Erik Satie

Erik Satie
Born Erik Alfred Leslie Satie
17 May 1866
Paris, French Empire
Died 1 July 1925
Paris, France
Occupation Pianist, Composer
Partner Suzanne Valadon

Éric Alfred Leslie Satie (17 May 1866 – Paris, 1 July 1925) was a French composer and pianist. Starting with his first composition in 1884, he signed his name as Erik Satie.

Satie was introduced as a "gymnopedist" in 1887, shortly before writing his most famous compositions, the Gymnopédies. Later, he also referred to himself as a "phonometrician" (meaning "someone who measures sounds") preferring this designation to that of "musician", after having been called "a clumsy but subtle technician" in a book on contemporary French composers published in 1911.[1]

In addition to his body of music, Satie also left a remarkable set of writings, having contributed work for a range of publications, from the dadaist 391 to the American top culture chronicle Vanity Fair. Although in later life he prided himself on always publishing his work under his own name, in the late nineteenth century he appears to have used pseudonyms such as Virginie Lebeau and François de Paule in some of his published writings.

Satie was a colourful figure in the early 20th century Parisian avant-garde. His work was a precursor to later artistic movements such as minimalism, repetitive music, and the Theatre of the Absurd.

Contents

Life and work

From Normandy to Montmartre

Erik Satie was born at Honfleur, and his home there is now open to the public. His youth was spent alternating between Honfleur, Basse-Normandie, and Paris. When he was four years old, his family moved to Paris, his father (Alfred), having been offered a translator's job in the capital. After his mother (born Jane Leslie Anton, who was born in London to Scottish parents) died in 1872, he was sent, together with his younger brother Conrad, back to Honfleur, to live with his paternal grandparents. There he received his first music lessons from a local organist. When his grandmother died in 1878, the two brothers were reunited with their father in Paris, who remarried (a piano teacher) shortly afterwards. From the early 1880s onwards, Alfred Satie started publishing salon compositions (by his new wife and himself, among others).

Satie house and museum in Honfleur

In 1879 Satie entered the Paris Conservatoire, where he was soon labelled untalented by his teachers. Georges Mathias, his professor of piano at the Conservatoire, described his pupil's piano technique in flatly negative terms, "insignificant and laborious" and "worthless". Émile Descombes called him "the laziest student in the Conservatoire".[2] Years later Satie related that Mathias, with great insistence, told him that his real talent lay in composing. After being sent home for two and a half years, he was readmitted to the Conservatoire at the end of 1885, but was unable to make a much more favourable impression on his teachers than he had before, and, as a result, resolved to take up military service a year later. However, Satie's military career did not last very long; within a few weeks he left the army through deceptive means.[3]

In 1887 Satie left home to take lodgings in Montmartre. By this time he had started what was to be an enduring friendship with the romantic poet Patrice Contamine, and had had his first compositions published by his father. He soon integrated with the artistic clientèle of the Le Chat Noir Café-cabaret, and started publishing his Gymnopédies. Publication of compositions in the same vein (Ogives, Gnossiennes, etc.) followed. In the same period he befriended Claude Debussy. He moved to a smaller room, still in Montmartre (rue Cortot N° 6), in 1890. By 1891 he was the official composer and chapel-master of the Rosicrucian Order "Ordre de la Rose-Croix Catholique, du Temple et du Graal", led by Sâr Joséphin Péladan, which led to compositions such as Salut drapeau!, Le fils des étoiles, and the Sonneries de la Rose+Croix.

By mid-1892 he had composed the first pieces in a compositional system of his own making (Fête donnée par des Chevaliers Normands en l'honneur d'une jeune demoiselle), had provided incidental music to a chivalric esoteric play (two Prélude du Nazaréen), had had his first hoax published (announcing the premiere of Le bâtard de Tristan, an anti-Wagnerian opera he probably never composed), and had broken with Péladan, starting that autumn with the Uspud project, a "Christian Ballet", in collaboration with Contamine de Latour. While the comrades from both the Chat Noir and Miguel Utrillo's Auberge du Clou sympathised, a promotional brochure was produced for the project, which reads as a pamphlet for a new esoteric sect.

