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

and beyondAuthor(s): David DrewSource: Tempo , New Series, No. 217 (Jul., 2001), pp. 7-21Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/946867Accessed: 25-04-2016 17:14 UTC

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2/16

David Drew

The Savage Parade-from Satie, Cocteau, and Picasso

to the Britten of Les Illuminations and beyond

This article arose from the author's review of Daniel

Albright's recent study Untwisting the Serpent -

Modernism in Music, Literature and Other Arts

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

The review, now published in the Spring 2001 Issue of

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

trates on Schoenberg and Weill, while the article explores

other aspects of Modernism considered by Albright.

Tempo's own formal review of Untwisting the

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

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

and Massine's Parade - the Three Managers of a

travelling theatre advertise their show to the

passing crowd by presenting excerpts on the

platform outside. Their efforts are in vain. The

public remains indifferent, and not a ticket is sold.

That's Modernism in primary school - long

before it learned how to market itself, and

upped the commission fees.

The Princess Ghika records in her joural of 5

July 1922 that the reception that opened the

social season in Roscoff had been 'magnificent' -

70 beautiful, famous, and titled guests; and the

servants were 'perfect'. The Princess had worn

her black-crepe peplum, 'a unique, wonderful

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

strings of pearls were 'simply endless... the

fiancee of Prince Coloradi-Mansfield alone wore

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

musicians: Auric, Poulenc, and Erik Satie. They

played their works'.'

Satie, the 'old Bolshevik' as he liked to call

himself, belonged elsewhere but knew how to

behave in such company. For the Princesse de

Polignac, born of the sewing-machine Singers,

he began Socrate in the winter of 1918-19, and

felt he owed his return to 'classical simplicity,

with a modern sensibility' to his 'Cubist friends.

Bless them'. Through Socrate he would meet and

become friends with Brancusi; but Parade had

already brought him Picasso, whose friendship

was more important to him than the fame that

Parade had also brought him.

'Compared with Petrushka, does my little

Parade stand up?', he mused.' Having announced

in November 19202 that Paul et Virginie, a 3-act

comic opera after a play by Cocteau and

Raymond Radiguet, would be his last work and

that he would then 'devote himself entirely to

the cause of young musicians', he forgot about

the opera but not the young musicians, and

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

year before his death.

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

by Lamartine, and dedicated it to the memory of

Debussy 'en souvenir d'une admirative et douce

amitie de trente ans'. The song's craggy and

desolate harmony inhabits the same landscape of

bereavement as the poem: the loss of one individ-

ual seems suddenly to have depopulated and

denuded the entire planet. 'Elegie' subsequently

became the first in a cycle of four songs, where

it is followed by settings of Cocteau and of an

18th-century verse dedicated to 'le petit trou',

and balanced at the end by an 'Adieu' - a gently

comical farewell to the past, on a poem by

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

Radiguet.

For Satie, the void left by Debussy was all the

greater for their previous painful estrangement

during the year that had remained to Debussy

after the success and scandal of Parade. To attempt

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

Jean Gris as well as Picasso and Brancusi - was

wiser than attempting a Paul et Virgine that would

have to find its feet in the continuing presence of

Pelleas et Melisande. Debussy, his near-contemp-

orary, was irreplaceable. Stravinsky, his junior by

16 years but similarly devoted to Debussy's

memory, was to become his new exemplar-

another who could do no wrong.

By 1924, Satie's devotion to Stravinsky and his

music was sufficient to ensure that his two ballet

scores would in no sense compete. As if sensing

that an Apollo and a Persephone were reserved for a

future well beyond his own lifespan, he dispatches

his anorexic Mercure to other climes. Under a

starry night-sky, Apollo exchanges tendresses with

Venus, and around them dance the signs of the

zodiac. Mercury appears. Jealous of the enamoured

Apollo, he threatens his life, relents, and makes

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

It is the agile Mercury, not Terpsichore, who



3/16

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

devises the dances for Bacchus's party. Among

the guests is Persephone. In the finale, she is

abducted by Pluto and Chaos, who carry her off

to Hades to the strains of a cheerful alla marcia in

the sort of F majorish mode associated with

Mercury's first entry.

Commissioned by the Count de Beaumont,

designed by Picasso, choreographed by Massine,

and presented at the Cigale music-hall, Mercure had

begun life with a scandal: led by Louis Aragon

and Andre Breton, the Surrealists mounted a

demonstration in favour of Picasso, and Aragon,

with the police close at his heels, had jumped

on to the stage shouting 'Bravo Picasso, down

with Satie '. The Surrealists duly published their

manifesto as Hommage a Picasso. It pointedly

ignored Massine and Satie, and proclaimed

Picasso as the true representative of Modernism.

Among the signatories were Poulenc and Auric,

the two young friends with whom Satie had

quarrelled a year before.3

Most of the missives Satie entrusts to his

messenger-god in Mercure are self-addressed. But

the one received by the Three Graces as they

are bathing is a wholly believable billet doux.

Marked 'Tres calme (sans aucune nuance)', its

limpid sequences distract their attention while the

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

stealing their pearls.4 Satie's score did at least have

that Apollonian moment to offer Picasso - eight

bars and a repeat, nothing more. The subsequent

'Polka des lettres' delivers nothing that might

interfere with Picasso's quite separate designs.

In Parade Picasso had invaded the theatre for

the first time (Cocteau would claim he pushed

him), and his popularized cubism had been

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

are put aside, while wooden and wickerwork

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

as Gertrude Stein describes it, 'is written, so

simply written, no painting, pure calligraphy'.5

Himselfa meticulous and inventive calligrapher,

Satie was an ideal table-companion for Picasso

wherever paper tablecloths and napkins were

available. 'Their' Mercury can only have taken

wing in the kind of cafes Satie frequented ('... to

give a moral example and appear respectable, I

say: Young folk, don't go to cafes: listen to the

solemn words of a man who has spent too much

time in them, in his opinion - but doesn't regret

it, the monster ') The Surrealists had other

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

cloths by the two conspirators.

Who was the fleet-footed and light-fingered

artist who had brought Satie and Picasso together

for Parade, and then made such a nuisance of him-

self? At the masked balls so lavishly mounted for

Parisian high society by Count de Beaumont and

lesser hosts of the day, there was a ubiquitous

guest who made himself immediately recognis-

able by wearing above his mask the helmet of

Mercury, and moving, wand in hand, through

the crowds so swiftly and lightly that he seemed

to be airbom. Satie, the uninvited, knew him best:

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

ing (for the thousandth time) the miseries which

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

up, rolled him flat, and raked him over while he

was writing this work - three lines long....'"

Thus Satie in Picabia's 391, only a month

after the premiere of Mercure in June 1924. Even

more telling is the message he had published

back in February:

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

....Yes.... Picasso and I were onlookers (unknowingly

of course)....

The Surrealists who demonstrated against Satie

and 'his' Mercure had missed the one point that

would have appealed to them. 75 years later it's

still being missed. Cocteau, seeing himself as

discoverer of Rimbaud, would have liked to be,

and expected to be, one of the Surrealists' heroes;

but try as he might, he never became one.

Mercure put him in his place as far as Picasso and

Satie were independently concerned. But their

private demonstrations were more thoughtful

than the public ones. The pros as well as the

cons and the conneries were being weighed up:

Picasso seems to be recalling Cocteau's notable

penmanship, and preserving it, like the erasures

of a palimpsest, beneath his calligraphic rendering

of Mercure; meanwhile, and much more

prominently, Satie gives Le Coq et l'Harlequin

another hearing, and in the end acquits Cocteau

with a warning.

