The Slipped Disc daily comfort zone (155): Visionary, lunatic, both?

John Borstlap says:

Once, the pianist of this recording suffered serious insomnia over a long period. He bought a ‘medical CD’ with ‘calming music’ to fall asleep and found fragments of his own recordings of Satie on the disc. It seems to have helped considerably. (This is not a joke…. it is a story that went around in the Dutch new music scene where he was very popular.)

But Vexations was, of course, a joke, a childish attempt to ridicule classical piano music.

Satie was an ‘anti-composer’, a decomposer if you like. His early pieces are nice, and his Gymnopedies are beautiful – they are, in fact, a Fauré ‘dénudé’. He gave some valuable advice to his friend Debussy, like: have a look at the technique of the impressionists with their small brush strokes and atmosphere (of course he had not enough talent to follow his own advice). He hated pathos and the blablah surrounding classical music and advised non-music instead, like his ‘musique d’ameublement’ which was the first version of muzak (‘Don’t listen to it!’ he yelled at the premiere). His best work is his oratorio ‘Socrate’ with its neoclassical ‘whiteness’.

He wanted to be an original at all costs, to compensate for his very limited talents (artists who are conscious of their lack of talent always gamble on originality, which is easier). After the premiere of Debussy’s ‘Pelléas et Mélisande’ he exclaimed: ‘I have to find something else or I’ll be lost!’ His music for Diaghilev’s ballet ‘Parade’ (1917) which is, like the ballet, entirely nonsensical, caused the rupture with Debussy who – ill and exhausted – had attended the premiere and had said he thought it was merely a joke, not to be taken seriously. This wounded Satie very much, he wrote an angry letter, and told his friends: ‘Why doesn’t he spare me a little place in his shadow?’

In the end, Satie prefigured the emptiness and lack of invention and musical imagination, in short: the minimalism (in all senses) that became such a successful trend later-on in the age – because it did not require any serious talents.