With Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, and Germaine Tailleferre he formed the Nouveaux Jeunes, shortly after writing Parade. Later the group was joined by Francis Poulenc and Darius Milhaud. In September 1918, Satie – giving little or no explanation – withdrew from the Nouveaux Jeunes. Jean Cocteau gathered the six remaining members, forming the Groupe des Six (to which Satie would later have access, but later again would fall out with most of its members).
From 1919 he was in contact with Tristan Tzara, the initiator of the Dada movement. He got to know the other Dadaists, such as Francis Picabia (later to become a Surrealist), André Derain, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, etc.
CHOSES VUES A DROITE ET A GAUCHE (SANS LUNETTES) pour Violon et Piano
(Things seen right-to-left; without glasses), for violin & piano
Erik Satie's ONLY work for violin and piano, a mini-suite written in 1912 entitled "Things Seen to Right and Left - without glasses," is a singulaly appropriate example of Satie's bourgeois attitude toward and irreverent treatment of conventional 20th Century mores and practices which were then intrinsic to music composition. Furthermore, obvious clues such as the titling of each movement, --Hypocritical Chorale --The Feeling One's Way Fugue --Muscular Fantasy....are clues that indeed lend additional credence to the existing firmament's abhorant distaste for Satie's brash, absolute commitment to utter disdain for convention.
PARADE (FOR PIANO 4 HANDS) (1917)
Satie collaborated with the Cubists Jean Cocteau and Picasso on the ballet 'Parade'. Most of Satie's compositions consist of three pieces, representing three different viewpoints of a single musical concept. This is very similar to the approach used by the Cubist painters. Parade created a scandal which propelled Satie finally to centre stage and stardom. From here on he was regarded as one of the instigators of neoclassicism. He became the godfather of Les Six and later the School of Arcueil. Of the one-act ballet Parade, first presented at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris on May 18, 1917, Richard Buckle, biographer of Diaghilev, has written, "it opened the gates of the twenties, during which Diaghilev's company would be identified not only with the painters of the School of Paris, but with a group of young composers who revered Satie and were to become known as 'Les Six.'" Extraordinary minds collaborated with the impresario to show that the Russian Ballet was capable of heading in new directions - librettist Jean Cocteau, choreographer Léonide Massine, designer Pablo Picasso and composer Erik Satie, whose contribution has proved the most durable of the three. The consensus of public and critical opinion was that it was a failure, though not without interest. Just as Picasso's naïve curtain, which resembled the decoration of a nineteenth-century fairground, gave no hint of the Cubist novelties to be revealed behind it, the music owed nothing to Debussy and introduced jazz to the typically French idiom. In 1918, the year after Diaghilev's Russian Ballet staged Satie's Parade in Paris, Poulenc wrote that "to me, Satie's Parade is to Paris what Petrushka is to St. Petersburg." (André Gide, however, commented on its poverty-stricken pretentiousness.) Satie was thenceforth adopted as the spiritual father of 'Les Six', whose ideal was the marriage of serious music with jazz, vaudeville, and the circus. Those who only know Satie from his early Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes - take heed: Parade shuffles along its apparently aimless, deadpan and wicked way with interjections from typewriters, lottery wheels, pistols and sirens.
RAG-TIME PARADE (1917)
The Ragtime contained in Parade would later be adapted for piano solo, and attained considerable success as a separate piano piece.
SONATINE BUROCRATIQUE (1917)
Dragged into court at the height of this battle by the critic Jean Poueigh who accused him of slander, Satie feared the seizure of his modest royalties as agreed by his publishers. Faced with the risk of losing all possibility of financial help (he was never exactly spoiled in this sense, anyway), he simply switched allegiances and offered his subsequent work - a Sonatine bureaucratique - to a fly-by-night publisher named Stéphane Chapelier. This Chapelier had shown a great admiration for the ballet then under fire by arranging several excerpts himself, under the pseudonymn Hans Ourdine ("en sourdine" translates as "muted") with a totally Satiean modesty.
5 NOCTURNES (1919)
The war finally over with (at roughly the same time as his run-in with the law), five Nocturnes came to haunt the composer's mind. The first three made up a "complete work" in his opinion, so he was careful to distinguish them from the remaining two by not submitting the two groups to the same publisher. They were, in fact, his "parting gifts" to Rouart, Lerolle and E. Demets, because his friend Blaise Cendrars - who had just founded La Sirène with the financier Paul Laffitte - managed to score an exclusive contract.
