Satie: Piano Works, Vol. 3

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Erik Satie (1866 - 1925)Piano Works Vol. 3 The French composer Erik Satie earned himself a contemporaryreputation as an eccentric. Stravinsky later described him as the oddest person he hadever known and at the same time the most rare and constantly witty. His musicalinnovations proved immensely influential on his nearer contemporaries Debussy and Raveland on a younger generation of composers and artists in the years after the war of 1914.Satie was born in 1866 at Honfleur, on the coast of Normandy.His father was at the time a ship's broker, while his mother was of Scottish origin.Something of his later eccentricity seems to have been acquired from his paternal uncle,Adrien Satie, known in Honfleur as a character. The family moved to Paris, but on thedeath of Satie's mother in 1872 he was sent back to Honfleur to the house of hisgrandparents. Six years later he returned to Paris, where in 1879 he entered theConservatoire. There he proved an undistinguished and unsatisfactory pupil, lingering on,according to one friend, in order to avoid the obligatory five years of military service.His status as a student allowed him a period of one year in the 33rd Infantry, cut shortby a severe attack of bronchitis that he had deliberately courted.Satie's few months of soldiering were followed by the firstpublications of his music, two piano pieces, and then a set of five songs, settings ofpoems by his friend Contamine de Latour, published by his father, who now had astationer's shop and small publishing business. Inspired by his reading, in the early1890s Satie came for a time under the influence of the extraordinary Josephin Peladan,self-styled S?ór Merodack of the Rose + Croix, an eccentric exponent of Rosicrucianismwith whom he had broken by 1892. Eclectic medieval preoccupations led him to establish hisown mock religion, the Metropolitan Church of the Art of Jesus the Conductor. Of this hedescribed himself fancifully as Parcier et Ma?«tre de Chapelle, the first title sheerinvention, issuing his publication Le cartulaire,in which critical enemies were attacked in appropriate style. At the same time,paradoxically, he was involved with Rudolf Salis and his bohemian cabaret, the Chat Noir.The same years brought contact with Dubussy, with whom he remained on good terms in theyears that followed, in spite of the latter's tendency to patronise him.In 1905, after a period in which he had been compelled to earnhis living as a cafe pianist and a composer of appropriate music, Satie enrolled as astudent at the Schola cantorum, where his teachers included Vincent d'Indy and Roussel.Here he attempted to make up for his technical deficiencies as a composer by aconcentration on traditional counterpoint. He completed his studies in 1908, but onlybegan to win some success through the agency of Ravel, who in 1911 performed the threeSarabandes that Satie had written in 1887, establishing the originality of Satie's earlywork. The following years brought his compositions befor