La statue retrouvée

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.

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.

[1] 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.

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.

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.

The role of the Statue was initially assigned to Marguerite Jacquemaire (the future Countess Marie-Blanche de Polignac), who would also perform as the soprano soloist for the Ludions, but she proved to be more talented as a singer than as a dancer.

"[16][17] He quickly composed a new number for her, the march-like Entrée, and revised the concluding Retraite to add a trumpet flourish illustrating the statue's awakening to life.

[20] La statue retrouvée was premiered as the grand finale of the extravagant "Baroque Ball" the Beaumonts held at their estate at 2 rue Duroc in Paris on May 30, 1923.

Massine and the Beaumonts danced small roles in La statue while composer Germaine Tailleferre, the lone female member of Les Six, performed the organ score.

Satie's first biographers Pierre-Daniel Templier (1932) and Rollo H. Myers (1948) made no mention of it, and as nothing under that title was found in his posthumous papers, the music was long thought lost.

In the 1980s Robert Orledge discovered the "Mme Fellowes" manuscript among the composer's notebooks at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and confirmed it was the missing score for La statue.

[26][27] The following year Beaumont launched his short-lived Soirées de Paris theatre company and produced several original ballets, the most important of which was the Picasso-Satie-Massine collaboration Mercure (1924).