Erik Satie: article (Erik Satie and the piano)

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The piano stands as a central pillar in Erik Satie's strange composing career. From his first musical studies in his native Honfleur to the ballet projects with the Parisian avant-garde of later years, his production is in one way or another connected to the piano.

His earliest known work is a little Allegro for piano from 1884; his last piano piece - a classicist menuet - is dated 1920. More than half the music he wrote during his 40 years of composing was intended for the piano, or was first presented to the public in piano version. If one were to count separate movements and posthumously published sketches and fragments, this would represent some 200 pieces. One may even say that Satie's music up until the ballet Parade (1917) was solely written for the piano. What he had composed in other genres to that point - theatre music, cabaret music and solo songs (along with individual attempts for orchestra amongst other things) - represents a relatively small part. Judging by existing sources, his fragmentary and incomplete studies at the Conservatoire de Paris seem to have mainly concerned piano playing. During certain periods of his life (especially from 1899 to circa 1909), he earned a meagre income as a cabaret pianist. He would occasionally give piano lessons, and in later years appeared sporadically as a pianist performing his own newly-written pieces. As late as 1923, for instance, two years before his death, he played the Trois morceaux en forme de poire for piano duet with the pianist Marcelle Meyer during a Dadaist happening in Paris.

However, though Satie's relationship with the piano was a lifelong and productive one, it seems to have been quite problematic. Francis Poulenc, one of the young composers in Satie's circles around 1920, indicated this in a reminiscence:

"Erik Satie very seldom played the piano. I may have heard him accompany some of his songs two or three times, at the most, and even then he tried to get out of it to the end. It was mostly Ricardo Viñes, Marcelle Meyer, Auric or I myself who played instead."

As a composer, Satie was long described as an odd man out who tried to dissimulate musical plainness and incompetent technique behind a smokescreen of irony, verbal pleasantry and all kinds of avant-garde pirouetting. Posterity retained a similar image of him as a pianist: an amateur bungler who had to depend on others to hear what his compositions sounded like - or an alcoholic tapeur à gages, a bounty player who had to be locked up a few hours ahead so that he could perform his duties at the cabarets of Montmartre.

Distorted images usually contain some grain of truth. This most certainly holds true for Satie. But the contention that he should be a complete amateur at the piano must be relegated to the rich flora of anecdotes and myths that surround this enigmatic, eccentric and charismatic figure. However, it would appear that he was completely uninterested in the piano as such, in the great pianistic tradition or in maintaining his skills in any way. Nor does he seem to have bothered to own an instrument in adequate condition himself. In the home of his parents he naturally had access to a piano, as well as in his first own home (on one occasion he advertised that he, as a former student at the conservatory, would receive piano pupils). His small bedsits up on Montmartre (1890-1896 and 1896-1898) were presumably too small to house an instrument; in any case the second, the so-called "closet", was.

In his youth, Satie evidently displayed quite a gift as a pianist. At the age of 13 he was received as a pupil in a preparatory class at the tradition-bound and demanding Paris Conservatory. His choice to play a movement from a piano concerto by the Czech virtuoso composer Jan Dussek at the audition seems nigh-prophetic. Dussek (1760-1812) was not only renowned for his delecate touch and singable playing, but was also something of a visionary, a forerunner of Chopin, Schumann and Brahms.

It was this singable quality, the beauty of tone and the elegance that were held as the most positive aspects of young Satie's playing. But apart from that his teachers found him an increasing source of disappointment. His piano teacher thought that he should devote himself to composition, his theory teacher that he should concentrate on playing. Critical evaluations began to accumulate: he was mainly accused of "indolence" and was soon considered to be "the laziest pupil in the conservatory, the school rules stipulating that any student not selected for the public competitions three years runnning should end their studies. In the autumn of 1885 he auditioned again, this time with a Chopin ballad, and was admitted once more. He was taught by none other than the famous George Mathias, once a pupil of Chopin's. However, after a year they had both grown tired, and Satie fled to do voluntary military service. In the final conservatory reports he was described as "a very unimportant pupil" and "totally useless".

These frustrating experiences were doubtless the main cause of Satie's ambigious attitude to the piano, and to the musical establishment. In a letter adressed (though possibly never sent) to the conservatory in the autumn of 1892, Satie eloquently tells, in the popous and quasi-religious style he then cultivated, of the time he spent in this institution (which he had described elsewhere as "rather ugly to look at, a kind of local penitentiary bereft of outer beauty - or inner, for that matter"):

"As a child I attended your classes; My soul was so delicate you could not understand it... Despite My extreme youth and My exquisite suppleness you made Me detest the crude Art you teach with your unintelligence; your inexplicable strictness made Me long despise you... May the Lord forgive you; blessed be the unfortunate souls you have yet to teach..."

Of course, posterity has reason to be grateful for the fact that Satie could not bring himself to join the ranks of the soon-forgotten composing piano virtuosos (to whom one must count his teacher, Mathias, who is little more than a footnote in the history of French piano-playing).

