1. Life.

He was the eldest son of Alfred Satie and Jane Leslie Anton, whose mother was Scottish. After the Franco-Prussian war, Alfred sold his ship-broking business and the family moved to Paris, but in 1872, Jane Satie died and Eric and his brother Conrad were sent back to Honfleur to be brought up, as Catholics, by Alfred’s parents. Here Eric (who, as a professional composer, later used ‘Erik’) began music lessons in 1874 with a local organist, Vinot, who stimulated his love of Gregorian chant. Disaster struck again in the summer of 1878 when his grandmother mysteriously drowned, and he was returned to Paris to be informally educated by his father. Meanwhile his father had met a piano teacher and mediocre salon composer, Eugénie Barnetche, and in January 1879 they married, much to Eric’s displeasure. Eugénie resolved to form Eric in her own mould and enrolled him in the preparatory piano class of Emile Descombes at the Paris Conservatoire that November.

Satie loathed his seven years at what he later called ‘a sort of local penitentiary’ and was described by Descombes in 1881 as the ‘laziest student in the Conservatoire’. Almost every report suggests that he was a gifted pianist who was utterly lacking in motivation and poor at sight-reading, and he was dismissed from the institution without a diploma in 1882. By 1885 he was readmitted, this time to the intermediate piano class of Eugénie’s former teacher, Georges Mathias, who ultimately also thought him ‘worthless’. His closest friend at the time, the Spanish-born poet Contamine de Latour, maintained that he only persisted with his Conservatoire studies so that he could get away with one year’s military service instead of five. In the end, he reduced this still further by deliberately contracting bronchitis to get himself invalided out of the 33rd Infantry Regiment in April 1887.

During his convalescence he discovered the literary works of Flaubert and Péladan. His father, who had set up his own music publishing business in 1883, brought out five songs he had written with Latour, and his Valse-ballet and Fantaisie-valse appeared in the journal La musique des familles. Despite these attempts to fit in with the bourgeois musical aspirations of his parents, relationships were becoming increasingly strained, and he left home late in 1887 to begin an independent career as a café pianist in Montmartre.

His first room, at 50 rue Condorcet, was close to the famous Chat Noir cabaret, where he soon became a frequent habitué. He (and Latour) were introduced to the colourful master of ceremonies, Rodolphe Salis, by the plumber-turned-poet Vital Hoquet. Satie impressively styled himself ‘Erik Satie – gymnopédiste’, although his three celebrated Gymnopédies were not completed until the spring of 1888. Free from his restrictive upbringing, he enthusiastically embraced the reckless bohemian lifestyle and created for himself a new persona as a long-haired man-about-town in frock coat and top hat. By 1890 he was engaged as conductor of the orchestra that accompanied Henri Rivière’s shadow theatre spectacles at the Chat Noir; there he was soon on familiar terms with the humorist Alphonse Allais, whose whimsical buffoonery influenced his own pseudonymous early journalism. In 1891 he quarrelled with Salis and left the Chat Noir to become second pianist at the nearby Auberge du Clou. Here his friendship with Debussy developed, especially when Debussy was the only one to recognize the serious intent behind the outrageous ‘Christian ballet’ uspud, which Satie and Latour had concocted to scandalize the musical establishment (even challenging the director of the Paris Opéra to a duel in order to gain uspud a hearing). Debussy’s perceptive description of Satie as ‘a gentle medieval musician lost in this century’ also dates from 1892, though their intimate 25-year friendship was not without its complications, especially when Satie later became successful.

In the spring of 1890 Satie moved higher up into the Butte Montmartre ‘to escape his creditors’, and his Rose+Croix compositions were conceived in tiny rooms at 6 rue Cortot. His aims during this fascinating period were to create a new musical style from the limited technical means at his disposal, and to make his name widely known. His association with the flamboyant, self-styled ‘Sâr’ Joséphin Péladan during 1891–2 helped in both respects: as the official composer for Péladan’s Ordre de la Rose-Croix Catholique du Temple et du Graal, he was allowed free rein to experiment, and Péladan’s Rosicrucian Salons at the fashionable Galerie Durand-Ruel gained him his first public hearings. In the process he developed his interests in mystical religion and Gothic art, and in Le Fils des étoiles, composed as incidental music for Péladan’s play, he invented ‘static sound décor’: incidental music that pursued a self-sufficient course oblivious to its theatrical surroundings.

