Geneviève de Brabant (Satie)
The score was intended as incidental music for a three-act comedy in verse and prose by J. P. Contamine de Latour (writing under the pseudonym "Lord Cheminot"), based on the medieval legend of Genevieve of Brabant.
As performed today, Geneviève de Brabant retains Satie's music but the narrative is a truncated hodgepodge of Latour's sung arias and spoken interpolations by others.
In this vein the satirical tone of the Satie-"Lord Cheminot" piece suggests it was created for the shadow plays of Montmartre cabarets, a form of entertainment both knew well.
[9] Geneviève de Brabant was composed when Satie was transitioning from the stark, semi-religious experimentalism of his Rosicrucian phase - "music on its knees" as he later called it - to a budding interest in popular influences.
[11] Versions of the opening Prelude reappear as the entr'actes, and the recurring Entrance of the Soldiers led one Satie biographer to liken its effect to that of the Promenade in Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition.
Milhaud recalled in his memoirs, "Behind the piano, we found an exercise book containing Jack in the Box and Geneviève de Brabant which Satie thought he had lost on a bus".
The roles of Geneviève and Golo were sung by mezzo-soprano Jane Bathori and baritone Roger Bourdin; the marionettes were operated by Les Waltons, a famed group of French puppeteers.
According to Volta, "This performance was such a great success that any other means of presenting Geneviève de Brabant became unthinkable - to the point that this work of Erik Satie has been classified in all catalogues as an 'opera for marionettes' ever since".
[25] In August 1925 he had paid a personal tribute with three articles entitled "My Close Friend Erik Satie: Memories of Youth", published in the Paris daily Comœdia.
Contemporary press releases claimed, "Having written it for puppets, Erik Satie had not concerned himself with the text", and billed Geneviève as set to "poems by Lucien Daudet".
Its absence created problems in forming some sort of cohesive narrative out of the free-standing musical numbers, so Lucien Daudet was brought in to write three short explanatory poems to be read before each act.
In later editions Universal gave Contamine de Latour sole credit for the texts, leading commentators to assume he also wrote the Canticle and Daudet's poems.
Ironically, one of Contamine de Latour's jokes in the play was having Count Sifroy order thousands of Épinal prints with Geneviève's image "for the delight of future generations".
[30] The restored Satie-"Lord Cheminot" version of Geneviève de Brabant was first performed in 1983 by the puppet theater troupe Monti-Colla of Milan at La Fenice in Venice, in an Italian translation by Ornella Volta.
