Sospeso performs arrangements of compositions by French composer Erik Satie at the Sospeso Cabaret at studioseven on April 16, 2005.

He was the eldest son of Alfred Satie and Jane Leslie Anton, whose mother was Scottish. 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. 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. 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. 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. Eugénie resolved to form Eric in her own mould and enrolled him in the preparatory piano class of Émile Descombes at the Paris Conservatoire that November.

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’. Almost every report suggests that he was a gifted pianist who was utterly lacking in motivation and poor at sight-reading. By 1885 he had reached the intermediate piano class of Eugénie's former teacher, Georges Mathias, who also thought him ‘worthless’. 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. 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.

During his convalescence he discovered the literary works of Flaubert and Péladan. 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. 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 in Montmartre.

His first room, at 50 rue Condorcet, was close to the famous Chat Noir cabaret, where he soon became a frequent habitué. He (and Latour) were introduced to the colourful master of ceremonies, Rodolphe Salis, by the plumber-turned-poet Vital-Hoquet. Satie impressively styled himself ‘Erik Satie – gymnopédiste’, although his three celebrated Gymnopédies were not completed until the spring of 1888. 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. 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. In 1891 he quarrelled with Salis and left the Chat Noir to become second pianist at the nearby Auberge du Clou. 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). 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 the jester later became successful and challenged Debussy's musical superiority.

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. 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. His association with the flamboyant, self-styled ‘Sâr’ Joséphin Péladan during 1891–2 helped in both respects: as the official composer for Péladan's spurious 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. In the process he developed his interests in mystical religion and Gothic art, and in Le fils des étoiles invented ‘static sound décor’: incidental music that pursued a self-sufficient course oblivious to its theatrical surroundings.

In August 1892 he publicly broke off relations with Péladan, and between 1893 and 1895 became the founder (and only member) of the Église Métropolitaine d'Art de Jésus Conducteur. From his ‘Abbatiale’ in the rue Cortot, he published scathing attacks on his artistic enemies – attacks which show signs of paranoia. He made three attempts to gain election to the Académie des Beaux-Arts, underwent his only known (and traumatic) love-affair with his neighbour, the painter Suzanne Valadon, in 1893, and changed his appearance again to that of the ‘Velvet Gentleman’ by buying seven identical dun-coloured suits with part of a small inheritance in 1895. This change, together with the collection of movements that form the Messe des pauvres, marked the end of his Rose+Croix period and the start of a long search for a new artistic direction.

Satie also needed somewhere even cheaper and less distracting in which to live and work, and to this end he moved to the southern suburb of Arcueil at the end of 1898. Once installed, he closed his door to the world for the rest of his life, adopting his final appearance as a respectable, deferential bourgeois functionary (with bowler hat, wing collar and umbrella) in 1905. He walked the ten kilometres into Paris every day, stopping at numerous cafés en route to drink and compose, returning in the small hours either by the last train from Montparnasse or on foot. In wet weather (which he preferred) he shielded his ubiquitous umbrella beneath his coat, which also contained a hammer to repel potential assailants. The unsolved question is how he emerged from his filthy room each day in pristine condition, ‘like an actor stepping out from the wings’ (Shattuck).

To earn a living he returned regularly to the café-concerts of Montmartre as accompanist to Vincent Hyspa, although he had greater commercial success with his songs for Paulette Darty (the ‘Queen of the Slow Waltz’) after 1902. He worked on various theatrical entertainments with Latour and Jules Dépaquit, and in The Dreamy Fish he tried mixing a jaunty music-hall style with the ‘Impressionistic’ harmonies of his friend Debussy. But what he called the ‘absolutely astounding’ revelation of Pélleas et Mélisande in 1902 showed him that this was an artistic cul-de-sac, and the only significant product of these unhappy, directionless years were the Trois morceaux en forme de poire of 1903, although these were a mixture of pieces written in 1890–91 with arrangements of more recent cabaret songs.

In a determined attempt to improve his technique, Satie enrolled as a mature student at the Schola Cantorum in October 1905, gaining a diploma in counterpoint (under Roussel) in 1908, and taking various parts of d'Indy's composition course (including fugue and orchestration) between 1905 and 1912. Now that he was self-motivated, his progress was more impressive, although by no means exceptional. His compositional offshoots show that he still retained his sense of parody, and his main aim seems to have been to develop a modern form of fugue, using short-winded, elliptical subjects (as in the ‘Fugue litanique’ from En habit de cheval).

