At first, things were looking up for Erik Satie.
At the dress rehearsal of his new ballet Parade in May 1917, the ever-unpredictable French composer was approached by Jean Poueigh, a critic from Le carnet de la semaine (The Weekly Notebook), who seemed thoroughly impressed. He offered Satie warm congratulations, full of praise and encouragement.
Sure, Parade was packed with the kind of experimental touches that could ruffle a few feathers at the Théâtre du Châtelet — but that was par for the course with Satie. At least, it seemed, he had a key critic in his corner.
Or so he thought.
'The review landed like a grenade'
But all was not quite what it seemed. For some reason, Poueigh had a significant change of heart between rehearsal and performance. Or, of course, he may simply have been lying when he'd first Somewhere between rehearsal and opening night, Poueigh did a complete U-turn. Or perhaps he’d just been faking his praise all along. Whatever the case, when his review hit the stands the following week, it landed like a grenade.
Gone was the admiration — in its place, a vicious takedown. Poueigh tore into the ballet with gleeful malice, sparing no insult. Satie could have let it go with a Gallic shrug and a muttered c’est la vie.
But he didn’t. He hit back. And that, as we’ll soon see, was a very bad idea.
Involving some of the finest creative talent of the day, Parade was always intended to cause a stir. The plot – about a group of performers trying to entice people into a show – was the brainchild of the writer Jean Cocteau, and it was he who invited Satie to come on board as the composer.
The first-night audience threw a tantrum
Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, whose infamous premiere of Stravinsky’s explosive ballet The Rite of Spring was still fresh in Parisian minds, now sought to repeat the trick with Parade, for which Pablo Picasso designed the set and Léonide Massine masterminded the choreography. Even the programme notes were written by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, no less.
Satie’s score, though, was not all his own work. Deciding that things needed spicing up a little, Cocteau chose to add a few unusual ‘instruments’ of his own, and by the time Parade reached the stage, the orchestra had welcomed the likes of a typewriter, a foghorn, a pistol and a selection of milk bottles into its ranks. Cocteau’s additions, along with Picasso’s unconventional stage designs, did just the trick – as with The Rite four years earlier, the first-night audience threw a collective tantrum.
'You're nothing but an arse'
Was it this reaction that triggered Poueigh’s rethink? Who knows. What we do know is that, on later finding his work destroyed in the press, Satie decided to pen a few words of his own. ‘My dearest Sir,’ he wrote to Poueigh in immaculate handwriting on a postcard; ‘You’re nothing but an arse, and an unmusical arse. Signed: Erik Satie.’
Unfortunately for the composer, Poueigh also didn’t take kindly to being insulted. Especially in a manner that anyone could read. And so on 12 July 1917 Satie found himself standing in the dock of a Parisian court, sued for libel and defamation of character.
‘I was at the hearing,’ recalled the painter Gabriel Fournier many years later. ‘I can still see Satie, his eyes twinkling, but overcome with emotion and outraged by the injustice of it all, tiptoeing to the witness box, with his gloved hands holding his bowler hat in an elegant gesture tightly against his chest and, as always, with the eternal umbrella hanging over his arm.’
'White with rage'
When the judge read out the sentence – eight days in prison, 1,000 francs in damages and a 100-franc fine – the reception from Satie’s friends in the courtroom was every bit as riotous as at the ballet itself. These included Cocteau who, ‘white with rage under his yellow-ish make-up’, soon found himself frogmarched down to the police station for slapping Poueigh’s lawyer.
Following abject apologies from Satie, however, Cocteau was released without charge. And as things panned out, Satie never actually did his time in prison. His sentence was first suspended and then abandoned, while his fine and damages were paid off by the Princesse de Polignac, a wealthy patron. I guess it pays to have friends in the right places.
What else happened in January 1917?
January 9
Irving Berlin’s song ‘For Your Country And My Country’ is recorded by Conway’s Band and released on Victor Records. Bearing the sub-title ‘The Official Recruiting Song’ on the score, it is a patriotic call to Americans to enlist in the army, with Berlin’s lyrics telling listeners that ‘It’s your duty and my duty to speak with the sword, not the pen’.
A series of internal explosions destroys the British battleship HMS Vanguard as it lies at anchor late at night in Scapa Flow, Orkney. The ship sinks immediately with the loss of 843 men – only two of the crew survive. A participant in the Battle of Jutland the previous year, HMS Vanguard had spent the afternoon taking part in training manoeuvres near the Scottish coast.
January 16
The German composer Philipp Scharwenka dies aged 70. A respected teacher at the conservatoires founded by his brother, Xaver, in Berlin and New York, his compositions include three symphonies, a violin concerto, two colourful ‘fantasy pieces’ for orchestra and one opera, Roland.
January 20
Four days of strikes and civil and military unrest in Petrograd – the ‘July Days’ – are followed by a major clampdown by Russia’s provisional government against the Bolshevik Party and its supporters. Many of the party’s leading figures, including Leon Trotsky, are arrested, while Vladimir Lenin goes into hiding before fleeing to Finland.
January 31
An Allied forces offensive to break through German lines and reach the Belgian coast leads to the Battle of Passchendaele (Third Battle of Ypres). Exceptionally heavy rain turns the battlefield into a mudbath, making significant progress almost impossible. By November, Field Marshall Haig calls off the offensive, with his forces having advanced little more than five miles.
