would want this, since it is their pleasure to grow even more indignant instead. As for the small number of those in the know, in the eyes of all they retain a strange and inestimable prestige."

Before leaving Parade, however, it's worth nothing that the scandalous production saw Satie, Picasso and Cocteau pilloried by the press as enemy boches (or Huns), just as British Vorticists in London had found their work condemned as Teutonic. One particularly vitriolic review wounded Satie so deeply that he set about mailing insulting postcards to the critic in question, Jean Poueigh. As a result Poueigh successfully sued for libel ("famous blockhead" and "leader of all cretins" numbered among Satie's insults), and the composer only narrowly escaped a short prison sentence. These fractious postcards can be seen as Dada in spirit, although in the light of subsequent events it is ironic that in May 1917 the poet Guillaume Apollinaire coined the term surrealism (sur-réalisme) with specific reference to Parade.

If Futurism was a red herring, Satie's interest and involvement in the Dada anti-art movement was more concrete. At a Dada soirée in Zurich in 1919 several (thus far unidentified) piano works by Satie were performed by Suzanne Perottet, and that same year the French painter and poet Francis Picabia (then based in Zurich) included Satie (mis-spelled Satye) in his 'tableau-message' drawing Mouvement Dada. Sadly no record has yet emerged of exactly which works by Satie excited the interest of the original Dada cabal in Zurich. However, Satie received Dada founder Tristan Tzara's review Dada from Switzerland, and was present at Tzara's first public appearance in Paris on 23 January 1920. However, during this period Satie was concerned as much with Le Group des Six and an obligatory dalliance with the Communist Party as with the first stirrings of Paris Dada.

Significantly, Francis Picabia again praised Satie for having introduced Musique d'ameublement ('furniture' or background/environmental music) to the world in issue 3 of Der Dada, published in Berlin in April 1920. Inspired by a statement by the painter Henri Matisse (who posited an art form "without any distracting subject matter that might be compared to a good armchair"), Satie wrote his Musique d'ameublement (Sons industriels) between February and March 1920. Sons industriels comprised two short entr'actes for piano duet (Chez un 'bistrot' and Un salon), premiered by Satie and Darius Milhaud at the Galerie Barbazanges on 8 March. Both pieces were also performed between the three acts of Ruffian toujours, truand jamais, a comedy by Max Jacob. Although neither piece is particularly 'dada' in form or context, Picabia evidently discerned an artistic dimension in Satie's furniture music that went beyond the merely satirical.

In November 1920 Francis Picabia praised Satie once more, this time in abstract and punning form on the cover of issue 14 of his irregular Dada journal 391: Erik est Satierik. Rachilde se soigné au mercure. Les arbres ont des feuilles en été, pour se garantir du soleil. (Erik is Satierical. Rachilde treats herself with mercury. The trees have leaves in summer, to guarantee themselves sunlight.) Doubtless flattered, and always interested in new developments in art, the following year Satie himself began contributing playful aphorisms to 391. For example, this ribald pair from issue 15 in July 1921: J'aimerais jouer avec un piano qui aurait une grosse queue ("I'd like to play with a grandly-hung piano"). In French a grand piano is a piano a queue, although queue also means penis. The first is followed by a second: Ce n'est pas beau de parle du noeud de la question, which translates as "It's not nice to talk about the nub of the question", although noeud can also mean the glans of the penis.

The same mischievous neo-Dada spirit is also evident (at least in the title) of Sonnerie pour réveiller le bon gros Roi des Singes (lequel ne dort toujours que d'un oeil), a fanfare for two trumpets written in August 1921, but not performed at the time. The satirical (indeed Satierik) title translates as Fanfare to Awaken the good old King of the Monkeys (who sleeps always with one eye open).

Although Satie chose to participate in Dada, it seems likely that this was rooted in his general interest in modernism and the avant-garde, rather than a particular commitment to the volatile Dada creed. Certainly Satie signed no manifestoes, and appeared in no group photographs. Furthermore his relationship with the proto-Surrealist/Littérature faction lead by André Breton was doomed from the outset, since Breton disliked music generally, and Satie in particular on account of his humorous songs and links with Jean Cocteau. Indeed when Tzara had first arrived in Paris in January 1920, Breton warned him against making contact with Satie for this very reason, a petty act the composer never forgot. Incidently, Tzara and other Dadaists disrupted an intonarumori performance by Futurist brothers Luigi and Antonio Russolo at the Theatre des Champs Elysees in June 1921, though whether Satie was also in attendance is unknown.

As we shall see, André Breton failed in his attempt to seize control of the Dada faction in Paris, and Satie continued to be admired by a majority of the participating anti-artists. Aside from his contributions to 391, however, among the most celebrated is his creative encounter with the American artist and photographer Man Ray on the 'ready-made' object Cadeau (The Gift). Having arrived in Paris in July 1921, Man Ray staged his first Exposition Dada at the Librarie Six in December, and on the opening night enjoyed some 'hot grogs' with Satie at a café. Afterwards, as Ray later recalled:

"We passed a shop where various household utensils were spread out in front. I picked up a flat-iron, the kind used on coal stoves, asked Satie to come inside with me, where, with his help, I acquired a box of tacks and a tube of glue. Back at the gallery I glued a row of tacks to the smooth surface of the iron, titled it The Gift, and added it to the exhibition. This was my first Dada object in France."

