Albert ehrnrooth
Journalist & Cultural Commentator
MUSIC WITHOUT SAUERKRAUT
The eccentric genius of Erik Satie
Erik Satie was one of the most iconoclastic classical composers of the 20th century, an eccentric oddball who described himself as a “phonometrographer” rather than a musician. On the centenary of his death, Albert Ehrnrooth explores the life and music of the composer once described by John Cage as “indispensable”.
Erik Satie was a precursor of French modernism and a trailblazer for musical movements that emerged long after his death 100 years ago this month. He broke sharply with Wagnerian Romanticism and characteristic Austro-German motivic development, instead redefining basic melodic building blocks through repetition, fragmentation and manipulation of musical time and form. He wanted to develop French music – “if possible, without Sauerkraut,” as he put it.
Satie laid the groundwork for composers like John Cage and John Adams, influenced Bill Evans’ iconic song Peace Piece, inspired the minimalism of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, and shaped Brian Eno’s ambient music.
Today, Gymnopédie No. 1 and Gnossienne No. 1 are two of classical music’s best-known pieces. But wider recognition for Satie only came in the 1980s, when his piano music began appearing in films, television series and commercials.
So, why did recognition for the groundbreaking musician – who was way ahead of his time – come so late?
One reason Satie is often not taken seriously is that his most popular, structurally simple keyboard compositions can be played by an intermediate pianist. French pianist Alexandre Tharaud is one of Satie’s most dedicated living interpreters. Does he consider Satie’s compositions to be simplistic?
¨No, [his music] is not simple,” he says. “It’s very difficult to play Satie – the long line, the reason, the calm. It’s very difficult to play the calm without surprises; to let the music play without your interpretation, your personality. It’s important to let the fingers follow, like mechanical writing. If you are very calm, in a state of meditation, you can play Satie very well. It’s very complicated and difficult as an interpreter to be a non-interpreter.”
During his lifetime, Satie remained an outsider in classical music circles. Detractors dismissed him as a negligible eccentric and an incompetent dilettante. But support from Debussy and Ravel, who performed and orchestrated a number of his compositions, shows that he commanded respect from some of his more famous contemporaries.
His multimedia collaborations with such artists as Picasso, Cocteau, Braque, Derain and Picabia displayed early manifestations of Dadaism, Surrealism and Absurdism, pushing the boundaries of ballet, opera and visual arts. He wrote one of the first film scores for René Clair’s manic 1924 film Entr’acte, perfectly synchronised to the onscreen action, and invented musique d’ameublement (furniture music) – pleasant, ever-present yet wholly unobtrusive background music, meant to be heard but not actively listened to. In all but name, he created Muzak. At the 1913 premiere of Le Piège de Méduse, a play with incidental music, he inserted pieces of paper between piano strings, anticipating John Cage’s invention of the prepared piano by 25 years.
After Satie’s death in 1925, critics and musicologists rarely gave him much credit, usually casting him as a mere musical jester.
Recognising a kindred spirit, Cage became his foremost advocate after World War II, promoting Satie to more open-minded audiences through lectures and concerts. In one lecture, Cage famously said, “I opposed Satie and Beethoven and found that Satie, not Beethoven, was right.”
In 1963, Cage organised a concert at the Pocket Theatre in Manhattan featuring 12 pianists in a relay performance of Satie’s Vexations (composed sometime during 1893 and 1894). This piece, which Satie called “a motif ”, consists of a bass theme followed by a superimposed harmonisation built mostly on diminished chords. The theme in the left hand is repeated, with the upper parts inverted in the second occurrence – all fitting on a single page. The challenge lies in playing the motif 840 times in succession, without a break (other than a sanitary one).
Cage’s first complete performance of Vexations lasted 18 hours and 40 minutes. Four years later, British-Australian musicologist Richard Toop became the first to complete a solo rendition, taking 24 hours. During the COVID pandemic, Russian-German pianist Igor Levit streamed the piece live from his home, completing it in just over 16 hours to a surprisingly large online audience. This April, Levit performed Vexations again, this time in front of a live audience at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall. It left me wondering why he chose to endure this almost masochistic marathon once more. “The reason is that I’m insane too,” Levit tells me.
“It’s rather crazy. Whether it is a joke or whether Satie meant it, I don’t know. But I can say from the experience of performing this piece, it’s a great deal of fun too. [During the first performance] I got annoyed, because at some point I thought, ‘Why on earth … what have I been doing here? I’ve been playing this for three hours and the stack of music papers does not get less. It’s still ages to go.’ I was a little annoyed, but I was never bored. I was not hallucinating; I had the time of my life. It was fantastic.”
