Geneviève de Brabant is a theatre piece composed around 1900 by Erik 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. Unproduced at the time, its existence was not discovered until after Satie's death in 1925.

Neither author left any indication of how the work should be staged. It was premiered as an "opera for marionettes" at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris on May 17, 1926.See the Roger Désormière (1898-1963) website at https://sites.google.com/site/rogerdesormiere18981963/concerts-representations/annees-20?form=MY01SV&OCID=MY01SVPierre-Daniel Templier, Erik Satie, MIT Press, 1969, p. 79. Translated from the original French edition published by Rieder, Paris, 1932.Rollo H. Myers, Erik Satie, Dover Publications, Inc., NY, 1968, pp. 47, 100. Originally published in 1948 by Denis Dobson Ltd., London. The conductor was Roger Désormière, who arranged the original piano score for orchestra. 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.Ornella Volta, "Give a Dog a Bone: Some investigations into Erik Satie." Originally published as "Le rideau se leve sur un os" in the Revue International de la Musique Française, Vol. 8, No. 23, 1987. English translation by Todd Niquette. At http://satie-point.net/text-VOLTA%20-%20Give%20a%20dog%20a%20bone.pdf

Background Between 1899 and 1901 Satie reunited with the boon companion of his Bohemian youth, the writer Contamine de Latour, for several projects that went unfinished or unpublished. The manuscripts of Geneviève de Brabant are undated but provisionally assigned to the year 1900, since Contamine de Latour, who made his living as a journalist, was signing his literary efforts as "Lord Cheminot" during this period. Satie always worked closely with his librettists and probably chose the subject, not least because his close friend Claude Debussy had just completed his opera Pelléas et Mélisande on a similar medieval tale.Volta, op. cit.

Geneviève was a traditional heroine of French puppet theatre and magic lantern shows,Anne Nguyen (translator), "World Encyclopedia of Puppetry Arts" at https://wepa.unima.org/en/genevieve-de-brabant/ and her tear-jerking saga of wronged virtue had already been spoofed by Jacques Offenbach in his Opéra bouffe Geneviève de Brabant (1859, revised 1867). 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.Robert Orledge, Satie the Composer, Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. 209.The Bibliothèque nationale de France classifies Geneviève as a shadow play. See BnF website at https://data.bnf.fr/fr/13930906/erik_satie_genevieve_de_brabant/

Legend and text

The legend originated in the Low Countries during the 12th Century and from there spread to Germany and France. Geneviève was said to be the daughter of the Duke of Brabant and wife of Count Sifroy of Treves. When her husband's trusted majordomo Golo fails to seduce her, he takes his revenge by accusing her of adultery. Sifroy condemns Geneviève and their infant son, but the executioners cannot perform the task and leave them behind in a forest. They find shelter in a cave, where they are nourished and protected by a kindly doe. Six years later, while hunting the doe, Sifroy discovers the hiding place of his wife and child. Geneviève manages to prove her innocence and is restored to honor, but soon dies of her suffering. Golo is then punished for his villainy.

Contamine de Latour's play parodies the noblewoman's misfortunes with insouciant humor and in-jokes aimed at a more sophisticated Parisian audience. Most of the tale's traditional elements are cast aside: Geneviève is childless, she does not encounter a doe, and does not die at the moment of her redemption. Instead of being executed Golo is sent into exile, where he prospers. All ends happily as Geneviève is brought home to the rejoicing of the crowd.Volta, op. cit.

Music

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. The score looks both ways, alternating between plainsong and operetta in a brightly colored style of great charm and naiveté. It is considered amongst his most characteristic works of the period.Myers, op. cit., p. 100.

Satie provided less than 10 minutes worth of music for the hour-long play, a score made even more compact by his recycling of themes. Numbers 4, 7, 8, 9, 11 and 13 all reuse material from the first three numbers, with slight variations (except for the straight repeat of No. 9).Orledge, op. cit., p. 282. 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.Pierre-Daniel Templier, op. cit.

The musical numbers are as follows:

Prelude ACT 1 ("We are a tight crowd / That you always find in the First Act") Entrance of the Soldiers ACT 2 Entr'acte Geneviève's Song ("I am innocent of a crime I did not commit"), soprano solo Sounding the Horn Entrance of the Soldiers ACT 3 Entr'acte Chorus (repeat of No. 2) Golo's Song ("No, Sifroy is not dead"), baritone solo Entrance of the Soldiers Procession/March Entrance of the Soldiers Geneviève's Little Song ("Ah! Heaven rewards my virtue, my constancy"), soprano solo Choral Finale ("The case went well")

Satie originally scored the work for piano, two unspecified male and female vocalists, and mixed unison chorus.