Man Ray would also record that Satie was "the only musician who had eyes."

Remarkably, no Satie music from 1922 survives. Whether Satie was too busy with Dada and other literary activities to write music, or whether Dada disguised a dry period, remains a matter of conjecture. What is certain, however, is that Satie's participation in Paris Dada coincided with a period of crisis. Towards the end of 1921 a schism had developed between Tristan Tzara and the proto-Surrealists lead by Breton. Romanian-born poet Tzara was a true Dada original, having co-founded the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916, edited the journal Dada, before relocating to Paris in 1920. In February 1922 Breton attempted to wrest control of Dada in Paris, dismissing Tzara as a "publicity-hungry imposter" and announcing a Congress at which would define the parameters and direction of Dada. In what may have been a gesture towards neutrality, Satie was proposed as chairman, although the composer quickly sided with Tzara, and dismissed the Littérature faction as "faux-Dadas." Beset by infighting, the First Dada Congress of Paris never took place, and Satie instead presided over the public 'trial' and censure of Breton, held at the Closerie des Lilas restaurant in Montparnasse on 17 February.

In April Satie also contributed to Le Coeur a Barbe (The Bearded Heart), the first and last issue of poet Tristan Tzara's Dada journal-cum-manifesto. Alongside luminaries such as Marcel Duchamp, Philippe Soupault, Paul Eluard, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes and Tzara himself, Satie contributed Office de la Domesticité (Domestic Staff Office) together with further extracts from his itinerant column Cahiers d'un Mammifere (A Mammal's Notebooks), parts of which also appeared in numerous other avant-garde reviews at this time, including 391, Le Coq, L'Esprit Nouveau and Le Mouvement accéleré.

Although none of these writings amount to sur-réal music manifestoes, Satie's Dada credentials were further enhanced during 1922 by Kurt Schwitters and Theo van Doesburg, who arranged a series of Kleine Dada Soirées in Holland. These events included a performance of a Satie composition billed as Ragtime Dada, although in reality the piece was simply the ragtime section of Petite Fille Américaine, extracted from Parade. The poster is reproduced elsewhere in this booklet.

During the latter part of 1922 Satie seems to have devoted his energies to more orthodox articles (including appraisals of Debussy and Stravinsky for Vanity Fair), and in 1923 returned to composition with Divertissement (La Statue retrouvée) (another collaboration with Cocteau and Picasso), Tenture de Cabinet préfectoral (more furniture music), Ludions (a cycle of short comic songs) and recitatives for Charles Gounod's opera Le Médicin malgré lui. Had his involvement with Dada ceased at this point, it would be tempting to equate his spell astride the Dada hobby-horse with his brief Rosicrucian adventure in 1892. However, in July 1923 Satie would return to share a stage with Tzara, and took a ringside seat for an infamous art-riot every bit as scandalous as any Futurist serata, or the Parade premiere six years earlier.

On 6 July Satie and fellow pianist Marcelle Meyer performed Trois Morceaux en forme de poire at Tzara's Soirée du Coeur a barbe, staged at the Théatre Michel. While hardly a bespoke Dada composition (having been written in 1903 as a riposte to Debussy), Satie evidently considered these seven short pieces appropriate for a soirée which also featured works by members of Les Six and Stravinsky, as well as abstract films by Man Ray, Hans Richter and Charles Sheeler, poems by Apollinaire, Eluard, Soupault and Cocteau, and a performance of Tzara's play Le Couer a gaz. During the evening Breton, Louis Aragon and other Littératurati leapt onstage to attack Pierre de Massot, and Paul Eluard attacked Tzara, who subsequently sued for damages. Much bad-blood ensued, not least after Breton accused Tzara of having called in the police to intervene. Satie was due to participate in a second soirée the following evening, but elected to withdraw, writing to Tzara: "I like you a lot, but I don't like Breton and the others."

In any event the second show was cancelled by the management of the Théatre Michel. Although this cancellation effectively marked the end of Dada in Paris, Satie and Tzara remained on good terms, and even discussed a new operatic collaboration in February 1924, though these plans came to nothing. Francis Picabia too broke with the Breton band, and during this period his journal 391 ridiculed the Surrealist clique at length, Breton, Aragon and company having disrupted the June 15 performance of the ballet Mercure, scored by Satie with décor by Picasso, at which their shouts of "Bravo Picasso!" and "Down with Satie!" once more required police intervention.