In Giovanni Bologna's ever-popular Late

Renaissance bronze, the naked and helmeted

messenger-god with raised right arm and verti-

cally extended index finger is bearing in his left

hand the traditional caduceus or wand. Around

the wand are entwined two snakes. As 'modern'

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

age, the snakes' double helix lies beyond

Professor Albright's carefully delimited field in

Untwisting the Serpent. It is not the Bargello's

bronze that inspires his title, but the Vatican's

statue of Laoco6n (and his two sons) grappling with

the sea-serpents. Hence the central importance

for him, as for present and past generations of

scholars, critics, and aestheticians, of Lessing's essay

of 1766- Laocoon, or On the Limits of Painting



4/16

The Savage Parade -from Satie, Cocteau, and Picasso

and Poetry. The qualities that distinguish

Untwisting the Serpent from other studies in the

same field are in the first place idiosyncratic and

frankly hedonistic. 'This book', declares Albright

on an early page, 'aims to please'.

And so did Cocteau. Albright's quest 'for the

fundamental units in the mixed arts' is a neo-

Cocteauesque tour deforce, reconciling the timeless

requirements of well-informed and intelligent

entertainment with the intellectual demands of a

conscious if not self-conscious modernity, here

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

quest divides into two supposedly complemen-

tary strands - 'Figures of Consonance among the

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

The latter are theoretically resolved at the close

by the great Paris-American C major concord of

the Thomson-Stein opera Four Saints in Three Acts.

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

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

amen to that is justified by his rigorous analysis

of iterative and differentiating patterns in Stein

and in Thomson (who understood, better than

many latter-day minimalists, how to make the

static move and be moving).

In the retrospective mirror of Four Saints it

becomes easier to understand Albright's decision

to begin the second part of his quest with Parade.

Generous and well-deserved tribute is paid to

Dorothy Menaker Rothschild's monograph of

1991 and her comprehensive investigation of

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

the matter of design, Albright concentrates on

what he calls the 'whorls' or 'apostrophes' char-

acteristic of Picasso's costumes for the Chinese

Conjuror and the Acrobat. Describing them as

'tantalisingly enigmatic', he promises to show

that the whorl is the 'master emblem of the

whole ballet, a veiled impudence'.

The plainer facts are these: in February 1917

Picasso and Cocteau joined the Ballets Russes

on their Italian tour to work on the forthcoming

production of Parade; they visited Pompeii and

other Roman sites; and taking the slogan 'be

vulgar ' as their motto, vied with each other in

emulating the phallic motifs common to graffiti

of every age and place. According to Albright -

on what authority is not clear -'they seem to

have spent a good deal of time' on this particular

recreation. In any event, when Picasso recounted

his dream of an erect penis improbably curling

back on itself (like some upended interrogation

mark), Cocteau made an inelegant sketch of it.

Reproduced by Rothschild and re-exposed in

Untwisting the Serpent, it is construed as a proto-

surrealist or dadaist excursion from self-fellatio

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

seen 'curling above' the groin of the Acrobat in

Picasso's costume-design is duly unveiled as the

impudent 'master emblem of the whole ballet'.

It would perhaps be sentimental to remark that

there's another and larger 'whorl' curling round

the Acrobat's heart area (master emblems should

aim higher than that, or lower). Take your

choice - one reader's impudent whorl could be

another's humdrum violin scroll, and that, after

all, had been a basic element in the iconography

of Picasso's Cubism since 1911.

The coiled tale of Picasso's Acrobat, and

Cocteau's too, has many endings. Untwisting the

Serpent has another one up its sleeve, as we shall

discover. But the discordancies within the col-

laboration remain the primary concern. Gide's

comment on Cocteau (at the time of the 1920

revival) is more benign than Satie's seven years

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

Picasso, and the music by Satie, but he wonders

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

Greater artists than Cocteau - Stravinsky for one,

Brecht for another - were to entertain similar

fancies about their creative partners. Yet the

proprietory instinct may not be entirely misguid-

ed. Satie for his part was unfair, and deliberately

so, in attributing to Cocteau only the few lines

of the printed scenario.

Already in 1918, Le Coq et l'Harlequin had

provided evidence of Cocteau's wider and

deeper involvement with Parade than the final

and concise version of the scenario suggests.

That evidence has been amply corroborated by

the intensive researches that began in the early

1970s, some ten years after Cocteau's death in

1963. By then Satie's music had infiltrated the

'subculture' of the day; and as soon as its public

and commercial success was confirmed - a

process not unconnected with the expiry of

copyrights - scholarly attention was drawn to it.

Citing Steegmuller's fine Cocteau (1986) as well

as Rothschild's monograph, Albright leaves no

doubt as to the extent and suggestiveness of

Cocteau's draft scenario and its appendages. Yet

his selections of evidence are inevitably restricted

by the preemptive 'Figures of Dissonance' rubric

and its tendency - reinforced by a well-chosen

quote from Artaud - to over-determine his

conclusion that in Parade the 'constituent arts

refuse to fit together'. It therefore becomes

obligatory to argue, or rather, to assert, that

Satie 'paid little attention to the content of

Parade, as Cocteau imagined it'.

Surprisingly, there is no mention in Untwisting

the Serpent of an artist and stage-designer who

played a crucial role as intermediary between

Cocteau and Satie. Valentine Gross - later married



5/16


to the artist Jean Hugo, with whom Cocteau

was to collaborate on several ballets and stage

pieces - was held in the highest esteem and

affection by Satie. Cocteau recognized that her

diplomatic powers were superior to his. In the

edited form quoted by Ornella Volta in her

invaluable SATIE - As Seen Through His Letters,

Cocteau's letter to Gross (dated 4 September

1916) begins as follows:

Make dear Satie understand, through the haze of

aperitifs, that I do after all have some part in Parade

and that he's not alone with Picasso. I believe Parade

to be a kind of renewal of the theatre and not a mere

'opportunity' for music. He hurts my feelings when

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

you I follow You're my master ' He seems to be

hearing for the first time things I've been telling him

over and over again.'

Later in the same letter, however, Cocteau

reports that 'Picasso is thinking up wonders and

Satie's American Girl is almost finished'.The

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

unexpected shaft of light that seems to indicate

something of what Satie may have grasped 'for

the first time':

The little American girl in Parade makes her entry like

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

the dentist's office - and there's this little song: 'Tic

tic tic the ti-ta-nic, sinking lights ablaze into the sea'.9

It's a song worth remembering. Though Satie

never set it, Cocteau inscribed his text at the

appropriate point in the non-autograph copy of

the full score.

Parade was first published in Satie's own

arrangement for piano 4 hands. In a place of

honour, after the title page and before Cocteau's

brief synopsis, comes an unheaded manifesto

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

Picasso's in the second sentence. Although

Cocteau's name does not appear, his style and

taste are omnipresent, and several formulations

are traceable directly to him. The only acknow-

ledged author, 18 years old at the time of the

premiere, is Georges Auric.

Satie's art, declares Auric, affords 'a new vision

of the individual, at the height of his powers,

pitching camp beside astonishing personages who

make one dream of Rimbaud and predict, with

some foreboding, a future without boredom'.

In the 'Parade' of Les Illuminations the 'etonnants

personnages' are innumerable - 'Chinese,

Hottentots, gypsies, idiots, hyenas, Molochs, old

insanities, sinister demons, all mingling their

popular and maternal tricks"' with bestial poses

and caresses'. The Managers of Satie's and

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

and it's the Chinese Conjuror who begins their

outdoor show. The second turn is introduced

by the Manager from New York, wearing the

cubist skyscraper designed by Picasso; it features

the popular but hardly maternal tricks of the

American Girl - a proto-Nabokovian ingenue,

as posed for the famous photo of the original

dancer, Marie Chabelska.

