Erik Satie, a life in solitude

Satie seems to me as a man who lives his life with his head down. Not so much shy; able at times to join the general chaos if wearing his same artful mask. Rather, Satie is absorbed, casually and utterly absorbed in his own thoughts in his one-room, unheated Arcueil flat, where no one ever goes but Satie. Maybe this state of being is not so uncommon among the populous at large, people living in similar kinds of solitude, maybe (like Satie!) with a cat, and that may help account for why Satie’s music lives on today, a century later. It is music of discreet charm and sly playfulness, and sometimes, oui, there is reverie, like a spoonful of sadness in your cup of coffee. Satie’s many tiny masterpieces – Oh, the Gymnopedies! the Gnossiennes! – bring the head down in solitude. I would even liken his music to crouching at a bush to watch a butterfly.

And Satie’s solitude went deeper than the mere fact of him living alone in his second-floor suburban flat in a corner house known as Les Quartre Cheminées where he spent his final twenty-seven years. After his death, all that was found in Satie’s flat was a hammock, a desk covered with papers, a candle, several old umbrellas, velvet suits and derby hats, notebooks, thirty years of notebooks, and the tin-can piano with pedals that worked by string. But hadn’t Satie said he had two pianos in his room, both white, stacked on top of one another? He did say that, oui, in the same way he gave his many tiny masterpieces titles that artfully masked, rather than revealed, their true intent. Which was solitude’s doing. Satie’s solitude is filled with barren space. “Wander about yourself,” he invited us. “I fill up the awkward silence.” I cringe when I hear Satie’s music described as simple, as if it does not contain enough notes, or is not sufficiently difficult to play. Its simplicity is its depth. As paradoxes go, that’s a favorite.

Satie’s music is simple as Toulouse-Lautrec’s lithographs are simple. The self-conscious effort to be artful appears missing in each. That Erik and Henri were friends will surprise no one who encounters the many tiny masterpieces of both artists. But where Toulouse-Lautrec looked for his subject in the audacious gaite bursting forth from beneath the red sails of the Moulin Rouge, Satie looked down at the keys of a tin-can piano in his dingy, bare-walled bohemian flat, his “cabinet,” and with technique severely limited brought forth the fine thoughts of his solitude, as if musing alone over coffee on the terrasse of Le Chat Noir, where Satie made his meager living as café pianist. As those who provoked his ire discovered, Satie could also sometimes muse nasty and brittle, to no less effect only stingingly satiric, like a drop of absinthe in your cup.

Satie wrote his many tiny masterpieces in La Belle Epoque, the beautiful era before the Great War turned Paris into a ferment of decay and destroyed everything beautiful. In his final years, Satie lived to see la belle return. “To place one’s trust in the young is something that is always absolutely essential,” said the wizened guru of Les Six.