In the series of "humourous" piano pieces of the years 1912-1915, 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.
EMBRYONS DESSECHES (1913)
Embryons desséchés ("Dried up embryos") is a piano composition by Erik Satie, composed in the summer of 1913. The composition consists of three little "movements", each taking about two to three minutes to play.
The parts of the composition are:
1. (Desiccated embryo) of a Holothurian (30 June 1913), dedicated to Suzanne Roux:
* See: sea cucumber. Note that this type of animal has no eyes.
* The music of this first part of the composition concentrates on the so-called "purring" of the holothurian, besides making fun of Loïsa Puget's song Mon rocher de Saint-Malo ("My rock of Saint-Malo" - a then popular salon composition, which Satie had probably played numerous times in his cabaret pianist career). That this song is intended is already clear from the introduction Satie writes above the score: "[...] I observed a Holothurian in the bay of Saint-Malo." Further he writes following remarks in the score, when "quoting" the melody of the song: "What a nice rock!" and the second time: "That was a nice rock! How sticky!". Going submarine in a bay in Brittany, might also have been a wink from Satie to his (former) friend Debussy: three years earlier this composer had published the piano piece La cathédrale engloutie (Préludes, book I, No. 10), alluding to the legendary city of Ys, submersed in a bay in Britanny. There's even a reproach implied: as friends, they had renounced romanticism in the late 19th century: since, Debussy apparently had turned to romanticised myths about submersed cities and the like, as a subject for his compositions. Satie's statement is clear: he had remained true to himself, taking as subject for his composition something "he had seen with his own eyes".
2. (Desiccated embryo) of an Edriophthalma (1 July 1913), dedicated to Edouard Dreyfus:
* Edriophthalmata, also known as Arthrostraca, are crustaceans with immobile eyes. In more modern taxonomies they belong to sub-groups of the Tetradecapoda (i.e. fourteen-legged crustaceans), e.g. Amphipoda (several kinds of usually small shrimp), and isopoda (see e.g. this giant isopod or these woodlice).
* It is not clear whether Satie had in mind any of these animals in particular, or that he just wanted to make reference to this group of crustaceans in general, for their "underdog"-like qualities (which he describes as subdue and morose in the score). Anyway, in this part of the composition he makes fun of Frédéric Chopin's funeral march (by the way calling it a "famous" mazurka by Schubert - now, there is no "famous" mazurka by Schubert: Schubert composed many dances, but no mazurkas - mazurkas are Polish dances: Chopin had been the most famous Polish composer that ever lived in Paris, and he had particularly favoured the composition of mazurkas... there's the link Satie makes with a curb).
3. (Desiccated embryo) of a Podophthalma (4 July 1913), dedicated to Jane Mortier:
* Podophthalmia are stalk-eyed crustaceans, like crabs and lobsters (and various types of mostly larger shrimp), now grouped as Decapoda (i.e. ten-legged crustaceans).
* In the score, Satie mentions the "hunter"-like qualities of podophthalmia, so the music is conceived as a miniature hunt. Note that hunts have quite a tradition in classical music, from early baroque keyboard music, over Vivaldi, several classical era composers and romantic opera composers to César Franck. Nonetheless, in music a hunting sea animal can be considered a one-of-a-kind.
* Satie also points out that podophthalmia are delicious nourriture: he was particularly fond of this kind of sea-food himself.
* Satie concludes his triptych with a coda marked, "Obligatory cadenza (by the composer.)" Consisting, as it does, of more than half a page of fortissimo F-major chords and arpeggios, this grandiose flourish is hilariously incongruous with the modest proportions of the piece as a whole (there is, however, a similar, but shorter passage at the end of movement 1.) The superficial brilliance of this coda, together with its mock-virtuosity and pretensious label, are clearly intended as jibes at the empty bombast of certain passages in the piano works of Liszt and his imitators.