According to Cocteau, the American Girl

knows all about Chaplin and the unending Perils

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

('chansons "bonnes filles"') won't fit the bill;

instead there's a 'Packet-boat Ragtime' that

predicts a 'future without boredom', until the

orchestral coda's sirens and submarine gurgles

remind the American Girl in her sailor-neck

shirt of the 'little song' Cocteau had intended

for her.

The last tricks are performed by the two

Acrobats, and surrealistically listed by Cocteau

in a note for Satie that begins thus:

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

archangel Gabriel balancing himself on the edge of the

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

at the bottom of the sea..."

Already alerted to the 'master emblem for the

whole ballet' and its veiled impudence, the reader

of Untwisting the Serpent is likely to emulate the

author's dash for the diver's lamp. What con-

nexion, asks Albright, might archangels and the

Cities of the Plain have with Cocteau's

Acrobats? An answer is found in Chabrier's and

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

of their two jeux d'esprit of 1863-64. (Like its

companion piece, Fisch-Ton-Kan first saw the

light of day in the subfusc Paris of April 1941).

Chabrier's tender lament for a fallen acrobat and

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

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

drinking song of 1920 - leads Albright to a song

in which the impudence of Verlaine's text is

'even more outrageous'. So far so good. But the

trail comes to an abrupt stop: 'the homosexual

subtext of trapeze art was entirely excluded from

the finished Parade'.'2

Reading between the lines is often less

rewarding than reading the lines themselves.

One might, for instance, start with the first word

in Cocteau's memo to Satie, and somersault

backwards to 1899 and Louis Ganne's successful

operetta, Les Saltimbanques. The Circus Director,

Malicorne, has brought his circus to a field near

Versailles. In front of his box-office is an apron-

stage, on which he presents his artistes to the

public. The local Baron has his eye on Mme.

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



6/16

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

general public is bored with the parade, and

Malicorne tells his singer to ginger things up.

Her chanson is a hit. Dispatched to collect cash

from the crowd, she rejects a generous offer from

an aristocratic young Lieutenant, and boxes the

ears of the Baron, who has propositioned her.

Malicorne is beside himself. His Strong Man,

Grand Pingouin, takes the Singer under his wing,

and together with the Clown and the Actress,

they abscond. After alternative employment in

Normandy - as street-singer, dog-clipper, chair-

mender, and fortune-teller respectively - the four

return to the circus, heavily disguised as the

long-overdue Italian acrobat troupe, the

Gigolettis. When the real Gigolettis arrive,

things look bad for the impostors. The ensuing

complications are resolved by the Comte des

Etiquettes, who entertains the disappointed

Gigolettis at his Chateau, and invites Malicorne

to pitch his circus in the grounds. To his great

surprise Malicome recognizes among the Count's

guests a familiar face from distant times: that of

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

assembled company he announces that his errant

Singer, one of the false and recently un-masked

Gigolettis, is the long-lost love-child of Mme. B.

and the Count. Socially upgraded, the Singer is

now free to marry the Lieutenant. The Count,

overjoyed, buys the circus from Malicorne and

gives it to the Clown, the Strong Man, and the

Actress.

Innocent fun, to be sure, and further removed

from Picasso's sorrowful or threatening Saltim-

banques of the early 1900s than from the Cirque

Medrano to which Cocteau clearly refers at the start

of his memo to Satie. In March 1915 Cocteau

had been planning a production (by Gabriel

Astruc) of his new version of A Midsummer

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

Medrano, with real circus clowns (the Fratellinis),

and a new score specially written for the circus

orchestra. In charge of the musical arrangements

was Edgar Varese, who had returned to Paris in

1913 after several years in Berlin working with

Max Reinhardt (among others). On patriotic

grounds as on others, Cocteau's circus Dream

ranged itself against Reinhardt's historic pre-war

productions in Vienna and Berlin, and therefore

against Mendelssohn's score. Satie was to provide

a five-piece framework; and additional numbers

were requested from Ravel, Stravinsky, and

Florent Schmitt.

The project came to nothing. The Cocteau

translation has vanished, and the only remnants

are the five little pieces Satie drafted in full score.

The draft is dated 2 April 1915, but the final

'Retraite' is incomplete. A year later Varese

asked Satie to send him the score in New York

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

Satie sent something else instead, and the pieces

remained in manuscript, untouched, until his

death. Subsequently completed and re-arranged

(by Milhaud), they were published as Cinq

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

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

town soldiers and huntsmen, they are musically

negligible, but critically important in relation to

Cocteau's ideas for Parade only a year later.

'There we may rehearse more obscenely and

courageously', Bottom the Weaver had once

declared, 'Take pains; be perfect; adieu'.

Satie hadn't taken pains. On the contrary, he

had been cast as Cocteau's Peter Quince, and

seems almost deliberately to have botched what

little carpentry was required of him. By 1916 he

was not for hire on Cocteau's terms. Only in his

dingy room in the suburb of Arceuil-Cachan -

a room from which his 'artistic' friends were

strictly excluded - could he read Les Illuminations

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

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

Other doors, other keys. Albright has many, and

one of his doors is Artaud's. Cocteau's 'flimsy ante-

theatre', he writes, 'advertises an unseen theatre of

dismemberment, human sacrifice, and bestiality';

but Cocteau, he continues, took Rimbaud's

goodies and put them in the foreground, while

suppressing his baddies (the Molochs, the bleeding

faces, and so forth), which nevertheless 'bulge

out from behind a curtain that is never opened'.

'Never' is a matter of opinion. In the silence and

solitude of his rooms, Satie could and surely did

open the curtain. Up in colourful Montmartre,

it's a different scene.

The picture is clearer in the black and white

of the piano-duet version, where Albright's

fanciful suggestion that 'Parade is what Erwartung

sounds like with its tongue torn out' can finally

be abandoned. The piano describes the view from

22 rue Cauchy. But up in the Montmartre

fairground, a circus orchestra larger than the

Medrano's has acquired - with help from Cocteau

and perhaps Varese - a Modernist-Futurist

array of percussion and scenic noise. Having

liberally annotated the master-copy of Satie's

score, Cocteau is able to watch the savage

parade from a new vantage-point; and he knows

exactly where it has come from. 'The noises of

war were never far from the ears of Paris', writes

Albright, 'and Parade's method of dealing with

terror through cultivated apathy makes it one

of the profoundest artistic responses to the

Great War'.

No stranger to terror, Satie found a better way



7/16


of dealing with it than providing a 'cultivated'

excuse for the defeatism, surrender, and collab-

oration that would one day blight his homeland.t

As if drawn on the empty pages at the end of

the Goyaesque war pieces for two pianos which

Debussy called En blanc et noir (1915), the key-

board Parade is the plan and model for the

orchestra's offensive-defensive emplacement.

The verticals are rigid, the horizontals are

mobile platforms.

For Albright and his generously acknowledged

predecessors, Parade recommends itself as a

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

garde art'. Citing Jeffrey Weiss's 1994 study

The Popular Culture of Moder Art: Picasso, Duchamp,

and Avant Gardism, he notes that by 1917 Picasso

was aware that the cubist painter had 'become a

figure of fun on the popular stage', and concludes

that he made Parade his excuse for joining the

enemy and showing that he too could 'enjoy

weightlessness and frivolity'.