Satie and Suzanne Valadon, an artists' model and artist in her own right, and a long-time friend of Miguel Utrillo (and mother of Maurice Utrillo), began an affair early in 1893. After their first night together, he proposed marriage. The two did not marry, but Valadon moved to a room next to Satie's at the Rue Cortot. Satie became obsessed with her, calling her his Biqui, and writing impassioned notes about "her whole being, lovely eyes, gentle hands, and tiny feet". During their relationship, Satie composed the Danses gothiques as a kind of prayer to restore peace of mind, and Valadon painted a portrait of Satie, which she gave to him. After six months she moved away, leaving Satie broken-hearted. Afterwards, he said that he was left with "nothing but an icy loneliness that fills the head with emptiness and the heart with sadness".[4] It is believed this was the only intimate relationship Satie ever had.[5]

In the same year he met the young Maurice Ravel for the first time, Satie's style emerging in the first compositions of the youngster. One of Satie's own compositions of that period, the Vexations, was to remain undisclosed until after his death. By the end of the year he had founded the Eglise Métropolitaine d'Art de Jésus Conducteur (the Metropolitan Church of Art of the Leading Christ). As its only member, in the role of "Parcier et Maître de Chapelle" he started to compose a Grande messe (later to become known as the Messe des pauvres), and wrote a flood of letters, articles and pamphlets showing off his self-assuredness in religious and artistic matters. To give an example: he applied for membership of the Académie Française twice, leaving no doubt in the application letter that the board of that organisation (presided by Camille Saint-Saëns) as much as owed him such membership. Such proceedings without doubt rather helped to wreck his popularity in the cultural establishment. In 1895 he inherited some money, allowing him to have more of his writings printed, and to change from wearing a priest-like habit to being the "Velvet Gentleman".

Move to Arcueil

By mid-1896 all of satie's financial means had vanished, and he had to move to cheaper and much smaller lodgings, first at the Rue Cortot,[6] and two years later, after he'd composed the two first sets of Pièces froides in 1897, to Arcueil, a suburb some five kilometers from the centre of Paris. During this period he re-established contact with his brother Conrad for numerous practical and financial matters, disclosing some of his inner feelings in the process. The letters to Conrad made it clear that he had set aside any religious ideas.

From 1899 on Satie started making money as a cabaret pianist, adapting over a hundred compositions of popular music for piano or piano and voice, adding some of his own. The most popular of these were Je te veux, text by Henry Pacory; Tendrement, text by Vincent Hyspa; Poudre d'or, a waltz; La diva de l'"Empire", text by Dominique Bonnaud/Numa Blès; Le Picadilly, a march; Légende californienne, text by Contamine de Latour lost, but the music later reappears in La belle excentrique; and many more, many of which have been lost. In his later years Satie would reject all his cabaret music as vile and against his nature,[7] but for the time being, it was an income.

Only a few compositions that Satie took seriously remain from this period: Jack-in-the-box, music to a pantomime by Jules Dépaquit (called a "clownerie" by Satie), Geneviève de Brabant, a short comic opera on a serious theme, text by Lord Cheminot, The Dreamy Fish, piano music to accompany a lost tale by Lord Cheminot, and a few others that were mostly incomplete, hardly any of them staged, and none of them published at the time.

Both Geneviève de Brabant and The Dreamy Fish have been analysed by Ornella Volta as containing elements of competition with Claude Debussy, of which Debussy was probably not aware, Satie not making this music public. Meanwhile, Debussy was having one of his first major successes with Pelléas et Mélisande in 1902, leading a few years later to ‘who-was-precursor-to-whom’ debates between the two composers, in which Maurice Ravel would also get involved.

