Erik Satie Parade ~ Ballet Réaliste sur un Thème de Jean Cocteau
Erik Satie
Parade ~ Ballet Réaliste en un Tableau sur un Thème de Jean Cocteau (1917)
Choral
Prélude du Rideau rouge
Prestigiditateur Chinois
Petite fille Américaine
Rag-Time du Paquebot Ragtime
Acrobates
Final
Suite au Prélude du Rideau rouge
Symphonieorchester Radio Luxemburg
Louis de Froment, conductor
Painting: Umberto Boccioni, The City Rises, 1910
Not content with Dada anticipations, Satie was the first to create a "manifestation” of Cubism in music. He began the revolutionary score for Parade in 1915, writing for an orchestra expanded to include typewriters, sirens, pistols, a lottery-wheel, and so on, and infusing the music with an intoxicating concentrate of ragtime rhythms and catchy tune fragments. This self-styled "realistic" ballet in one scene with scenario by Cocteau, decor by Picasso, and choreography by Massine, was one of the most sensational Diaghilev Ballets Russes stage spectaculars when it was first produced in Paris, May 18, 1917, with Ernest Ansermet conducting. The "story" is a mere, but apt, springboard for the stage action and, of course, Satie's music: there is a circus parade with a Chinese magician, American ingenue, and acrobats giving free samples of their acts to entice onlookers into buying tickets for the full performance... but the crowd mistakes this preview for the main show and disperses without paying despite all the anguished entreaties of the actors and their three managers. There are no real breaks in the some quarter-hour flow of the music, but its components are subtitled Chorale, Red Curtain Prelude, Chinese Prestidigitator, little American Girl, River-Boat Ragtime, Acrobats, and Reprise of the Red Curtain Prelude.
Music Notes by R.D. Darrell