In today's fashionable context of a modernist

critique of modernism by way of anti-elitist

popularism, Parade is a vote-winner and Mercure is

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

they are spoiled by the subject and its suspect

neo-classicism; and even if the Cocteau satire is

recognized for what it is - a joke for insiders,

and one that explains why Satie and Picasso went

to such lengths in keeping their choice of subject

a secret even from the Count de Beaumont - its

point is now lost beyond recovery. Moreover,

Satie himself dispenses with it in the final scene's

'Nouvelle Danse', where an almost Faure-like

chamber-music (and late Faure at that) pays

sincere tribute to Bacchus's choreographer and

Satie's message-bringer. Mercure is that notable

rarity, a mixed-art collaboration from which one

of the principals is absent throughout.

In Untwisting the Serpent there's a jump-cut

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

title is the conventional billboard notice indicating

that the theatre in question is closed. Which

theatre did Satie and Picabia have in mind?

Cocteau's road show of 1917, once its Managers

had been bankrupted or arrested? Etienne de

Beaumont's, now that Mercure and other treasures

had been sold to an unenthusiastic Diaghilev?

Or just the theatre that will soon re-open as a

cinema and eventually end up as a bingo-hall?

Relache resisted closure by embracing the movies.

Rene Clair's Entr'acte cinematographique is much

longer than Act 1 of the ballet, and the same

length as Act 2. Not only did it outlive the

ballet itself; after its rediscovery in 1945, solemn

analyses by French and Italian cineastes preceded

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

university departments. Then came a big-screen

re-mastering with analogue recording, and finally

a digital epithalamium for endless replay.

In the present electronic circumstances,

Reldche remains the poor relation from a bygone

age. Regrettably but not surprisingly, Untwisting

the Serpent perpetuates the notion that the ballet

score is cut from the same matrices as the film

score' whereas in actual fact it is so direct a

development from Mercure that it could almost

be performed as its continuation. Relache is as

different from Entr'acte as Mercure from Parade.

Combining Picasso's former functions as

designer with Cocteau's as scenarist, the painter

Francis Picabia was an ideal partner for Satie in

1924 (as Tate Modem can show). Reldche 'doesn't

want to say anything', he declares in his fore-

word to the piano reduction of the score,

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

to recall that Satie had 'loved' Relache much as

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

is no mention of Entr'acte - ostensibly because it

was published separately in Milhaud's piano-duet

arrangement, but also, surely, because neither

love nor kirsch, nor slices of lamb, belong in the

machinery of a score that ignores the film

images and montages even or especially at the

two junctures where it pretends to follow them:

the dancer whose pasjetes on plate-glass are filmed

from below in slow motion, and the 'hilarious'

funeral procession with the runaway hearse.

Detached from the film and heard with full

musical attention as a quite un-Schoenbergian

'Accompaniment to an Imaginary Film Scene',

Entr'acte reveals itself as Satie's most radical

score - the one closest to a 'future without

boredom' that's also without a musical culture

worth hanging on to. Blocks of static harmony

and vestigial melody are repeated, juxtaposed, and

re-arranged according to a rhythmic and tonal

programme whose purpose is to create an effect

of randomness while raising the expectation of an

unforeseeable denouement. The abrupt change

of gearing at mid-point coincides with the start

of the film's funeral procession, and of the

music's expansion and extension in quite another

direction. For the second time in his life, Satie is

recalling Chopin's great funeral-march, but this

time he is in earnest: there's an orchestra to

prove it, and harmonized plainsong to re-affirm

it. As if summoned from his own cathedrale

engloutie, memories of the Angelus and the Messe

des Pauvres - the quotidian and the spiritual - are

thrust aside by the last repeat of the familiar

ritomello, with a new continuation leading to its



8/16


own annihilation: a harmonic/rhythmic black-

out supposedly synchronized with Clair's parting

shot and end-title.

Only the inane logic of the final A major triad

supports the pretence that such a music celebrates

the resurrection of the top-hatted dancer and

choreographer who has finally emerged from the

helter-skelter coffin. The second act of Relache is

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

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

curtain-music for Reldche, in which Satie returns

to Act 1 and its threefold reminder, crescendo, of

the motif for the Chinese Conjuror in Parade.

The Reldche that 'doesn't wish to say anything'

has actually been saying something quite simple

about a complex question: fixed identity, binary

opposition, and the familiar stereotypes of gender.

The variation-techniques that distinguish Relache

from Mercure are precisely those which in the

later score quietly subvert the traditional mascu-

line/feminine typologies of the Conservatoires.

Figures identified in Picabia's scenario as L'Homme

and La Femme are encouraged to exchange

musical roles in which dressing, undressing, and

cross-dressing are so effortlessly accomplished

that a staging could be superfluous or worse. A

climactic and wholly serious pas de deux in 5/4

time is laconically identified as 'Dance of the

Wheelbarrow'.

In 1949, two years before his death, Constant

Lambert included Mercure in an all-Satie pro-

gramme he conducted for the BBC. Yet it was

Reldche and its gender-poetics that related more

closely to his own forthcoming project: the

ballet Tiresias (1950-51).

According to the version of the myth

Lambert drew upon, Tiresias encounters two

snakes as they are mating, strikes the female one

and finds himself transformed into a woman.

Seven years later she meets the same copulating

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

Zeus and Hera call upon him to settle a dispute

as to the relative pleasures of sex for woman and

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

favour of women. Hera, who had argued the

contrary, strikes him blind; Zeus compensates

him with the gift of prophecy.

Lambert had composed nothing substantial

since the Horoscope ballet of 1937, and was in poor

health by the late 1940s. Tiresias was planned in

1950 as a satirical piece lasting half an hour. It

ended as a serious and confused one lasting more

than twice as long - most of it orchestrated at

the last moment by a team of faithful friends and

colleagues, including Elisabeth Lutyens and Denis

Aplvor. The premiere in July 1951 was poorly

received, and Lambert died a few weeks later.

The score of Tiresias remains in manuscript to

this day, and with good reason: after a promising

start - well matched by the original backdrop

depicting a massive Cretan bull, before which the

female athletes performed the gymnastics devised

by Frederick Ashton - the score already begins

to fall apart. Despite an assertively 'masculine'

motto-theme that has its corresponding inversion,

there is little integration and no sign of any lessons

that might profitably have been learned from

Reldche or indeed from the highly successful Opera-

bouffe - a form Lambert appreciated - which had

had its premiere in Paris less than three years

before the inception of Tiresias.

Poulenc had composed Les mamelles de Tiresias

in 1944-45, the year of the Liberation. A land-

mark piece without being intended as such, it

now has a special place in the affections of its

composer's countless admirers, and rightly so.

Apollinaire had written his so-called 'drame

surrealiste' of the same name in 1903, but it had

remained unpublished until 1917, the year of

Parade. A friend and vociferous supporter of Satie

(his senior by 14 years), Apollinaire was chosen

by Diaghilev to write an introductory note on

Parade - there's a fine sketch by Larionov of

them sitting together at a rehearsal. The note

duly appeared in the Paris press a week before

the premiere on 18 May 1917. A month later

Apollinaire's Les mamelles de Tiresias was staged

for the first time - without the incidental music

by Satie he had originally been hoping for.

Around that time, or soon after, Poulenc was

introduced to the poet by Valentine Gross.'4

The first of his posthumous collaborations with

the poet was Le Bestiaire (au cortege d'Orphee).

Not quite the last, but much the most ambitious,

was Les Mamelles de Tiresias.

