Depicted in its pages
Paris Salons, Cafés, Studios
The Ballet Mécanique riot, reported from the seats — sixteen pianolas, an electric propeller, and Pound in a flowing blue shirt shouting down the hecklers.
Théâtre des Champs-Élysées
Still standing
Hours or admission
Still the same
The concrete temple of the avant-garde — where The Rite of Spring caused a riot in 1913, and the Ballet Mécanique caused another in 1926, with Ezra Pound shouting over the pianolas.
- 15 Av Montaigne, 75008 Paris
- 1913–present
Illustration
The place, briefly
Auguste Perret's theater opened in 1913 as a scandal in itself — reinforced concrete on the smartest avenue in Paris, with Antoine Bourdelle's reliefs where the gilt should have been — and within weeks it hosted the most famous riot in the history of music: the premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, where the fashionable audience howled the orchestra into inaudibility. The building has been the avant-garde's parade ground ever since.
The era on our shelves gave it a second riot. On 19 June 1926, George Antheil — the young American composer Ezra Pound had adopted and promoted — premiered his Ballet Mécanique here: a battery of synchronised pianolas, loudspeakers, and a large electric propeller aimed, more or less, at the seats. Sisley Huddleston was in the hall: coats went up, umbrellas opened against the fan's blast, the audience yelled against the buzzers, and Pound stood up in a flowing blue shirt to bellow insults at the philistines over the din. Brancusi grew excited; everyone was shouting at everyone; the tiny figure on the platform pedalled harder.
The theater survived its scandals into respectability — it remains one of Paris's great concert halls, Perret's concrete now a protected monument. The seats are calmer these days; the propeller has not been invited back.
In their words
There was to be an orchestra of pianos not played by hand but by machinery. Sixteen pianolas connected and synchronised, their sound magnified by loud speakers and a large buzzing electric fan adding to the uproar, were promised us if we would attend the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. The torrent of sound was to be unimaginable.
People turned up their coat collars, put on their hats, opened their umbrellas, yelled and hooted against the buzzers. Ezra Pound, in a flowing blue shirt, stood up and raised his voice above the hubbub. One could distinguish such words as ‘Idiot! Imbecile! Ignoramus! Philistine!’ But there were louder roars of laughter.
Key facts
- 1913 — Auguste Perret's reinforced-concrete landmark on the Avenue Montaigne
- The Rite of Spring premiere, 29 May 1913
- Antheil's Ballet Mécanique, 19 June 1926 — pianolas, propeller, and Pound in full voice
- Still open — one of the city's principal concert halls
In images
Timeline
Opens in April; the Rite of Spring premiere in May supplies the founding legend.
Picabia and Satie's ballet Relâche premieres in December with René Clair's film Entr'acte running between the acts — partly shot on the theater's own roof, where Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp play chess.
The Ballet Mécanique concert — the era's second great riot in the same seats, recorded live by Huddleston.
Still a working concert hall; the concrete is now a listed monument.
On the map
Related books
Writers who knew this place
Sisley Huddleston
Sisley Huddleston wrote about Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris Salons, Cafés, Studios.
Artists who knew this place
Francis Picabia
Picabia wrote the scenario for Entr'acte and handed it to Clair, then twenty-six, to film. It ran between the acts of Picabia's ballet Relâche at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in December 1924, and both men appear in it.
Art & literary movement · 1924–1966
Surrealism was seen here first
The dream given a manifesto — Breton's Paris movement of automatic writing, sleeping fits, and marvelous images, whose orbit brushes half these pages.
Enter the movementCultural movement · c. 1918 – mid-1930s
The Harlem Renaissance was seen here first
The flowering of Black American literature, music, and art centered on Harlem between the world wars — Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Duke Ellington, Aaron Douglas — with an outpost in Montmartre that this atlas knows street by street.
Enter the movementWithin walking distance
Chez Francis
The brasserie on the Place de l'Alma that Cendrars scholarship names as one of the writer's regular stops — a Right Bank address in a café life mapped mostly through Montparnasse.
Visit the place
Le Bœuf sur le Toit
The bar-cabaret Louis Moysès opened in 1922, named for the Cocteau–Milhaud ballet — headquarters of the postwar avant-garde around Jean Cocteau, and one of Blaise Cendrars's regular Paris stops.
Visit the place
Théâtre Marigny
The theatre in the Champs-Élysées gardens where Colette played Paniska in Pan in 1906.
Visit the place
2 Square de Robiac
James Joyce's longest Paris address — the family flat in a quiet cul-de-sac off the rue de Grenelle, with the cool quiet study where Work in Progress cost twelve hundred hours a chapter.
Visit the placeThe Friday Letter
Paris, one address at a time.
The cafés, studios, and walk-up flats where the work was made — one story from the map in every letter.