Vexations, which translates as ‘annoyances’, was discovered after Satie’s death in his cluttered apartment in Arcueil, a suburb of Paris. Was it born out of annoyance that his brief, stormy relationship with painter and former trapeze artist Suzanne Valadon had broken down? Did he even intend the piece to be performed, or was it just another one of his blagues (jokes)? A performance of Vexations is an epic event; British composer Gavin Bryars described it as a “poor man’s Ring des Nibelungen”. But why, I ask Levit, is the piece so hard to memorise?
“In a way, it is incredibly easy to play. I can teach anybody to play it in two days,” he replies. “But it’s hard to memorise, because there is a brain fatigue at some point. You get tired and sometimes you lose focus. Then you just forget the notes. I think it’s easy to memorise if you just play it 10 times or play it once. It’s bloody impossible to learn this thing by heart for the entire performance. It doesn’t make any sense.”
Tragedy to Creativity
Satie wasn’t just an eccentric composer; his personal life was arguably even stranger.
Eric Alfred Leslie Satie was born on 17 May, 1866 in Honfleur, the picturesque port town in Normandy, which was a creative hub for the burgeoning Impressionist movement. In 1884, he signed his name on his first known composition, and on all subsequent works, as Erik, with a ‘k’ instead of a ‘c’.
His mother, Jane Leslie Anton, was of Scottish descent and grew up in London. She came to Honfleur to study French. She married Alfred Satie, a shipping broker, in London. Erik was conceived in Scotland, and they settled in Honfleur.
When Erik was five, by which time he had three siblings, the family moved to Paris, where his father worked as a translator. Tragedy soon struck. First his younger sister died, then his mother, and Erik was sent to live with his paternal grandparents in Honfleur. He attended school there and received a solid grounding in music from church organist Gustave Vinot, who instilled in him a lifelong love of Gregorian plainsong. It has been suggested that the sound of the organ influenced Satie’s dreamier, more meditative piano pieces. Some experts believe that Gymnopédie No. 1 was first conceived on the organ – the sustained notes and timbre are well suited to the instrument.
In 1878, further tragedy followed when his grandmother drowned in the sea. Satie and his siblings returned to Paris to live with their father and new stepmother, Eugénie Barnetche, an accomplished pianist, piano teacher and second-rate composer. She lost no time enrolling her stepson in preparatory classes at the Paris Conservatoire. Satie described the institution as “a rather ugly building, a sort of local penitentiary”. His playing was judged to have a certain “grace and beauty of tone”, but his indolence and mediocrity led to his dismissal. He was later readmitted and did progress, but the strict and fusty academic environment didn’t suit the adolescent Satie. He left for good in 1886, preferring to study medieval music, the occult and Gothic church art by himself at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Interestingly, at age 40, he enrolled at the decidedly academic Schola Cantorum conservatory to improve his understanding of counterpoint and composition. For seven years he was, according to his teacher, composer Albert Roussel, “the most punctilious and disciplined pupil the Schola had ever had”.
Following an alleged affair with the family maid, Satie had a falling-out with his father and his much-disliked stepmother. As a result, he moved to Montmartre, where rents were cheap, friends were dodgy and the nightlife was vibrant. He fully embraced the drinking culture and bohemian lifestyle, adopting its dandyish uniform – long hair, beard, pince-nez, top hat, Windsor tie, dark trousers and a frock coat. The transformation was complete when he was hired as a pianist at the raucous Chat Noir cabaret.
Montmartre’s racy esprit ignited Satie’s creative spark, and in April 1888 he finished what would become his best-known work, Trois Gymnopédies. While many of his titles are intentionally whimsical, Tharaud believes that the name Gymnopédies may hint at the ancient Spartan festival of the same name, where nude youths performed dances and gymnastics in honour of fallen heroes.
“To me [Trois Gymnopédies] is a dance from a very far age, something very old . . . Satie changed our relationship with time. We don’t know exactly what this rhythm is, but it’s musique répétitive. At the same time, there is a melody line on the right hand, very slowly. You just follow the music and you don’t understand what he wants to say. You understand something, but [only] at the last bar, the last chord. It is very important to listen to a piece by Satie until the end, without thinking. When I play Satie on stage, I want a long silence after each piece, because the audience can feel something very deep, during the silence,” says Tharaud.