In August 1892 he publicly broke off relations with Péladan, and between 1893 and 1895 became the founder (and only member) of the Eglise Métropolitaine d’Art de Jésus Conducteur. From his ‘Abbatiale’ in the rue Cortot, he published scathing attacks on his artistic enemies in exquisite calligraphy. He underwent his only known (and traumatic) love affair, with his neighbour, the painter Suzanne Valadon, in 1893, composing Vexations in April that year during the relationship. In 1895 he changed his appearance again to that of the ‘Velvet Gentleman’ by buying seven identical dun-coloured suits with part of a small inheritance in 1895. This change, together with the collection of movements that form the Messe des pauvres, marked the end of his Rose+Croix period and the start of a long search for a new artistic direction.

Satie also needed somewhere even cheaper and less distracting in which to live and work, and to this end he moved to the southern suburb of Arcueil at the end of 1898. Once installed, he closed his door to the world for the rest of his life, adopting his final appearance as a respectable, deferential bourgeois functionary (with bowler hat, wing collar, and umbrella) in 1905. He walked the ten kilometres into Paris almost every day, stopping at numerous cafés en route to drink and compose, returning in the small hours either by the last train from Montparnasse or on foot. In wet weather (which he preferred) he shielded his ubiquitous umbrella beneath his coat, which also contained a hammer to repel potential assailants. The unsolved question is how he emerged from his filthy room each day in pristine condition, ‘like an actor stepping out from the wings’ (Shattuck).

To earn a living he returned regularly to the café-concerts of Montmartre as accompanist to Vincent Hyspa, although he had greater commercial success with his songs for Paulette Darty (the ‘Queen of the Slow Waltz’) after 1902. He worked on various theatrical entertainments with Latour and Jules Dépaquit, and in The Dreamy Fish he tried mixing a jaunty music-hall style with the ‘Impressionistic’ harmonies of his friend Debussy. But what he called the ‘absolutely astounding’ revelation of Pelléas et Mélisande in 1902 showed him that this was an artistic cul-de-sac, and the only significant product of these unhappy, directionless years were the Trois morceaux en forme de poire of 1903, although these were a mixture of pieces written in 1890–91 with arrangements of more recent cabaret songs.

In a determined attempt to improve his technique, Satie enrolled as a mature student at the Schola Cantorum in October 1905, gaining the diploma in counterpoint (under Roussel) in 1908, and taking various parts of d’Indy’s composition course (including fugue and orchestration) between 1905 and 1912. Now that he was self-motivated, his progress as a student was more impressive, although by no means exceptional. His compositional offshoots show that he still retained his sense of parody, and his main aim seems to have been to develop a modern form of fugue, using short-winded, elliptical subjects (as in the ‘Fugue litanique’ from En habit de cheval).

The turning point in his career came in January 1911 when Ravel performed some of his earliest pieces at a concert of the Société Musicale Indépendante. Satie was suddenly seen as a ‘precursor of genius’: he became a focus for young composers, and Debussy conducted his orchestrations of the first and third Gymnopédies two months later at the Salle Gaveau, upsetting their composer by being jealous of their success. What pleased Satie most about all this was that Demets agreed to publish his recent Véritables préludes flasques in 1912 and was soon requesting other short piano pieces. This enabled Satie to give up his ‘degrading’ cabaret work and stimulated a productive period that culminated in the Sports et divertissements of 1914, in which his exquisitely calligraphed texts and music combined with Charles Martin’s drawings in a miniature Gesamtkunstwerk. Articles began to appear about his music, and the celebrated pianist Ricardo Viñes promoted his cause with some notable first performances.

Though World War I interrupted the flow of concerts and publications somewhat, this period also brought Satie’s second lucky break when Cocteau heard Viñes and Satie perform the Trois morceaux in 1916. With his abundant energy and high society contacts, Cocteau was able to open doors for Satie, leading to the Dyaghilev-Massine-Picasso ballet Parade in 1917. After this succès de scandale, Satie’s career revolved around the theatre and he found himself in the fortunate position of writing mostly to commission. If he preferred working with Picasso, and had a greater respect for Dyaghilev than for Cocteau (whom he came to find interfering and egoistic), it was the latter’s championship of him – especially in Le coq et l’arlequin and as godfather to Les Six – that ensured his fame in the postwar years.