TROIS PETITES PIECES MONTEES (FOR PIANO 4 HANDS) (1919)
Erik Satie completed Trois petites pieces montées in February 1920. Though they were originally orchestral miniatures, they are better known in the piano, four hands format. This work comes not long after the composer had recovered from a terrible depression that came with exhaustion following the end of World War I. By the time the war was over he was destitute and hated art. He also seemed to have been abandoned by his friends and supporters, but it turned out that they had been simply too distracted by their own post-war problems to notice Satie's poverty and misery. Eventually many of the best minds and artists of France coaxed him onto a train to tour through Western and Central Europe, and for a while it seemed as though the man was back, if somewhat more insular.
On the occasion of this work, he was an honored guest among many artists invited to contribute to Cocteau's Le Boeuf sur le toit, a variety show with a carnival atmosphere financed by Etienne du Beaumont. The Six, a group of composers who, like Debussy, had been influenced by Satie, contributed as well. There was ballet with music by Milhaud and an overture by Poulenc. Cocteau included clowns, ideas from American silent films, and whatever else seemed worth exploring at the time. Satie's own Trois petites pieces montées were an illustration of the characters of the French writer Rabelais. The first two movements do not have a very festive atmosphere in the traditional sense. They are introspective and seem more suited to an upscale salon. There is still the ghost of the prankster among the angular phrases and transitions, but there is no celebration in the sound. The third movement, on the other hand, is a spectacular testimony to the hackneyed barroom polka. The first two movements sound similar to certain Neo-Classical works by Stravinsky, with a detached, cerebral pace. It is clear to any listener that this work was not meant to sit well with the other participants, that the composer was obviously making it known that he did not want to be among these sorts of festivities anymore. Trois petites pieces montées is the product of a cranky and tired genius.
REVERIE DE L'ENFANCE DE PANTAGRUEL (1919)
The Rêverie (De l'Enfance de Pantagruel) is an extract from Trois petites pièces montées adapted for piano solo, originally composed for small symphony orchestra. In this suite it is meant as a restful intermezzo.
PREMIER MENUET (1920)
The Première Menuet (before writing which, we are told, he had studied a Mozart minuet - little effect as this seems to have had on him). This is an introvert piece.
LA BELLE EXCENTRIQUE (1920)
The score of La Belle Excentrique for piano four hands, published by La Sirène in 19221, is composed of four parts, listed on the cover in no particular order. Inside, however, they have seen fit to number the parts as follows:
Grande Ritournelle / I
Marche franco-lunaire / II
Valse du Mystérieux Baiser dans l'Oeil / III
Cancan Grand-Mondain2 / IV.
As a result, these four pieces have been performed - and necessarily danced - in the above order for decades
Analysis of Satie's sketchbooks, his copyright declaration to SACEM and his correspondance has established that La Belle Excentrique really has only three parts:
1. Marche franco-lunaire
2. Valse du Mystérieux Baiser dans l'Oeil
3. Cancan Grand-Mondain
The fourth ("Grande Ritournelle") being only an intermezzo designed, as the name indicates, to "return" (at least twice) between the other three. Despite Satie's indications, admittedly somewhat terse, a comfortable conclusion wouldn't be possible without lending an ear to details of a somewhat anecdotal nature. For example, the fact that (in Le Coq parisien), it was announced that Mademoiselle Caryathis had worn, for this dance composed especially for her, "three" costumes designed by Nicole Groult. Also the tale of "Jean Hugo's first failure in his costume-making career," which had to do with "three" costumes he'd imagined for La Belle Excentrique, and that Satie had categorically refused. All this plainly shows that this work, rather than a dance, should be considered as a series of dances, which explains all the costume changes. The "Grande Ritournelle," written to fill the gaps left by these costume changes, is the only piece not to be danced.
One can find the original running order in Bojan Gorisek's recording, Aldo Ciccolini's lastest recording of Erik Satie's complete piano works and Max Eschig has also prepared a corrected edition.
ERIC SATIE (1808-1925)
Complete Piano Works Vol. 7
Piano – Bojan Gorišek
[1995] Audiophile / CBR320 / scans
O Púbis da Rosa
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