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The Musical Activities of Alfred Satie and Eugénie Satie-Barnetche, and Their Effect on the Career of Erik Satie

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Robert Orledge
Robert Orledge*
Affiliation:
University of Liverpool
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Extract

Erik Satie is now thought of as a precursor and a man of ideas whose unconventional career took its direction from his continual rethinking of every aspect of contemporary music and aesthetics, largely as a reaction to nineteenth-century tradition and excesses. Eugénie Satie-Barnetche, whose ultimate aim for her stepson was a brilliant career as a pianist with an official seal of approval from the Paris Conservatoire, provided just one example of such a tradition, whilst her husband Alfred, the gifted and impulsive dilettante and a Romantic at heart, might well be seen as another. In fact, it is easy to conclude that Eugénie's academic approach helped to turn Satie into a left-wing revolutionary, whilst the uninspired salon music of both his parents made him determined to become a serious professional composer. But that is by no means the whole story, for Erik was very close to his father, even if he disliked his stepmother, and Alfred's love of the music-hall (whose songs he both wrote and published) was enthusiastically inherited by his son. Even after Satie abandoned his work as a cabaret pianist around 1911, the influence of this popular medium still ran as a thread through his later compositions. Similarly, he was often forced to resort to his stepmother's profession of piano teaching to make ends meet, and in the 1920s he delighted in moving in the exalted social circles that his aspiring stepmother had only dreamt about as she mounted her bourgeois musical soirées in the Boulevard de Magenta in the 1880s. Like Alfred and Eugénie, Satie also spent much of his composing time with short piano pieces that he hoped would reach a popular market, and dance music runs as another thread throughout his career, just as it did in their own compositions. Above all, Satie's parents provided domestic surroundings in which music played a substantial part, with the emphasis on the present rather than the past, though it remained for Satie alone to take music into the future.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 117 , Issue 2 , 1992 , pp. 270 - 297
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Musical Association, 1992

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References

This article is a revised version of a paper delivered to the Royal Musical Association on 23 November 1991Google Scholar

1 From a letter dated ‘Honfleur, 25 March 1865’, cued in Ornella Volta, Satie Seen Through His Letters, trans Michael Bullock (London, 1989), 16 This comes from a collection of letters from Alfred Satie to Albert Sorel during the 1860s, written in a minuscule copperplate hand, that is now in the Archives de la Fondation Erik Satie, 56 rue des Tournelles, Paris 3 Unfortunately they do not mention Erik at all, and Alfred Satie seems to have been far more interested in his children once they had passed the infant stageGoogle Scholar

2 Cocteau, Jean, ‘Erik Satie’, Fanfare, 1, no 2 (15 October 1921), 21Google Scholar

3 Information taken from the catalogue of the exhibition Erik Saite ä Honfleur 125e anniversaire (Honfleur, May 1991), ed Ornella Volta, item no 34Google Scholar

4 I am indebted to Laurent François for this information and for other helpful advice in the preparation of this articleGoogle Scholar

5 Translated in Volta, Satie, 22Google Scholar

6 This was registered by Wiart as publication no 4124 (out of 5798) in the Registre du dépôt des oeuvres de musique in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris Much of the information about Alfred Satie's publishing activities was traced from this valuable source, which I checked from the start of 1881 to the end of 1897Google Scholar

7 The fact that the remaining five positions in Alfred's early catalogue (A S 6–9, 13) are occupied by Abel Queille suggest that he may have been a friend who perhaps provided Alfred with financial assistance when he began his operations in 1883. Besides publications, Queille would also have obtained a cheap exercise in market research before he went into publishing on his own account the following yearGoogle Scholar

8 Kindly made available to me by Ornella Volta from the Archives de la Fondation Erik SatieGoogle Scholar

9 Vittorio Monti (1868–1922) was an Italian violinist and composer who studied at the Naples Conservatory and came to Paris in 1886 to study with the then-famous Camillo Sivori Therefore Alfred Satie must have had considerable faith in him, both as a youthful composer and as one who was so new to the musical life of the capital Monti later specialized in making arrangements involving the mandolin, and he had several ballets and operas performed, notably Noel de Pierrot in 1900 He also worked as a music-hall conductor in Paris around this timeGoogle Scholar

