Take a look at our current subscription offers.
Erik Satie
1866 – 1925
Today he is best known to us through his well-loved Gymnopédies, the small melancholic piano pieces from 1890, but at the time of his death in 1925, Satie was barely known beyond the city limits of Paris.
Life and Music
- Erik Satie, the well-loved yet eccentric composer of piano miniatures, was born on 17 May 1866 in Honfleur, Normandy, the son of a French music publisher.
- At the age of 18, Satie moved to Paris where he studied briefly at the Paris Conservatory and found his first musical voice as the official composer of the Rosicrucian movement.
- Only a select few from music circles of the time knew that he was of an innovative influence on the composer group Les Six, which included Darius Milhaud and Francis Poulenc. Following Satie’s lead, they tried to write simple and clear music. Satie was also an influence on the Impressionist composer Debussy, a life-long friend whom he met in the famous cabaret, Le Chat Noir in 1891.
- Besides the influence he had on his contemporaries, he was best known for his eccentric behaviour. Some of his odd antics included never allowing anyone to enter his apartment, and some of the instructions he asked performers to follow during a performance of a work would be, playing a piece of music as ‘light as an egg’.
- His early life in Paris was characterized by poverty which meant Satie had to live in a working class suburb, Arcueil, from where he would walk every day to Paris. His daily 12-mile walk was punctuated, according to the poet Apollinaire, with stops at cafes where he would take down musical ideas in his notebooks.
- He finally achieved a degree of success that had long eluded him in 1917 with ‘Parade’, a collaboration with Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and the director of Les Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo, Serge Diaghilev. The score was compelling, and the inclusion of guns, car horns, sirens, and typewriters were so innovative and raucous as to cause an opening night riot that brought Satie to the public's attention.
- Satie died in 1925, his music faded into obscurity for almost 50 years until the 1960s when it was rediscovered by the modern minimalist composer John Cage, who found Satie an inspiration and influence on his own music. Happily, modern music audiences know and love Satie’s music, but are often unaware that he could have been consigned to the oblivion of musical history.
Did you know?
Satie wrote a piece for piano with one hundred and eighty notes, which had to be repeated eight hundred and forty times. When it was presented in New York in 1963, five different pianists had to play in relays all night long to give it a full performance.
