Erik Satie

Based on Wikipedia: Erik Satie

The Composer Who Dressed Like a Priest, Then a Velvet Dandy, Then a Bureaucrat

Erik Satie owned seven identical suits. All the same dun color—a muddy gray-brown. He bought them with the proceeds of a small inheritance and wore nothing else for years. This was only one of his personas. Before the velvet suits, he dressed like a quasi-priest. After them, he transformed into something resembling a meticulous civil servant: bowler hat, wing collar, umbrella always in hand. The man who wrote some of the most hauntingly simple piano music ever composed spent his life trying on identities like costumes.

He also died of cirrhosis at fifty-nine, a lifelong heavy drinker who lived his final twenty-seven years in a single cramped room that no one—not a single person—was ever allowed to enter.

But here's the thing about Satie: he changed the direction of French music. He influenced Debussy. He influenced Ravel. He mentored a whole generation of young composers who would go on to define twentieth-century music. And he did it while writing pieces with titles like "True Flabby Preludes (for a Dog)" and "Sketches and Exasperations of a Big Wooden Man."

A Childhood Split Between Two Countries, Two Religions, Two Failures

Erik Satie was born in 1866 in Honfleur, a harbor town in Normandy where the Seine meets the English Channel. His father was French and Catholic. His mother was English, Protestant, and of Scottish descent. The children were baptized Anglican.

Then his mother died when he was six.

Erik and his younger brother Conrad were shipped back to Honfleur to live with their paternal grandparents. The boys were rebaptized Catholic—their third religious identity before adolescence. At the local boarding school, young Erik excelled at history and Latin. At everything else, he was unremarkable.

But something important happened during these years. A local organist named Gustave Vinot began teaching him music. Vinot had studied under Louis Niedermeyer, founder of a school dedicated to reviving Renaissance church music. Through Vinot, Satie discovered Gregorian chant—those ancient, modal melodies that Catholic monks had been singing for over a thousand years. This music operated by different rules than the Romantic compositions flooding concert halls in the late nineteenth century. No rich harmonies building to dramatic climaxes. No virtuosic displays. Just single melodic lines, hovering in space.

Satie never forgot it.

The Laziest Student at the Conservatoire

When Satie was twelve, his grandmother died and the boys returned to Paris. Their father had remarried—a piano teacher named Eugénie who was determined to make her stepson a professional musician. She enrolled him at the Paris Conservatoire, France's most prestigious music academy.

Satie hated it. He called it "a vast, very uncomfortable, and rather ugly building; a sort of district prison with no beauty on the inside—nor on the outside, for that matter."

His teachers were not impressed either. After his first exams, one described him as "gifted but indolent." The following year, another called him "the laziest student in the Conservatoire." In 1882, they expelled him.

He got back in two years later. It went no better. His new piano teacher, Georges Mathias, wrote that Satie's playing was "insignificant and laborious" and the student himself "worthless. Three months just to learn the piece. Cannot sight-read properly."

But Satie was learning elsewhere. He spent hours in Notre-Dame Cathedral, staring at stained glass windows. He haunted the National Library, poring over obscure medieval manuscripts. A friend nicknamed him "Esotérik Satie." From this period comes his first significant work: Ogives, four piano pieces inspired by Gregorian chant and Gothic architecture. An ogive is a pointed arch, the kind you see in cathedral windows and doorways. The music has that quality too—austere, vertical, reaching upward.

Escape Through Pneumonia

Desperate to leave the Conservatoire, Satie found a creative solution: he joined the army.

The thirty-third Infantry Regiment was not, it turned out, an improvement. So he engineered his own discharge. One winter night, he went outside, stripped off his shirt, and stood in the cold until he contracted acute bronchitis. After three months recovering, he was invalided out.

This tells you something about Satie. He would rather give himself pneumonia than continue doing something he found intolerable.

The Temple of Zany Convention

In 1887, at twenty-one, Satie moved to Montmartre—the hilly neighborhood on the northern edge of Paris that was then the center of bohemian artistic life. He found lodgings near the Chat Noir, a famous cabaret whose name translates to "Black Cat."

The Chat Noir styled itself as "the temple of zany convention." Artists, writers, and musicians crowded its smoky rooms. The entertainment mixed shadow puppetry, satirical songs, and experimental performances. Satie became first a regular, then the house pianist.

Free from his restrictive upbringing, he reinvented himself. He grew his hair long. He wore a frock coat and top hat. He embraced what his biographer Robert Orledge calls "the reckless bohemian lifestyle." This was the first of his costume changes, and perhaps the most liberating.

It was also when he composed the Gymnopédies.

