Erik Satie - Imposter or Genius ?

Of all the important Modernist composers, Satie has probably the largest influence and fame, relative to the number of, and musical ambition of, his compositions. 

In my youth, I was much taken with Satie's compositions. Short, witty, occasionally quite wistful and sad, at other times lugubrious, at still other times insolent, ridiculous and wicked. 

As early as the late 1880's, he had begun to compose (and publish) some of his revolutionary pieces (Gymnopedies, Gnossiennes, etc.). These works sound, even now, completely contemporary to our ears--clean, unburdened with any Victorian muddle, any thick harmonies. The piano was perfectly suited to Satie's modestly conceived music, which is characterized by simple lyrical lines, brevity, quick changes--a kind of short-hand.

What distinguished the spirit of Satie's inspiration--what makes him almost unique for his time--was a pre-Dada, pre-Surrealist approach--absurdist, nihilistic, crudely humorous at times, parodistic, mocking, and occasionally innocently lyrical. All these qualities--some might call them extra-musical, even anti-musical in feeling--have been enormously influential on later trends and composers. 

"Classical music" as it is now popularly regarded, has several discrete threads from the late 19th Century and throughout the 20th: Symphonic music, based on the participation of large urban orchestral groups, church and liturgy, chamber music, the virtuoso tradition, opera, atonal music, music hall, folk music and country, jazz, and many, many others. Part of what Modernism means is the accommodation of such non-traditional elements into "serious" music. Satie was an early explorer in imagining that the edifice of serious 19th Century academic music should be, and could be, shaken to its foundations.  

Satie thumbed his nose at the figure-heads of French academicism: Berlioz, Saint-Saens; and the "geniuses" the German-Viennese European taste: Wagner, Liszt.

His most famous piece, Trois Morceau en forme de Poire (Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear) [1903], for piano duet, sounds crisply modern to our ears, while retaining an aura of sweet nostalgia reminiscent of Paris in its twilight, pre-WWI heydays. 

Later, Satie went on to write more ambitious works--including some ballets--though his limited skills at orchestration prevented him from achieving more substantial performance pieces. The vast majority of his works were for keyboard solo, and were accessible to the untrained amateur. After WWI, Satie became associated with the Dadaists and Surrealists, whose principles of shock, revolt, defiant humor, and mystery were all ideas he had been thinking about for 20 years or more.  

Among the pieces of his I love--in addition to almost all the piano works, which finally began to be generally available over the last two decades--is Socrate [1918], for voice and small orchestra (or piano reduction). It has a kind of liturgical monotony which is quite suited to the seriousness of the "dialectic" text (from Plato). Also, he was a master of children's music--pieces of pure lyrical simplicity, but with great feeling. 

After he died, Darius Milhaud and a friend went to his dusty little suburban apartment and found a treasure-trove of memorabilia, unpublished compositions and letters. In addition they found seven velvet suits, which Satie had worn during his "velvet gentleman" period. 

When Virgil Thomson went to Paris in the 'Twenties, he says that he went out and bought a three inch stack of Satie's keyboard music; which became the foundation for his attitude and style of composition. There was no other composer whose work more clearly and definitively embodied the spirit of the age.  

When I went France in the 1990's, I visited the Erik Satie birthplace in Honfleur. The town has a beautiful tiny rectangular harbor surrounded by period houses. I fantasized little Erik scurrying down the town's narrow alley-ways in the 1870's. Our hotelier was a very stuffy fellow, and when I asked him about Satie, he straightened up pretentiously and replied "I am not an admirer of the work of Monsieur Satie!"