The Nursery as Circus: Dancing the Childlike to Fauré's Dolly Suite, 1913

ABSTRACT

In 1913, at the Théâtre des Arts in Paris, a controversial but highly successful ballet choreographed a circus-style pantomime to the music of Fauré's Dolly Suite. With its apparently incongruent relation of dance to music, the ballet displayed, as one reviewer put it, ‘criticisms in action’. This article investigates how we might conceive the production as an act of musical and cultural criticism, by examining its close relation with contexts such as early comic film, music-hall entertainment, the children's literature market, medical and anthropological theories, and surrealist thought. The ballet implicitly challenged conventional interpretations of Fauré's music as reflecting a particular perception of childhood – one which was rather too close to the sentimental attitudes vehemently dismissed in contemporaneous literature. The production was an important manifestation of an emergent understanding of the ‘childlike’ in early twentieth-century French culture – as a condition enlightened by irrationality, with important physiological traits.

Notes

1 ‘Ce sont de petites méditations inspirées par l’enfance, offertes en hommage à l’enfance, pleines de tendresse, de douceur, parfois aussi riantes et animées, mais toujours intimes et faites pour évoquer une calme atmosphere de “nursery”. [ … ] Aussi est-ce sans doute en manière de paradoxe [ … ] qu’il a combiné, pour illustrer ces pièces enfantines, une pantomime, puérile à vrai dire, mais incohérente, bruyante, confuse, qui se passe en plein air, où il y a des clowns qui se donnent des gifles, une nourrice bernée, un lapin marchand de jouets, que sais-je encore? et qui est en désaccord absolu et discontinu avec l’exquise musique de M. Fauré’. Reynaldo Hahn, ‘La musique’, Le journal, 12 January 1913, 3 (emphasis original). All translations from French are my own unless otherwise stated.

2 Fauré’s four-hand original was premièred by Alfred Cortot and Édouard Risler at the Société Nationale de Musique, Paris, in April 1898. Hamelle published Rabaud’s orchestration in 1906.

3 Cf. Stephanie Jordan, ‘Choreomusical Conversations: Facing a Double Challenge’, Dance Research Journal, 43/1 (2011), 43–64 (p. 58).

4 ‘Une petite fantaisie intellectuelle explosive’. Émile Vuillermoz, ‘Les théâtres’, La revue musicale S.I.M., 1 February 1913, 43–6 (p. 45). ‘Fantaisie’ had the general meaning of imagination or fancy; as a description of an artwork, it denoted something ‘free and capricious’ (‘libre et de capriceux’), expressing a ‘taste for the bizarre and ephemeral’ (‘goût bizarre et passager’). Petit Larousse illustré: Nouveau dictionnaire encyclopédique, ed. Pierre Larousse and Claude Augé, 47th edn (Paris, 1909), 380 (s.v. ‘Fantaisie’).

5 See Trésor de la langue française: Dictionnaire de la langue du XIXe et du XXe siècle (1789–1960), 16 vols. (Paris, 1971–94), v (1977), 752 (s.v. ‘Chorée’). These disorders are often caused by a disease of the basal ganglia (Oxford Concise Medical Dictionary, 8th edn (Oxford, 2010), 139, s.v. ‘Chorea’); the term may simply refer to the physiological symptoms.

6 Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500, 2nd edn (Harlow, 2005), 2. See Musical Childhoods and the Cultures of Youth, ed. Sarah Boynton and Roe-Min Kok (Middletown, CT, 2006), and, for instance, Adeline Mueller, ‘Who Were the Drei Knaben?’, Opera Quarterly, 28 (2012), 88–103. Julianne Lindberg gives a cogent account of perceptions of childhood embodied in the Dolly Suite, focusing on its manifestations of nostalgia, in her ‘Through the Looking Glass: Child-Inspired Keyboard Albums of the French Fin de siècle’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2011), 30–59.

7 Cunningham, Children and Childhood, 1.

8 Carolyn Steedman, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780–1930 (London, 1995).

9 Lynn Garafola, ‘Forgotten Interlude: Eurhythmic Dancers at the Paris Opéra’, Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research, 13/1 (1995), 59–83 (p. 60).

10 For details of the theatre’s repertoire, see Garafola, ‘Forgotten Interlude’, 61–2, and Lynn Garafola, Legacies of Twentieth Century Dance (Middletown, CT, 2005), 86–7. Novel approaches to the interrelationship of décor, music and dance also characterized Rouché’s productions. See also Dominique Garban, Jacques Rouché, l’homme qui sauva l’Opéra de Paris (Paris, 2007), 71.

11 ‘Spectacles de musique’; ‘des visions de rêve, paysages de jadis ou féeries d’aujourd’hui’. H. Décé, ‘Théâtre des Arts’, Le théâtre, 340 (February 1913), 17–20 (p. 17).