In October 1916 Satie received a commission from the Princesse de Polignac that was to result in his masterpiece, Socrate, two years later. He chose to set extracts from Plato’s Dialogues in a translation by Victor Cousin as a ‘symphonic drama’, though one ‘without the least idea of conflict’. Satie called it a ‘return to classical simplicity with a modern sensibility’, and it greatly impressed Stravinsky when he heard it in 1919. Its composition was, however, interrupted in 1917 by the successful libel case brought against him in the wake of Parade by the critic Jean Poueigh, when he only narrowly escaped a prison sentence.

After 1920 his journalistic output increased. During that year there were two festivals of his music and the only public performance in his lifetime of Musique d’ameublement (music designed to be, like furniture, part of the background) at the Galerie Barbazanges. In 1921 Satie joined the Communist party and began to become increasingly involved in the Dada movement in Paris; he presided at the public trial of André Breton at the Closerie des Lilas café in February 1922. In 1923 a group of young composers (Henri Cliquet-Pleyel, Roger Désormière, Maxime Jacob, and Henri Sauguet) adopted him as their mascot, and he promoted the ‘Ecole d’Arcueil’ in concerts even after he became intensely occupied in setting the spoken dialogue from Gounod’s opera Le médecin malgré lui at Dyaghilev’s request for his winter season in Monte Carlo. (This score showed that he was perfectly capable of using directional, 19th-century chromatic harmony when he chose to.) 1924 proved even more eventful with the ballets Mercure (Picasso-Massine) and Relâche (Picabia-Borlin), both of which provoked first night scandals. Relâche, with its onstage obscenities, anticipated the theatre of alienation, though its most significant part was René Clair’s surrealist film Entr’acte, for which Satie composed the first synchronized film score.

After Relâche Satie’s years of heavy drinking finally caught up with him, and he had to be hospitalized in February 1925 due to cirrhosis of the liver and pleurisy. He remained uncompromising to the end, refusing to see past friends with whom he had quarrelled. When his brother Conrad, Milhaud, Désormière, and Robert Caby finally entered his squalid room in Arcueil, they had to evict two cartloads of accumulated rubbish before they could begin to sort out his papers and manuscripts. The letters he had kept were unfortunately later destroyed in a fire at Conrad’s home, but his notebooks and scores were preserved by Milhaud.

2. Works.

There are so many conflicting interpretations of Satie’s career that it may best be viewed as a single span – one whose unconventional direction was determined by a continual rethinking of the aims and aesthetics of music in reaction to 19th-century practice and excesses. Dance, theatre, and cabaret music run as virtually continuous threads through this span, as do the cardinal French virtues of simplicity, brevity, and precision. If a dividing line has to be drawn, it should be with the move to Arcueil in 1898.

Just as there is no motivic development in Satie’s oeuvre, or any sense of harmonic direction towards a climax, so his style as a whole does not develop in any conventional sense. In many ways the 1887 Sarabandes are more sophisticated harmonically than his final ballet Relâche, and his genius lay rather in his capacity for constant renewal and experimentation within a limited textural range. His harmonic ear was his greatest gift, though his work gained greater strength through the sparser, more contrapuntal approach he adopted after his years at the Schola Cantorum. Curiously, rhythmic originality never seemed to concern him.

When considering any piece by Satie, the following key passages from his compositional aesthetic (formulated retrospectively in 1917) should be borne in mind:

Do not forget that the melody is the Idea, the outline; as much as it is the form and the subject matter of a work. The harmony is an illumination, an exhibition of the object, its reflection … If there is form and a new style of writing, there is a new craft … Great Masters are brilliant through their ideas, their craft is a simple means to an end, nothing more. It is their ideas which endure … The Idea can do without Art.

This principle can already be seen operating in Satie’s earliest important composition, the four barless Ogives of 1886 (ex.1). In each piece the controlling Idea is a single melodic line (A) written in the spirit of medieval plainsong. There are two harmonizations (or illuminations), the first (A1) in ff parallel octaves using alternating root position chords and inversions, the second (A2) entirely in pp root position chords. The form is A–A1–A2–A1, and the only real ‘Art’ applied to this first compositional system is that there are between one and four chordal changes from A1 to A2 in each Ogive. As in many of Satie’s early compositional sets, the concept is timeless and spatial, as if the same sculpture were being viewed from different angles. Through repetition Satie makes a lot out of a little; the craft is certainly a simple means to an end, and both the style of writing and the concept were entirely new.

