Mercure is a ballet in three tableaux, with a text by Pablo Picasso. It was first performed at the theatre de la Cigale in June of 1924, along with Darius Milhaud's ballet Salade. Satie and Picasso collaborated with the Russian-born dancer Léonide Massine on Mercure; the end result was a falling out between Massine and Satie, who felt rushed and undermined by Massine during the production of the ballet. Satie's play Le Piege de Medusa (Medusa's Trap), of more than a decade earlier, is said to be one of the first Surrealist dramas, and Mercure likewise pointed the way to what was coming next: it is an early Cubist creation, as can most obviously be seen in the abstract collages of tableau three.
The ballet was commissioned for one of Comte Étienne de Beaumont's Soirées de Paris, in Robert Orledge's words, "a series of chic, but ill-organized spectacles." The work as originally conceived by Picasso was a mere eight minutes long, but after Satie began composing the music, the result was a fifteen-minute-long ballet. There is little musical repetition in this work, for Satie sought to make the music fit Picasso's series of changing "poses plastiques." Some of the music in the ballet is borrowed from Satie's early years at the Scuola Cantorum, in particular from a "Fugue-Valse" from 1906. As Orledges notes, this self-borrowing shows that Satie was indeed pressed for time by Massine.
Just before the premiere of Mercure, Satie noted that "[t]hough it has a subject, this ballet has no plot. It is a purely decorative spectacle." While Mercure represented a collaboration between composer and visual artist, the work was first and foremost a visual production, a spectacle, as Satie indicated. Satie's contribution consisted of music to fit Picasso's images and the movements of the dancers. The composer was drawn to this collaboration for several reasons, the most important being the abstract nature of the piece, with its posed figures and plotless structure. There is also the importance of calligraphy: the ballet scenery consisted largely of calligraphy superimposed upon cutout images, and Satie, as is well known, loved calligraphy.
RELACHE (1924)
Relâche is French for "cancellation", "theater dark", or "no performance today".
Relâche (1924) was the name Erik Satie and his surrealist (former Dada) friends gave to the ultimate ballet production in which Satie was involved as composer.
A one-time flavour of surrealism was invented for the production, which was named "instantanéisme." The name of the ballet was a kind of practical joke: "Relâche" was the usual word to be found on posters announcing performances, in the case of a last minute cancellation of such performance - which was bizarre for a production that was not cancelled.
Relache was Satie's last work. It is a ballet in two acts, with a film, Entr'acte, intended to be shown after the overture and then again between acts. Satie also provided the music for Entr'acte. Shot by film critic Rene Clair, the experimental film is full of humorous, surrealistic images, and outrageous scenes. Filmed in Paris, Entr'acte includes scenes in which a ballerina with a beard and moustache dances, a hunter shoots a large egg with a shotgun, only to be shot in turn by Picabia, and a mock funeral procession with a camel-drawn hearse causes havoc in the streets. The music for the film, which Robert Orledge describes as "revolutionary," consists of yet another example of Satie's forward-looking style. The score for Entr'acte includes ad lib. repetitions of discrete, "self-contained segments," perhaps an early manifestation of indeterminant music. It is also an excellent early example of film music, as the different segments of the music reflect and support, as Gillmor notes, "the rhythm of the action," serving as "a kind of neutral rhythmic counterpoint to the visual action." The film score consists largely of juxtaposed units of ostinati, and is scored for small orchestra.
Satie referred to Relache, as a pornographic or obscene ballet, and indeed, some of the staging, which included large silver breasts with light bulb nipples along with a coterie of half-naked dancers, certainly supports this designation. The work is essentially plotless, with a central female character dancing with changing numbers of male characters--including a paraplegic in a wheelchair--all of whom wander in and out of the audience while images are projected onto a screen, balloons are released, and clothes are removed. Throughout the ballet, a man dressed as a fireman wanders about on the stage, passing water from on bucket to another. Musically, the ballet proved shocking to audiences and critics, perhaps even more so than the provocative staging and choreography, but, this kind of music was nothing new to Satie. Most of the music for Relache was adapted from popular, generally bawdy tunes, including a number of very raunchy army songs. While the ballet seems by all accounts to have been a nonsensical, fragmented spectacle, the music is much more unified and symmetrical, using reoccurring motives which are overlapped, transformed, and recontextualixed to connect the twenty-two numbers of the work. As expected, the work provoked scandal, and was only performed about a dozen times. It was despised by critics, who attacked the stupidity of the staging, and the paucity of the score.
