Erik Satie: Music, Art and Literature

Caroline Potter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409434214
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317141785
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Erik Satie (1866-1925) was a quirky, innovative and enigmatic composer whose impact has spread far beyond the musical world. As an artist active in several spheres - from cabaret to religion, from calligraphy to poetry and playwriting - and collaborator with some of the leading avant-garde figures of the day, including Cocteau, Picasso, Diaghilev and René Clair, he was one of few genuinely cross-disciplinary composers. His artistic activity, during a tumultuous time in the Parisian art world, situates him in an especially exciting period, and his friendships with Debussy, Stravinsky and others place him at the centre of French musical life. He was a unique figure whose art is immediately recognisable, whatever the medium he employed. Erik Satie: Music, Art and Literature explores many aspects of Satie's creativity to give a full picture of this most multifaceted of composers. The focus is on Satie's philosophy and psychology revealed through his music; Satie's interest in and participation in artistic media other than music, and Satie's collaborations with other artists. This book is therefore essential reading for anyone interested in the French musical and cultural scene of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Chapter 1
Satie’s Personal and Musical Logic

Robert Orledge

Over the past quarter of a century, I feel I have come to know the strange phenomenon that is Erik Satie quite well through my research. The sad thing is that if I had been alive at the same time as he was and had known as much about him then, I don’t think I would have wanted to meet him. At his least attractive, he was a sponging, irascible alcoholic who refused to speak to his supportive brother Conrad for over seven years, supposedly because he would not have a drink with him after their father’s funeral in December 1903. Conrad undoubtedly feared beginning what would have been an extended binge at his expense, laced (in that period) with religious paranoia. And Satie, it has to be said, often appeared to cut off his nose to spite his face, here putting filial love above present-day reality. Before Satie returned to learning at the Schola Cantorum in 1905, he felt particularly insecure and uncertain of his musical direction. And even after graduating there as a composer of proven competence in 1912 after his courses with Albert Roussel and Vincent d’Indy, he imagined personal slights where none were intended and usually remained intransigent towards their supposed perpetrators for long periods of time.

Thus, as late as February 1924, he severed relations with Auric and Poulenc when he discovered about the backstage goings-on at Diaghilev’s Monte Carlo opera season the previous month, and their association with his lifelong enemy, Louis Laloy (who had omitted Satie’s name from the official programme, even as the composer of the new recitatives for Gounod’s Le Médecin malgré lui). Whereas he had congratulated Poulenc for his success with Les Biches on 11 January, he told Milhaud a few weeks later that the ballet was ‘the lowest of the low’ and that Auric’s Les Fâcheux‘had lost all its charm due to the lassitude of its author’.1 And he refused to see either composer on his deathbed the following year, even if he remained devoted to Milhaud, perhaps because he never criticised him behind his back.

On a smaller scale, a similar thing happened to Henri Sauguet when he was summoned to turn pages for Satie as he accompanied Jane Mortier in a performance of Socrate at the Salle Gaveau on 20 June 1923. Although Satie disliked playing in public, Sauguet says ‘he played well but in a very studied manner’, in this instance ‘rigid, with his pince-nez set for battle’.2 Being spaciously printed, the La Sirène edition had lots of pages and, according to Sauguet, Satie kept wanting him to turn too early, keeping up a low, yet undoubtedly audible commentary as follows: ‘Turn … No, not immediately … come on … let’s go … No! Well, what are you waiting for? Now’s the time!’3 After the (applauded) performance, Satie furiously turned on Sauguet, crying: ‘You are a cretin, worse than Durey.’4 The mild-mannered Sauguet, although it was not his fault, valued Satie’s friendship and help in his career, and apologised by letter for his apparent shortcomings. And, for once, Satie apologised two days later himself and subsequently introduced Sauguet to Diaghilev. This might seem a fit of pique brought on by nervousness, but the logical explanation is that Satie wanted to be at one of Diaghilev’s rare revivals of Parade on the same night and was anxious to get through Socrate so that he could get there in time, perhaps even just to take his onstage applause at the end. Whether he speeded up Socrate in the process Sauguet does not say, and the fact that he gave the performance testifies to the importance he attached to his latest compositions. But he wrote twice to Diaghilev on the day before the concert reminding him to reserve a box for himself and his friends and to tell Ernest Ansermet (the conductor) to take the ballet a bit faster, especially the ‘Prélude du Rideau rouge’, as he had found his interpretation ‘Flabby and too slow’ (presumably at the final rehearsal).5 So he had an artistic as well as a personal reason to get to the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées that evening.

