Nocturnes (Satie)

The Nocturnes are a set of five piano pieces by Erik Satie. They were written between August and November 1919. With the exception of the Premier Menuet, they were his final works for solo piano, and are considered among his most significant achievements in the genre. The Nocturnes stand apart from Satie's piano music of the 1910s in their complete seriousness—lacking the zany titles, musical parody, and extramusical texts that he typically featured in his scores of the time. The completed set of five nocturnes takes about 13 minutes to perform.

Background

Much had transpired in Satie's personal and professional lives in the two years since his previous keyboard piece, the Neoclassical spoof Sonatine bureaucratique. There was the fallout from the scandalous premiere of his ballet Parade, including his conviction of criminal libel for sending insulting postcards to one of its critics, Jean Poueigh; his bitter estrangement from longtime friend Claude Debussy, and Debussy's subsequent death; and the completion of the work which he believed represented the best of himself: the "symphonic drama" Socrate. Ridiculed by the French press and dogged by chronic poverty, Satie fell into a depressed state that reached its nadir in August 1918, when he wrote to Valentine Hugo, "I shit on Art, it has 'cut me up' too often." He then proceeded to break with the Nouveaux jeunes group of musicians he had recently founded—an act that set the stage for their eventual regrouping as Les Six. By the summer of 1919, his creative energies had revived, though his spirits remained hard-bitten and gloomy: "I have changed a lot during these last months", he mused to singer. "I am becoming very serious...too serious, even." Such feelings may have steered him to the nocturne form itself—the province of Chopin, evocative of the night, and usually quiet and introspective—and affected the way in which the project developed.

Composition

Satie's notebooks reveal that he initially intended to present the Nocturnes with the whimsical literary humor that the Parisian public had come to expect from him. The first piece had the working title Faux Nocturne and was accompanied by one of those little stories he enjoyed writing for the pianist's private amusement:

The night is silent
Melancholy is all-pervasive
The will-o'-the-wisp disturbs the peaceful landscape
What a bore! It's an old will-o'-the-wisp
Trust him to come
Let us resume our reverie, if you will

But he soon abandoned the text and satirical nomenclature, choosing instead to let the Nocturnes stand as pure music. He also wrote them using conventional bar lines, a practice he had largely eschewed in piano music for nearly 30 years before returning to it—perhaps with a dash of irony—in his Sonatine bureaucratique.
On 24 August 1919, Satie informed Valentine Hugo: "I am coming to the end of my Third Nocturne. I am dedicating it to you. The three of them are not at all bad. The first serves as a prelude; the second is shorter and very tender—very nocturnal; the third, yours, is a more rapid and dramatic nocturne, a little longer than the first. Between the three of them they form a whole with which I am very pleased—though the first is the least good." This assessment was premature; Satie was not satisfied with Nocturne No. 2 until the following month, and he continued to tinker with No. 3 until October—by which time he was developing ideas for additional pieces in the series. Nos. 4 and 5 are dated October and November 1919, respectively.

Publication and performance

The printing of the Nocturnes was split between two of Satie's regular publishers; issued Nos. 1–3 in late 1919, and E. Demets published Nos. 4 and 5 in 1920. Demets also advertised a Nocturne No. 6 without a price, indicating it was a work in progress—but the piece would not appear in the composer's lifetime.
Satie dedicated each of the completed five to a patron or proponent of his music:

Doux et calme, to Marcelle Meyer
Simplement, to André Salomon
Un peu mouvementé, to Valentine Hugo
= 92, to Countess Étienne de Beaumont
= 60, to Madame Georges Cocteau

Nocturne No. 1 was premiered by Jane Mortier at the Salle Pleyel in Paris on 18 March 1920; Nos. 1–3 were performed by Ricardo Viñes during an all-Satie concert at the Salle Érard on 7 June 1920. Nocturne No. 4 was not heard until 4 January 1923, when it was played by Jean Wiener at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Nocturne No. 5 was performed sometime in 1921 by Marcelle Meyer.

Reception

The Nocturnes caused no immediate stir, although at the Viñes performance, Jean Cocteau and Les Six members Darius Milhaud and Louis Durey expressed their enthusiasm. Given Satie's reputation as a musical humorist, the audience may have been unsure if it was having its leg pulled. But they have long been prized by Satie aficionados. John Cage championed them in the United States after World War II, and they inspired choreographer Merce Cunningham's ballet Nocturnes, in which the dances were created using chance procedure. Rollo Hugh Myers, Satie's first English-language biographer, ranked the Nocturnes with a handful of Satie compositions that are "outstanding and cannot be ignored by any student of contemporary music." He continued: "The Nocturnes are in a sense the natural corollary of Socrate, which preceded them by a year, and are conceived in the same gravely austere mood. The style is chastened, simplified, uncompromising in its rejection of any sensuous appeal, but the music is strangely impressive in its bleakness and almost inhuman detachment." The Nocturnes have never enjoyed the mainstream popularity of the Gymnopédies or other Satie piano works; although they have been recorded by such artists as Aldo Ciccolini, Pascal Rogé, and Jean-Yves Thibaudet, they remain—according to John Keillor's AllMusic review—"among the undiscovered masterpieces of the twentieth century."

Posthumous Nocturnes

Shortly before his death in 1925, Satie told Robert Caby that the manuscript of his Nocturne No. 6 was virtually complete and might be published someday. Six decades later, musicologist Robert Orledge examined Satie's notebooks from the period and discovered a single, full draft of a piano piece, missing only two bars of the left-hand part. Orledge completed a performance version, and it was published as Satie's Nocturne No. 6 in 1994. Speculative versions of a Nocturne No. 7, based on a 12-bar sketch in Satie's notebooks, have been created by Orledge and others.

Recordings

Online Score

5 Nocturnes: Scores at the International Music Score Library Project