Her
brothers, Osbert and Sachie, had seen Parade,
a ballet conceived by Cocteau that had sets by Picasso and music by Satie, in
Paris, and they urged Edith Sitwell to collaborate with William Walton, the
composer, who was then not quite 20, on a project that would be an artistic
event in London to equal Parade. Walton, who was living at the time,
1922, with Osbert and Sachie, was dubious. Thus, Façade was
born.
Edith Sitwell
wrote the poems that became Façade. These are nearly nonsense rhymes
meant for a laugh. Walton set the
poems to jaunty, jazzy music. In
order to hear the poems over the music, the Sitwells decided to use
Sengerphones, which were large paper mâché megaphones to magnify the
spoken voices.
The first public
performance of the piece was held in June 1923. Walton conducted the music. Edith and one of her brothers stood on stage behind a
curtain to read the poems through the Sengerphones. There were friends, critics, and others in the
audience. Virginia Woolf was
there. Woolf wrote soon to a
friend, “Though I paid 3/6 to hear Edith Sitwell vociferate her poems
accompanied by a small and nimble orchestra, through a megaphone, I understood
so little that I could not judge.”
Critics hated the performance.
Of course, it became famous, and Façade
gained in popularity.
We drove
over to the University of Idaho this week for a performance of Façade. Like Virginia Woolf, I understood little of the poems, although
they were declaimed well and without the use of megaphones. One simply surrendered to the rhythms
of the poetry, offset as it was by flute, clarinet, saxophone, trumpet, cello,
and rackety percussion, and listened for the few instances of comprehensible
lines. I hear the male reader
begin “Sailors come / To the drum / Out of Babylon;” and understand nothing of
the rest of the poem. And when the
second poem begins, I hear the woman reader say “In the early spring-time,
after their tea,” and I begin to think about the tea I haven’t had this
evening, and my thought drifts through the line “Through the young fields of the springing Bohea,” and Bohea . . . gathers my concentration as
I try to conjure an image of the plant when the alliteration of the poem’s
“Jemima, Jocasta, Dinah, Deb / Walked with their father Sir Joshua Jebb –” sends
my head and foot to bob. I listen
to the flow of the music and allow the words to flow as well over me through
the poems “Country Dance,” “Polka,” to “Jodelling Song” (but what is jodelling
I wondered till I heard the poem’s lines about William Tell and “And the
mountain streams / Like cowbells sound”), “Scotch Rhapsody,” and “Popular
Song.” My eyelids and shoulders
were sagging by this time, for the evening was late, and I looked forward to
the final poem, “Sir Beelzebub.”
The Sitwells wanted it to be “fun,” and Façade was fun. In
1923, Façade was avant garde, and it
still, this week, had the ‘feel’ of a modernist event—a little surreal but also
beautiful and fun.
* * *
Notes: Lines of poetry are from Edith
Sitwell’s Façade (1987,
Duckworth). The Virginia Woolf
quotation is from p. 78 in Victoria Glendenning’s Edith Sitwell (1981, Knopf).