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Ex.1 First Ogive

In the three Sarabandes of 1887, Satie made his first experiment in juxtaposing musical cells within the binary form (with repeated halves) of a baroque dance movement. The uncompromising harmonic vocabulary (chains of unresolved 7ths and 9ths) undoubtedly influenced Debussy’s 1894 Sarabande, and probably came about as an extension of similar progressions in the barless song Sylvie rather than from the functional parallel 9ths that Satie had recently heard in Chabrier’s prelude to Le roi malgré lui. The gently undulating Gymnopédies belong to a different antique world and rightly remain among Satie’s most popular creations: lilting, modal, and never quite predictable. Satie claimed that they were inspired by reading Flaubert’s Salammbô. The three Gnossiennes of 1890 acquire a more oriental feeling through their modal use of the raised fourth degree, their melodic decorations, and their more static basslines. For the first time Satie added occasional strange comments to challenge the preconceptions of performers and to stimulate their interest.

In the Rose+Croix pieces of 1891–5 he moved forward from the Ogives, endlessly experimenting in his search for a perfect compositional system. While the end-products are uniformly slow, hieratic, modal, and detached from their bizarre titles, the thought behind them is way ahead of its time. Golden section proportioning is frequent; the recurring cadences in the two Préludes du Nazaréen create a musical punctuation adapted from literature; and Vexations (1893) is both the first organized piece of total chromaticism, on a hexachordal basis, and the first minimalist piece. It is unclear, however, whether Satie intended it for public performance: its infamous heading states ‘To play oneself this motif 840 times in a row, it would be good to prepare oneself in advance, in the most profound silence, by serious immobilities’. Unpublished in his lifetime, it is John Cage who in September 1963 started the tradition of marathon public performances of 840 repetitions of Vexations by a group of performers.

The theatre piece uspud represents an early experiment in the theatre of the absurd; its text was the first to be published entirely in lower case. The best pieces of this period, such as the prelude to Jules Bois’ esoteric drama La porte héroïque du ciel or the Eginhard prelude, are exquisite miniatures; the most abstruse – among them Salut Drapeau!, one of several experiments in using the Greek chromatic mode – remain intricately conceived curiosities.

After the move to Arcueil, Satie’s career appeared to bifurcate, and however much he professed to despise his café-concert work, it was already fertilizing his ‘serious’ compositions by 1903. The error that prevented him from finding a new way forward before 1912 was partly that of trying to ape his illustrious peers, for we find bits of Ravel in his miniature opera Geneviève de Brabant and echoes of both Fauré and Debussy in the Nouvelles pièces froides of 1907. An earlier following-up of the economical and fluid piano style that appears in the Pièces froides of 1897 could have saved him a lot of soul-searching – but then he might never have gone to the Schola Cantorum or produced a gem like Le Piccadilly, one of the earliest French experiments in ragtime. Like many of his pieces, from the 1884 Allegro to the ‘Ragtime du paquebot’ (the ‘Titanic’) in Parade, Le Piccadilly has a popular model – in this case the phone-call chorus from Hello! Ma Baby by Howard and Emerson (1899). If Satie can seem like Henri ‘Douanier’ Rousseau in this respect, he could also anticipate popular melodies, whether ‘Tea for Two’ in ‘Le golf’ (from the Sports et divertissements) or ‘Run, rabbit, run’ in The Dreamy Fish, both ostensibly ‘serious’ compositions. His original cabaret songs, like Je te veux and La diva de l’Empire, are catchy and well-crafted, with unexpected harmonic twists, and his scorings for small cabaret orchestra in the 1900s set the pattern for his later orchestrations, which are characterized by conservative instrumental ranges, the absence of any doublings at the same pitch, and an almost continual mixture of separately articulated strings and wind.

