Play focuses on artists’ relationship
Play examines creative artists’ relationship
Anew play thematically concluding the Mountain View International Festival of Song and Chamber Music on Saturday at the University Theatre delves into the intertwining lives of two of the 20th century’s most fascinating and individual creative artists, Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau.
OK, who is Satie, who is Cocteau — and what was the particular complexity of the relationship between them?
Answers to the first two questions are a matter of public record, anecdotal and otherwise.
Briefly, Satie — who died in 1925 at age 79 — was an eccentric French composer and cabaret pianist, who proved instrumental in steering a generation of French composers away from Wagnerian excess and towards a leaner, more concise style — epitomized in his own musical output, for example, by the well-known piano pieces, Les Gymnopedies.
Furthermore, he was someone who made no bones about his disdain for being anywhere but on the fringe of society and the musical community of the period.
“He is the one who influenced everyone after him and also the one that gets forgotten,” says award-winning Calgary playwright Mike Czuba, author of the play in question, Satie et Cocteau.
According to Czuba, Satie the composer was “discovered” at different times in his career, and then re-discovered in different decades after his death by such individuals and groups as musical philosopher John Cage (in the 1950s); minimalist composer Philip Glass (1970s); and most recently, the British band Uncle, whose piece The Criminal is based on the aforementioned Gymnopedies.
An on-again, off-again friend of great French composer Claude Debussy, and widely respected for the originality of his musical ideas, Satie himself was relatively untrained at the keyboard, says University of Calgary drama prof Barry Yzereef, director of Czuba’s two-character play.
“One of the best criticisms I ever heard of Satie was this: ‘If he was a writer, he knows 13 letters of the alphabet — and is now trying to re-write all the classics,’ ” Yzereef says, laughing.
Cocteau, on the other hand, was Satie’s opposite.
Author, poet, playwright, photographer, cinematographer, “Cocteau knows everybody from Debussy and Stravinsky, Nijinsky, Diaghilev, to — you name it, the list just goes on and on,” Yzereef says.
“He had his hand on the pulse of what was going on in both French society and French art from before the (First World) War right up until he died in 1963 (at age 74).”
Says Czuba, “Satie (Cocteau’s musical mentor) went out of his way to run away from ‘the scene.’ Cocteau ran toward it.”
Inasmuch as Cocteau opened his own doors, it was Satie who gave him the cachet to walk through some of them, the playwright says.
Written as the project for his master’s thesis at U of C, the play draws on a book by Ornella Volta about Satie, Czuba says.
“She (Volta) basically argued that without Satie, Cocteau does not make it in those doors in the time that he did.”
And without Cocteau, Satie doesn’t get the push into posterity (for the epochal ballet Parade, a collaboration with Cocteau and Picasso), Czuba adds.
“So without each other, they have a different legacy.”
In Satie et Cocteau, the intermittent friendship between the two men comes to the fore nearly 15 years after Satie’s death.
“It’s 1939 in New York, and Cocteau has written a play called Soyons Vulgaires (Let’s Be Vulgar) — which was one of the rules for Parade when they were working on it,” Czuba says.
Cocteau’s play (which may or may not have really existed, Czuba coyly points out) was ostensibly aimed at celebrating Satie and his importance as an artist, but was really an attempt at working through a kind of reconciliation with his dead colleague — while at the same time putting Cocteau himself into the action.
“He would promote people, but he would make sure his name was there, too,” Czuba says of Cocteau.
Satie et Cocteau is set on the last day of rehearsal and things aren’t going well with Cocteau’s Soyons Vulgaires — the actor portraying Satie can’t seem to get it right, Czuba says.
“Cocteau needs the actor to ‘embody’ Satie so he can finally have it out with him (Satie), because Cocteau and Satie did not see eye to eye in the last five years of Satie’s life,” says the playwright.
In fact, he says, “It almost looked like they were enemies.”