Bizarre Instructions
All three Gymnopédies are slow, with clear yet strange harmonies and modal melodies built around unresolved seventh chords that go nowhere – or alternatively into ethereal clouds. Debussy admired Satie’s proto- Impressionistic triptych enough to orchestrate Nos. 1 and 3.
While Satie deeply respected Debussy and often praised him, the older composer was reluctant to return the favour and could be quite patronising. When Satie finally gained recognition, Debussy mocked him, prompting Satie to abruptly sever ties. After Debussy’s death from cancer in 1918, Satie regretted his behaviour and composed Élégie in memory of what had once been his closest friendship.
Both composers attended the 1889 Paris Exposition, a world’s fair. In the Javanese village, the sound of the gamelan enthralled Debussy, and he echoed it in Estampes: Pagodes. Meanwhile, Satie became fascinated by a group of Romanian musicians and took inspiration from their folk music. In the Greek pavilion, he may have encountered artefacts from Knossos (Gnossse in French) in Crete. The title for his series of Gnossiennes likely reflects his interest in Greek antiquity and Greek modes. The pieces lack bar lines and time signatures, and Satie adds bizarre instructions to the pianist, like “on the tongue”, “with a light intimacy” and “very lost”. These kinds of directions became a recurring feature in his works.
French pianist Bertrand Chamayou, another passionate Satie interpreter, hears echoes of the Phrygian dominant scale in the Gnossiennes.
“The Gnossienne No. 1 has more of this kind of Orientalism in the melody, while the Gymnopédie No. 1 has, in a very slow way, a kind of French clarity of the valse (waltz). In the case of the Gnossienne, the harmonies almost never move. It’s in F minor. At that time, I can’t think of any [other] composition that is bold enough to keep the same harmony on the first theme without any modulation. What remains is the genius of the melody,” says Chamayou.
The Gnossiennes reveal Satie’s interest in ancient Greek and medieval church modes, tinged with hints of Romanian and Hungarian folk music. The elusive and introverted tone is imbued with a timeless calm and open harmonies, while all normalcy in time and space is abandoned – as in so many of his compositions. When Debussy once told Satie that his music had genius but lacked form, Satie hit back with the brilliant Trois Morceaux en forme de poire (1903) for piano duet. Asked “Why such a title?” Satie quipped, “Because, mon cher ami, pieces in the shape of a pear can’t be criticised for being shapeless.” Incidentally, the set contains seven pieces, not three.
The Velvet Gentleman
In the early 1890s, Satie became the house composer for Joséphin Péladan’s Rosicrucian Order. The flamboyant occultist and writer believed that through art one could achieve spiritual awakening and connection with the divine. Satie wrote incidental music for Péladan’s poetic drama Le Fils des étoiles, which impressed the young Ravel, who orchestrated at least one now-lost prelude.
In 1892, Satie wrote Uspud, a three-act ‘Christian ballet’ that can be seen as a precursor to the Theatre of the Absurd. After a run-through (with shadow puppets) it was panned by his colleagues. Incensed by the harsh criticism, Satie declared that the work would be performed at the Opéra national de Paris instead. After receiving no reply, he challenged the director of the Opéra to a duel. This resulted in a meeting, but nothing further came of it.
Satie self-published Uspud and asked his neighbour Suzanne Valadon, whom he was madly in love with, to create an illustration for the deluxe edition. Valadon modelled for renowned artists like Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec but was becoming an accomplished artist in her own right. She had a tempestuous six-month affair with Satie, while also seeing an older, wealthy stockbroker, whom she later married. Her colourful portrait of Satie, discovered in his flat after his death, remains the most striking image of him.
Throughout this time, Satie was working in virtual obscurity, earning nothing from his compositions and being paid a pittance for dance hall gigs and accompanist work. At least he honed his skills at writing cabaret songs, resulting in a handful of memorable tunes, like the sensuous La Diva de l’empire and the lustful Je te veux. A generous inheritance enabled Satie to buy seven identical chestnut-coloured corduroy suits with matching hats, earning him the nickname “The Velvet Gentleman”.
By 1897, he was broke again and moved to cheaper accommodation in Arcueil. From his tiny apartment in the industrial town, he would set off each morning on a 10-kilometre walk to Montmartre, occasionally pausing for un petit verre at a café, while ideas were taking shape in his head. In his 1912 Memoirs of an Amnesiac, he claimed that his only nourishment consisted of white foods including eggs, sugar and shredded bones. He also mentions mouldy fruit and sausages in camphor – a clear indication that he was fibbing!