If Satie’s years at the Schola Cantorum stimulated his taste for sectionally conceived fugues and dissonant chorales, it was his sudden success in 1911 that made him revert to a single, all-embracing track. Sets of short piano pieces with in-score texts rolled off what became almost a production line in 1912–15, their eccentric titles and literary diversions showing his renewed and endlessly inventive mind. As well as foreshadowing surrealism in the Heures séculaires et instantanées (and in the play Le piège de Méduse, where the Baron Méduse is a self-portrait), he for once also looked to the past. The inconsequential Rossinian development section is parodied in ‘d’Holothurie’ from the Embryons desséchés, in the section marked ‘like a nightingale with toothache’, while the whole piece is both a rethinking of the implications of sonata form and an adaption of Loïsa Puget’s popular song Mon rocher de St Malo. A marvellously flat and unromantic version of the trio theme from Chopin’s Funeral March bears the brunt of Satie’s devastating wit in ‘d’Edriophthalma’, and in the coda of ‘de Podophthalma’ Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony is the victim of what must be one of the funniest afterthoughts in music. Like the Rose+Croix music, these pieces are barless, but the tempos now are much more varied, and as Satie forbade their commentaries to be read aloud in public performance, they are essentially meant for private consumption, with the focus on novel graphic presentation reaching its peak in the Sports et divertissements, where beautifully calligraphed scores appear alongside illustrations by Charles Martin. As always, the pieces were assembled like a jigsaw puzzle from an assortment of short ‘motifs’ with an emphasis on abrupt contrast and a logic that was explicable only to the composer. Many experiments were left unpublished, again for reasons that can only be guessed at, but Satie had an unerring awareness of what was right for a particular time, and quickly lost interest in his past compositions.

During the last decade of his career, the commissions that came after his second discovery by Cocteau enabled him to diversify his output. He produced four sets of miniature songs, of which the finest (and least known) are the Quatre petites mélodies of 1920, which open with a uniquely personal and anguished ‘Elégie’ for Debussy. He continued writing piano pieces up to the same year, anticipating Stravinskian neo-classicism in the Sonatine bureaucratique (an adaptation of Clementi’s Sonatina, op.36 no.1), and returning to systematic composition (based on intervals) in the Nocturnes. Altogether he collaborated on five theatre works with Cocteau, three with Picasso (fig.1) and three with the choreographer Massine, and from Parade onwards he worked mainly for Dyaghilev’s Ballets Russes, devising no fewer than six ballet projects for them, four of these with the painter Derain. His attraction to analytical cubism surely inspired the block-like orchestral juxtapositions of Parade, just as its noise-making instruments (typewriters, revolvers, etc.) can be compared to the use of everyday objects in synthetic cubism. This epoch-making ballet, whose unchanging pulse is that of the human heartbeat, put Satie into the forefront of the avant-garde and ensured his reputation in his final years was as a fashionable, witty, and shocking composer. His final anarchic ballets, Mercure and Relâche, show a similar concern with mirrored structuring through interrelated sections.

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The New York Manager in Satie’s ballet ‘Parade’, Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris, 1917: costume and stage design by Pablo Picasso

Succession Picasso/DACS 2000; Photo courtesy of Sotheby’s Picture Library

Among the works of these later years, Socrate stands out as Satie’s main claim on seriousness. It is the ultimate example of Apollinaire’s ‘cult of restraint’ and, in contrast to Parade, displays a linear logic in the succession of motifs and a more horizontal, continuous approach, with the vocal line derived from the instrumental texture. Satie aimed to make Socrate ‘white and pure like antiquity’, and its complete absence of rhetoric and almost monochrome simplicity invite the sensitive listener to enter its interiorized world, where the slightest nuance is significant. In a sense, its detachment returns to the ‘static sound décor’ of the Rose+Croix period, and at one stage Satie even likened it to his contemporary ‘furniture music’.

During his lifetime Satie exerted an important influence on Debussy, Ravel, and the young composers of Les Six. After his death he was predictably vilified by those he had alienated through his explosive rages and seemingly irrational behaviour, and his subsequent restoration to cult status in the 1960s was validated by John Cage, who mounted concerts of his works and declared him ‘indispensable’ to the development of contemporary music. Many later composers, particularly in Britain and the United States, have drawn on Satie’s ideas in their work, and this living tradition has also been stimulated by surrealist artists like Magritte, Man Ray, and Miró.

Works