For Albright's purposes in Untwisting the Serpent,

the play and the music are a godsend worthy of

Four Saints in Three Acts. (Bernanos and

Dialogues des Carmelites don't rate a mention -

but neither does the Cocteau of La voix

humaine). Technically, his reading of the play

lives up to his description of it as 'the ideal

Saussurean drama'. In itself a bravura exercise, it

fulfils a higher purpose on the musical level,

where a form of double hearing and reflective

memory acutely sympathetic to Poulenc's own,

leads to the very heart of what makes Les

mamelles de Tiresias so much more than the

entertainment it undeniably is. 'Ma blessure'

(my wound) groans the tree in Ravel's L'enfant

et les sortileges; 'bois meurtri' (murdered woods)

reply the a cappella chorus in Poulenc's setting

of Eluard's wartime and war-damaged poems,

Un soir de neige (1944). Beyond question, Poulenc



9/16


was at some level recalling Ravel - though

whether that constitutes a 'theft' is another

question. In any event, the intertextual reference

proves revelatory in relation to the passage

following the Husband's expostulations about

the male figure who has seemingly usurped the

role of his wife. Tiresias concedes that although he

is no longer a woman, he remains Th6erse. Here

(as a music example unerringly demonstrates)

the voices of Ravel's wounded tree and

Poulenc-Eluard's murdered woods are an audible

background, with implications deeper than even

Albright suggests. Were Therese simply 'to insist

on her injured dignity', Poulenc's gesture would

be disproportionate; for dignity and its injuries

have been the stuff of comic opera since its

beginnings. In the blind but prophetic eye of

the classical Tiresias, and surely in Poulenc's

understanding, Th&erse's loss of her rights and

satisfactions is a real injury, a deep wound.

The British premiere of Les mamelles de Tiresias

was given by the English Opera Group at the

Aldeburgh Festival on 13 June 1958, in a pro-

duction designed (like its EOG predecessors) for

the tiny Jubilee Hall. The director and translator

was John Cranko, who had recently been

responsible for the scenario and choreo-graphy

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

Pagodas (Royal Opera House, Covent Garden,

January 1957). Poulenc's quite lavish orchestra-

tion was replaced by an arrangement for two

pianos, prepared for the occasion by Britten,

who was also one of the pianists. Poulenc was to

have partnered him, but had had to withdraw,

and was unable to attend the Festival.

Poulenc's and Britten's friendship dated back to

their first musical collaboration in January 1945,

when they appeared together on the platform of

the Royal Albert Hall (London) as joint soloists

in Poulenc's 2-piano concerto (1932) - the centre-

piece in one of three concerts sponsored by de

Gaulle's French National Committee. Three

months later Britten and Pears visited Paris for

the first time since the liberation, and gave three

concerts under the auspices of the British

Council. One of their programmes included the

French premiere of Britten's Les Illuminations -

the cycle he had begun in England in March

1939, and completed in Amityville, Long Island,

in October 1939.

On 21 January 1954 Britten wrote to Poulenc

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

so much about the wonderful lecture of [sic]

'Les Six' that you give with exquisite illustra-

tions on the piano [...]. If the Couraud Choir

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

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

case perhaps you would accompany them on the

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

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

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

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

commends to Poulenc 'un grand ami de moi',

John Cranko, and mentions the ballet project

that would become The Prince of the Pagodas.

Work on the ballet began early in 1955, very

soon after Poulenc's 2-piano concerto - with its

Balinese daydreams - had reunited Britten and

Poulenc in a performance conducted by John

Pritchard (at the Royal Festival Hall on 16

January).

It was not until 1956 that Poulenc was able

to attend the Aldeburgh Festival, deliver his

talk, and appear on the concert platform- as

soloist in a performance, under Paul Sacher, of

his 1929 Aubade for piano and 18 instruments.

After the Festival, Britten wrote to express his

appreciation on behalf of all concerned: 'Both

your talk and the Aubade were a great pleasure

and excitement for all concerned, and your

presence was both a delight and an honour'. He

went on to say that he had asked his publishers

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

'Your words about this opera', he continues,

have touched me deeply; praise from you is some-

thing really to be treasured May I say also that I have

had tremendous pleasure from the record of "Les

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

feeling very depressed and exhausted, I played it

through, and it made me laugh aloud, and also

touched me (a rare combination)."

The idea of an English Opera Group production

of Les mamelles de Tiresias germinated for nine

months or so. In a tentative form it was then

conveyed to Poulenc by a mutual friend, the

cellist Maurice Gendron. On receiving a

favourable report from Gendron, Britten wrote

to Poulenc (2 July) explaining that there was no

room for an orchestra in the Jubilee Hall, and

adding 'I am sure you & I can make up for that

with our 20 nimble fingers We could fix the

piano arrangement ourselves, couldn't we?'7

Poulenc replied on 1 August:

YES, YES, YES, withjoy, for Les Mamelles, both of them.

I want Peter for the husband (there is a tenor version).

I shall try to make a brilliant transcription '"

On 25 September Poulenc wrote to Britten

saying that he had just finished the orchestration

of La voix humaine, and was going to Venice to

hear Stravinsky's Threni. The 'marvellous photos

of Tiresias' had just arrived.



10/16


The well-known photo of Pears as night-

gowned Husband staring aghast at his trans-

formed wife - Jennifer Vyvyan bearded like

Baba the Turk - is a worthy companion to the

one showing the befrocked and lorgnetted

Husband, wearing a frilly apron and interviewed

by his son, The Journalist, against a backdrop

by Osbert Lancaster after the manner of Dufy.

Understandably, perhaps, these photos have

retained their place in the popular operatic

imagination, while their immediate and wider

contexts have tended to be overlooked. For

Britten, the summer of 1958 was marked in the

first place by the composition of the Sechs

Holderlin-Fragmente and the Nocturne (finished in

September); for the audience that came to the

Jubilee Hall to see and hear Tiresias (that being

the announced title) there had to be and there

was a double bill. Unmentioned in Humphrey

Carpenter's Benjamin Britten - A Biography,

where the reader is informed that Peter Pears

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

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

is the fact that the second work in the pro-

gramme was Monteverdi's not inconsiderable I

Ballo delle ingrate.

The ingrate of the title are identified by

Rinuccini's courtly Italian as inflexible and stony-

hearted in matters of love; in Carl OrfFs 1931

version they are translated as die Sproden,

which adds an appropriate hint of primness or

prudishness. Whereas two world wars and their

massacres are the implicit background of

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

Apollinaire's play - hence the cheerfully philo-

progenitive message with which they both

end - the marriage of Duke Francesco Gonzaga

to Margarita of Savoy, and the subsequent

festivities in the Mantuan court, were the only

pretext for II Ballo and for the opera Arianna

which preceded it. But when Pluto orders the

ingrate to return to Hades - after the brief respite

on earth which Venus, with the encouragement

of Amor, has secured for them - one of their

number begins a farewell to the world, its light

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

sempre'. Closely akin in style and tone to the

famous Lamento di Arianna, her solitary farewell

becomes a madrigalian lament when the other

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

It was surely to the composer of (for instance)

'Linien des Lebens' in the Holderlin cycle and

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

obbligato) in the Nocturne that Monteverdi's

great valediction was thinkable by way of

introducing a staging of Les mamelles de Tiresias.

Though the audience at the Jubilee Hall may

still have liked to hear, and been encouraged to

see, Therese and her Husband through the eyes

and ears of a middle-aged and thoroughly bour-

geois Albert Herring repatriated to the land of

Maupassant and undergoing some of the trials

of marriage, Britten himself was by that time

already on his way to A Midsummer Night's

Dream and Curlew River. In the Poulenc-

Monteverdi double bill, the levity of the opera

belonged to a postwar past, the gravity of I Ballo

to a still uncertain future.

In music as in the other arts, the momentum

of the time was inexorable. Britten's awareness

of that is perhaps less evident in the public

statement of War Requiem than in the relative

seclusion of the Shakespeare opera and Curlew

River. After three decades of intensive research

by Britten scholars, his path to Noh theatre and

Motomasa's Sumidagawa can no longer be mis-

taken for a detour, still less a flight from the

unexpected success of War Requiem. Irrespective

of the courses and discourses of Modernism,

Curlew River is inseparable from the arterial

systems of his own work since the late 1930s -

and from music-history in general since that

work's Aldeburgh Festival premiere in June 1964.

