[porkmarras]

Erik Satie.

Satie's first great piano period dates back to his youth and his first time spent in Montmartre. During these years he wrote some 20 piano pieces, five songs, some sketches for string quartet, theatre music for Joséphin Péladan and a little orchestral piece, later re-used as the penultimate movement in Trois morceaux en forme de poire for piano duet.
These early compositions stand against a background of Gregorian chant and salon and cabaret music. Satie's personal life was also in a turnmoil: his conservatory studies failed, while at the same time he found a new interest in the "esoteric". He also met artists and writers and got to know the special atmosphere that permeated Bohemian life in Montmartre during La Belle Époque - this curious mixture of serious seeking, mysticism, an unbridled sense of fun and the general madness that were par for the course in the famous cafés of the day: Chat noir, Auberge du clou, Le lapin agile and many others.
During the years of his youth in Honfleur, two people came to have a great, perhaps decisive, importance in Satie's future development: his uncle Adrien Satie, and his first music-teacher Vinot, the organist of the church of Saint-Léonard. The uncle, who went by the name "Uncle Seabird", appears to have been a most eccentric man and something of the black sheep of the family. He devoted little attention to his profession - he was a ship-broker - but all the more so to boats, horses and frivolous theatre. This charming, rather mad, gentleman and his young nephew spent much time together, which certainly left deep traces in the personality of the latter. When Satie later came into contact with the cultural climate of Montmartre he evidently had no problems adapting to it himself. It would also appear to be a popular misconception that Satie should first have become jocular in the early 1910s. His special brand of humour and sense of the absurdities of life was part of him from the

beginning, as was the equally characteristic deep strains of melancholy.

In the spring of 1874 Satie's grandfather brought his musically gifted grandson to the organist Vinot, who undertook his musical education. Vinot had received his education at the École Niedermeyer in Paris, the most famous school for church musicians in the latter half of the 19th century. He was the organist and choir leader of the Saint-Léonard church in Honfleur between 1873 and 1878. It was probably through him Satie first was subjected to Gregorian chant, which serene, distant and endless melodic lines are traceable in almost everything he wrote from the Ogives in 1886, to Socrate in 1918. But Vinot also had another, less expected, trick up his sleeve: he composed slow waltzes that were sometimes played by the orchestra association of Honfleur. Thus the two main tonal foundations of Satie's musical creation were already in place in the mid-1870s, clearly defined and established: Gregorian chant and light music.

 

Charcoal drawing of Erik Satie by Ramón Casas from 1892.

Satie had no doubt already encountered the latter on going to the theatre and the circus with Uncle Seabird. Moreover, his many-talented father was quite a passable amateur composer who wrote salon music and cabaret songs. When he remarried in 1879, it was to the piano teacher Eugénie Barnetche (who also composed salon pieces for piano). Together they founded a music business which included a shop, a publishing company and a comprehensive piano and song-teaching school. Satie's father presumably turned the
new home in Paris to a proper centre for popular music.

It was in all probability the step-mother, whom young Erik immediately loathed, who was the driving force behind his studies at the conservatory; studies which were certainly decisive in his artistic
and personal development, if in a very negative capacity.

He sought companionship amongst writers and artists rather than fellow musicians. Early reading experiences of H.C. Andersen, Gustave Flaubert and Joséphin Péladan, amongst others, grew more important and inspirational than musical experiences (with the possible exception of Chabrier's opera Le roi malgré lui). Of special importance to him was the friendship with the young Spanishborn symbolist poet Contamine de Latour (1867-1926). "Le vieux modeste", as Satie ironically called him, is said to have claimed kinship with Napoleon and considered himself entitled to the throne of France. As a writer his talents were mediocre, at least if one is to judge by the texts Satie put to music in the mid-1880s, but he became a great source of inspiration, both as a Montmartre practical joker and a guide to medieval mysticism and esotericism.
Allegro

Satie's earliest known composition is an as yet unprinted Allegro for piano dated "Honfleur. Sept. 9th 1884". It is, however, hardly likely that this should be his first attempt at composing. This piece is only nine bars long (taking 20 seconds to play), but the elegant signature suggests that the young composer saw the little piece as complete. The notation is flowing, almost nonchalantly so, and moreover it seems that he wished to compress the piece even further by striking out a short bridge passage. The Satie researcher Laurent de François has shown that the piece is based on a popular tune with the refrain J'irai revoir ma Normandie" (a method Satie also used much later in his humorous piano pieces 1912-1915). This fact naturally prompts the thought that it is simply a little musical "postcard" from his summer holidays in his home town by the Atlantic Coast, far away from the hated conservatory and the energetic step-mother. It still resounds with bright optimism, far from the melancholy and slow tempo that would later come to dominate his music.