Robert Caby

Robert Caby (Venette, March 25 1905 - Paris, October 3 1992) was a French composer and writer.

Besides composing, he was engaged in writing art critics and political articles, arranging concerts, creating surrealistic drawings and dealing with rare books and paintings. He had a wide circle of friends who were important musicians and artists of the time - Erik Satie, Darius Milhaud, Pablo Picasso, Francis Poulenc, Charles Koechlin, Henri Sauguet - just to mention a few.

In the mid 1960's he spent a considerable amount of time at the Biblioteque National, doing research and arrangements of Erik Satie's unpublished works from sketchbooks. In cooperation with Salabert he had all of them published posthumously, leading to an awakening public interest in the composer.

Caby wrote almost 900 works, songs being in majority, with lyrics mostly by famous poets such as Guillaume Apollinaire. Some of his greatest influences were Erik Satie, Emmanuel Chabrier, Claude Debussy, Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert. In 1947 Marianne Oswald performed some of his chansons in a French radio broadcast. In 1959 the first phonogram record was produced - Jacques Douai performing the song "Belle Belle". Not until 2001 a second recording appeared - Olof Höjer performing a wide selection of piano works.