CROQUIES ET AGACERIES D'UN GROS BONHOMME EN BOIS (1913)
(3 sketches and exasperations of a big wooden fellow)
Erik Satie completed Croquis et agaceries d'un bonhomme en bois for solo piano in the summer of 1913. This is a brief work in three movements and filled with typical Satiean, humorous twists. Like most of his other piano works containing comedic elements, these movements were composed quickly, in about a week each. The title refers to Allais, who wrote strange articles for Parisian papers, involving bizarre wordplay. He did all of his work from cafes, and he and Satie were good friends. This piece's title suits the music and spirit of the times, at least in the composer's corner of the world. In English, the title translates to "Sketches and Flirtation of a Fat and Wooden Bloke." In the proto-surrealist atmosphere of the cabaret culture of Paris during these years, clarity and obscurity were combined with religious irreverence. It is among other things, an attempt to make the logic of dreams a reality. The mystery of life in fin-de-siècle Paris was in some ways more pointedly modern then in Vienna, where Expressionism and atonality were at war with a saccharine waltz culture. In Paris, middle and upper-class industrialists attempted to rub shoulders with the bohemian, avant-garde arts community. There was no division between the conservatives and the progressives that was clear enough to forge a martial identity in either. The divisions that did exist, such as Debussy vs. the academics, was not important enough to make a difference because the moneyed patrons were not supporting the academics. This was not the case for the Second Viennese School; talents such as Allais and Satie could enjoy a relaxed relationship with their own creative processes. This is not to say that the music of Satie is self-indulgent but rather that it sometimes sounds indulged.
Croquis et agaceries d'un bonhomme en bois is not much different from his successful, earlier compositions. Bonhomme en bois no doubt refers to a street in the composer's hometown of Honfleur called rue de l'Homme-de-bois. When Satie's Ogives was performed at Chat Noir--the first cabaret to exist--in 1889, it was advertised as a work by a composer with a wooden head. No doubt the man in the title of his 1913 work is the composer himself. The humour of the music pervades each separate movement. The first movement is a Turkish yodeling song. There is little evidence of a Turkish yodeling tradition, extinct or otherwise. However, there is a Turkish rondo in Mozart's keyboard Sonata KV. 331 worth considering, and the central section of Satie's first movement is a parody version of it. The following two movements feature somewhat icy retorts at a growing trend among Parisian tastes: Spanish flavorings in French music. These movements are insults directed towards offending composers and the academics that encouraged them. It was a trend that was obviously suspect when Spanish composers such as Falla and Albéniz came to Paris to write Spanish music for French money. Fortunately, Satie's work is more brilliantly intertextual than poisonous.
CHAPITRES TOURNES EN TOUS SENS (1913)
The aptly named Chapitres tournés en tous sens (Chapters Turned Every Which Way) consists of three distinct, and entirely unrelated, pieces: "Celle qui parle trop" ("She who talks too much"), "Le Porteur de grosses pierres" ("The hauler of big stones"), and "Regrets des Enfermés" (Lament of the confined). These pieces are typical of Satie's later style -- humorous, dry, and unsentimental. The ceaseless chatter of the woman in the first piece is represented by a wandering melody made up of consistent, repeating triplets. The piece is actually a dialogue between the woman and her husband, whose feeble interjections are heard as a diatonic theme (in G major) two octaves above the wife's motoric melody. The husband is never able to get a word in edgewise, and as the piece ends, the wife's chatter ceases, and the husband' s theme is heard, as Satie scholar Alan M. Gillmor observed, "dissonantly harmonized and chromatically distorted," testifying to the husband's exhaustion. Excepts from Aimé Maillart's operetta Les Dragons de Villars may be heard in this short piece. Satie borrows tunes from another operetta, Robert Planquette's Rip, in the second piece, "Le Porteur de grosses pierres." This piece tells the story of a man hauling stones, using excepts from the operetta to narrate the man' s painful labors. By the end of the piece, after struggling with a heavy rock, the man can no longer carry it, and drops it. In the third and final piece, Satie offers a musical tale of the biblical Jonah and the eighteenth-century plotter and convict Jean-Henri Masers de Latude, in which they dream of escape together: Jonah from the whale, Latude from prison. As with many of his piano pieces from this time, Satie borrows from children's songs -- in this case, "Nous n'irons plus au bois" ("we will go to the woods no more"). As a result, his melodies are consistently simple, diatonic, and narrow in range. These melodies are heard against Satie's idiomatic, eccentric, and often experimental harmony, which includes bitonal structures, modality, and chromatically altered chords.
VIEUX SEQUINS ET VIEILLES CUIRASSES (1913)
Variously translated as "Old Sequins and Armor" and "Antique Gold and Ancient Armor", the piano suite Vieux séquins et vieilles cuirasses is one of a series that Satie composed from 1912 - 1915. The "sequin" in question was a Venetian gold coin in use from the end of the thirteenth century until the fall of the Venetian Republic under Napoleon, 500 years later. Satie satirizes those dealing either in precious metals or the military both in this suite's music and in commentaries printed among the staves.