Britten's first and tenuous link with Noh-

theatre came about through Ronald Duncan

(1914-82). A dedicated pacifist, Duncan had

visited Gandhi soon after his graduation. His

collaboration with Britten, and his long if uneasy

friendship with him, began in the autumn of

1936, when he provided the text for Britten's

Pacifist March - a 4-minute piece for chorus and

orchestra, completed in January 1937 and pub-

lished by Peace Pledge Union. From Ezra Pound,

whom he had visited in Rapallo, Duncan

obtained an introduction to Stravinsky, with a

view to his participating - as composer and

conductor- in an anti-war concert in London.

In January 1938 he published the first issue of

Townsman, a quarterly to which Pound - who

had encouraged and supported him in this

venture - contributed articles on music. In return,

Duncan secured the loan of the Mercury Theatre

in Notting Hill Gate for Pound to give a reading,

in October 1938, of one of his Noh-play trans-

lations, with help from a female dancer and a

gong-player sought and found, at Duncan's

request, by Britten. Despite a further personal

connexion through Henry Boys (who had

recommended the dancer), there is no evidence

that Britten attended the Pound evening. More-

over, his letter to Elizabeth Mayer of 6 August

1944 - some six years later - refers to Pound as

a very remarkable poet, whom I only started on the

other day.20



11/16


To Duncan on 13 September of the same year,

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

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

of Reading, published in 1934 -

I've gone all Chaucerian [...] can't anything be done

about helping Pound - he's obviously a great man, &

we haven't so many that we can go around spilling

their blood?

Since the fall of Mussolini and especially since

the Allied advance on Rome, Pound had been

in increasing personal danger on account of his

propaganda broadcasts to the USA. American

troops finally caught up with him in Genoa in

May 1945. After a period of incarceration near

Pisa - where he wrote his Pisan Cantos - he was

taken to the USA, stood trial for treason, and

began his 12-year confinement in St Elizabeth's

Hospital in Washington, D.C. Released in 1958,

he was allowed to return to Italy. It was there

that representatives of BBC's Third Programme

re-established the lines of communication that had

been severed in 1939. The BBC's production in

1930 of Pound's self-styled 'opera' Le testament -

billed as The Testament of Franfois Villon - had been

one of the early triumphs of creative broadcast-

ing in the UK. It was a classic example of the kind

of achievement that had helped define the aims

and cultural priorities of those responsible for

establishing the BBC's Third Programme in 1946.

A new production of Pound's Testament was

commissioned by the Third Programme and

broadcast on 28 June 1962. The producer was

D.G. Bridson, one of the outstanding talents in

radio drama and 'features', and already recog-

nized as such in the late 1930s - though Britten

had a poor impression of Bridson's King Arthur,

for which he wrote music in 1937. 2 A new

performing edition of Pound's score had been

commissioned from the Canadian composer and

editor Murray Schafer during his extended

residence in England.2 It replaced the one made

for Pound in December 1923 by his protege of

the time, the then 23-year-old George Antheil.

Le testament was not Villon's 'will', but Pound's;

and in the Paris of December 1923, Antheil

was a useful witness to it. Having successfully

launched his European career in Germany, he

had moved to Paris in June 1923, firmly set on

making his name as composer and pianist in the

city where Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Satie and

Cocteau were the arbiters, and the first generation

of Nadia Boulanger's American pupils had yet to

emerge (with Copland as acknowledged leader

but Virgil Thomson more closely identified

with Left Bank moderism). As an artist-manager

in the best American style, and Parade's style too,

Pound had excelled himself with Antheil during

the Paris saison of 1923-24 - sponsoring his Paris

debut as composer-pianist, commissioning two

violin sonatas for Olga Rudge (Pound's lifelong

friend) to premiere at the same concert, and last

but not least, simultaneously publishing, in a

magisterially exclusive edition limited to 40 copies,

a volume sonorously entitled Antheil and the Treatise

on Harmony. Only one of its four sections is

centred on Antheil.

Like the actual Treatise - a significant if eccen-

tric document best read in the context of the

early writings of Henry Cowell - Le testament was

Pound's means of positioning himself in relation

to the Parisian musical avant garde. More

importantly, it was a development by other means

of his and Yeats's overwhelming discovery of

Noh theatre in the year before World War 1. In

the 'Parisian' Villon of the testaments (the 'small'

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

companion for his further explorations of the

poetry and music of the 15th-century troubadours.

Cocteau got the giggles, Albright tells us, when

Pound sang Le testament to him; but the little

white-note song for 'l'me due bon feu, maistre

Je(h)an Cotard' was an affectionate enough tribute

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

the Third Programme's Testament belonged; and

Antheil, who had died in Hollywood in

February 1959, had not been taken 'seriously'

since he entered the penumbra of Hollywood

film studios, only to emerge with his symphonic

glosses on the wartime Shostakovich (perhaps

more interesting nowadays than his notorious

Ballet Mecanique - despite the attendant Dudley

Murphy/Femand Leger film, made with Pound's

blessing and running still at Tate Modern).

Even were it true that 'Pound actually intro-

duced Britten to the Noh theatre in 1938'2 it

would be misleading to say so without adding

that the introduction had little or no point for

Britten at that time, except in so far as Duncan

was the intermediary. Duncan's affiliations were

with Paris and its theatre (Cocteau's included),

Britten's with the Group Theatre, via Auden and

Isherwood. Their theatre had its roots in Weimar

Germany and its contemporary affiliations with

the emigre Left, and particularly the post-

Expressionist Ernst Toller. Auden's Paul Bunyan

was to turn its giant's back on most of that while

Britten was composing it (November 1939 to

April 1941); and when Britten resumed his col-

laboration with Duncan in the early months of

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

Lucrece as the basis for their first and only oper-

atic collaboration was in effect an affirmation of

an essentially French form of anti-realist theatre -



12/16


the form associated with the ideas of Jacques

Copeau and the work of Michel Saint-Denis,

whose tours with his Compagnie des Quinze

had made a considerable impression in pre-war

England, even before his 1936 London produc-

tion of Obey's Noah (with John Gielgud in the

title role).

By comparison with that indisputable link, it

is simply a matter of record that in 1948 Britten

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

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

Dreigroschenoper - an English version of which he

had heard and been profoundly unimpressed by

when Edward Clark conducted it in 1935 in

one of his BBC contemporary music concerts.26

As for Weill's 'school opera' DerJasager - based

on Arthur Waley's free adaptation of the Noh

play Taniko, via a strict German translation by

Elisabeth Hauptmann and a few refinements by

Brecht - it was virtually unknown in England

until Jacques-Louis Monod conducted its pro-

fessional premiere at a BBC Invitation Concert

in December 1965. Curlew River was composed

in the early weeks of 1964, and Sumigadawa had

been in Britten's mind since William Plomer

first discussed it with him in 1957.

Usefully overriding chronology while doing

so under a misapprehension regarding the Pound

connexion, Untwisting the Serpent introduces

Curlew River in the immediate context of the

Pisan Cantos, and after considering The

Threepenny Opera with reference to Brecht's

'embezzlement' of Villon, concludes 'Figures of

Consonance among the Arts' with an impressive

account of DerJasager. Given that the actual and

effective disputes between drama, sources, text,

and music in Der Jasager are as extreme as any

under consideration in the region of 'Dissonance',

Curlew River might seem relatively harmonious.