12 Garafola, Legacies of Twentieth Century Dance, 59.

13 For descriptions of other music-hall dancers at the Théâtre des Arts, see ibid., 87–9.

14 ‘Sorte de sketch dansant, montrait pour la première fois, à ma connaissance, sur une scène de théâtre, le burlesque du cirque et du music-hall’. Louis Laloy, La musique rétrouvée (Paris, 1928), 198.

15 ‘Des idées extravagantes à l’aide d’expressions bouffonnes, voire triviales’; ‘dont la bouffonnerie assez grossière porte au rire ou à la mocquerie’. Trésor de la langue française, iv (1975), 1072–3 (s.v. ‘Burlesque’).

16 Laloy himself wrote a series of articles on the music-hall in 1913 in La revue musicale S.I.M., which describe the sketches and revues at some notable venues. The scholarship that I have found especially helpful in understanding the performance styles of popular entertainment has been that of Rae Beth Gordon: ‘From Charcot to Charlot: Unconscious Imitation and Spectatorship in French Cabaret and Early Cinema’, Critical Inquiry, 27 (2001), 515–49; Why the French Love Jerry Lewis: From Cabaret to Early Cinema (Stanford, CA, 2001); and Dances with Darwin, 1875–1910: Vernacular Modernity in France (Aldershot, 2008). For a detailed study of the large-scale ballets pantomimes that appeared alongside these genres in Paris’s largest music halls, see Sarah Gutsche-Miller, Parisian Music-Hall Ballet, 1871–1913 (Rochester, NY, 2015).

17 Jean-Michel Nectoux, Gabriel Fauré: A Musical Life, trans. Roger Nichols (Cambridge, 1991), 63.

18 For details of the production and reception of these ballets, see Frank W. D. Ries, The Dance Theatre of Jean Cocteau (Ann Arbor, MI, 1986). See also Nancy Perloff, Art and the Everyday: Popular Entertainment and the Circle of Erik Satie (Oxford, 1991), and Ann Dils, ‘Reimagining Le boeuf sur le toit’, Dance on its Own Terms: Histories and Methodologies, ed. Melanie Bales and Karen Eliot (New York, 2013), 43–63.

19 See Denis Herlin, ‘André Hellé et La boîte à joujoux’, Cahiers Debussy, 30 (2006), 98–122 (p. 108).

20 ‘Mais il m’est tout à fait impossible de découvrir quel lien peut bien exister entre elle [l’action] et la musique de M. Fauré. On la superposerait tout aussi bien à n’importe quelle autre musique, à Siegfried Idyll par exemple, ou bien à l’Après-midi d’un faune [ … ]. C’est ainsi qu’on nous montre, sur la fine musique de Dolly, une clownerie échevelée.’ Pierre Lalo, ‘Le deuxième “spectacle de musique” du Théâtre des Arts’, Le temps, 28 January 1913, 3.

21 ‘L’audience de [ … ] cette souple et tendre musique [ … ] ne m’entraîne à aucun des ébats dont le public s’est, hier, franchement diverti.’ Georges Pioch, ‘Théâtre des Arts’, Gil Blas, 10 January 1913, 4–5 (p. 4).

22 See Laloy, La musique rétrouvée, 198. Vuillermoz had also been Fauré’s pupil.

23 ‘Elle l’a livré aux artistes de music-hall, de cirque et de cabarets montmartrois en se réclamant – impertinence suprême! – du Directeur du Conservatoire!’ Vuillermoz, ‘Les théâtres’, 45.

24 ‘De problèmes esthétiques’. Ibid.

25 ‘Les Russes [ … ] ont achevé de corrompre en nous le sentiment de l’harmonie et de l’unité.’ Lalo, ‘Le deuxième “spectacle de musique”’.

26 ‘Depuis qu’ils nous ont montré leurs brillants ballets [ … ] nous nous sommes accoutumés [ … ] à applaudir des divertissements chorégraphiques dans lesquels on réunit, une oeuvre musicale qui n’a pas été faite pour cela, une action qui n’a pas le moindre rapport avec cette oeuvre musicale, ou même dont le sens lui est exactement contraire.’ Ibid. See also Lalo, ‘La musique’, Le temps, 11 June 1912, 3.

27 Davinia Caddy, The Ballets Russes and Beyond: Music and Dance in Belle-Époque Paris (Cambridge, 2012), 68. See also Stephanie Jordan, ‘Debussy, the Dance, and the Faune’, Debussy in Performance, ed. James Briscoe (London, 1999), 119–34.

28 Garafola, Legacies of Twentieth Century Dance, 86, 59.

29 ‘Nous n’avons pas eu en France depuis la révélation des ballets russes une expérience de synesthésie digne d’être comparée à celle-là. [ … ] Nous pouvons prendre une prompte revanche en luttant sur le terrain de la fantaisie, de l’esprit et de la bonne humeur [ … ]. Nous sommes seuls à posséder la clef de certaines subtiles énigmes musicales.’ Vuillermoz, ‘Les théâtres’, 45.

