The Composer as Clown

...If you want the near-complete vocal music, try to locate Mélodies (EMI 7491672), with Mady Mesplé, Nicolai' Gedda and Gabriel Bacquier splendidly singing these ingratiating songs...

...instead, he would jump out the window...

...When I was young, people were telling me: You'll see when you are 50.1 am 50...

...Satie's musical achievement has been best summarized by Robert Orledge in Satie Remembered, an important chrestomathy of recollections and reflections about the man and the composer: "Debussy christened him 'the precursor.' Satie foreshadowed organized total chromaticism (1893), surrealism and the preparedpiano (1913), neoclassicism, minimalism, and even Muzak (1917), and the concept of the synchronized yet aleatorie film score (1924...

...Everybody who knew him wondered how, given his poverty in the Arcueil dump—whither he had to fetch water from the fountain in the square, and where neither friends nor even the concierge were allowed to set foot—he always went out looking spotless and soign...

...On his deathbed he took Last Communion, some thought merely to placate the hospital's solicitous nuns...

...A short piano piece, "Vexations," was, according to Satie's cheeky instructions, to be repeated 840 times...

...Satie followed this up with Trois Sarabandes, another irresistible composition...

...Dry, poker-faced wit (pince-sans-rire the French call it) is said to be a Norman characteristic, and Eric (he later changed the spelling) Alfred Leslie Satie was born in 1866 of a Norman father and Scottish mother who died when he was six, but not without making him proud of his mixed ancestry: "What, don't you know the Leslie clan...

...The French commentator Jean-Pierre Armengaud sees this dual tendency as "disguising a hidden suffering, an obsessive frustration making Satie's some of the most moving music of modern times...

...He loved children, though, and did lovely things for them, even when it cost him his scant food money...

...Presumably from his reading, he got a title, Trois Gymnopédies (which actually refers to ritual dances by naked Spartan youths), for a set of short piano pieces he proceeded to write...

...The little seaside Norman town of Honfleur was the birthplace of two of France's greatest wits: Alphonse Allais, a supreme humorist with words, and 12 years later, Satie, the solemn joker with both words and music...

...Roland-Manuel saw in him Norman cunning combined with Scottish humor, though Satie never spoke English...

...The artist does not have the right to dispose needlessly of the hearer's time," Satie proclaimed...

...God help him who came between Erik and his umbrella—it could mean anything from month long to lifelong bitter enmity...

...Perhaps most eccentrically...

...the so-called humoristic work...

...the "furniture music," meant to blend with background noises and stimulate conversation...

...SATIE'S very appearance elicited contradictions—some thinking him shorter, others taller than his very average height...

...At the conclusion, Satie and Picabia drove out onto the stage in the conductor's tiny car...

...Despite his guarded way of speaking, softly yet emphatically from behind a hand covering his mouth, Satie was a great wit...

...For the two-piano and piano four-hands music—which usually includes the wonderful Three Pieces in the Form of a Pear, composed when Debussy remarked that his friend's music lacked form—I would suggest Etcetera 1015, with two fine Dutch pianists...

...I would suggest three: Hyperion 66365, with Ronald Corp conducting the New London Orchestra...

...He liked to do things in threes...

...But his music was not affected much, if at all...

...Fancy your using that stuff," he would say angrily...

...Erik's father, however, moved to Paris and became a bookseller and minor publisher...

...Certainly his long-haired bohemian looks in his early Montmartre days differed from his Monsieur le Pauvre aspect later on, when he moved himself by handcart to the distant and impoverished working-class suburb of Arcueil...

...SeaBird would mostly smoke his pipe on the anchored boat...

...the following year he got out of that by coming down with bronchitis and requiring a two-month hospitalization...

...Indeed, he was childlike, if not childish, to the end...

...In addition, the first three installments of Steffen Schleiermacher's complete Satie piano works are now available (Darbinghaus und Grimm 6131063, 1064, 1065), as are various selections by Pascal Rogé on Decca and Ciccolini on EMI...

...In 1963 Cage arranged such a performance in New York, with five alternating pianists, and it lasted some 15 or 16 hours...

...If you knew what it's made of: sweat, human waste, it's revolting...

...His own sister said of her eccentric brother, "It doesn't seem that he was ever perfectly normal...

...Among his many peculiarities were his long, late-night walks from Montmartre or Montparnasse to Arcueil, either because, drinking, he had missed the last bus or train, or because he was broke...

...Already much that was to be the essence of Satie's music was manifest...

...In the hospital he read voraciously, particularly exotic works like Flaubert's Salammbô, and novels by the great charlatan Joséphin Péladan, a leader of Rosicrucianism...

...More easily available are two one-disc versions by Quéfellec that are worth searching out...

...but if he was crazy, he was crazy like a fox...

