Erik Satie
Eric Alfred Leslie Satie, better known as Erik Satie, was a French composer and pianist. The son of a French father and a British mother, he studied at the Paris Conservatoire but was undistinguished and did not obtain a diploma. In the 1880s he worked as a pianist in café-cabarets in Montmartre, Paris, and began composing works, mostly for solo piano, such as his Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes. He also wrote music for a Rosicrucian sect to which he was briefly attached.
Following a period of sparse compositional productivity, Satie entered Paris's second music academy, the Schola Cantorum, as a mature student. His studies there were more successful than those at the Conservatoire. From about 1910 he became the focus of successive groups of young composers attracted by his unconventionality and originality. Among them were the group known as Les Six. A meeting with Jean Cocteau in 1915 led to the creation of the ballet Parade for Sergei Diaghilev, with music by Satie, sets and costumes by Pablo Picasso, and choreography by Léonide Massine.
Satie's example guided a new generation of French composers away from post-Wagnerian Impressionism towards a sparer, terser style. During his lifetime, he influenced Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, and Francis Poulenc, and he is seen as an influence on more recent composers such as John Cage and John Adams. His harmony is often characterised by unresolved chords; he sometimes dispensed with bar-lines, as in his Gnossiennes; and his melodies are generally simple and often reflect his love of old church music. He gave some of his later works absurd titles, such as Véritables Préludes flasques , Croquis et agaceries d'un gros bonhomme en bois and Sonatine bureaucratique. Most of his works are brief, and the majority are for solo piano. Exceptions include his "symphonic drama" Socrate and two late ballets Mercure and Relâche.
Satie never married, and his home for most of his adult life was a single small room, first in Montmartre and, from 1898 to his death, in Arcueil, a suburb of Paris. He adopted various images over the years, including a period in quasi-priestly dress, another in which he always wore identically coloured velvet suits, and is known for his last persona, in neat bourgeois costume, with bowler hat, wing collar, and umbrella. He was a lifelong heavy drinker, and died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 59.
Life and career
Early years
Satie was born on 17 May 1866 in Honfleur, Normandy, the first child of Alfred Satie and his wife Jane Leslie. Jane Satie was an English Protestant of Scottish descent; Alfred Satie, a shipping broker, was a Roman Catholic. A year later, the Saties had a daughter, Olga, and in 1869 a second son, Conrad. The children were baptised in the Anglican church.After the Franco-Prussian War Alfred Satie sold his business and the family moved to Paris, where he set up as a music publisher. In 1872 Jane Satie died and Eric and his brother were sent back to Honfleur to be brought up by Alfred's parents. The boys were rebaptised as Roman Catholics and educated at a local boarding school, where Satie excelled in history and Latin but nothing else. In 1874 he began taking music lessons with a local organist, Gustave Vinot, a former pupil of Louis Niedermeyer. Vinot stimulated Satie's love of old church music, and in particular Gregorian chant.
In 1878 Satie's grandmother died, and the two boys returned to Paris to be informally educated by their father. Satie did not attend a school, but his father took him to lectures at the Collège de France and engaged a tutor to teach Eric Latin and Greek. Before the boys returned to Paris from Honfleur, Alfred had met a piano teacher and salon composer, Eugénie Barnetche, whom he married in January 1879, to the dismay of the twelve-year-old Satie, who did not like her.
Eugénie Satie resolved that her elder stepson should become a professional musician, and in November 1879 enrolled him in the preparatory piano class at the Paris Conservatoire. Satie strongly disliked the institution, which he described as "a vast, very uncomfortable, and rather ugly building; a sort of district prison with no beauty on the inside – nor on the outside, for that matter". He studied solfeggio with Albert Lavignac and piano with Émile Decombes, who had been a pupil of Frédéric Chopin. In 1880 Satie took his first examinations as a pianist: he was described as "gifted but indolent". The following year Decombes called him "the laziest student in the Conservatoire". In 1882 he was expelled from the Conservatoire for his unsatisfactory performance.
In 1884 Satie wrote his first known composition, a short Allegro for piano, composed while on holiday in Honfleur. He signed himself "Erik" on this and subsequent compositions, though he continued to use "Eric" on other documents until 1906. In 1885, he was readmitted to the Conservatoire, in the intermediate piano class of his stepmother's former teacher, Georges Mathias. He made little progress: Mathias described his playing as "insignificant and laborious" and Satie himself as "worthless. Three months just to learn the piece. Cannot sight-read properly." Satie became fascinated by aspects of religion. He spent much time in Notre-Dame de Paris contemplating the stained glass windows and in the National Library examining obscure medieval manuscripts. His friend Alphonse Allais later dubbed him "Esotérik Satie". From this period comes Ogives, a set of four piano pieces inspired by Gregorian chant and Gothic church architecture.
Keen to leave the Conservatoire, Satie volunteered for military service and joined the 33rd Infantry Regiment in November 1886. He found army life no more to his liking than the Conservatoire, and deliberately contracted acute bronchitis by standing in the open, bare-chested, on a winter night. After three months' convalescence, he was invalided out of the army.