“ He was always hiding himself during his life, also in his music.
You think you can catch Satie.
He’s in a forest; he’s behind a tree. You want to see him and he’s behind another tree.”
Recognition At Last
Satie’s breakthrough came in January 1911, when Ravel performed three of his works at a concert in Paris. Debussy conducted his orchestrations of the Gymnopédies two months later – the only time he conducted music other than his own. A critic described Satie as a forerunner of Impressionism. A younger generation of composers, later known as Les Six, embraced him as a mentor and made him their mascot! A respected publisher added Satie to its catalogue, and he finally gained recognition in specialist periodicals. Spurred on by all the attention, he composed a series of humoristic piano suites, including Sonatine bureaucratique (1917), a clever parody of Clementi’s sonatinas that anticipates neoclassicism.
The poet, playwright and film director Jean Cocteau introduced Satie to the glamorous Parisian haut monde, and eulogised him in his manifesto Le Coq et l’Arlequin. During World War I, there was a push to favour French music, and Satie profited from this cultural shift. Thanks to Cocteau, Satie was much in demand by impresarios, receiving six commissions from Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. The pick of the bunch is Parade (1917), featuring set and costumes by Picasso. Satie’s score blends fairground and circus noises with cabaret, ragtime and carnivalesque sounds, while Cocteau added “noise-making instruments”, such as a typewriter, siren, whistle and milk bottles. Today, the ballet is more famous for Satie’s insult of a critic who had lambasted Parade. Accused of defamation during the fracas, Satie nearly landed in jail.
Several attempts were made to emulate the succès de scandale of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, but despite some striking Cubist and Fauvist designs, the madcap stagings, whimsical plots and humorous scoring kept most of Satie’s ballets and orchestral works from being taken seriously. They are rarely revived today.
One noteworthy exception is Socrate, a cantata for one or two voices, accompanied by piano or chamber orchestra. The libretto – three dialogues by Plato in archaic French – describes the philosopher’s life and, in a detached manner, his final hours. The music is austere, devoid of conflict, other than in the text, and without Socratic irony. Satie wanted the music to be “white and pure like antiquity”.
owever, at its 1920 premiere, people laughed, assuming it was another of Satie’s satires. Many now consider Socrate his masterpiece. Some even see it as a self-portrait; like Socrates, Satie was an outsider who gravitated toward young people. But he remains elusive. Tharaud admits that, at times, he has struggled to grasp the nature of Satie’s music.
“It’s difficult to catch him,” he says. “He was always hiding himself during his life, also in his music. You think you can catch Satie. He’s in a forest; he’s behind a tree. You want to see him and he’s behind another tree. It’s very strange… He was very mysterious, secret.”
In addition to composing, Satie was also a writer and absurdist illustrator. Hundreds of bizarre architectural drawings came to light after his death. He liked adopting various personas. In his final guise, he dressed like the perfect civil servant– his way of mocking conformity. Eventually the bohemian lifestyle and heavy drinking caught up with him. Satie succumbed to cirrhosis in a Paris hospital on 1 July, 1925.
Though his irrational behaviour had alienated many, loyal friends visited him at the hospital and paid his medical bills.
For 27 years, no one had been allowed to enter his cramped, unheated apartment in Arcueil. After his death, friends were astonished by what he had hoarded. Apart from the seven velvet suits, 99 handkerchiefs, unwrapped umbrellas, heaps of shirts and piles of newspapers that were found hidden inside and behind two grand pianos stacked on top of each other, they also discovered Vexations and other unpublished music.
Satie is unusual in that he seems to have influenced more popular artists– Frank Zappa, David Bowie, Radiohead, John Cale and Aphex Twin, among others–than classical composers. That may explain why, even on the centenary of his death, so few classical music venues and festivals are honouring one of the 20th century’s most iconoclastic artists.
When asked in 1963 about Satie’s relevance, John Cage gave a prescient reply. “It’s not a question of relevance. He’s indispensable.”
Van Diemen’s Band will play an arrangement of Satie’s Gnoissienne No. 1 as part of its national tour of Where Everything is Music, 25 September – 3 October. The Australian Chamber Orchestra will play Satie’s Relâche in its national tour of Cocteau’s Circle, 8–22 November.