...He owned a carriage so fine that it was never used for fear of scratching the paint, and a boat so precious that it had only one sailor and put to sea only for short promenades...

...His significance is to be sought in his 'teachings,' in his personality, and in his whole attitude toward and ideas about music...

...Though his teacher, the fine composer Albert Roussel, felt he did not need it, Satie studiedassiduouslyforthree years, graduating with top honors...

...after his mother's death, he was rebaptized Catholic, like the rest of the Saties...

...Moreover, it was no secret that he never took a bath and abhorred soap...

...His appearance was variously described as that of a schoolmaster, bank clerk, petty bureaucrat, ultrarespectable provincial lawyer, funeral director, model civil servant (Darius Milhaud), and beneficent elderly goat (George Antheil...

...The preferred word for Satie's music is dépouillement, meaning stripping down, sobriety, concision, or bareness...

...Also discovered were innumerable musical and literary jottings (Satie was quite a writer) pellmell in boxes, and worst of all, old, hardened black turds lining one wall...

...Satie is known for the bizarre titles of many of his pieces: "Desiccated Embryos," "Bureaucratic Sonatina," "Veritable Flabby Preludes (for a dog)," to name a few...

...No one can complain about this recent release, whose artistic and sonorous qualities are sovereign...

...It lasted two tempestuous years, whereafter the basically shy Satie, who felt that women did not understand him, withdrew...

...Take only his oft-quoted mots about his friends Debussy and Ravel...

...James Harding remarks in his excellent Erik Satie, "His adoption of the very uniform of those he laughed at was the supreme joke...

...They are matched by his strange, sometimes quite elaborate, written instructions on how to play them: "like a nightingale with a toothache," "with great oblivion of the present," "from the top of the teeth," or "so as to obtain a void...

...Naxos 554279, with Jérôme Kaltenbach leading the Symphony Orchestra of Nancy...

...There was in the self-contradictory Satie a distinctly dual personality, especially apparent when he became Péladan's official Rosicrucian composer for two years and wrote mystical-sounding music, while also making a living as a Montmartre café pianist, playing both popular music and some of his own compositions in the café-concert style...

...I have seen nothing...

...at the other, mischievous, anarchic humor, sometimes carried to frenetic heights...

...In Honfleur, the organist-piano teacher Vinot instilled in young Erik a love of plainsong and the old Gregorian chant...

...Jean Cocteau, however, was right: "The public is shocked by the charming ridiculousness of Satie's titles and instructions, but it respects the formidable ridiculousness of the Parsifal libretto...

...Several Decca CDs offer pianists like Rogé, Louis Lortie, or JeanPhilippe Collard...

...His musical periods were as marked as Stravinsky's: the churchly "kneeling music...

...His final avatar was with bowler hat, pince-nez, stiff collar, starched shirt, dark suit, and, regardless of the weather, umbrella tightly clutched under his arm...

...there was a sly method in his madness...

...But his influence went way beyond them to Debussy, Ravel and any number of subsequent composers, including such diverse figures as Federico Mompou and John Cage...

...Often he arrived home at dawn, only to be obliged soon after to foot it back...

...most were found, unworn and moth-eaten, after his death...

...I myself discern three modes in Satie's music: at one end, bittersweet, hypnotically insinuating melancholy...

...whoever disagrees with this will please leave the hall...

...But no one else's bareness, save that of a Greek statue or Renaissance nude, seems so fully, sensuously self-sufficient...

...THE LION'S SHARE of Satie's music is for the piano, and to those who rightly want all of it, I heartily recommend The Complete Solo Piano Music, played by Jean-Yves Thibaudet on five CDs (Decca473620...

...His overriding aims [in reaction to romanticism, Wagnerism, and impressionism] were simplicity, brevity and clarity of expression...

...Roger Shattuck has speculated that "the source of Satie's sense of musical beat— the possibility of variation within repetition, the effect of boredom [which he endorsed] on the organism—may be this endless walking back and forth across the same landscape day after day...

...And: "Ravel refuses the Legion of Honor but all his music accepts it...

...Upon his death, when his brother and three friends broke into his small apartment, they found unspeakable dirt and disorder: unopened mail and parcels, a broken-down piano held together with strings, and behind it two manuscripts he thought he had left on a bus...

...In order to understand Satie's music, it is essential to know what sort of a man he was," writes musicologist Rollo H. Myers...

...He bought stiff collars and handkerchiefs by the dozens, even worried on his deathbed when Madame Milhaud retrieved only 98 of 99 hankies from his laundry, and asked another friend, Valentine Hugo, to buy him some more that he had seen in a shop window...

...and Les Inspirations insolites (EMI 69686), where insolite naturally means unusual, not insolent, though it is that as well...

...He was involved in Arcueil's civic affairs too, first joining the Socialist and then the Communist Party...