The first piece is "Chez le Marchand d'or (Venise, XIIIe Siècle)" (At the Gold Merchant's) [Venice, thirteenth Century]. With a sighing figure, Satie slowly builds to a quote from the "Song of the Golden Calf" from Gounod's opera Faust. The patterns alternate between modal, whole-tone, and chromatic writing, as the merchant continues to goes wild over his merchandise.
The second piece is the "Danse cuirassée (Période grecque)", variously translated as the "Armored dance" and "Armor-plated dance". This piece makes continuous variations on a famous bugle tune, "Aux champs (en marchant)." The tempo is marked "Pas noble et militaire" (Noble and military step). The bugle melody uses only the pitches of a G-major chord, but it is subjected to interesting chromatic harmonies in the lower voices. Satie humorously imagines the dance "in two rows": "The first row does not move" (the lower harmonization produces low chords in semi-ponderous open fifths). "The second row is motionless" (the lower line moves more melodically in thirds). On the slowly diminishing coda, Satie adds the image, "Each of the dancers receives a sabre blow that cuts off his head" -- a sort of nothing-war, where everybody just dies and gets it over with.
In the third and last piece, "La Défaite des Cimbres (Cauchemar)" (The Defeat of the Cimbri [Nightmare]), Satie combines several historical battles and commanders; they merge in the surreal nightmare of a young boy who has been given "a kind of strange, short course in General History" drawn from the vague memories of his aged grandfather. Satie quotes two tunes that are not only respectively associated with commanders Dagobert and John Churchill, but also by way of Satie's commentaries with Boïorix and Marius. A mention of "Les Dragons de Villars" refers to Aimé Maillart's operetta, but there is no musical quote -- just an eerie ascending passage with a chromatic bass and white-keyed triplets. This is a mirror to an descending triplet passage earlier in the piece with the notation "Pluie de javelots" (Rain of javelins). The skipping and smooth triplet rhythms throughout the piece are like those of hunting calls and martial drum rhythms.
There is a final cryptic notation that appears at the head of the tuneful coda, marked "Grandiose". The text refers to "Le Sacre de Charles X (267 bis)" (The coronation of Charles X [No. 267a]). Musicologist Alan Gillmor suggests that this is the "reactionary, ultraroyalist Comte d"Artois, crowned King of France as Charles X in 1825 ... the musical reference to the dissolute and by most accounts intellectually rather undernourished monarch takes on a deliciously satirical overtone in the context of the song's ["Le bon roi Dagobert"] opening verse: ' The good king Dagobert had his pants on inside out, The great Saint Eloi said to him: O my king, Your majesty is badly trousered. It's true, replied the king, I'm going to put them on again right side out'."
ENFANTINES (1913)
TROIS NOUVELLES INFANTINES (1913)
In 1913 Satie wrote many children pieces; in October alone, he composed the Trois Nouvelles Enfantines, and the three sets of "Enfantines": Menus propos enfantins, Enfantillages pittoresques, and the Peccadilles importunes. Satie's interest in the number three is clearly manifested with these pieces: there are three works comprising the Enfantines, and each work consists of three small pieces. As musicologist and Satie scholar Robert Orledge has noted, the introduction to the piano for children that rivals Satie's Enfantines is Bela Bartok's Mikrokosmos, which similarly captures and maintains children's interest, "both visually and aurally."
LES PANTINS DANSENT (1913)
(The puppets dance)
This little chamber piece-a "poeme dansee"-was originally scored for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, and strings, before a piano reduction was created. It was composed for the dancer, poet, and painter Valentine de Saint-Point, and was intended to be performed at a festival as the accompaniment to the poem of the same name. The festival, a "Metachoric" festival, was devised by Saint-Point, who sought a closer union between music and dance. Saint-Points' "Metachory" describes a poetic work which incorporates music and dance; however, neither music nor dance are subordinate, but are instead equally dependent upon the poetic idea. Satie was drawn to this esthetic position, and eagerly participated in the creation of Les Pantins dansent.
Les Pantins dansent is a very short piece, with a duration of only a minute and a half. Its most prominent feature is its staccato, march-like rhythm. There are actually two differently composed versions of this work: the first, reconstructed from Satie's sketches, was, according to musicologist Robert Orledge, "too jaunty, expressive, and harmonically unambiguous" to adequately reflect the poem it was to accompany; however, he also notes that neither version of Satie's music fits the poems phrase scheme, and so the poem and music were likely not performed simultaneously. The second version of this piece is the published score.
