Le Piccadilly


Le Piccadilly is a 1904 composition for piano or string orchestra by Erik Satie. Written as a light cabaret or café-concert tune, it was one of Satie's early experiments with ragtime influences. A performance lasts under 2 minutes.

Description

Satie was arguably the first French composer to make use of budding American jazz. In April of 1900 he wrote a cakewalk for piano, the Petit prélude de 'La Mort de Monsieur Mouche', a few months after entertainer Eugénie Fougère introduced the dance to Paris. The piece went unpublished but he remained intrigued by the genre. By the peak of the Parisian cakewalk craze in 1904, Satie was working as a cabaret accompanist-songwriter and was better prepared to make use of it. After scoring a hit with the music hall song La Diva de l'Empire he started Le Piccadilly, a purely instrumental number in the same style.
It is a Joplinesque ragtime march in standard ternary form, with the addition of a four-bar introduction and four-bar vamps preceding each sixteen-bar strain. The key is F major, with a middle-section trio in the subdominant of B flat major. Musicologists believe Satie modeled his main theme on the "phone call chorus" of Howard and Emerson's Tin Pan Alley tune Hello! Ma Baby ; Fougère had used this song to demonstrate the cakewalk onstage. The composer's sketches reveal alternate versions of the introduction and that he planned to add a coda.
According to the manuscripts the piece was originally called La Transatlantique, an ironic term for wealthy American heiresses who sailed to France looking to buy social status through marriage to impoverished French aristocrats. One such woman, Princesse Edmond de Polignac, would later become an important patron of Satie's, so perhaps it was for the best that he changed the title. The new one was probably suggested by La Diva de l'Empire, with its lyrical references to Piccadilly Circus in London.
Satie registered Le Piccadilly with SACEM on October 19, 1904, and subsequently arranged it for string orchestra. Both scores were published by Alexis Rouart in 1907; today these are among the rarest of Satie first editions. Despite its appearance in print this cabaret instrumental slipped into total obscurity compared to Satie's other piano works. His first biographers, Pierre-Daniel Templier and Rollo H. Myers, seemed unaware of its existence. A resurgence in Satie's posthumous fame during the late 1960s and early 1970s coincided with the popular Scott Joplin revival, prompting renewed interest in his ragtime excursions. A new edition of Le Piccadilly was published by Salabert in 1975, and it has since become one of his more popular and frequently recorded works.

Recordings

For piano:
Aldo Ciccolini, France Clidat, Philippe Entremont, Jean-Pierre Armengaud, Roland Pöntinen, Anne Queffélec, Pascal Rogé, Yitkin Seow, Peter Lawson, Gabriel Tacchino, Klára Körmendi, Bojan Gorišek, Olof Höjer, Peter Dickinson, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Håkon Austbø, Francine Kay, Cristina Ariagno, Jan Kaspersen, Marco Rapetti, Alexandre Tharaud, Jeroen van Veen, Noriko Ogawa, Nicolas Horvath, Steffen Schleiermacher.
For orchestra:
Michel Plasson, Orchestre du Capitole de Toulouse.