...He quarreled with every single one of his friends except the angelic Milhaud, usually over a trifle, and even refused to see Auric and Poulenc on his deathbed...

...The composer and novelist Paul Bowles described that essence as "wan elegance, perverse humor and nostalgia...

...He finally escaped the Conservatoire in 1886 by volunteering for military service...

...and Relâche (meaning "No performance" or "Theater closed") with Francis Picabia and the dancer Jean Berlin for Rolf de Maré's Swedish Ballets (1924...

...he once half-jokingly asked someone...

...To tasters, I recommend the two-CD set by Anne Quéfellec, beautifully played and recorded (Virgin 4533 3...

...the odd oratorio Socrate (1918...

...Mercure (1924), again with Picasso and Massine...

...His relations with women were practically nil...

...Could this have contributed to his dual nature...

...To clean himself, he used a pumice stone and dog brush...

...against Debussy's advice, he enrolled at 39 in Vincent d'Indy's Schola Cantorum, the Conservatoire's rival, to learn counterpoint and other techniques in which he felt deficient...

...Because the mother was Protestant, the boy was baptized in that faith...

...And about himself: "I came very young into a very old world...

...This includes the orchestral version of Socrate...

...a setting for small orchestra and four sopranos of three selections from Plato's dialogues in the dullest translation Satie could deliberately pick...

...Hence Erik was to derive his Marche du grand escalier, about a huge, ivory royal staircase that the king himself wouldn't use...

...He proclaimed himself Master of Music and Parcier (whatever that meant), published briefly a broadsheet attacking his enemies (one insulting postcard to a critic nearly cost him a week in jail), and was, of course, the only worshiper...

...In between there is a third manner, especially noticeable in the piano music: as if someone at the keyboard were improvising slow, brooding melodies, neither sad nor cheerful, but tentative, searching, indeterminate—imbued with a mysterious vagueness...

...His one known affair was in Montmartre with the wild painter Suzanne Valadon (unwed mother of Maurice Utrillo...

...For less money, one can obtain an earlier five-CD collection played by Aldo Ciccolini (EMI 75434)—also fine, but not digital and minus a few Satie pieces then not yet known...

...During World War I, when streetlamps were decimated, his productivity decreased...

...To this day it remains his most popular work, either in the piano version, or in much later orchestrations of the first and third by Debussy, and of the second by RolandManuel...

...The extremely spare and severe musical accompaniment is considered a masterpiece by most musicians, but a few find it monotonous, as do I. Then there are the ballets: the epochal, scandal-provoking Parade (1917), a collaboration with Cocteau, Picasso, and Leonid Massine for Diaghilev...

...Later, in Paris, his new, unloved stepmother, a piano teacher, steered him toward the Conservatoire, which he heartily hated and only fitfully attended...

...He was the unofficial sponsor of the Nouveaux Jeunes, who evolved into the Groupe des Six...

...The boy's beloved uncle Adrien, known as Sea-Bird, was a true eccentric, passionate about ships and horses...

...More scandal...

...There are any number of complementary versions of the orchestral music, none of them complete by itself...

...To the German musicologist H. H. Stuckenschmidt, the cabaret-Péladan years reflected "the Janus-headed split personality of Satie, who all his life was a philosopher and a farceur...

...He would stop at many a lamppost to jot down musical ideas into a little black pocket notebook...

...In emulation of Péladan, who arrogated to himself the mystic Chaldean title of Sâr, Satie for a while set up the Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor in his apartment...

...later he founded the socalled Ecole d'Arcueil, whose members included the delightful composer Henri Sauguet and the distinguished conductor Roger Désormière...

...Perhaps so...

...but Stravinsky, who liked him, recalls his churchgoing just before his final illness—cirrhosis, from his heavy drinking, which killed him on July 1,1925...

...The composer Roland-Manuel, who was Satie's friend, put it more pointedly: "The importance of Satie lies not so much in what he did as in what he caused to be done...

...Once, when he came into a small inheritance, he bought himself a dozen identical gray corduroy suits and matching hats...

...if, like Stravinsky and Ned Rorem, you prefer the one for male voice and piano, there is the great old Nimbus 5027, with the amazing Hugues Cuenod, and a good new one with Jean Belliard on Timpani 1020...

...The opening curtain for the last was inscribed, "Erik Satie is the world's greatest musician...

...At the premiere of the former's La Mer, Erik remarked concerning the opening movement, "The Sea Between Dawn and Midday": "There was a little bit in particular between half past 10 and a quarter to 11 that I found stunning...

...This has recently been withdrawn, but can still be tracked down...

...The Satie ancestors were sailors who turned into shipping clerks...

...Nevertheless, his teachers, such as Ambroise Thomas, remarked that he could do very well if only he were not so lazy...