Three Pieces That Changed Everything

The word "gymnopédie" refers to an ancient Greek festival where naked young men danced and performed athletic feats in honor of Apollo. But don't let the exotic name fool you. The three Gymnopédies, written in 1888, are among the simplest piano pieces ever to enter the classical repertoire.

Each one follows the same pattern: a gentle, rocking accompaniment in the left hand; a slow, melancholy melody in the right. The harmonies are deliberately unresolved—they create a sense of floating, of suspension, of time stretching out. The tempo marking for the first is "Lent et douloureux," which means "Slow and painful."

They sound like nothing else that was being written in 1888. While other composers were building massive orchestral works with crashing climaxes and emotional intensity, Satie stripped music down to its essence. Just a melody. Just an accompaniment. Just enough.

The Gymnopédies would later influence everything from ambient music to film scores to the entire aesthetic of what we now call "minimalism." Brian Eno, the pioneer of ambient music, has cited Satie as a primary influence. So has John Cage, the avant-garde composer famous for his piece 4'33"—four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. The through-line is clear: Satie showed that music didn't have to do more. Sometimes less was not just enough—it was better.

The Only Love Affair

In 1893, Satie met Suzanne Valadon.

Valadon was a painter—one of the first women to be admitted to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. She had been a circus acrobat until a fall ended that career, then became an artist's model for Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec before picking up brushes herself. She was bold, unconventional, and exactly the kind of person you'd expect to find in Montmartre's bohemian circles.

After their first night together, Satie proposed marriage.

They didn't marry, but she moved into the room next to his on the rue Cortot. Satie became obsessed. He called her "Biqui" and wrote her passionate notes praising "her whole being, lovely eyes, gentle hands, and tiny feet." During their relationship, he composed the Danses gothiques, which he said was an attempt to calm his own turbulent mind. Valadon painted his portrait and gave it to him.

Five months later, she left.

Satie was devastated. He later said the breakup left him with "nothing but an icy loneliness that fills the head with emptiness and the heart with sadness."

He never had another romantic relationship. For the remaining thirty-two years of his life, he lived alone.

Founding a Church of One

Before Valadon, during his time at the Chat Noir, Satie had fallen in with a mystical group called the Ordre de la Rose-Croix Catholique du Temple et du Graal—the Catholic Order of the Rosy Cross of the Temple and the Grail. This was one of many occult societies flourishing in late nineteenth-century Paris, led by the flamboyant Joséphin Péladan, who styled himself "Sâr" (an ancient Persian title meaning "king").

Satie became the order's official composer. He wrote music for their ceremonies and gained his first public performances at Péladan's salons. But eventually he broke with the group—Satie had trouble staying in any organization for long.

His solution was characteristically extreme. Between 1893 and 1895, he founded his own church: the Église Métropolitaine d'Art de Jésus Conducteur, which translates to the Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor. The church had one member. Erik Satie. From his "Abbatiale" (abbey) in his Montmartre room, he published scathing attacks on his artistic enemies and dressed in robes of his own design.

This was the quasi-priestly phase. The velvet suits came later, in 1895, purchased with that inheritance money. His biographer notes that this wardrobe change "marked the end of his Rose-Croix period and the start of a long search for a new artistic direction."

The Room No One Entered

In 1898, Satie made a decision that would define the rest of his life. He moved out of Montmartre to Arcueil-Cachan, a working-class suburb eight kilometers south of central Paris. His new home was a single small room.

He lived there for twenty-seven years, until his death. He walked to Paris and back regularly—a round trip of some sixteen kilometers. He joined the Socialist Party. After the founding of the French Communist Party in 1920, he switched his membership. Yet despite these leftist affiliations, he adopted an utterly bourgeois appearance: bowler hat, wing collar, umbrella. One biographer wrote that "with his umbrella and bowler hat, he resembled a quiet school teacher. Although a Bohemian, he looked very dignified, almost ceremonious."

No one was ever allowed into his room. Not once in twenty-seven years. When he died and friends finally entered, they found it thick with dust and filled with accumulated possessions: umbrellas, old newspapers, two pianos stacked one on top of the other. Behind one piano they discovered compositions no one knew existed.

The Cabaret Years

For about a decade, roughly 1898 to 1908, Satie supported himself as a cabaret pianist. He arranged over a hundred popular songs for piano or piano and voice, and wrote some of his own. The most successful was "Je te veux" (I Want You), a sensuous waltz that became a minor hit.

He also wrote satirical songs that mocked current political events, exploring how to use musical quotations for comic effect. But later in life, he rejected all this cabaret work as "vile and against his nature." The compositions he took seriously from this period—a pantomime called Jack in the Box, a short comic opera called Geneviève de Brabant—were mostly unperformed and unpublished during his lifetime.