30 ‘Des associations d’idées nouvelles entre une mélodie, un geste et un sentiment’. Ibid.

31 ‘Critiques en action’. Ibid.

32 ‘Elle cherche à se justifier en évoquant cette prestigieuse Shéhérazade qui malgré sa prédestination formelle de tableau maritime est devenue, de par la fantaisie tyrannique d’un maître de ballet, le commentaire très éloquent et très précis d’une aventure de harem!’ Ibid., 45–6.

33 Jordan, ‘Choreomusical Conversations’, 47–8. For Vuillermoz’s perception of the action’s oneness with the music, see below, note 66.

34 Hahn, ‘La musique’, 3. Maurice Ravel, ‘Au Théâtre des Arts’, Comoedia illustré, 5 February 1913, 417–20, trans. Arbie Orenstein, A Ravel Reader: Correspondence Articles, Interviews (New York, 1990), 362–5 (p. 364).

35 Nicholas Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia (Oxford, 1998). Recent scholarship has, of course, produced varying terminology in attempts to theorize how music enters into intermedial relations with, and within, other art forms. According to Vuillermoz’s interpretation, the music and dance in Laloy’s ballet potentially exemplified the relation that Cook calls ‘contest’, in which opposition forms the basis of connection between different media, each ‘attempting to impose its own characteristics upon the other’ (p. 103). This article focuses on the imagery employed by contemporaneous commentators to conceive this relation.

36 See below, note 66.

37 Henriette Régnier, L’harmonie du geste: Exercises de maintien et de grâce à l’usage des jeunes filles (Paris, 1913). Comoedia illustré, 20 January 1913, 393.

38 The publication of the manual suggests the continuation into the twentieth century of the late nineteenth-century fashion for danses anciennes. See Jann Pasler, Composing the Citizen (Berkeley, CA, 2009), 498–506, 631–40.

39 ‘Un rhythme musical doit accompagner l’exécution de nos exercises. Il en commande et en modèle en quelque sorte l’exécution.’ Régnier, L’harmonie du geste, 2.

40 Caddy, The Ballets Russes, 102. Jean d’Udine (whose real name was Albert Cozanet) had promoted Dalcrozian ideas in ‘Qu’est-ce que la gymnastique rhythmique?’, Bulletin français de la S.I.M., 15 June 1909, 635–51. Like Laloy, Dalcroze had written for La grande revue, which Rouché had edited: Émile Jacques-Dalcroze, ‘Le rhythme au théâtre’, La grande revue, 10 June 1910, 339–50.

41 See Caddy, The Ballets Russes, 106, and Gordon, ‘From Charcot to Charlot’, 518–22.

42 Cited in Caddy, The Ballets Russes, 106. The quotations are from Caddy’s translation of a passage from a paper by de Rochas entitled ‘L’origine physiologique des arts de la musique et de la danse’ and given at the Congrès de Grenoble, 1904.

43 Adolphe Aderer described the choreography as ‘a succession of unexpected appearances’ (‘une suite d’apparitions inattendues’). Aderer, ‘Theatre des Arts: Représentations musicales’, Le petit parisien, 13 March 1913, 5.

44 Ravel, ‘Au Théâtre des Arts’, 419, trans. Orenstein, 365. ‘Cabrioles’ (translated by Orenstein as ‘caprioles’) could refer to the balletic gesture, or more generally to a cavorting movement, a tumble or somersault.

45 ‘M. Louis Laloy a disposé un ballet d’une fantaisie subtile et charmante.’ Henri Quittard, ‘Théâtre des Arts’, Le Figaro, 10 January 1913, 4. See also Régis Gignoux, ‘Avant le rideau’, Le Figaro, 8 January 1913, 4.

46 ‘Le tendre, comique et délicieux ballet de MM. Gabriel Fauré et Louis Laloy’. ‘Théâtres et concerts’, Le matin, 20 May 1913, 4.

47 The theatre put on 44 different shows in three seasons, creating 91 different décors. Garban, Jacques Rouché, 157.

48 Caddy, The Ballets Russes, 100, 98.

49 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, ‘Production of Presence, Interspersed with Absence: A Modernist View on Music, Libretti and Staging’, trans. Matthiew Tiews, Music and the Aesthetics of Modernity, ed. Karol Berger and Anthony Newcomb (Cambridge, 2005), 343–55 (p. 355), cited in Caddy, The Ballets Russes, 101.

50 Ibid., 97.

51 Ibid., 114.

52 Perloff, Art and the Everyday, 183.

53 Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts (London, 2000), 185.

54 Where inconsistently spelt in reviews, the names of the performers are taken from Ravel, ‘Au Théâtre des Arts’, 419, trans. Orenstein, 364.