10 Document in the Archives de la Fondation Erik Satie It is interesting to note that Meuriot was then taken over in 1904 by Alexis Rouart, who subsequently acquired the firm of Bellon-Ponscarme in 1906 (including the stock of Baudoux et Cie, which Bellon had taken over in 1902) The amalgamated firm became Rouart-Lerolle in 1908, and it is surely no coincidence that Satie used all these publishers (except Meuriot) who can be traced back to his father's original business Indeed, Rouart-Lerolle became his principal publisher after his ‘discovery’ by Ravel in 1911, and they were finally taken over in 1953 by Salabert, who remain Satie's main publishers to this day Indeed, Dr Jeremy Drake has recently discovered copies of compositions by Eugénie Satie-Barnetche in the Salabert archives which have miraculously survived throughout the entire series of takeovers For a brief period in 1897, Erik and Eugénie were both published by Emile Baudoux, and one of Eugénie's last known publications (her 1888 Scherzo retitled Minuetto – see Appendix 4) has Erik's Le fib des étoiles advertised on its coverGoogle Scholar

11 Henri Kling (1842–1918) was a multi-talented horn player, teacher, conductor and composer of Franco-German birth who took Swiss nationality in 1865 and was appointed horn professor at the Geneva Conservatory the following year He was appointed conductor of the Kursaal Orchestra in 1886, and his book Modem Orchestration and Instrumentation, first published in the early 1880s, went through several editions and was translated into English in 1902 He was exceptionally prolific as a composer and as a writer on music and was an influential figure during his lifetime – especially in the field of brass band musicGoogle Scholar

12 Louis Bachlot, Emile Benoît, Alphonse Blondel, Emile Chatot, Maison David, Imprimerie de Delanchy, Philippe Feuchot, la Veuve Gheluve, Auguste Hélaine, Jules Hiélard, A Humbert, Auguste Le Bailly, Alphonse Le Signe, Auguste Lissarrague, L Rotier, and Rotier et Serbre Further information about most of these publishers can be found in Anik Devnès and François Lesure, Dictionnaire des éditeurs de musique français, ii 1820–1914 (Geneva, 1988), from which I have derived other helpful information in the preparation of this articleGoogle Scholar

13 This amounted to just under 1% of the total number of new pieces (6425) registered at the Bibliothèque Nationale that year (see above, note 6) As there were several hundred publishers operating in Paris at the time, Alfred Satie's activities must have been less peripheral than has hitherto been thoughtGoogle Scholar

14 I am grateful to Dr David Charlton for confirming this informationGoogle Scholar

15 Kindly communicated by Ornella Volta from the Archives de la Fondation Erik SatieGoogle Scholar

16 31 December was the day of St Sylvestre, when the French traditionally celebrate family union as one year passes into the next It must also have been very close to the anniversary of Alfred Satie's burial in 1903 I am grateful to Ornella Volta for pointing this out to me, and for other helpful advice during the preparation of this articleGoogle Scholar

17 Letter in the Archives de la Fondation Erik SatieGoogle Scholar

18 Information supplied by Laurent FrançoisGoogle Scholar

19 Catalogue Erik Satie à Honfleur, item no 42Google Scholar

20 Gillmor, Alan, ‘Erik Satie and the Concept of the Avant-Garde’, Musical Quarterly, 69 (1983), 104–19 (p 109)Google Scholar

21 See Orledge, Robert, Satie, Koechlin and the Ballet Uspud', Music and Letters, 68 (1987), 26–41 (pp 38–9)Google Scholar

22 I am grateful to Professor Peter Dickinson for providing me with this sourceGoogle Scholar

23 Another possible source for this parody, of course, is Alfred Satie's favourite composer, Rossini A dominant seventh chord spun out into a single line replaces the development section in his overtures to La Cenerentola and L'italiana in Algeri, for instance, though not to the same length as in Example 6(b)Google Scholar