For his part, Satie endorsed an article by Paul Dermée titled Pour en finir avec le Surréalisme (To have done with Surrealism once and for all), while offering the following sage 'advice' in 391 (Issue 18) in July 1924: Do not breathe without boiling your air beforehand… If you want to live long, live old… No more short hair: tear it out…

Rather more consequential was the collaboration by Satie and Picabia on Relâche, an radical ballet in two acts, with music by Satie, choreography by Jean Borlin and libretto, curtain, sets and costumes by Picabia. A true multi-media piece, Relâche (literally translated, 'theatre closure') also featured a cinematic interval, during which a surreal, comedic short film by René Clair (Entr'acte) was shown, also scored by Satie and published as Cinéma. Picadia promoted the production in 391 as an 'Instantaneist' ballet, Instantanism being his one-man antidote to Surrealism, although his comments on Relâche betray a persistent Dada temperament: "It is perpetual movement, life, it is the minute of happiness we all seek; it is light, richness, luxury, love far from prudish conventions; without morality for fools, without artistic research for the snobs."

Satie wrote the score for Relâche between July and October 1924, and the music for the interval film Entr'acte (in which he also appeared) in November. The version on this CD, arranged for piano for four hands by Darius Milhaud, was published as Cinéma that same year. The piano arrangement for Relâche is by Satie himself. Some of this work was hurried, and in Relâche Satie incorporated repeating crosswise phrases, as well as elements of several tunes popular with soldiers and students, apparently in an act of playful anti-art provocation: "In it I depict characters who loaf about. For this reason I have used popular themes. These themes are strongly 'evocative', one could even say special. The 'scrupulous' and other 'moralists' will reproach me for using these themes. I have no need to concern myself with their opinions. Reactionary 'blockheads' will issue their fulminations. Bah! I tolerate only one judge: the public. They will recognize these themes and not be at all shocked to hear them… Anyone who fears these 'evocations' should stay away… I would not wish to make a lobster blush, nor an egg."

Relâche should have been premiered by the Swedish Ballet at the Théatre des Champs-Elysees on 27 November 1924. An advert in 391 (Issue 19) advised members of the audience to bring dark glasses and earplugs, and ex-Dadaists among them were invited to shout "Down with Satie!" and "Down with Picabia!" On the night the expectant crowd outside the theatre was estimated at 3000, and included Tzara, Picasso, Brancusi, Milhaud, Duchamp and Man Ray (the latter pair are seen playing chess in the filmed Entr'acte). However, after sudden illness afflicted the principal dancer-choreographer, Jean Borlin, the performance was cancelled, giving rise to widespread rumours that Relâche ('theatre closure', lest we forget) was just another Dada-inspired prank.

The show finally opened on 4 December and provoked no small degree of scandal. It began with a brief filmed prelude by René Clair, which showed Satie and Picabia bouncing like insects on the roof of the theatre before firing a cannon into the city of Paris. During the first act, the dancers performed against a literally dazzling backdrop comprising 370 reflective metal discs, each equipped with a light that was dimmed and illuminated according to the pace of the music, at times blinding the audience. After the filmed intermission Entr'acte, the second act saw large and provocative signs appear above the stage, one of which read: "If you are unhappy, whistles are on sale at the box office." There were indeed 1000 whistles available, though none were purchased. The finale was a mimed song titled The Dog's Tail, and for their curtain call Satie and Picabia drove onstage in a tiny 5CV Citroen car, resplendent in jewels and furs.

The raucous ovation astounded most of the critics, however, and Relâche ran for just twelve performances before closing. Some deemed it a deliberate artistic suicide note on the part of the composer, via low cabaret and vulgar novelty. Indeed Satie's score was lost for many years, although Clair's Entr'acte (with cannon prelude added) was immediately acknowledged as a milestone in avant-garde cinema. While hardly artistic suicide, Relâche would prove to be Satie's last ballet score, and Cinéma his last musical work, since after January 1925 he suffered a rapid decline in health due to pleurisy and cirrhosis of the liver. Refusing to see those with whom he had quarreled, he died in 1 July, aged 59.

With good grace, Andre Breton admitted later in life that he had been wrong about Satie and his work. Certainly the 840 repetitions of Vexations make it one of the most sur-real musical works in the avant-garde cannon, and far more deserving of Apollinaire's apt phrase than Parade. Indeed this points to a paradox of sorts. Never a Surrealist (or faux-Dada), Satie's music was invariably surreal, yet seldom obviously Dadaist in nature - if the sound of Dada can be said to be located somewhere between the phonetic poems of Schwitters, Tzara et al (Die Sonata in Urlauten, L'Amiral cherche une maison a louer) and Marcel Duchamp's random musical erratum' of circa 1913, La mariée mise a nu par ses célibataires, meme.

Then again, there are as many different interpretations of Dada as there were Dada artists, so much so that Dada may be said to be in the eye of the beholder. John Cage, the first significant posthumous champion of Satie, and who in effect rediscovered Vexations in 1949, deserves the last word on the subject: "To be interested in Satie one must… give up illusions about ideas of order, expressions of sentiment, and all the rest of our inherited claptrap. It's not a question of Satie's relevance. He's indispensable."

James Hayward
October 2006

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