CINEMA (1924)
The film score Cinéma, written to accompany René Clair's film Entr'acte which was made to be shown in the interval of the Satie-Picabia ballet instantanéiste of 1924, Relâche. The score is really nothing at all without the film: it lacks any kind of melodic development and there is not logic to it in musical terms. After seeing the film, however, it becomes apparent why Satie created this particular score for Clair's film. The main function of film music - both in the ear of the silent film and today - is 'to underline and interpret the narrtives, with careful reflections of a film's settings, characters, actions and moods.' Entr'acte, however, has no real narratives, no fully developed characters, and certainly no 'moods'. The whole film is a celebration of the beauties of the visual - shape, line, form and movement - and of the effects obtainable with the cinecamera - slow motion, vanishing figures, decaying letters on the screen. There is barely a single shot in the whole film which has not some sort of notable movement, whether of the camera or of the actors. Satie's music responds to this visual movement with aural stasis. For the main part of the film, the music lends continuity to the rapid and disconnected series of images, mainly through the composer's use of closely related motifs. At some point, however, the film is attending to its own continuity and providing a transitional section to the ballerina-dominated Section 4, so the music need not reinforce that, but instead start the new secion and introduce the new musical material which will be associated with the ballerina. This retains the smoothness of the visual transition into Section 4.
The nature of the visual part of the film, being non-narrative, is essentially objective in itself, and this helps to promote detachment in the score too. As a result, Satie was able to allow himself the liberty of including a satirical paraphrase of the opening of Chopin's famous funeral march from the Piano Sonata no. 2 in B-flat minor, op. 35 in the March funèbre section of the score.
The reference is immediately identifiable, but the humorous use of the quotation, underlined by the visuals, prevents the usual emotional connotations of the piece from taking effect. The quotation of othr composers' music in his own pieces was another technique Satie frequently employed to maintain objectivity in his music, usually by parodying the quoted composer, but occasionally by writing serious pastiche or appropriating an historical musical genre and reinterpreting it by using his own harmonic idiom and techniqeus of development.
JACK IN THE BOX (1899)
Satie composed Jack in the Box in 1899. It was only after Satie's death in 1925 that the manuscript of the piano piece Jack in the Box was recovered. Satie himself thought he had lost the manuscript in a bus. When his flat in Arceuil was cleaned out, a small notebook was discovered behind his piano and it contained the manuscript which was assumed to be lost forever. Milhaud orchestrated the piano score and the work was first performed by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in Paris with choreography by George Balanchine.
Neither Satie's music for Jack in the Box nor Depaquit's scenario represents high drama—Satie said it merely satirizes “the evil men who live in the world.” The music comprises three very short movements, each with a bit of the music hall about them: they bring to mind a vaudeville pit band that has collectively gone slightly mad. It has that delectable combination we expect from Satie—apparent simplicity laced with a wry edge.
This little three-movement "suite anglaise", a kind of stylized circus music, is in its way a curious work in Satie's career. The sometimes hectic forced gaiety in the jig-like rhythms and the often rather garish tones, with dissonant and sometimes bitonal colouring, make Jack-in-the-Box appear as a sudden flash of blinding light from a grey sky. There is nothing like it in his earlier production of almost constant slow tempo and introvert, melancholy atmosphere. The music presages the works from his last years, like La belle Excentrique or Relâche. Yet it is written with the same sort of montage technique as his Rosicrucian pieces.
ALLEGRO (OEUVRE POSTHUME) (1884)
Erik Satie's very first work, composed in the happy atmosphere of his home town, Honfleur, on 9 September 1884, while on holiday with his grandfather, far from the hated National Music Conservatoire. It is distinguished, of the refrain of the famous Norman romance Ma Normandie, a quotation that bears witness to Satie's interest in popular music from the start of his composing career, and which also in an astounding way foreshadows the choice of a ready made, which Dada was to make fashionable many years later. This work was discovered together with Jack in the Box after Satie's death.
ERIC SATIE (1808-1925)
Complete Piano Works Vol. 8
Piano – Bojan Gorišek
[1995] Audiophile / CBR320 / scans
O Púbis da Rosa
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