page_title: La statue retrouvée
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: La statue retrouvée / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Cropped and adjusted
context_page_description: La statue retrouvée is a short composition for organ and trumpet by Erik Satie. Commissioned as a danced pièce d'occasion, it was originally set to a scenario by Jean Cocteau and featured choreography by Léonide Massine and costumes designed by Pablo Picasso. Its only performance in this form took place in Paris on May 30, 1923.
  The work is notable for reuniting the creative team behind Serge Diaghilev's landmark 1917 ballet Parade. Today only Satie's music survives.
context_section_description: In December 1922, Satie was invited by Count Étienne de Beaumont (1883-1956) and his wife Edith (1877-1952) to compose a divertissement for their upcoming annual masquerade ball, a glamorous high society affair. Its theme was "The Antiquity of Louis XIV" and the entertainment would consist of a series of musical tableaux vivants performed by select members among the distinguished guests. One of Satie's tasks was to help showcase the newly restored 18th Century pipe organ the couple had installed in the gilded music room of their Paris mansion. He had written nothing for the instrument since his (yet unperformed) 1895 Messe des pauvres, but welcomed the challenge.
  Satie's frequent collaborator Cocteau managed to involve himself in the project, even though their relations were deteriorating by then. This would be their final work together, and it began with a disagreement. "I'm very surprised to see that [Cocteau] shares the prejudice of the masses against the organ," Satie wrote to Edith de Beaumont on December 26. "Odd, isn't it?...I very much hope to win him over to our cause - our good cause." Dismissing fears it would bring a somber note to the festivities, he added, "The organ isn't necessarily religious & funereal...Just remember the gilt-painted merry-go-round." One week later he was able to inform the Countess, "Jean just gave me a good idea concerning it (the Divertissement)...It's not stupid, you'll see." Cocteau's scenario was set in the Rococo era and involved two young women searching for a mythical lost statue. When discovered the statue springs to life.
  The piece acquired additional prestige thanks to Satie's wide connections in the Parisian cultural scene. By April 1923 he had brought in Picasso to create the wardrobe and Massine to regulate the choreography. Count Beaumont, who dabbled in costume and theatre design, gave Picasso specific instructions, demanding "women in shades of gold with white wigs and masks...men in shades of brown with golden wigs, and draperies over their formal costumes...needless to say the costumes should be of utmost fantasy made from stuffs of utmost simplicity." Picasso also offered to paint four large grisaille panels on classical subjects to serve as backdrops for the masquerade. Beaumont enthusiastically agreed, but Picasso's dealer Paul Rosenberg persuaded the artist to drop that idea as too unremunerative for the amount of work involved.
  Satie was wary of choreographers. While working on the Divertissement he described Massine as "very stupid...and very much a dancer." In a letter on March 23 he suggested to Countess Beaumont that he should not compose the music until Massine had designed the movements of the characters - a novel concept at the time. He later confided to the painter Moïse Kisling that this unusual procedure was the only way he could protect his music from being misinterpreted: "The choreographer cares only about himself; the female dancer cares only for spectacular effects that will bring applause. And who cares about the composer - about his sensibility, indeed, about his message? No one!"
  In the meantime he started composing a second entertainment for the masquerade, the  
  Ludions, a song cycle to poems by his friend Léon-Paul Fargue; it was also to have organ accompaniment. Satie admitted this turned out to be "the most complicated" number and it occupied him through mid-May, causing some anxiety over his part in the Divertissement. On May 14 he wrote to reassure Edith de Beaumont, "From Friday [May 18] on I shall be at the disposal of the dancers. We shall be ready, have no fear as far as my work is concerned."
  Massine left no record of his choreography, though like Satie's music it would have been simple and dignified to accommodate the upper crust amateur participants. Olga Picasso, formerly of the Ballets Russes, was the only professional danseuse in the small ensemble. She and the Marquise de Médicis were cast as the searchers and were each given a solo dance. The role of the Statue was initially assigned to Marguerite Jacquemaire (the future Coun
caption: Daisy Fellowes, who danced the title role of La statue retrouvée. Portrait by John Singer Sargent
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