Montmartre
In 1887, at the age of 21, Satie moved from his father's residence to lodgings in the 9th arrondissement. By this time he had started what was to be an enduring friendship with the romantic poet Contamine de Latour, whose verse he set in some of his early compositions, which Satie senior published. His lodgings were close to the popular Le Chat Noir cabaret on the southern edge of Montmartre where he became an habitué and then a resident pianist. The Chat Noir was known as the "temple de la 'convention farfelue – the temple of zany convention, and, as the biographer Robert Orledge puts it, Satie, "free from his restrictive upbringing … 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". This was the first of several personas that Satie adopted over the years.In the late 1880s Satie styled himself on at least one occasion "Erik Satie – gymnopédiste", and his works from this period include the three Gymnopédies and the first Gnossiennes. He earned a modest living as a pianist and conductor at the Chat Noir, before falling out with the proprietor and moving to become second pianist at the nearby Auberge du Clou. There he became a close friend of Claude Debussy, who proved a kindred spirit in his experimental approach to composition. Both were bohemians, enjoying the same café society and struggling to survive financially. At the Auberge du Clou Satie first encountered the flamboyant, self-styled "Sâr" Joséphin Péladan, for whose mystic sect, the Ordre de la Rose-Croix Catholique du Temple et du Graal, he was appointed composer. This gave him scope for experiment, and Péladan's salons at the fashionable Galerie Durand-Ruel gained Satie his first public hearings. Frequently short of money, Satie moved from his lodgings in the 9th arrondissement to a small room in the rue Cortot not far from Sacre-Coeur, so high up the Butte Montmartre that he said he could see from his window all the way to the Belgian border.
By mid-1892 Satie had composed the first pieces in a compositional system of his own making, provided incidental music to a chivalric esoteric play, had a hoax published, and broken away from Péladan, starting with the "Uspud" project, a "Christian Ballet", in collaboration with Latour. He challenged the musical establishment by proposing himself – unsuccessfully – for the seat in the Académie des Beaux-Arts made vacant by the death of Ernest Guiraud. Between 1893 and 1895, Satie, wearing quasi-priestly dress, was 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 1893 Satie had what is believed to be his only love affair, a five-month liaison with the painter Suzanne Valadon. After their first night together, he proposed marriage. They 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 means of calming his mind, and Valadon painted his portrait, which she gave him. After five months she moved away, leaving him devastated. He said later that he was left with "nothing but an icy loneliness that fills the head with emptiness and the heart with sadness".
In 1895 Satie changed his image once again, this time to that of "the Velvet Gentleman". From the proceeds of a small legacy, he bought seven identical dun-coloured suits. Orledge comments that this change "marked the end of his Rose+Croix period and the start of a long search for a new artistic direction".
Move to Arcueil
In 1898, in search of somewhere cheaper and quieter than Montmartre, Satie moved to a room in the southern suburbs, in the commune of Arcueil-Cachan, from the centre of Paris. This remained his home for the rest of his life. No visitors were ever admitted. He joined the Socialist Party after the assassination of Jean Jaurès ; and others. Between 1898 and 1908, he composed and arranged the music for around thirty Hyspa texts. These songs, which caricatured current political events, enabled Satie to explore the use of quotations for humorous purposes that characterises his work. In his later years Satie rejected all his cabaret music as vile and against his nature. Only a few compositions that he took seriously remain from this period: Jack in the Box, music to a pantomime by Jules Depaquit ; Geneviève de Brabant , a short comic opera to a text by "Lord Cheminot" ; Le poisson rêveur, piano music to accompany a lost tale by Cheminot, and a few others that were mostly incomplete. Few were presented, and none published at the time.File:C-Debussy-V-d'Indy-A-Roussel-M-Ravel.jpg|thumb|left|Musical friends and teachers: from top left clockwise – Claude Debussy, Vincent d'Indy, Albert Roussel, Maurice Ravel|alt=head and shoulders photographs of four white men, two neatly bearded, with full heads of hair, the third bald and neatly bearded, the fourth clean shaven with full head of hair
A decisive change in Satie's musical outlook came after he heard the premiere of Debussy's opera Pelléas et Mélisande in 1902. He found it "absolutely astounding", and he re-evaluated his own music. In a determined attempt to improve his technique, and against Debussy's advice, he enrolled as a mature student at Paris's second main music academy, the Schola Cantorum in October 1905, continuing his studies there until 1912. The institution was run by Vincent d'Indy, who emphasised orthodox technique rather than creative originality. Satie studied counterpoint with Albert Roussel and composition with d'Indy, and was a much more conscientious and successful student than he had been at the Conservatoire in his youth.
In 1911, when he was in his mid-forties, Satie came to the notice of the musical public in general. That January Maurice Ravel played some early Satie works at a concert by the Société musicale indépendante, a forward-looking group set up by Ravel and others as a rival to the conservative Société nationale de musique. Satie was suddenly seen as "the precursor and apostle of the musical revolution now taking place"; he became a focus for young composers. Debussy, having orchestrated the first and third Gymnopédies, conducted them in concert. The publisher Demets asked for new works from Satie, who was finally able to give up his cabaret work and devote himself to composition. Works such as the cycle Sports et divertissements were published in de luxe editions. The press began to write about Satie's music, and a leading pianist, Ricardo Viñes, took him up, giving celebrated first performances of some Satie pieces.