Roughshod revolution? In our over-informed, supposedly pancultural world it may be difficult to wind back and understand how exotic anything so rough and undainty as jazz and tribal masks still were eighty years ago — exotic as well as a shade threatening. Indeed, Milhaud remarked later that Léger was never satisfied that the curtain for La Création du monde was ‘terrifying’ enough. Beefcake bluntness suited Léger, whose taste for chunky outlines and refusal of the human nonetheless give an ironic pre-echo of the totalitarian official art to come.

Here for once we have a case of the artist coming before the composer, for Léger had been chosen to illustrate a dance scenario by the writer Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961) before the happy decision came to have the score written by Darius Milhaud — happy, since it has proved one of his most characteristic and durable scores. The collaboration was first seen on 25th October 1923 at the Théâtre des Champs élysées in Paris, with the man and woman danced by Jean Börlin and Ebon Standin and the animals by the Ballet Suédois, all to a choreography by Börlin. The wrongly neglected Vladimir Golschmann conducted.

The charm of what was then unabashedly termed ‘primitive’ art, especially in the form of artefacts from Africa, had established itself well before the Great War — think of the mask-like images by Picasso, Braque and even Matisse from around 1906 — but by the 1920s the presence of jazz influences revitalised the pertinence of it all. Cendrars had just published an Anthologie nègre and had the habit of setting off together with Léger to attend the raucous, shabbily irreverent bals-musette music halls in Paris: this was the concoction of raw ingredients that gave birth to Création, itself written nearby at 10, boulevard Clichy.

The scenario opens in darkness. We begin to see the three deities N’kva, Medere and Nazame, then comes the story of the arrival of animals in a measured and ceremonious manner — an elephant, tortoise, crab and monkeys for instance as well as fanciful birds. They emerge from a tree of life that follows with the invention of man and woman whose dance de désir — a concertino for clarinet — entails a dance de l’accouplement. This ends in a round dance with the instruction: "The couple are isolated in an engulfing kiss that transports them like a wave. It is spring."

Léger was inspired by tribal art (observed in the British Museum as well as in Paris) just as Milhaud was then under the sway of the transatlantic jazz rhythms, his special favourites being Paul Whiteman heard in New York and Billy Arnold at the Hammersmith Palace. He wrote for 17 players, a score he called "a breathless counterpoint of broken and twisted rhythms". (There is also a rare version for piano quintet.) The artist’s restricted palette and raw, sturdy sense of line suited the crudity that we can sense struggle out from — and of course against — the inevitable sophistication of their age. Léger kept to black & white and earth colours such as ochre, though in the animals fancy and colour triumph over this muddy primal soup. He wanted nothing to resemble a human being. Against a single backdrop the setting was to shift throughout the score, with varying degrees of half-lighting and no set-pieces to pin down the dancing animals — their role more that of décor than figure.

We may have lost the ability to have such clunky productions make such an impact. It is clear that the event was not quite full-baked. The Revue musicale was aware that the production "was intent on making the evening an audacious manifestation of the avant-garde." It added drily: "This did not happen." Heavens knows what it would have been like had technical reasons not stopped Léger from having scenery painted on baloons, an idea that well captures the mood of anything-goes which provided the energy of it all. As for Milhaud, it always made him chuckle that the reviewers who dismissed the event were those who ten years later hailed it as a turning point to be compared with Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. The Stravinsky stands higher in the history of music yet Milhaud’s compact and deft score may seem to have been more influential in the long term. As for the production, it was revived at the Teatro Fenice in Venice in 1986.