55 Louis Laloy, Dolly (Paris, Théâtre des Arts, 9 January 1913). Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Arts du spectacle, 8-RO-10939.

56 Laloy, Dolly. The original French is given in the Appendix.

57 Biographers agree that the titles of the second and fourth movements should be ‘Messieu Aoul!’ and ‘Ketty-Valse’ respectively (and that that of the sixth should be ‘Le pas espagnol’), in preference to the versions given to them in early editions. As a way of acknowledging that listening is inextricable from spectatorship, I use the titles given in the programme.

58 ‘Arrangée [ … ] en fantaisie mimique, acrobatique et chorégraphique’. Décé, ‘Théâtre des Arts’, 20. See also Aderer, ‘Théâtre des Arts’; and ‘Théâtres’, Le temps, 11 January 1913, 4.

59 See, for instance Décé, ‘Théâtre des Arts’, 20; and Félix Gàiffe, ‘Chronique parisienne: Théâtre des Arts’, Revue française de musique, 1 February 1913, 346–7 (p. 347).

60 Padilla was known ubiquitously by the racial slur ‘Chocolat’.

61 Jean Cocteau, Paris Album, 1900 –1914, trans. Margaret Crosland (London, 1987), 56. Cocteau himself sought to reproduce this kind of ‘fantaisie’ in Le boeuf sur le toit.

62 ‘[Les danseurs] contrepointèrent la musique de Fauré de gestes si précis, si minutieusement établis et si savamment prémédités, sous les apparences d’une fantaisie échevelée.’ Vuillermoz, ‘Les théâtres’, 46.

63 ‘Un jeune lapin noir portant un coquet pantalon de dentelles’. Ibid., 45.

64 Ravel, ‘Au Théâtre des Arts’, 419, trans. Orenstein, 364.

65 ‘Sens et choses de théâtre’, Le matin, 15 January 1913, 5 (see also Décé, ‘Théâtre des Arts’, 20).

66 ‘Qui n’a pas goûté la saveur purement musicale des pizzicati disloqués de Tommy, des trilles qu’il exécute sur la tête ou des tours de reins de l’effarant Espagnol, ignore la joie profonde des stylisations et des traductions plastiques d’un rythme.’ Vuillermoz, ‘Les théâtres’, 46.

67 ‘C’est M. Tommy Footit qui [ … ] anime aussi, secondé par son frère Georgy, les quatre pattes du taureau dont leur père est le toréador, dans une parodie de Carmen [ … ] ces jeûnes gens dont on n’a pas oublié l’émouvante bouffonnerie dans Dolly.’ Louis Laloy, ‘Cabarets et music-halls’, La revue musicale S.I.M., 15 April 1913, 52–5 (p. 54).

68 See Décé, ‘Théâtre des Arts’, 20; Gignoux, ‘Avant le rideau’, 4; ‘Sens et choses de théâtre’; ‘Théâtres et concerts’, L’humanité: Journal socialiste quotidien, 20 May 1913, 5.

69 ‘Toute la grâce et la science classique d’Aveline ne purent égaler le “caractère” et le relief de l’interprétation de ses camarades!’ Vuillermoz, ‘Les théâtres’, 46.

70 See, for instance, Décé, ‘Théâtre des Arts’, 20. Aveline was possibly Albert Aveline, a member of the Opéra troupe who would go on to become premier danseur.

71 See Ravel, ‘Au Théâtre des Arts’, 419, trans. Orenstein, 364.

72 ‘Un gitan[o] qui joue des castagnettes et exécute le fandango comme Peppo el amoso en personne’. Aderer, ‘Théâtre des Arts’. I have been unable to find further details about this character. In an article in March 1913, Laloy himself would also note the ‘sinuous wiggling’ (‘trémoussements onduleux’) of Spanish dancers at the Alhambra, recalling Vuillermoz’s ‘waist-twirling’ remark. Louis Laloy, ‘Cabarets et music halls’, La revue musicale S.I.M., 15 March 1913, 53–7 (p. 53).

73 ‘L’entrain endiablé de M. Mirallès [sic]’. ‘Sens et choses de théâtre’.

74 ‘Dolly [ … ] abandonne tous ces amis pour un pirate espagnol.’ Gignoux, ‘Avant le rideau’, 4. See also Pioch, ‘Théâtre des Arts’, 5.

75 ‘Les clowneries bon enfant auxquelles se livrent les adorateurs de l’espiègle Dolly ne se racontent pas: il faut les voir.’ Gàiffe, ‘Chronique parisienne’, 346–7.

76 These can be easily viewed (with added music, and in one case added colour) at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjHZ_z23BZY> and <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpYTanqDzvc> (accessed 29 April 2016).

77 Gordon, ‘From Charcot to Charlot’, 535, 516. Incidentally, Vuillermoz would become a central figure in the development of French cinema criticism in the 1910s.