But not to Albright:

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

taken as a profound meditation on the theme of orig-

inal sin. In 1950 Hans Keller described in print

Britten's musical personality as a dialectic between

sadism and repression of sadism; and Britten commended

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

ing about Britten's many representations of abused

children is the feeling that the composer sometimes

seems as sympathetic to the child abuser as to the

child: Britten's children are often knowing, brutal,

beautiful, good to kiss, good to beat.2

For a clear and balanced account of these topics,

and a perspective that extends from Britten to

the Noh-related music-theatre of Alexander

Goehr, the reader is referred to W. Anthony

Sheppard's Revealing Masks (University of

California Press, 2001). Meanwhile, an imagi-

nary dialogue between Keller and Britten has

been concocted from a single well-accredited

source which in this instance happens to be

unreliable.

The source is Humphrey Carpenter's Benjamin

Britten. In Carpenter, a substantial quotation from

Keller's 1952 Britten essay on 'The Musical

Character' ends with a full stop where Keller is

still in mid-sentence. The silent omission of

Keller's complementary clause seems to have

two purposes - first in relation to Imogen Holst

and her partially quoted diary entry of 4

December 1952, secondly in relation to the

statement that 'Ten years later Britten was asked

by an interviewer what he thought of Keller's

remarks'.

The 'interviewer' was none other than Murray

Schafer, author and editor of British Composers in

Interview, published in 1962, the same year as the

Third Programme's broadcast of his performing

edition of Pound's Testament. Though brief,

Schafer's quotation from Keller is as scrupulous

as Britten's response:

SCHAFER: You are a pacifist. In an absorbing article on

your music Hans Keller has written: 'What distinguish-

es Britten's musical personality is the violent repressive

counter-force against his sadism; by dint of character,

musical history and environment, he has become a

musical pacifist too.' How does Keller's observation

strike you?

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

objectively on what is written about oneself. But I

admire Keller's intelligence and courage enormously,

and certainly about others he is very perceptive 8'

By interrupting Keller's sentence at its semicolon,

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

subject of his own continuation:

Imogen Holst wrote of this in her diary that Britten

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

What Holst actually wrote in her diary was:

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

read out a terrible sentence about sado-masochism .

The sentence can only be the one in the para-

graph preceding the paragraph from which

Schafer quotes. Referring to Schoenberg's concept

of'a new sound symbolizing a new personality',

Keller asks what this 'new personality might be',

and continues:

It does not show Bart6k's straightforward sadism. It

does not show Stravinsky's equally uncomplicated

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

The 'new personality' for Keller- not supplanting

but complementing Schoenberg and his 're-

sexualization of music' - was of course Britten.



13/16


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

because he himself was opposed to pacifism

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

ing for the crucial phrase which Carpenter omits:

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

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

think, is the solution to the manifold solutions he has

effected upon our war-worn and war-weary musical

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

scious search for the truth.

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

research into, and consequent peaceful organization of,

aggression) is an illusion. In art, and especially in our art,

pacifism is realism par excellence, producing as it can the

quickest possible communicability of new discoveries.

The only guarantee, to be sure, that pacification will

not degenerate into compromise is genius.29

No wonder Britten was only able to commend

'Keller's perspicacity' with regard to others:

courtesy and modesty also had a place in his

(musical) character. Sure enough, the nominal

purpose of Untwisting the Serpent has become

nugatory at exactly the point where Curlew River

might profitably have encountered DerJasager-

in certain superficial respects, by far the cruellest

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

pacifist.

Early in October 1939 - approximately a month

after the outbreak of war in Europe - Britten

mentions, in a letter to Ralph Hawkes from his

temporary haven in Amityville, New York, his

plan for a work to be called Sinfonia da Requiem.

On the 19th of that month he writes again to

Hawkes saying he has completed his Rimbaud

cycle Les Illuminations for high voice and strings,

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

now be sent to the Swiss-born soprano Sophie

Wyss, for whom it was written. That same day

he sends a long and affectionate letter to Sophie

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

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

tions where appropriate.30 The conclusion is

representative:

BEING BEAUTEOUS. No one in the world could

tell you how to sing this one.

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

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

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

most terrific poem and at the moment I feel the music

has got something of the poem After this,

DEPART should be sung quietly, very slowly, and as

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

The 'clue to the whole work', Britten suggests

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

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

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

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

the end of the interlude following 'Marine', and

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

a clue is not synonymous with solving it. That he

leaves that to his fellow musicians. The real ones.

For instance Oliver Knussen. In 1995 Knussen

contributed a characteristically elegant musical

manuscript to the symposium On Britten and

Mahler - published as a Festschrift for Britten's

musical executor, Donald Mitchell, on the

occasion of his 70th birthday." Knussen calls his

deceptively simple but almost self-explanatory

musical text 'The Key to the Parade'. Since

Britten's 'clue' is in fact the rebus, the solution

to the rebus is elsewhere, though close at hand:

precisely in the 'Fanfare' that ends with the

setting of Rimbaud's 'clef. Knussen's solution

duly embraces every number in Les Illuminations,

ending with 'Depart' and the setting of 'Assez

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

'airs' understood not only as expressions or aspects,

but also in the musical sense.

Rimbaud's 'Assez vu' becomes 'Assez eu' and

finally 'Assez connu'. Britten's visionary com-

prehension of 'tous les airs' is likewise - as

Knussen's 'Key' implies - an extension from

thematic-motivic demonstration and (pacific)

remonstration to a 'purely' musical experience

whose essence is a profound belief in the pos-

sibility of reanimating functional tonality rather

than merely disinterring the relics of its previous

incarnation. That belief is inconsistent with

modernist criteria of any sort, including those

flexible enough to find a place for Poulenc. Aside

from his present and understandable popularity,

and irrespective of his close affiliations with fig-

ures whose Moderist credentials are impecca-

ble, Poulenc earns his keep in the grace-and-

favour homes of modernism by virtue of his

stubborn disregard for the kind of compositional

resources and continuities that were fundamental

to (say) Britten and the greatest of his musical

friends, Shostakovich.

Poulenc died in 1963. Curlew River was first

performed at the 1964 Aldeburgh Festival, in

Orford Church on 12 June. A month or so later

Britten travelled to Aspen, Colorado, to receive

the first Robert O. Anderson Award which had

been established 'to honour the individual any-

where in the world judged to have made the

greatest contribution to the advancement of the

humanities'. The Citation read: 'To Benjamin

Britten, who, as a brilliant composer, performer

and interpreter through music of human feelings,



14/16


moods, and thoughts, has truly inspired man to

understand, clarify, and appreciate more fully his

own nature, purpose and destiny'.

Britten's acceptance address has stood the test

of time, a test implicit in his arresting thought

that 'the richest and most productive eighteen

months in our music history is the time when

Beethoven had just died, when the other great

nineteenth-century giants, Wagner, Verdi, and

Brahms had not begun.' The period he had in

mind was that of Schubert's Winterreise, the C

major symphony, the last three piano sonatas, and

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

is nothing finite about his final and undoubtedly

sincere disclaimer - 'I do not write for posterity

[...] I write music, now, in Aldeburgh, for people

living there, and further afield, indeed for any-

one who cares to play it or listen to it'.32 Yet his

last thought was of the next and after-next

generation of British composers.