Then, in 1902, everything changed.

Debussy's Opera and Satie's Crisis

Claude Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande premiered that year, and Satie attended. He found it "absolutely astounding."

Satie and Debussy had been friends since the late 1880s, when both were struggling bohemians in Montmartre. They shared an experimental approach to composition and a love of café society. But while Satie wrote miniatures for solo piano and worked cabaret gigs, Debussy had become famous. Pelléas was his masterpiece—a revolutionary opera that threw out traditional forms in favor of something dreamlike and ambiguous.

Hearing it forced Satie to confront his own limitations. At thirty-six, he made an extraordinary decision: he enrolled as a student again. Not at the Conservatoire, which had expelled him decades earlier, but at the Schola Cantorum, Paris's other major music academy.

The Schola was run by Vincent d'Indy, who emphasized rigorous technique over creative experimentation. Satie studied counterpoint—the art of combining multiple melodic lines—with Albert Roussel, and composition with d'Indy himself. He was, finally, a successful student. He stayed for seven years, until 1912.

This might seem like a step backward. Why would an established composer, however marginal, subject himself to academic training in his forties? But Satie understood something: his earlier works had succeeded through instinct and originality, but he'd run out of ideas. To move forward, he needed craft.

Sudden Fame at Forty-Five

In January 1911, Maurice Ravel—by then one of France's most celebrated composers—played some early Satie works at a concert. It was a revelation. Critics suddenly saw Satie as "the precursor and apostle of the musical revolution now taking place."

Everything accelerated. Debussy orchestrated two of the Gymnopédies and conducted them in concert. Publishers came calling. Satie could finally quit cabaret work and compose full-time. His works appeared in deluxe editions. Pianists performed his music. The press wrote about him.

Young composers gathered around him. First came those associated with Ravel—the "jeunes" (young ones). Then a group initially called the "nouveaux jeunes" (new young ones), later known as Les Six: Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Germaine Tailleferre, Francis Poulenc, and Darius Milhaud. These six would become major figures in twentieth-century French music, and they all looked to Satie as a father figure.

He encouraged them. Then he turned on them.

This became a pattern. Satie would mentor young composers, then distance himself—sometimes bitterly—when their fame threatened to overshadow his, or when they simply annoyed him. He broke with Les Six in 1918. In the 1920s, he gathered another group around him, the "Arcueil School," only to alienate some of them too. He quarreled with his old friend Debussy in 1917 and refused to attend the funeral when Debussy died the following year.

Only a few protégés escaped his displeasure. Milhaud and Roger Désormière remained friends until the end.

The Scandal of Parade

In 1915, Satie met Jean Cocteau, the poet and impresario who seemed to know everyone in Parisian artistic circles. Cocteau had an idea: a ballet for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, the most innovative dance company in the world.

The result was Parade, which premiered in 1917. Satie wrote the music. Pablo Picasso designed the sets and costumes, including giant Cubist constructions that made the dancers look like walking buildings. Léonide Massine created the choreography. The scenario, by Cocteau, depicted circus performers trying to lure an audience into their show—a parade, in the French sense of a sideshow advertisement.

Satie's score was revolutionary. He incorporated the sounds of typewriters, sirens, airplane propellers, and what the program called "ear-disturbing noises." This was years before musique concrète—the movement that would use recorded sounds as compositional material—yet Satie was already there, blurring the line between music and noise.

The audience rioted. Critics were outraged. One called the creators "Boches"—an insult meaning Germans, explosive in wartime France. Satie responded by sending the critic a postcard calling him an "asshole." The critic sued for libel. Satie was convicted and sentenced to eight days in prison, though the sentence was suspended.

But Parade became legendary. It showed that ballet could be modern, urban, ironic. Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet who wrote the program notes, used a new word to describe it: "surrealist." It was the first time that term appeared in print.

Absurd Titles, Serious Music

Around this time, Satie began giving his compositions deliberately ridiculous titles. "Véritables Préludes flasques (pour un chien)"—True Flabby Preludes (for a Dog). "Croquis et agaceries d'un gros bonhomme en bois"—Sketches and Exasperations of a Big Wooden Man. "Sonatine bureaucratique"—Bureaucratic Sonatina. "Embryons desséchés"—Desiccated Embryos.

What was he doing?

Partly, it was a joke—Satie had a savage wit and loved deflating pretension. Partly, it was self-protection: if critics mocked his music, he could claim he was mocking it first. But partly, it was serious. By giving absurd names to carefully crafted compositions, he was asking: what is the relationship between a title and the music it labels? Does calling something a "Flabby Prelude" change how you hear it?