78 Ibid., 535. See also Rae Beth Gordon, ‘Laughing Hysterically: Gesture, Movement, and Spectatorship in Early French Cinema’, Moving Forward, Holding Fast: The Dynamics of Nineteenth-Century French Culture, ed. Barbara T. Cooper and Mary Donaldson-Evans (Amsterdam, 1997), 217–317.

79 Georges Sadoul, Histoire générale du cinema, 3 vols. (Paris, 1947–51), ii: Les pionniers du cinéma, 1897–1908 (1948), 192, quoted in Richard Abel, The Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema, 1896–1914 (London, 1994), 87.

80 Abel, The Ciné Goes to Town, 62, 70.

81 For instance, the basis of Méliès’s Tom Tight and Dum Dum (1903) is, as Abel observes, ‘a music-hall number involving “eccentric clowns”’. Ibid., 90.

82 As Gordon suggests, later films show that technology did not determine this aesthetic in early film.

83 Abel, The Ciné Goes to Town, 72.

84 For details of these, see Tristan Rémy, Entrées clownesques (Paris, 1962).

85 ‘Tout cela gambade et sautille.’ Aderer, ‘Théâtre des Arts’.

86 ‘Un ballet de joujoux qui s’animent, dansent, virevoltent [ … ], se battent’. ‘Théatre des Arts’, Les annales du théâtre et de la musique, ed. Noël Édouard and Edmond Stoullig (Paris, 1913), 417–36 (p. 417). For a reference to puppets, see Quittard, ‘Théâtre des Arts’, 4.

87 Gordon, Dances with Darwin, 34, 46, 49.

88 ‘Échos et nouvelles’, L’aurore, 10 January 1899, 1.

89 Perloff, Art and the Everyday, 44. As Perloff observes, the ballet cast Milhaud as a ‘writer of comic circus music’. Ibid., 185.

90 Laurent Grillet, Footitt [sic] et Chocolat (Polka), arr. Angelino Trojelli (Paris, 1913).

91 Timothy B. Cochran, ‘Adapting Debussy: Dislocation and Crisis in Prélude à “L’après-midi d’un faune”’, 19th-Century Music, 39 (2015–16), 35–55.

92 Perhaps significantly, these features are also central to Satie’s music for the acrobats’ show in Parade. There, the waltz’s opening is, as in ‘Mi-a-ou’, peppered with hemiola rhythms.

93 Roy Howat, The Art of French Piano Music (London, 2009), 130, 140.

94 Unlike Bizet’s Carmen, Chabrier’s España or Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio espagnol, Rabaud’s orchestration does not involve actual castanets.

95 Caddy, The Ballets Russes, 55.

96  See Perloff, Art and the Everyday, 35, 104.

97  Lindberg, ‘Through the Looking Glass’, 52.

98  Caddy, The Ballets Russes, 73.

99  In all three movements, we might identify specific moments of diegetic music in the violin part. Fauré’s score does not, however, provide moments of monophony equivalent to, say, the Magician’s flute-playing in Petrushka.

100 Hugh MacDonald, Bizet (Oxford, 2014), 177. As Hervé Lacombe notes, it is standard to place the Dolly Suite within a small tradition of French four-hand music, whose canonic examples are Bizet’s Jeux d’enfants, Debussy’s Petite suite and Ravel’s Ma mère l’oye (Lacombe, Georges Bizet: Naissance d’une identité créatrice (Paris, 2000), 530). This article attempts to situate Fauré’s music in less familiar and wider cultural movements.

101 I am grateful to one of this journal’s reviewers for pointing this out.

102 ‘D’un burlesque vigoureux’. Laloy, La musique rétrouvée, 81.

103 Gordon, Dances with Darwin, 243–64.

104 Peter Lamothe, ‘Theater Music in France, 1864–1914’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina, 2008), 191.

105 Ibid., 204.

106 Lamothe, ‘Theater Music in France, 1864–1914’, 180.

107 Ibid., 205.

108 Perloff, Art and the Everyday, 172.

109 See Paul Roberts, Images: The Piano Music of Claude Debussy (Portland, OR, 1996), 218–28. For Satie, see Perloff, Art and the Everyday, 28, and Barbara Kelly, Music and Ultra-Modernism in France: A Fragile Consensus, 1913 –1939 (Woodbridge, 2014), 48, 54. Alexis Roland-Manuel proposed that Satie’s 1913 Descriptions automatiques, specifically, were a ‘fantaisie de clown’. Roland-Manuel, Erik Satie, lecture given at the Société Lyre et Palette, 8 April 1916 (Paris, 1916), 3, cited in Kelly, Music and Ultra-Modernism, 48.