In the light of the Poulenc-Auric-Laloy incident cited above, it can be seen that Satie was, in reality, hypermoral. His tempestuous affair with Suzanne Valadon, which lasted between 14 January and 20 June 1893, probably made him thus, especially as she then went straight off with a banker, Paul Mousis, whom she later married. His only known relationship found Satie calling on the police for protection and composing the nine Danses Gothiques in March to restore his peace of mind ‘and the greater tranquillity of my soul’.6 As he told the wife of his brother Conrad, who asked in 1912 why he had never married: ‘Quite simply, the fear of being horribly cuckolded … And I would have deserved it: I am a man that women do not understand.’ The same day, he added to his then friend, Roland-Manuel: ‘Besides, men don’t understand me any better. Some of them, I should say.’7 Yet Satie enjoyed the company of young women, christening Germaine Tailleferre ‘his soft and gentle “daughter”’.8 He also preferred women pianists to men, telling Henri-Pierre Roché that he would like one as his ‘accomplice’ to perform Parade with him in America – finding ‘female pianists [like Marcelle Meyer] decidedly more intelligent than men [like Ricardo Viñes]’. He also wanted Roché ‘to find me a female virtuoso with enormous malice’ for his piano solos!9 After 1911, he contented himself with visiting his early interpreter, Paulette Darty (now Mme Edouard Dreyfuss), on Sunday afternoons at her luxurious country chateau in Luzarches, where Jacques Guérin remembers ‘Paulette sitting on a folding-stool and casting a line into the stream’ on the estate. ‘Satie, in quiet and genuine admiration, stood behind her, commenting on her successes.’10 A first-rate free lunch was also a good logical reason to be there, and in this case his devotion never wavered, even if Paulette now resembled a plump mother hen.

Despite his somewhat suspicious enthusiasm for the activities of salt-of-the-earth characters like working-class truck drivers, Satie disapproved strongly of the homosexual circle he found himself drawn into through his later commissions, as we have seen. He disliked Cocteau, kicking him under the table at dinner parties, and subsequently wrote libellous articles and letters waging war against ‘Omoplates’ and ‘Homogènes’ like Poulenc and Auric (in Auric’s case erroneously). He envisaged all sorts of homosexual and drug-taking activities in Monte Carlo in 1924, as well as despising the arrivisme of his previous protégés from Les Six. And he had already distanced himself from this group in 1923, transferring his allegiance to Sauguet and his Ecole d’Arcueil in his desire to maintain his position as godfather of the most extreme avant-garde. Another gripe was that both Poulenc and Auric came from wealthy backgrounds, and for this reason (alone it would seem) he did not admire the music of Lord Berners. He told his young Belgian friend E.L.T. Mesens in 1921 that his fellow eccentric was ‘a professional amateur. He hasn’t understood’.11

Many aspects of Satie’s strange personal logic, which sometimes ventured towards the paranoid, stemmed from his own position as an impoverished, uncompromising professional composer. As such, he never took on any other form of paid employment and survived ignominiously on the generosity of friends like Dukas, Milhaud, or his brother Conrad. In the summer months, when his wealthier acquaintances were sunning themselves on the Riviera, matters often became desperate. This was especially true during the war, and his celebrated letter to Valentine Gross in August 1918 shows things at their nadir. For once, he admitted that ‘I loathe this ‘beggar’s’ life … I shit on Art: it has cut me up too often’.12