The teaching of the time-honoured and time-consuming piano was thoroughly academic and branded with the strict French way of thinking. This was of course nothing for Satie, whether he was genuinely lazy, or, which is more likely, torn because he flet out of place. The compositions from this period - the Ogives and the Sarabandes - show him drifting towards a musical no-man's-land. Here, the music is not shaped, according to established dialectical manner, on the time axis of tonality, but is rather put together by melodic and chordal segments in static, timeless montages. Satie turned his back on the need of contemporary music for variation and linear development: he found another musical time, based on repetition and circularity, a ritual repetition of small units complete in themselves. In all this he also expressed another need, closely bound to the asthetic of repetition and ritual, allowing all things to occur slowly, casting a spell on time. Practically everything he wrote during 1886 to

1899 was characterized by a slow, hypnotically grinding movement.

Erik Satie in his first room at 6 rue Cortot, Montmartre, 1890. Oil painting by Santiago Rusiñol. Photo courtesy Archives de la Fondation Erik Satie.

It has been said that this distinctive composition technique appeared as a solution in extremis, an escape from a paralysing technical incompetence. We shall never know the truth in this matter. In any case, the Conservatory's view on music and how to compose for the piano, which was forced upon Satie, was of no use to him in this experimentation with musical "time" and development.

Nevertheless, Satie always conceived his music in terms of pianism. In spite of that, though, he never composed at the keyboard: this he did in his head, on walks or, quite frequently, at a café table. There is no evidence of his ever having revised the music to make it more pianistic. His course of action, especially in later years, was rather the contrary: anything superfluous was peeled away. His goal was evidently the utmost purity, clarity and precision. Nothing but the essential is there, no ornaments or elegant tonal effects, few or no possibilities for the pianist to demonstrate further skills. At the same time, there is hardly any original piece for the piano by Satie that is unpianistic or written against the instrument. Even the simplest and starkest of his pieces bears witness to a genuine feeling for, and knowledge of the piano. Superficially, the pieces are not technically demanding and could certainly be learnt by any moderately talented schoolchild; some could even be used as beginner's practice. Yet Satie's piano music is a thankless task for the mediocre pianist. The process of denuding and purifying his work requires something similar in his interpreters. Any meaningful interpretation of his work demands a high level of technique, total control of tone and a long period of familiarisation with the music to create a condition of complete mental and physical readiness.

It can be noted that Satie's piano music, perhaps for these very reasons, has not been popular in the repertoires of pianists or intuition. Nor does it seem to have established itself in the context of conventional concerts. This is certainly related to two other particularities: that the music is often linked to a function (dance, theatre, ritual, ceremony, etc.) and, perhaps most importantly, that of its need for, or coincidence with, a verbal sphere of expression.

Indeed, it would seem that Satie's need to express himself in writing was at least as deeply rooted as his musical creativity; his talent in that area was also considerable. The verbal and musical sides of his creative personality are largely equal. As early as the late 1880s he started contributing light articles to La lanterne japonaise (the written organ of the cabaret Le divan japonais) and also published madcap advertisements and announcements about his verbal practical jokes and the quasi-religious verbal torrents that were sent from his "Church of Art" (see vol. 2) rather than his music. Later, during his time in Arceuil, he wrote causeries in the local socialistic press and also the well-known autobiographical series Memoirs of an Amnesiac. In the 1920s he was more active as a collaborator to various avant-garde cultural periodicals than as a composer. During all these years he also wrote down his thoughts of small pieces of paper, and made numerous drawings which he collected in cigar-boxes. Many of these commentaries - sometimes bitter, sometimes crushing and hilarious - can be found in his musical scores.

In his piano music one often encounters this extremely original and often sparklingly witty verbal side in the curious titles, absurdist playing directives and the more or less

coherent texts in the scores that complete and complicate the music.

In the earlier works it may have been a way to "mystify" in a symbolic spirit, to find eccentric or poetically suggestive titles and wordings. To start with they may confuse or block the pianist, but ultimately they challenge the sincerely interested interpreter to

make up his mind and try to divine the composer's intention on his own.

Gradually, perhaps as he came to realize the twofold nature of his talent, texts of a different sort became an increasingly important means of expression. During the crisis years of 1898 to 1911, when he returned to the school-bench, he avoided his fictitious indications (but still indulged in his weakness for strange titles). Around 1912, when he once again found a way forward and a new style of his own, inspiration began to flow - and texts of varying kinds came to play a more extensive and independent part in the score.

In the series of "humourous" piano pieces of the years 1912-1915 (vol. 5), one find illuminating little "sign-posts" as well as complete prose poems that sometimes seem completely screened off from the music. Here, he swings back and forth over the un-clear borders between imaginative indications to the pianist and texts that may be of interest in the execution of the music but that might also just as well be left out. The audience itself is not expected to be aware of them - they are a matter exclusively between the composer and his interpreter. This piano music leans two ways: the interpreter has his own private poetic and musical whole to face, and the audience gets the tonal structures that are partly condition to the pianist's interpretation of Satie's ravings. Between the two are the strange, "mad" titles, which always seem to require either explanations or apologies. In that sense the audience inescapably becomes part of the poetic whole, but is at the same time not privy to the inspiration that certainly lies in the curious texts.

In this light it is not really surprising that Satie's piano music never became successful on the concert platform. Something within it counteracts the conventional concert custom, both in its stark, simple unobtrusiveness and its many layers of musical and verbal expression. It calls for a more intimate and personal context, which leaves space for a private communication.

Satie's own position in this respect is quite clear, however: he did not want to be seen as a buffoon or verbal mystificator, but recognized and heard as a composer. Perhaps

the recording medium is the optimal way to convey these personal messages.