Last night I watched ‘Memoires d’un Amnesique’, a one-man show about Erik Satie, performed by Alex Metcalfe at the Grove Theatre Eastbourne.
Metcalfe, in a formal suit and black hat, played Satie’s music while a silent film was being screened, starring Metcalfe and directed by Keith Lovegrove, using Satie’s words. There were some very strange images in the film (a wasp buzzing about the mouth of a live crab); with the weird monologue the whole thing felt very surrealist. But the whole thing was a fascinating experience and perfectly produced. I’m not sure I know a lot more about Satie now that I did then, and I’m not sure that ‘enjoyment’ would be a description of how I felt, but it was thought-provoking and challenging and different and I am sure that I shall remember it for a long time. This is the sort of thing that little theatres like the Grove should be producing.
Satie: a short biography
Satie was born in 1866 in Honfleur, Normandy, France. At the age of 22 he was admitted to the prestigious Conservatoire de Musique in Paris. There were a number of amusingly dismissive reports: he was apparently a ‘lazy’ and ‘insignificant’ pupil. He was expelled in 1882 but was still disregarded and he joined the army to escape the Conservatoire in 1886. He hated the army and deliberately caught bronchitis, being invalided out in 1887 to become the resident pianist at the Chat Noir nightclub in Montmartre. Now he dressed and behaved as a Bohemian (one feels his life was a series of poses). He was interested in religion and arcana (his friends called him ‘esoterik’) and composed for the Ordre de la Rose-Croix Catholique du Temple et du Graal, the mystic sect of rosicrucian novelist Joséphin Péladan. He changed nightclubs and met Debussy.
After a five month love affair in 1893 with the model and painter Suzanne Valadon, Satie changed his image to the ‘Velvet Gentleman’, always wearing one of seven identical velvet suits. At this stage he seems to have given up his religious interests. He moved to a flat in the suburbs (to which no-one was ever admitted) where he lived for the rest of his life and joined the socialist and later the communist political party (although now he wore the suit and bowler hat of the bourgeois). He worked as a cabaret pianist, writing music much of which he later destroyed.
Another artistic change in direction came after he heard Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande in 1902. Satie went back to school (the Schola Cantorum Paris's second main music academy) in 1905 and studied there until 1912. From about 1911, Ravel and Debussy started playing Satie compositions and he became regarded as a pioneer of a musical revolution.
He died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 59 in 1925.
Erik Satie in 1909
Metcalfe, in a formal suit and black hat, played Satie’s music while a silent film was being screened, starring Metcalfe and directed by Keith Lovegrove, using Satie’s words. There were some very strange images in the film (a wasp buzzing about the mouth of a live crab); with the weird monologue the whole thing felt very surrealist. But the whole thing was a fascinating experience and perfectly produced. I’m not sure I know a lot more about Satie now that I did then, and I’m not sure that ‘enjoyment’ would be a description of how I felt, but it was thought-provoking and challenging and different and I am sure that I shall remember it for a long time. This is the sort of thing that little theatres like the Grove should be producing.
Satie: a short biography
Satie was born in 1866 in Honfleur, Normandy, France. At the age of 22 he was admitted to the prestigious Conservatoire de Musique in Paris. There were a number of amusingly dismissive reports: he was apparently a ‘lazy’ and ‘insignificant’ pupil. He was expelled in 1882 but was still disregarded and he joined the army to escape the Conservatoire in 1886. He hated the army and deliberately caught bronchitis, being invalided out in 1887 to become the resident pianist at the Chat Noir nightclub in Montmartre. Now he dressed and behaved as a Bohemian (one feels his life was a series of poses). He was interested in religion and arcana (his friends called him ‘esoterik’) and composed for the Ordre de la Rose-Croix Catholique du Temple et du Graal, the mystic sect of rosicrucian novelist Joséphin Péladan. He changed nightclubs and met Debussy.
After a five month love affair in 1893 with the model and painter Suzanne Valadon, Satie changed his image to the ‘Velvet Gentleman’, always wearing one of seven identical velvet suits. At this stage he seems to have given up his religious interests. He moved to a flat in the suburbs (to which no-one was ever admitted) where he lived for the rest of his life and joined the socialist and later the communist political party (although now he wore the suit and bowler hat of the bourgeois). He worked as a cabaret pianist, writing music much of which he later destroyed.
Another artistic change in direction came after he heard Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande in 1902. Satie went back to school (the Schola Cantorum Paris's second main music academy) in 1905 and studied there until 1912. From about 1911, Ravel and Debussy started playing Satie compositions and he became regarded as a pioneer of a musical revolution.
He died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 59 in 1925.
Satie's music
Satie's music is very different. Most people know and love the simplicity of his three Gymnopédies (1888) and his Gnossiennes (1889 onwards). They're written for piano and they are simple plodding melodies with complex and original harmonies. His Vexations (1893) has 152 notes which are to be played 840 times in succession. He also wrote a lot of critical work and nonsense, of which his Memoires d'un Amnesque is a collection.
Comments
Post a Comment