The turning-point in his career came in January 1911 when Ravel performed some of his earliest pieces at a concert of the Société Musicale Indépendante. Satie was suddenly seen (in his second Sarabande) as a harmonic forerunner of Impressionism: he became a focus for young composers, and Debussy conducted his orchestrations of the Gymnopédies two months later at the Salle Gaveau, upsetting their composer by being jealous of their success. What pleased Satie most about all this was that Demets agreed to publish his recent Véritables préludes flasques in 1912 and was soon requesting more such humorous piano pieces. This enabled him to give up his ‘degrading’ cabaret work and stimulated a productive period that culminated in the Sports et divertissements of 1914, in which his exquisitely calligraphed texts and music combined with Charles Martin's drawings in a miniature Gesamtkunstwerk. Articles began to appear about his music, and the celebrated pianist Viñes promoted his cause with some notable first performances.

Though World War I interrupted the flow of concerts and publications somewhat, this period also brought Satie's second lucky break when Cocteau heard Viñes and Satie perform the Trois morceaux in 1916. With his abundant energy and high society contacts, Cocteau was able to open doors for Satie, leading to the Dyaghilev-Massine-Picasso ballet Parade in 1917. After this succès de scandale, Satie's career revolved around the theatre and he found himself in the fortunate position of writing mostly to commission. If he preferred working with Picasso, and had a greater respect for Dyaghilev than for Cocteau (whom he came to find interfering and egoistic), it was the latter's championship of him – especially in Le coq et l'arlequin and as godfather to Les Six – that ensured his fame in the postwar years.

In October 1916 Satie received a commission from the Princesse de Polignac that was to result in his masterpiece, Socrate, two years later. He chose to set extracts from Plato's Dialogues in a translation by Victor Cousin as a ‘symphonic drama’, though one ‘without the least idea of conflict’. Satie called it a ‘return to classical simplicity with a modern sensibility’, and it greatly impressed Stravinsky when he heard it in 1919. Its composition was, however, interrupted in 1917 by the successful libel case brought against him in the wake of Parade by the critic Jean Poueigh, when he only narrowly escaped a prison sentence.

After 1920 his journalistic output increased. During that year there were two festivals of his music and the first performance, with Milhaud, of Musique d'ameublement (music designed to be, like furniture, part of the background) at the Galerie Barbazanges. In 1921 Satie joined the Communist party and began to become increasingly involved in the Dada movement in Paris; he presided at the public trial of André Breton at the Closerie des Lilas café in February 1922. In 1923 a group of young composers (Cliquet-Pleyel, Désormière, Jacob and Sauguet) adopted him as their mascot, and he promoted the ‘École d'Arcueil’ in concerts even after he became intensely occupied in setting the spoken dialogue from Gounod's opera Le médecin malgré lui at Dyaghilev's request for his winter season in Monte Carlo. (This score showed that he was perfectly capable of using directional, 19th-century chromatic harmony when he chose to.) 1924 proved even more eventful with the ballets Mercure (Picasso-Massine) and Relâche (Picabia-Borlin), both of which provoked first night scandals. Relâche, with its onstage obscenities, anticipated the theatre of alienation, though its most significant part was René Clair's surrealist film Entr'acte, for which Satie composed the first synchronized film score.

After Relâche Satie's years of heavy drinking finally caught up with him, and he had to be hospitalized in February 1925 due to cirrhosis of the liver and pleurisy. He remained uncompromising to the end, refusing to see past friends with whom he had quarrelled. When his brother Conrad, Milhaud, Désormière and Robert Caby finally entered his squalid room in Arcueil, they had to evict two cartloads of accumulated rubbish before they could begin to sort out his papers and manuscripts. The letters he had kept were unfortunately later destroyed in a fire at Conrad's home, but his notebooks and scores were preserved by Milhaud.

Read the Ensemble Sospeso's interview with Pierre Boulez here.

From Robert Orledge's article in the New Grove. Image: Portrait d'Erik Satie, by Pablo Picasso (1920) from the Online Picasso Project.