Désormière's 1926 arrangement calls for soprano and baritone soloists, mixed chorus, and an orchestra consisting of 1 flute, 1 oboe, 2 clarinets in B, 1 bassoon, 2 horns, 1 cornet, 1 trombone, percussion for 2 players (snare drum, cymbals, bass drum), and strings.Orledge, op. cit, p. 284. A narrator was added for the first public performance and has become standard.Volta, op. cit.

Discovery, premiere, interpolations The subsequent history of Geneviève de Brabant is sown with mystery and confusion that still haunt the work. Ornella Volta fit most of the puzzle pieces together in her 1987 article "Give a Dog a Bone: Some investigations into Erik Satie."Volta, op. cit.

It appears that by March 1901 Satie had grown unsure of this essentially complete opus. That month he borrowed 16 bars from Geneviève's second aria (No. 14) for another Contamine de Latour collaboration that came to naught, the piano piece Le poisson rêveur (The Dreamy Fish).Orledge, op. cit., p. 285. He did not register the music with SACEM and never spoke of it to anyone, including his young admirers Alexis Roland-Manuel and Paul Collaer, who compiled the first two catalogues of his compositions (1916, 1924).Alexis Roland-Manuel, Erik Satie, Paris, Impr. H. Roberge, 1916, p. 10-11. Roland-Manuel was Satie's first important musical protégé.Paul Collaer,"Catalogue de l'oeuvre d'Erik Satie", in Arts & Lettres d'Aujourd'hui, IIe année, no. 11, Brussels, March 16, 1924, pp. 255-257. Collaer was a Belgian musicologist and one of the very few music critics whose opinions Satie respected. Volta speculated that the shock of seeing Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande in April 1902 caused Satie to shelve Geneviève for good.Volta, op. cit.

After Satie's death Darius Milhaud was among the first to enter his squalid room in Arcueil, previously off-limits to visitors. 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".Darius Milhaud, Notes Without Music, translated by Donald Evans, Calder & Boyers, London, 1967, pp. 148-151. The extant manuscripts tell a different story: Jack in the Box was found in a single sketchbook, while Geneviève was composed on eight loose sheets torn out of a different book. It was also determined that the story of the bus related only to Jack in the Box, which Satie had copyrighted with SACEM in 1905.Volta, op. cit.

Enter Count Etienne de Beaumont (1883-1956), Satie's most devoted patron of the 1920s. In early 1926 he began organizing a one-day "Satie Festival" to honor the composer's memory and raise funds for a monument over his unmarked grave in Arcueil.The monument was to be sculpted by Satie's friend Constantin Brâncuși, but this project did not materialize. See Caroline Potter, Erik Satie: A Parisian Composer and his World, The Boydell Press, 2016, p. 242. For the finale it was Beaumont's idea to stage the newly unearthed Geneviève as a lavish puppet show. He had seen Manuel de Falla's El retablo de maese Pedro (1923) at the private salon of Princesse Edmond de Polignac, and commissioned the same artist, Spanish painter Manuel Angelès Ortiz (1895-1984), to design the sets and marionettes.Volta, op. cit. Désormière was named the event's music director and set about orchestrating the score.

On May 17, 1926, the 60th anniversary of Satie's birth, the premiere of Geneviève capped off the Satie Festival at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. 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".Volta, op. cit.

Contamine de Latour was still living but too ill to attend the concert; he died a week later at 59, the same age as Satie.On May 24, 1926. See Volta, op. cit. 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. Though sometimes hazy in facts and chronology, these pieces have proved a valuable resource for Satie researchers with their vivid portrayals of his early adulthood. For all his prolific efforts as an author and journalist, Contamine de Latour's claim to fame rests on his personal and professional connection to Satie.P. Contamine de Latour, "Erik Satie intime: souvenirs de jeunesse", Comœdia, August 3, 5, 6, 1925. (The author omitted his first initial in the bylines). Texts reprinted in Robert Orledge, Satie Remembered, Faber and Faber, London, 1995, pp. 15-17, 24-36.

The strangest twist in Geneviève'''s premiere was the complete disregard for Contamine de Latour's contributions. Apart from the sung verses, for which he was uncredited, none of his play was used; his name did not appear in the show's program or publicity material. 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".Comœdia, May 13 and 19, 1926. See Roger Désormière website (op. cit. and linked above). Nearly 50 years later Ornella Volta discovered the intact libretto in Count Beaumont's archives, and eventually secured its publication. If Beaumont had the playscript while he was planning the festival, it is not known why he chose to suppress it. 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. At the premiere this was done by actor Edouard Ferras.Volta, op. cit.