In 1965 the English Opera Group commis-

sioned from the 30-year-old Harrison Birtwistle

an opera for performance at a future Aldeburgh

Festival. The result was Punch andJudy, 'a tragical

comedy or a comical tragedy', to a libretto by

Stephen Pruslin. 'This tale is told, the damage

done', sings Choregos in the Epilogue, 'The hurly-

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

by Punch andJudy at the Jubilee Hall, Aldeburgh,

in 1968 was not against Britten (though it was

widely thought to be). It was against the world

represented by Poulenc's gentrification of

Apollinaire - funny and touching, certainly, but

none the less a gentrification. Punch and Judy

was a predictable yet unexpected eruption of the

volcanic modernism whose origins went back to

the Cirque Medrano of Varese and Cocteau in

1915, to Parade in 1917 (though not to Mercure,

of which Birtwistle was to make an arrangement

in 1980), and especially to the farmyard vanities

and violence of Renard.

A theatre of dismemberment but a musically

constructive one, Punch and Judy was sure to

weather well, and it has. Like other notable

achievements of its time - Maxwell Davies's

Taverner for instance, or Goehr's masked theatre -

it had the good luck to be born before the era

that was to exploit and vulgarize the most

comprehensive cultural and critical revolution

since the dawn of Modernism. It was in a

supposedly post-Modem world - the careful

orthography is Albright's - that the Pretty-Poll

songs and tic toc pendulum of Parade may have

seemed to be making a lustier noise than The

Triumph of Time or Worldes Blis. But no sooner

had it become possible to imagine what Karl

Miller has called 'a generally stoical response to

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

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

to which an actually surviving avant-garde

belongs'33 began to assert itself. Whereupon

Vulgar Postmodernism - a genuinely popular

form and none the worse for that - struck back.

Only to find that Adoro had been rehabilitated.

Whether it was called Ballet Mecanique 75 years

ago or as-you-like-it the other day, the oppor-

tunistic twaddle of modem-minded persons is

all of a piece, and mercifully buries itself until

eager academics need to unearth it. The same

goes for the trivia of much larger figures who

can't be recognized as such lest they upset the

value-free apple-cart (read Albright on Le boeuf

sur le toit). It's all too easy to forget that even the

finest critical and academic work is at best a

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

just a parade of vanities or whether it's about

(for instance) matters of some musical or poetic

import, it remains a parade. Inside the theatre

there's a real show, still going on.

David Sawer's opera From Morning to Midnight,

and the production of it which Richard Jones

has directed for the English National Opera,

have scored a notable public and critical success.

The opera is based on a Modernist 'classic' by

Georg Kaiser that was precisely contemporary

with Pierrot Lunaire and Picasso's cubist violins.

Dramaturgy, composition, and direction skilfully

incorporate techniques drawn from the silent

film era. Relevant enough. But why this partic-

ular Kaiser play rather than another and better

one? Why Kaiser at all?

From Morning to Midnight deserves a long run,

and reflects credit on all concerned. Yet the neo-

Modemism it dispassionately espouses is not so

much a new phenomenon as a new development

- a fifth terminal for popular postmoderism.

Landings and departures will continue unabated

out there. Meanwhile it takes an ever-young

Elliott Carter to show where true learning,

mastery and invention can lead. From him, an

opera buffa called What Next? was sure to amount

to more than a characteristically pithy and

reasonable expostulation. In the event, it leaves

Poulenc's Apollinaire standing - unharmed of

course - by the wayside.

Carter remains the outstanding representative

in any of the living arts of an inclusive and

eminently rational Modernism whose culture

was at once classical and Franco-American. Punch

and Judy had waged war with the alarming

heritage of irrationalism; and now Gerald Barry's

The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit (1995) restores

the Reason of Handel's time in order furiously

to denounce and obliterate it before finally



15/16


making peace under the banners and blankets of

Pleasure and Beauty. And where are the Acrobats

of yesteryear if not on the high wire of Andrew

Toovey's recent orchestral piece of that name,

suspended as it is between the heritage of

Feldman and the current work of the painter

John Davies?

Britten in one way, and his quizzical friend

and colleague Michael Tippett in another, lent

their support to younger composers as generously

as they themselves had once been supported. It's

a tradition that needs to be fought for, daily,

fiercely, always and everywhere. 'In recent times

the bestiality of the music industry has extolled

the performer over the composer'. That was

Pound. In Meridiano di Roma. In 1941.34

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author expresses grateful thanks to the following:

Andrew Kurowski and Stephen Plaistow for assistance

with data regarding BBC Third Programme broad-

casts; DrJenny Doctor, Director of the Britten-Pears

Library; Rosamund Strode, formally Benjamin

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

making available relevant passages from his forthcom-

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

The quotations from the diaries and letters of

Benjamin Britten are ? copyright the Trustees of the

Britten-Pears Foundation and may not be further

reproduced without the written permission of the

Trustees.

REFERENCES SOURCES

Albright, Daniel. Untwisting the Serpent,

Chicago/London, 2000

Britten, Benjamin. On Receiving the First Aspen

Award, London 1964

Britten, Benjamin. Lettersfrom a Life - Selected Letters

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

Volume Two 1939-45; ed. Donald Mitchell and Philip

Reed, London 1991, revised paperback edition 1998

Britten, Benjamin. A Catalogue of the Published Works,

compiled and edited by Paul Banks, Aldeburgh 1999

Britten and the French Connection, programme book of

the Aldeburgh October Britten Festival, 20-23 October

1994

Carpenter, Humphrey. Benjamin Britten, A Biography,

London 1992

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

in the music of Benjamin Britten, Woodbridge, Suffolk

1998

Gillmor, Alan M. Erik Satie, London 1988

Hell, Henri. Francis Poulenc, London 1959

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

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

ists, London 1952

Orledge, Robert. Satie, the Composer, Cambridge 1990

Oulette, Fernand. Edgard Varese, London 1968

Rothschild, Deborah Menaker. Picasso's "Parade", From

street to stage, New York/London 1991

Satie, Erik. The Writings ofErik Satie, edited and trans.

Nigel Wilkins, London 1980

Satie, Erik. Correspondance presque complete, reuni et

presentee par Omella Volta, Paris 2000

Schafer, Murray. British Composers in Interview, London

1963

Schafer, Murray. Ezra Pound and Music - the Complete

Criticism, edited with commentary, London 1978

Sheppard, W Anthony. Revealing Masks - Exotic Influences

and Ritualized Performance in Modernist Music Theater,

California 2001

Varese, Louise. Prose Poemsfrom the Illuminations, New

York 1946

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

Michael Bullock, London 1989

Whiting, Steven Moore. Satie the Bohemian - From

Cabaret to Concert Hall, Oxford 1999

SOURCE NOTES

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

2Wilkins, p. 84

Volta, pp.186-187

See Whiting pp.522-523, and Orledge, p.39 and p.339,

note 2, for accounts of Mercure in terms of the erotic tableaux

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

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

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

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

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

' Andre Gide, Journal 1913-22, Rio de Janiero 1943, p.375.

Gide begins: Avant mon depart, ete voir Parade - dans on ne

sait ce que'il faut admirer le plus: pretention ou pauvrete.

8Volta, p.120

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

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

Rothschild, p.89, for original text.

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

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

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

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

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

the key line (p.97).

Rothschild, pp. 83, 85

2 Albright, p.214

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

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

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

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



16/16


3 Albright, p.225

4 Hell p.10

5 Britten and the French Connection, p.9

, ibid, p.12

7 ibid, p.12

ibid, p.13

'9 Carpenter, p.384

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

ibid, p.1222

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

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

Pound in the summer of 1960, having already elicited the

interest of the Third Programme. Pound was then staying in

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

and her husband. According to Shafer (pp.243-245), Antheil

had 'assisted the poet in the notation and orchestration of Le

Testament, substituting for the "two tins and wash-board" an

idiosyncratic little orchestra of brass, winds, a couple of strings,

and mandolin'.

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

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

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

extremely cordial.

25 Albright, p.88

Bntten's diary entry

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