A little-known feast day falls on May 17. Music lovers, artists and eccentrics everywhere will remember the composer Erik Satie, who was born that day in 1867. Oysters will be eaten – with luck the Normandy oysters sold on the quay of Satie’s birth town of Honfleur. To drink: perhaps a little of the champagne that Satie loved too much before his death, from pneumonia and cirrhosis, in July 1925.
In countless small ways, Satie is remembered every day, around the globe, whenever a Gymnopédie drifts over the radio or is placed on the music stand by a student pianist. Easy to get your fingers around yet hard to capture its gentle mood, simple yet unconventional in harmony, instantly recognisable yet satisfyingly difficult to memorise, Gymnopédie No 1 has come to define the sound of Satie. He wrote it in 1888, and borrowed the title from the poetry of a friend, JP Contamine de Latour.
The two young men knocked around together in Montmartre as penniless artists who conformed so wretchedly to the bohemian stereotype that they even had to share clothes. The poet later said Satie was like “a man who knew only 13 letters of the alphabet but who had nevertheless decided to create a new literature with only these means, rather than admit his inadequacy”. Harsh, but fair: seven years of study at the Paris Conservatoire had left the 20-year-old Satie lacking a diploma but possessed of a lasting non-conformist mindset and a suspicion of formal education only overcome through hard work in middle age.
Satie was as unconventional in belief as in every other facet of his life. His father was no churchgoer and his mother was a Scottish Presbyterian. She died when Erik was just six years old, and his grandparents agreed to look after him only on condition that he be baptised a Catholic.
Yet his faith endured. In 1891 he reworked his Gnossiennes as stage music for a Christian drama, The King of the Stars, to a scenario invented by Sâr Joséphin Péladan, the leader of a Rosicrucian sect to which Satie had a brief but intense commitment. Satie left in 1892 to found his own sub-sect, the Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor. In pseudo-antique French, he wrote a pocket catechism: the new Church would be “a refuge where the Catholic faith and the Arts, the which are indissolubly bound to it, shall grow and prosper, sheltered from profanity, expanding in all their purity, unsullied by the workings of evil”.
Late in 1892 Satie and Contamine de Latour produced Uspud, a “Christian ballet” in which the set and costumes were entirely white. Like the Gymnopédies and all his early piano music, the score is built from slow, off-kilter chords. The influence of Gregorian chant on his melodies is best appreciated in the four Ogives, named after the architectural term for a diagonal arch across the vault of a Gothic cathedral. They have the same ageless solidity as the roughened granite of a Gothic pillar. Run your hand down it and feel the centuries, the craftsmanship and the weight of belief beneath your palm.
By the time of Uspud, Satie was in the throes of his only known romantic relationship, with his neighbour in Montmartre, the painter Suzanne Valadon. He had met her earlier in 1892 and proposed (unsuccessfully) on their first date. He called her “Biqui” and wrote her a four-bar song. Composing the gentle Danses gothiques as a distraction from his emotions, he subtitled them “A Novena for the great calm and profound tranquillity of my Soul”.
When the affair broke up early in 1893, Satie was bereft. From this time dates the single page of Vexations, which, when repeated 840 times at his suggestion, has become a cult success. He also wrote his only explicitly sacred work: the Messe des pauvres (“Mass for the Poor”) is an organ Mass with choral interpolations in the French tradition. The Gloria is now missing and other movements seem unfinished, but the extant quarter-hour of music strides with an angular magnificence that anticipates the best-known organ works of Messiaen such as the Apparition de l’Église éternelle. In this of all years, it deserves revival.
Satie sometimes defies his audience to take him seriously, but there is no irony in the Messe des pauvres. He knew poverty at first hand. When a little money came his way, it was quickly spent, on friends, food and drink. From 1899 until his death a quarter of a century later he lived in a one-room flat in the shabby Parisian suburb of Arcueil. He belonged to the community and the community knew him, walking as he did each day into the city, dressed in his civil servant’s uniform of suit, bowler hat and umbrella. In the local newspaper he advertised solfège music lessons at 9am on Sunday morning, just when his prospective students should be at Mass.
His sense of solidarity with the people of Arcueil led him to join the Communist Party in 1913 after the murder of the party leader Jean Jaurès, and he remained a card-carrying member until his death.
Fierce convictions do not often sit well with anarchic humour; in Marxist terms, Satie was more school of Groucho than Karl. His cabaret songs, ballets and satirical piano cycles were the soundtrack to Paris of the 1910s and 1920s, when everyone from Picasso to Man Ray to Brancusi wanted to learn from and work with him.
In time, he fell out with most of these fellow travellers. He died alone in a religious hospital, having made his Confession and received the Eucharist with the Sisters. His brother Conrad knew him as well as anyone knew this intensely private man, who let not a single soul into his house for 25 years. “Satie used to say,” reported Conrad, “I have great confidence in the good Lord. When I’m dead He will do with me whatever he likes.”
To honour the memory of this true original, the least we can do is raise a glass, and maybe listen to more than a Gymnopédie.
Peter Quantrill writes about music for Gramophone, the Strad, the Wagner Journal and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter at @peterquantrill
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