Pretty much all of the classical composers I have written about in this blog so far (let’s see: Brahms, Mozart, Chopin, Mendelssohn, to name but a few) were prolific and complex and noted for being child prodigies for whom an upward musical trajectory was clearly in the offing. Not so this week’s enigmatic composer, Eric Satie (1866–1925). The son of a French father and a Scottish mother, Satie studied at the Paris Conservatoire, but was an undistinguished student and left without even obtaining a diploma (one tutor described his piano technique as “insignificant and worthless”; they didn’t hold back in those days), working throughout the 1880s as a pianist in café-cabaret in Montmartre, Paris. At this time, however, he would begin composing works, mostly for solo piano such as his Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes, that would propel him to an unanticipated renown.
Satie famously employed a minimalist, pared back style of music in contrast to the grand and epic compositions of a Wagner, for example. In fact, he would influence a whole new generation of French composers away from post-Wagnerian impressionism and towards a sparer, terser style. Among those influenced by him during his lifetime were Maurice Ravel (see his Boléro, for example) and he is seen as an influence on more recent, minimalist composers such as John Cage and Arvo Pärt.
Satie was an enigma, for sure, and something of a quirky character. He gave some of his later works absurd titles, such as Veritables Preludes flasques (pour un chien) (“True Flabby Preludes (for a Dog)”, 1912), and Croquis et agaceries d’un gros bonhomme en bois (“Sketches and Exasperations of a Big Wooden Man“, 1913). He never married, and his home for most of his adult life was a single small room, first in Montmartre and later in Arcueil. He adopted various images over the years, including a period in quasi-priestly garb, another in which he always wore identically coloured velvet suits, and another, perhaps his most enduring persona, in which he wore a 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.
If you think you don’t know Eric Satie’s music, think again, as you’re sure to recognise his Gymnopédie No. 1 that you can hear here against some footage of old Paris (I love these old videos, don’t you, during the advent of moving pictures when passers-by would stare or glance at this strange new-fangled gizmo pointing at them, and seeming to connect, albeit briefly, with we the viewer well over a century later).