110 Pasler, Composing the Citizen, 489.

111 ‘Une musique aimable accompagne ces exhibitions et ces facéties. [ … ] sur la trame d’un clair orchestre, des airs populaires et des fragments d’oeuvres appropriés, comme cette impression du matin dont le public savoure la tendresse ingénue en ignorant le nom de son auteur, Edvard Grieg’. Laloy, ‘Cabarets et music-halls’, 15 April 1913, 54.

112 Catherine Hindson, Female Performance Practice on the Fin-de-siècle Popular Stages of London and Paris: Experiment and Advertisement (Manchester, 2007), 168. For equivalent observations more directly concerned with music, see Jann Pasler, Writing through Music (Oxford, 2008), Chapter 13: ‘Material Culture and Postmodern Positivism: Rethinking the “Popular” in Late Nineteenth-Century French Music’.

113 Jean Huré, ‘L’art au Café-Concert’, La revue musicale S.I.M., 15 July 1911, 63–4.

114 ‘La “mauvaise musique” – la musique frivole que nous avons convenu d’appeler la “mauvaise musique” – est toujours “musicale” [ … ]. Celle que nous appelons la “bonne musique”, la musique bien faite, la musique sérieuse (!) est, le plus souvent, dénuée d’invention, de spontanéité, de logique naturalle: elle est “antimusicale”.’ Ibid., 63.

115 Louis Laloy, ‘Cabarets et music halls’, La revue musicale S.I.M., 15 February 1913, 53–6.

116 On this intellectual process, see John Storey, Inventing Popular Culture: From Folklore to Globalization (Oxford, 2003).

117 ‘Le charme attendri, [ … ] la grâce harmonique’. Ravel, ‘Au Théâtre des Arts’, 418; trans. Orenstein, 364.

118 ‘Jadis écrivit pour des bambins amis’. Magnus Synnestvedt, ‘Concerts Chevillard’, Le mercure musical, 15 January 1907, 507.

119 Nectoux, Gabriel Fauré, 62. For details of the genesis of other movements, see ibid., 61–2.

120 Carlo Caballero, Fauré and French Musical Aesthetics (Cambridge, 2001), 249.

121 ‘“Scènes d’enfant”, pour piano à quatre mains, qui sont un Chef-d’oeuvre de raffinement et d’ingénuité’. J. Saint-Jean (Joseph de Marliave), ‘La musique de piano de Gabriel Fauré’, La nouvelle revue, 15 January 1910, 256–72.

122 For instance, Robert Schumann, Scènes d’enfant (Paris, 1908).

123 ‘En soulignant les aspects pittoresques de ce petit monde par des anecdotes, tantôt amusantes, tantôt pathétiques’. Marina Bethlenfalvay, Les visages de l’enfant dans la littérature française du XIXe siècle: Esquisse d’une typologie (Geneva, 1979), 120.

124 ‘L’évocation d’enfances ouatées, dans un milieu de haute bourgeoisie’. Guillemette Tison, ‘Le récit d’enfance: À (ne pas) mettre entre toutes les mains? (1870–1900)’, L’ère du récit d’enfance: En France depuis 1870, ed. Alain Schaffner (Arras, 2005), 33–48 (p. 38).

125 Ibid., 36.

126 Ibid., 35.

127 Lucien de Flagny and André Lichtenberger, Trott au village (Paris, 1905).

128 This title and those in the next sentence are taken from Théophile Hirlemann, Scènes enfantines (Paris, 1897).

129 A photograph from around 1913 shows Fauré and a young girl (a Mlle Lombard) playing four-hand with this arrangement of roles. Nectoux suggests that it depicts them playing the Dolly Suite (see Gabriel Fauré, 62).

130 ‘Sa majesté l’enfant’. Bethlenfalvay, Les visages de l’enfant, 119. Bethlenfalvay’s phrase recalls Freud’s term ‘His Majesty the Baby’, which appears (in English) in his 1914 introduction to the concept of narcissism. Freud was probably referring to a well-known painting of 1898 with that title by Arthur Drummond, in which a policeman holds up busy traffic as a finely dressed little girl and a woman carrying toys walk across the road towards the viewer.

131 Sylvia Schafer, Children in Moral Danger and the Problem of Government in Third Republic France (Princeton, NJ, 1997), 9, quoted in Andrew Counter, ‘Zola’s Fin-de-siècle Reproductive Politics’, French Studies, 58 (2014), 193–208 (p. 204).

132 Penny Brown, A Critical History of French Children’s Literature (New York, 2008), 151.

133 Ibid., 152.

134 ‘Il faut casser l’enfant en sucre que tous les Droz ont donné jusqu’ici à sucer au public. L’enfant est un petit animal nécessaire. Un chat est plus humain.’ Jules Renard, Journal 1887–1910, ed. Léon Guichard and Gilbert Sigaux (Paris, 1960), 54.

135 ‘Rejettait l’éthos de la famille bourgeoisie’. Bethlenfalvay, Les visages de l’enfant, 123.

