His association with the flamboyant, self-styled ‘Sâr’ Joséphin Péladan during 1891–2 helped in both respects: as the official composer for Péladan’s Ordre de la Rose-Croix Catholique du Temple et du Graal, he was allowed free rein to experiment, and Péladan’s Rosicrucian Salons at the fashionable Galerie Durand-Ruel gained him his first public hearings. His aims during this fascinating period were to create a new musical style from the limited technical means at his disposal, and to make his name widely known. In the spring of 1890 Satie moved higher up into the Butte Montmartre ‘to escape his creditors’, and his Rose+Croix compositions were conceived in tiny rooms at 6 rue Cortot. Debussy’s perceptive description of Satie as ‘a gentle medieval musician lost in this century’ also dates from 1892, though their intimate 25-year friendship was not without its complications, especially when Satie later became successful. Here his friendship with Debussy developed, especially when Debussy was the only one to recognize the serious intent behind the outrageous ‘Christian ballet’ uspud, which Satie and Latour had concocted to scandalize the musical establishment (even challenging the director of the Paris Opéra to a duel in order to gain uspud a hearing). In 1891 he quarrelled with Salis and left the Chat Noir to become second pianist at the nearby Auberge du Clou. By 1890 he was engaged as conductor of the orchestra that accompanied Henri Rivière’s shadow theatre spectacles at the Chat Noir there he was soon on familiar terms with the humorist Alphonse Allais, whose whimsical buffoonery influenced his own pseudonymous early journalism. Free from his restrictive upbringing, he enthusiastically embraced the reckless bohemian lifestyle and created for himself a new persona as a long-haired man-about-town in frock coat and top hat. Satie impressively styled himself ‘Erik Satie – gymnopédiste’, although his three celebrated Gymnopédies were not completed until the spring of 1888. He (and Latour) were introduced to the colourful master of ceremonies, Rodolphe Salis, by the plumber-turned-poet Vital Hoquet. His first room, at 50 rue Condorcet, was close to the famous Chat Noir cabaret, where he soon became a frequent habitué. Despite these attempts to fit in with the bourgeois musical aspirations of his parents, relationships were becoming increasingly strained, and he left home late in 1887 to begin an independent career as a café pianist in Montmartre. His father, who had set up his own music publishing business in 1883, brought out five songs he had written with Latour, and his Valse-ballet and Fantaisie-valse appeared in the journal La musique des familles. In the end, he reduced this still further by deliberately contracting bronchitis to get himself invalided out of the 33rd Infantry Regiment in April 1887.ĭuring his convalescence he discovered the literary works of Flaubert and Péladan. His closest friend at the time, the Spanish-born poet Contamine de Latour, maintained that he only persisted with his Conservatoire studies so that he could get away with one year’s military service instead of five. By 1885 he was readmitted, this time to the intermediate piano class of Eugénie’s former teacher, Georges Mathias, who ultimately also thought him ‘worthless’. Almost every report suggests that he was a gifted pianist who was utterly lacking in motivation and poor at sight-reading, and he was dismissed from the institution without a diploma in 1882. Satie loathed his seven years at what he later called ‘a sort of local penitentiary’ and was described by Descombes in 1881 as the ‘laziest student in the Conservatoire’. Eugénie resolved to form Eric in her own mould and enrolled him in the preparatory piano class of Emile Descombes at the Paris Conservatoire that November. Meanwhile his father had met a piano teacher and mediocre salon composer, Eugénie Barnetche, and in January 1879 they married, much to Eric’s displeasure.
Disaster struck again in the summer of 1878 when his grandmother mysteriously drowned, and he was returned to Paris to be informally educated by his father.
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Here Eric (who, as a professional composer, later used ‘Erik’) began music lessons in 1874 with a local organist, Vinot, who stimulated his love of Gregorian chant. After the Franco-Prussian war, Alfred sold his ship-broking business and the family moved to Paris, but in 1872, Jane Satie died and Eric and his brother Conrad were sent back to Honfleur to be brought up, as Catholics, by Alfred’s parents. He was the eldest son of Alfred Satie and Jane Leslie Anton, whose mother was Scottish. Membranophones (Stretched Membrane Percussion) Music Business, Institutions and Organizations
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