In October 1905 Satie enrolled in Vincent d'Indy's Schola Cantorum to study classical counterpoint while still continuing his cabaret work. Most of his friends were as dumbfounded as the professors at the Schola when they heard about his new plan to return to the classrooms, especially as d'Indy was an admiring pupil of Saint-Saëns, not particularly favoured by Satie. Satie would follow these courses at the Schola, as a respected pupil, for more than five years, receiving a first (intermediate) diploma in 1908. Some of his classroom counterpoint-exercises, such as the Désespoir agréable, were published after his death. Another summary, of the period prior to the Schola, also appeared in 1911: the Trois morceaux en forme de poire, which was a kind of compilation of the best of what he had written up to 1903.

Something that becomes clear through these published compilations is that Satie did not so much reject Romanticism and its exponents like Wagner, but that he rejected certain aspects of it. From his first composition to his last, he rejected the idea of musical development, in the strict definition of this term: the intertwining of different themes in a development section of a sonata form. As a result, his contrapuntal and other works were very short; the "new, modern" Fugues do not extend further than the exposition of the theme(s). Generally, he would say that he did not think it permitted that a composer take more time from his public than strictly necessary. Also Melodrama, in its historical meaning of the then popular romantic genre of "spoken words to a background of music", was something Satie avoided. His 1913 Le piège de Méduse could be seen as an absurdistic spoof of that genre.

In the meantime, other changes had also taken place: Satie had become a member of a radical socialist party, and had socialised with the Arcueil community: Amongst other things, he'd been involved in the "Patronage laïque" work for children. He also changed his appearance to that of the 'bourgeois functionary' with bowler hat, umbrella, etc. He channelled his medieval interests into a peculiar secret hobby: In a filing cabinet he maintained a collection of imaginary buildings, most of them described as being made out of some kind of metal, which he drew on little cards. Occasionally, extending the game, he would publish anonymous small announcements in local journals, offering some of these buildings, e.g. a "castle in lead", for sale or rent.

1912–1925

Erik Satie: project of bust, 1913

From this point, things started to move very quickly for Satie. First, starting in 1912, there was the success of his new humorous miniatures for piano; he was to write and publish many of these over the next few years (most of them premiered by the pianist Ricardo Viñes). His habit of accompanying the scores of his compositions with all kinds of written remarks was now well established so that a few years later he had to insist that these not be read out during performances. He had mostly stopped using barlines by this time. In some ways these compositions were very reminiscent of Rossini's compositions from the final years of his life, grouped under the name Péchés de vieillesse.

But the real acceleration in Satie's life did not come so much from the increasing success of his new piano pieces. In fact, it was Ravel who (perhaps unwittingly) triggered something that was to become a characteristic of Satie's remaining years and part of each progressive movement that manifested itself in Paris over the following years. These movements succeeded one another rapidly, at a time in which Paris was seen as the artistic capital of the world, and the beginning of the new century appeared to have set many minds on fire.

In 1910 the "Jeunes Ravêlites", a group of young musicians around Ravel, proclaimed their preference for Satie's earlier work (from before the Schola period), reinforcing the idea that Satie had been a precursor of Debussy. At first Satie was pleased that at least some of his works were receiving public attention, but when he realised that this meant that his more recent work was overlooked or dismissed, he looked for other young artists who related better to his more recent ideas, so as to have better mutual support in creative activity. Thus young artists such as Roland-Manuel, and later Georges Auric, and Jean Cocteau, started to receive more of his attention than the "Jeunes".

As a result of his contact with Roland-Manuel, Satie again began publicising his thoughts, with far more irony than he had done before (amongst other things, the Mémoires d'un amnésique and Cahiers d'un mammifère).[8]

With Jean Cocteau, whom he had first met in 1915, Satie started work on incidental music for a production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (resulting in the Cinq grimaces). From 1916, he and Cocteau worked on the ballet Parade, which was premiered in 1917 by Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets russes, with sets and costumes by Pablo Picasso, and choreography by Léonide Massine. Through Picasso Satie also became acquainted with other cubists, such as Georges Braque, with whom he would work on other, aborted, projects.

With Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, and Germaine Tailleferre Satie formed the Nouveaux jeunes, shortly after writing Parade. Later the group was joined by Francis Poulenc and Darius Milhaud. In September 1918, Satie — giving little or no explanation — withdrew from the Nouveaux jeunes. Jean Cocteau gathered the six remaining members, forming the Groupe des six (to which Satie would later have access, but later again would fall out with most of its members).

From 1919 Satie was in contact with Tristan Tzara, the initiator of the Dada movement. He became acquainted with other artists involved in the movement, such as Francis Picabia (later to become a Surrealist), André Derain, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Hugo and Man Ray, among others. On the day of his first meeting with Man Ray, the two fabricated the artist's first readymade: The Gift (1921). Satie contributed writing to the Dadaist publication 391. In the first months of 1922 he was surprised to find himself entangled in the argument between Tzara and André Breton about the true nature of avant-garde art, epitomised by the failure of the Congrès de Paris. Satie originally sides with Tzara, but manages to maintain friendly relations with most players in both camps. Meanwhile, an "Ecole d'Arcueil" had formed around Satie, with young musicians like Henri Sauguet, Maxime Jacob, Roger Désormière and Henri Cliquet-Pleyel.

Finally he composed an "instantaneist" ballet (Relâche) in collaboration with Picabia, for the Ballets Suédois of Rolf de Maré. In a simultaneous project, Satie added music to the surrealist film Entr'acte by René Clair, which was given as an intermezzo for Relâche.

Death

After years of heavy drinking, Satie died on 1 July 1925, from cirrhosis of the liver.[9] At the time of his death no one else had ever entered his room in Arcueil since he had moved there 27 years earlier. After his burial, Satie's friends discovered compositions that were totally unknown or which were thought to have been lost. These were found behind the piano, in the pockets of the velvet suits, and in other odd places, and included the Vexations, Geneviève de Brabant, and other unpublished or unfinished stage works, The Dreamy Fish, many Schola Cantorum exercises, a previously unseen set of "canine" piano pieces, and several other piano works, many untitled. Some of these works would be published later as more Gnossiennes, Pièces froides, Enfantines, and Furniture music.

Media

Recordings and arrangements

Piano works

Recordings of Satie's piano works have been released by Cristina Ariagno, Jean-Pierre Armengaud, Aldo Ciccolini, Claude Coppens (live recording), Reinbert de Leeuw, Eve Egoyan, Philippe Entremont, Frank Glazer, Olof Höjer, Michel Legrand, Jacques Loussier, Anne Queffélec, Bill Quist, Pascal Rogé, João Paulo Santos, Yuju Takahashi, Jean-Yves Thibaudet and Daniel Varsano, among others.

Orchestral and vocal
Arrangements in popular music

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Je suis phonomètre avant d’être musicien" Aperçus phonométriques & autres sous-entendus
  2. ↑ The Ensemble Sospeso New York
  3. ↑ p.25 in: Mary E. Davis: Erik Satie. Reaktion Books - Critical Lives. ISBN 9781861893215. Published June 2007. http://books.google.com/books?id=1GjATpLsFuYC&lpg=PA25&ots=OzlOGxEZo1&dq=satie%20regiment%20drastic%20steps&pg=PA25#v=onepage&q=satie%20regiment%20drastic%20steps&f=false
  4. ↑ Valadon and Erik Satie Retrieved June 12, 2010
  5. ↑ Orledge, Robert. "Erik Satie". Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/40105. Retrieved 17 April 2010. 
  6. ↑ Plaque #3265 on Open Plaques.
  7. ↑ Erik Satie in a 17 January 1911 letter to his brother Conrad, quoted in Volta 1989 and in Gillmor 1992 (Chronology p. xxix)
  8. ↑ English translations of these pieces were published in A Mammal's Notebook, see Sources section below.
  9. ↑ Eric Satie - Biography at Humanitiesweb.org

Sources

In English, unless indicated:

Writings by Satie:

Books on Satie:

Other:

External links