The music itself remained beautiful and strange. The Bureaucratic Sonatina, for instance, takes Muzio Clementi's Sonatina in C Major—a piece that every piano student learns—and rewrites it with Satie's own harmonies, turning something familiar into something uncanny. The joke is in the title and concept. The craft is in the notes.

Socrate: The Masterpiece Almost No One Knows

In 1919, Satie completed what many consider his greatest work: Socrate, a "symphonic drama" for soprano voices and chamber orchestra. The text comes from Plato's dialogues, translated into French—specifically, passages about the life and death of Socrates.

It is unlike anything else in his catalog. Where most of his pieces are brief piano miniatures, this is a substantial work lasting nearly thirty minutes. Where his cabaret songs are witty and his ballet scores playful, this is utterly solemn. The music is sparse, almost motionless. Long melodic lines float over simple, sustained harmonies. There are no climaxes, no drama in the conventional sense. Even the death of Socrates—one of the most famous scenes in all of philosophy—is rendered with calm restraint.

Satie called it "white and pure like antiquity." It sounds like Gregorian chant reimagined for the twentieth century, which is perhaps what he'd been working toward his entire life—back to those lessons with Vinot, those hours in Notre-Dame, those medieval manuscripts in the National Library.

The Final Act

Satie's last major works were two ballets from 1924: Mercure and Relâche. Mercure, choreographed by Massine with sets by Picasso, was another succès de scandale—André Breton and the Surrealists disrupted the premiere. Relâche (the word means "no performance"—what theaters display when they're closed) was created with the filmmaker René Clair, whose short film Entr'acte was shown during the intermission. The ballet featured a car chase, a cannon fired at the audience, and a finale where the dancers drove onstage in a hearse.

These were Satie's last flourishes. His health was failing. The decades of heavy drinking had destroyed his liver. In 1925, at fifty-nine, he was admitted to a hospital.

He died on July 1, 1925, of cirrhosis.

Only then did friends finally enter the room in Arcueil. They found the squalor, the dust, the hoarded umbrellas. Behind one of the two stacked pianos, they discovered unknown compositions. Among the piles of papers were letters from Debussy, notes from admirers, and artifacts of a hidden life.

The Influence That Keeps Spreading

Satie's reputation has only grown since his death. During his lifetime, he influenced Ravel, Debussy, and the composers of Les Six, guiding French music away from the lush excesses of post-Wagnerian Impressionism toward something leaner and more ironic. But his influence didn't stop there.

John Cage discovered Satie in the 1940s and championed him for decades. Cage saw Satie as a radical who had questioned the very foundations of what music should be—not just how it should sound, but how long it should last, what it should be called, how seriously it should take itself. Cage's famous 4'33"—in which a performer sits at a piano and plays nothing for four minutes and thirty-three seconds—is unthinkable without Satie's example.

Brian Eno cited Satie as a primary influence on ambient music. The Gymnopédies are essentially ambient music before the term existed: background sound that creates atmosphere rather than demanding attention. Eno's Music for Airports follows the same principle, though Eno arrived at it through a different route.

John Adams, the American minimalist, has spoken of Satie's influence. So have countless film composers—the Gymnopédies have appeared in dozens of movies and television shows, their floating melancholy perfectly suited to moments of reflection or loss.

What Satie understood, perhaps before anyone else, was that music doesn't have to prove anything. It doesn't have to build to a climax. It doesn't have to demonstrate the composer's virtuosity. It can simply exist, creating a space for the listener to inhabit. That idea—radical in 1888, accepted now—is Satie's gift to us.

The Man Behind the Masks

Who was Erik Satie, really? The long-haired bohemian? The quasi-priest founding a church of one? The velvet gentleman in seven identical suits? The dignified bureaucrat with the bowler hat and umbrella?

All of them, probably, and none of them. The personas were costumes, and Satie kept changing costumes because the alternative—being simply himself—may have been unbearable. He lived alone for decades. He let no one into his home. He drank heavily. He pushed away friends when they got too close.

But he also wrote music of extraordinary tenderness. The Gymnopédies are gentle, almost heartbreaking. Socrate approaches death with a calm acceptance that suggests hard-won wisdom. Even the absurd titles seem like the jokes of someone who has seen through life's pretensions and decided to laugh rather than cry.

After Suzanne Valadon left him, Satie wrote that he was filled with "icy loneliness" and "emptiness." Maybe the music was his way of making that emptiness beautiful. Maybe the costumes were his way of keeping the world at a distance so he could survive. We can't know. He never let anyone close enough to find out.

What we have is the music. And a century later, it still sounds like nothing else.