SPORTS ET DIVERTISEMENTS (1914)
"Sports and Entertainments", which served as a musical-poetic "illumination" to drawings by the illustrator Charles Martin (1884-1934), is quintessential of Satie's different creative attitudes and has become one of his most famous piano compositions. This is a multimedial work of art in which picture, music, text and notation are meant to work together. The story of its orgin is often retold. The publisher first asked Igor Stravinskij to compose these pieces, but Stravinskij declined, finding the fee too low. Someone then suggested Satie, who was offered the same amount. However, the hypermoral and radical leftist Satie found the fee unconscionably high and refused indignantly. It was only when the publisher had agreed to cut the fee to half the original amount that Satie accepted.
HEURES SECULAIRES ET INSTANTANEES (1914)
Heures séculaires et instantanées (Age-old and instantaneous hours), pieces (3) for piano
Between about 1911 and 1917, Satie turned his attention from the sometimes dour music he'd written during his late studies of counterpoint at the Schola Cantorum and the repetitive, mystical style of his earlier Rosicrucian period, to quirky miniatures composed especially for pianist Ricardo Viñes, who introduced and promulgated many works by the likes of Ravel and Falla. Satie dedicated one such suite of three pieces, Heures séculaires et instantanées, to the imaginary figure Sir William Grant-Plumot, and laced the score with a surreal commentary he insisted should not be read aloud during performance. Whether the text has any direct bearing on the music is debatable, but it does reinforce the music's absurdist nature. The suite's first movement, "Obstacles venimeux" (Venemous Obstacles), begins with a limping, comically discordant figure that soon receives a more flowing treatment that is interrupted by quickly shifting march-like fragments. The limping version of the theme closes the piece. "Crépuscule matinal (de midi)," which translates as Morningtime Twilight (at Noon), begins with another fragmentary march that is constantly interrupted by a nattering motif and soon collapses in volleys of hiccups. "Affolements granitiques" (Granitic Panic) begins with an urgent little phrase repeated several times, which becomes the basis of several upward-rising gestures that abruptly end.
LES TROIS VALSES DISTINGUES DU PRECIEUX DEGOUTE (1914)
These "three distinguished waltzes of the disgusted snob" have traditionally come to be seen as an ironic comment on Ravel, a renowned fashion snob, and his Valses nobles et sentimentales. In this second waltz, "His lorgnette", Satie seems to be quoting his own gymnopédies, perhaps in reference to Ravel's bold contention that he had written the fourth gymnopédie in his Entretiens de la Belle et la Boite (from the suite Ma mère at l'oye). Here too he provides the piece with an ambivalent motto, this time from Cicero's De Republica, on how the old custom of forbidding nubile young people to show themselves naked in their minds (perhaps this was an allusion to the naked dance in the gymnopédie?).
CINQ GRIMACES POUR "LE SONGE D'UNE NUIT D'ETE" (1915)
The war would follow its course for several years, but artists did not keep silent quite as long, because the smallest pretext must have been good for a performance of any kind. There was still talk in the cafés of Montparnasse, for example, of the sumptuous production of A Midsummer Night's Dream by Max Reinhardt in Berlin, in 1910. Edgard Varèse, who contributed to the musical portion, encouraged his friends to prove that the French could do even better. After all, as Jean Cocteau observed when he nominated himself to adapt the play, the Englishman Shakespeare is an "Ally;"; he couldn't be on the side of the Huns!12 Theatres being dark for the duration, they planned to use the grounds of the Cirque Médrano, which led to the idea of, among other things, mixing clowns with actors. As for the incidental music, they would replace Mendelssohn (traditional for the play at that time) with a "pot-pourri of French music", composed especially for the occasion. Among the composers solicited, Satie was the only one to answer the call. His Cinq Grimaces were destined from the beginning to be unplayed and unpublished until much later, as a posthumous work13, since the Midsummer project came to naught.
AVANT-DERNIERES PENSEES (1915)
Even if the title of these "penultimate" pieces themselves sounds like cheerful irony, there is not much pleasantry in evidence, either in the strictly neutral sub-headings (unusual for Satie), the guiding prose poems or the music. From a purely musical point of view, these pieces are written with detached clarity and clockwork precision. In the not very meditative Méditation, the right hand whisks up a mechanical, constantly-repeated pianissimo triplet and the left hand contributes melodic interjections in other keys with an occasional flavour of "tonepainting".
ERIC SATIE (1808-1925)
Complete Piano Works Vol. 6
Piano – Bojan Gorišek
[2006] Audiophile / CBR320 / scans
O Púbis da Rosa
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