And this was shortly after his substantial commissions for Parade and Socrate, for Satie was also financially incompetent. When he had money, he spent it almost immediately. Besides being over-generous to his friends, it also explains the many new umbrellas, handkerchiefs, shirts and wing collars found in his otherwise filthy Arcueil apartment after his death. The logic behind these was that Satie was making provision for future periods of poverty and the preservation of his carefully controlled public images. The same logic undoubtedly applied to his prodigious appetite, for his brother Conrad testified that he ‘can eat 150 oysters’13 at one sitting, and Mme Geng, the proprietress of an Arcueil café, describes a meal in 1905 when she and her husband, and principally Satie, consumed enough mussels for 20 people.14

From a home that no one was ever allowed to enter (apart from the stray dogs he took pity on, for he loved animals) and which had no running water or heating, Satie managed to emerge immaculate each day, emerging ‘into the world as an actor steps out from the wings’, as Roger Shattuck so eloquently observed.15 Madeleine Milhaud, who apprehensively packed his suitcase for his final departure to the Hôpital Saint Joseph in February 1925, was shocked to discover how little he had. As she recalled:

I asked Braque, the painter, who was a big, tall man, to stand between the bed and the suitcase, and so I was able to pack because Satie couldn’t see. Then, when we arrived at the hospital, the nun who was supposed to take care of Satie asked for the soap, and I had to tell her that he didn’t have any, because in fact he never washed with soap. He scrubbed his skin very carefully with pumice stone and his skin was as soft as it can be. It seems that the ancient Chinese did that, at least that’s what he said.16

Later, Madeleine had to collect his laundry from his concierge in Arcueil ‘and Satie blew up again because there were only ninety-eight handkerchiefs when it seemed that he had given ninety-nine or a hundred to the laundry’.17

The process of impoverished deception and everyday continuity began with the famous seven identical dun-coloured velvet corduroy suits. Satie purchased these at La Belle Jardinière department store in 1895, either from a small legacy or, more likely, with the assistance of the wealthy Le Monnier brothers from his native Honfleur. With these he created his second persona as ‘The Velvet Gentleman’ and he was anxious that all his suits should all be preserved in as near-identical a condition as possible. The clue as to how he achieved this comes from the painter and art historian Francis Jourdain, who asked Satie to join him one evening for the dress rehearsal of the melodrama The Fatal Card: ‘He was wearing a hat, coat and shoes of velvet corduroy, and he asked me to let him go back home and change. He returned wearing a suit and an overcoat identical to those he had taken off, only with the velvet in very slightly better condition.’18 And protecting his umbrellas under his coat when it rained is explained both by his desire to keep them new and by the fact that Satie loved rain but hated sunshine. He told his brother Conrad that the ‘sun was his personal enemy, [it was] brutal and said bad things about him’19 and in Verrières ‘the owner of a wine shop would always say to his wife, whenever the weather looked bad: “Today, it w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Musical Examples
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 Satie’s Personal and Musical Logic
• 2 Satie and the Meaning of the Comic
• 3 Satie’s Rose-Croix Piano Works
• 4 Satie as Poet, Playwright and Composer
• 5 ‘The Only Musician with Eyes’: Erik Satie and Visual Art
• 6 Exploring Interart Dialogue in Erik Satie’s Sports et divertissements (1914/1922)
• 7 Parade: ballet réaliste
• 8 Collaborative Works in Satie’s Last Years
• 9 History, Homeopathy and the Spiritual Impulse in the Post-war Reception of Satie: Cage, Higgins, Beuys
• 10 After Satie: Howard Skempton in Conversation with Caroline Potter
• Appendix: Chronological Catalogue of Satie’s Compositions and Research Guide to the Manuscripts
• Select Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Works