136 ‘Avec cette démystification du soi-disant “bonheur familial” commence toute une littérature d’accusation de la famille et de révolte de l’enfant contre l’hypocrisie et la tyranny des adultes.’ Ibid., 122.

137 ‘Notre vie enthousiaste et brutale de vigoureux sauvageons [ … ], c’est-à-dire libérée des hypocrisies de la famille et de l’école’. Louis Pergaud, La guerre des boutons: Roman de ma douzième année (Paris, 1912), 9.

138 ‘Non sans ironie’. Gignoux, ‘Avant le rideau’, 4.

139 For an elaboration of this point in relation to Impressionist painting, see Greg M. Thomas, Impressionist Children: Childhood, Family, and Modern Identity in French Art (London, 2010).

140 ‘Elle n’accorde à la musique descriptive qu’un pouvoir d’évocation vague et imprecise.’ Vuillermoz, ‘Les théâtres’, 45.

141 Caddy, The Ballets Russes, 74.

142 See Roberts, Images, 218–20.

143 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, ‘The Variety Theater’, Futurism: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence S. Rainey, Christine Poggi and and Laura Wittman (New Haven, CT, 2009), 159–64 (p. 159). Marinetti’s ‘Le music-hall: Manifeste futuriste’ appears in Futurisme: Manifestes, proclamations, documents, ed. Giovanni Lista (Lausanne, 1973), 249–54; it was first published in English in the Daily Mail, 21 November 1913.

144 Ibid., 161.

145 Daniel Albright, Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources (London, 2004), 312.

146 ‘La complaisance envers l’absurde rouvre à l’homme le royaume mystérieux qu’habitent les enfants.’ André Breton, Oeuvres complètes, 4 vols. (Paris, 1988–2008), ii (1988), 962.

147 ‘L’esprit qui plonge dans le surréalisme revit avec exaltation la meilleure part de son enfance.’ André Breton, ‘Manifeste du surréalisme’, Manifestes du surréalisme, ed. Jean-Jacques Pauvert (Paris, 1962), 13–63 (p. 55).

148 David Hopkins, ‘Re-enchantment: Surrealist Discourses of Childhood, Hermeticism, and the Outmoded’, A Companion to Dada and Surrealism, ed. Hopkins (Chichester, 2016), 270–86 (p. 271).

149 See Breton, ‘Manifeste du surréalisme’, 55–6.

150 For a study of this idea in Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment opera, see Mueller, ‘Who Were the Drei Knaben?’ For the development of this literary idea up to Rimbaud, see Edward Ahearn, Rimbaud: Visions and Habitations (Berkeley, CA, 1983).

151 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland had been translated (by Henri Bué, as Aventures d’Alice au pays des merveilles) as early as 1869, and reprinted with illustrations by Arthur Rackham in 1908.

152 Caddy’s brilliantly contextualized discussion of clowning in relation to this movement does not elaborate this activity’s particular link to childhood. Davinia Caddy, ‘Parisian Cake Walks’, 19th-Century Music, 30 (2006–7), 288–317.

153 ‘L’exaltation des forces de l’irrationnel contre l’ordre prétendement rationnel assuré par la “logique” de la pensée bourgeoise’. Giovanni Lista, ‘Esthétique du music-hall et mythologie urbaine chez Marinetti’, Du cirque au théâtre, ed. Claudine Amiard-Chevrel (Lausanne, 1983), 48–64 (p. 54).

154 Cocteau, Paris Album, 55.

155 Massine described the burlesque as ‘a succession of convulsive leaps’ (quoted in Léonide Massine, My Life in Ballet, ed. Phyllis Hartroll and Robert Rubens (London, 1968), 104). Kenneth E. Silver notes the connection between childhood and popular entertainment in Cocteau’s imagination through reference to the Little American Girl, in ‘Jean Cocteau and the Image d’Epinal: An Essay on Realism and Naiveté’, Jean Cocteau and the French Scene, ed. Ashton Dore (New York, 1984), 81–105 (p. 93). In Le boeuf sur le toit, the peculiarly oversized heads of the masks gave the characters childlike bodily proportions (see ibid., 97). Later examples of related, non-musical surrealist child figures include Victor from Roger Vitrac’s Victor ou les enfants au pouvoir (1929).

156 Mark S. Micale, Approaching Hysteria: Disease and its Interpretations (Princeton, NJ, 1995), 200.

157 See also Caddy, The Ballets Russes, 112–13, for a discussion of these phenomena in relation to dance. For a wider study, see Felicia McCarren, Dance Pathologies: Performance, Poetics, Medicine (Stanford, CA, 1998). Discussions of realizations of hysteria on rather different musical stages include Brian Hyer, ‘Parsifal hystérique’, Opera Quarterly, 22 (2006), 269–320, and Julie Pedneault-Deslauriers, ‘Pierrot L.’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 64 (2011), 601–45. As Pedneault-Deslauriers discusses, pantomime was intrinsically suited to exhibiting hysteria.

