Les Pantins dansent

Maurice Droeghmans[1] conducted the premiere at the Salle Léon-Poirier (now the Théâtre de la Comédie des Champs-Elysées)[2] in Paris on December 20, 1913.

In 1903 she left her wealthy second husband, moved in with struggling author Ricciotto Canudo after the divorce, and started a literary salon that eventually became a magnet for modernist Paris.

[4] When she invited Satie to compose Les Pantins Dansent for her upcoming interdisciplinary Festival de la Métachorie in 1913, he was intrigued by the concept and eagerly agreed.

An interior monologue of suicidal contemplation, it begins and ends with the same stanza: As a professional musician Satie had worked with inferior poetry and managed to make art from some of it (his early collaborations with Contamine de Latour, a handful of his cabaret songs).

Earlier that year Satie had written his surreal one-act comedy Le piège de Méduse, in which the musical interludes were to be danced by a mechanical monkey, but his fascination with puppetry dated from childhood and first bore fruit in his attempts to create shadow plays for Montmartre cabarets.

In Version I a jarring, discordant introduction segues into a jaunty quick march bearing a resemblance to the old English song Cherry Ripe, neither of which reflect the poem with any real earnestness.

Apart from the scoring - Satie dropped the harp, second flute and second trumpet, and added an oboe - the changes were more of tone than structure, suggesting he had a set plan in mind.

Music for the second tableaux consisted of Debussy's La Damoiselle élue and two Satie pieces: Les Pantins dansent and a prelude from Le Fils des étoiles, the latter orchestrated by Saint-Point's young protégé Daniel Chennevière (later known as astrologer Dane Rudhyar) and retitled Hymne au Soleil.

The smell of incense wafted through the hall as actor Édouard de Max declaimed each poem from the wings; Saint-Point then executed her solo dances, at times naked beneath diaphanous veils of tulle and silk.

It is not known if he approved the printing of an extract from his orchestral score in the November-December issue of Canudo's Futurist magazine Montjoie!, or of the complete piano version in the following number (January-February 1914).

Barely a month after this event Saint-Point publicly broke with the Futurists, claiming she belonged to no movement, and her salon ended with the start of World War I.