158 See Bertrand Marquer, Les ‘romans’ de la Salpêtrière: Réception d’une scénographie clinique: Jean-Martin Charcot dans l’imaginaire fin-de-siècle (Geneva, 2008), 101, and Pedneault-Deslauriers, ‘Pierrot L.’, 617, 619.

159 Sydenham’s chorea (as St Vitus’s dance is now known) is caused by a streptococcal infection; its symptoms are uncontrolled jerking motions, in particular of the face, feet and hands. Rainer Maria Rilke gives a detailed and, by contemporaneous standards, atypically humane account of the symptoms of St Vitus’s dance afflicting a Parisian man in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), trans. Michael Hulse (London, 2009), 48–51.

160 Georges Montorgueil et al., Les demi-cabots: Le café-concert, le cirque, les forains (Paris, 1896), quoted in Gordon, ‘From Charcot to Charlot’, 515.

161 For a discussion of the pathologization of earlier clown pantomimes, see Gordon, ‘From Charcot to Charlot’, 113–26.

162 Sophie Basch, ‘The Writer’s View: Hysterical Clowns, Ridiculous Martyrs’, Great Parade: Portrait of the Artist as Clown, ed. Jean Clair (London, 2004), 57–63 (p. 58).

163 ‘Période des contorsions et des grands mouvements’; ‘une souplesse, une agilité [ … ] bien faite pour étonner le spectateur’. Paul Richer, L’art et la médecine (Paris, 1902), 149.

164 In ‘The Writer’s View’, Basch notes that several publications by the Salpêtrière ‘alternated portraits of clowns with photographs of patients’ (p. 58).

165 The Foottit sons, of course, were dressed as Pierrots in Dolly. Press descriptions demonstrate that they were essentially instances of what Pednault-Deslauriers calls the ‘buffoonish Pierrot’ (‘Pierrot L.’, 605), as is the clown in Méliès’s Au clair de la lune ou Pierrot Malheureux (1904).

166 Michael R. Finn, Hysteria, Hypnotism, the Spirits and Pornography: Fin-de-siècle Cultural Discourses in the Decadent Rachilde (Newark, DE, 2009), 72.

167 Caddy, The Ballets Russes, 104.

168 ‘Pouvoir irrésistible’. Laloy, ‘Cabarets et music halls’, 15 March 1913, 55.

169 Joseph N. Straus, ‘Normalizing the Abnormal: Disability in Music and Music Theory’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 59 (2006), 113–84 (p. 113). For consideration of a musical embodiment of clownisme from the perspective of disability studies, see Straus’s discussion of the second of Stravinsky’s Trois pièces pour quatuor à cordes in ‘Representing the Extraordinary Body: Musical Modernism’s Aesthetics of Disability’, The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies, ed. Blake Howe et al. (Oxford, 2016), 729–46.

170 Gordon, ‘From Charcot to Charlot’, 533.

171 Ibid., 60.

172 Ibid., 42.

173 Gordon, ‘From Charcot to Charlot’, 97.

174 Gordon, Dances with Darwin, 26.

175 ‘La chorée variable des dégénérés’. Magalhaes Lemos, ‘Infantilisme et dégénérescence psychique: Influence de l’hérédité neuro-pathologique’, Nouvelle iconographie de la Salpêtrière, 19 (Paris, 1906), 50–75 (p. 52).

176 Ibid., 59.

177 Revue de psychiatrie et de psychologie expérimentale, 15 (August 1911), 330.

178 ‘Réactions nerveuses’. Ibid.

179 ‘Chez ces individus atteints d’infantilisme mental [ … ] on observe les mêmes modes de réactions motrices que chez l’enfant: instabilité des attitudes, maladresse des mouvements, [ … ] spasmodicité apparente des reactions.’ Ibid.

180 Jody Blake notes the connection between the ‘primitive’ and the childlike in relation to Debussy’s ‘Golliwogg’s Cake Walk’, but not the pathological ideas that unite these categories with clowning: Blake, Le tumulte noir: Modernist Art and Popular Entertainment in Jazz-Age Paris, 1900–1930 (University Park, PA, 1999), 30.

181 See Pednault-Deslauriers, ‘Pierrot L.’, 639. In Dances with Darwin, Gordon maintains, however, that this earlier interest in corporeal automatism was central to the surrealists’ elevation of psychic automatism.

182 ‘S’il garde quelque lucidité, il ne peut que se retourner alors vers son enfance qui, pour massacré qu’elle ait été par le soin des dresseurs, ne lui en semble pas moins pleine de charmes.’ Breton, ‘Manifeste du surréalisme’, 15–16.

183 Lindberg, ‘Through the Looking Glass’, 30.