Satie and "Socrate"

The Zany of Modern Music Has, in His Latest Work, Revealed Himself as a Grave and Serene Poet

PAUL ROSENFELD

SOCRATE has made grave the figure of Erik Satie. The tiny symphonic drama, based on fragments of the Symposium, the Phaedrus, and the Phaedo, has given it the weight and dignity of those of the composers who have felt life simply and profoundly. Before the pure, naked score was published, one conceived the good man first the clown of music. The tragedian one saw in him second always. Debussy, Rimsky, Strauss, Ravel; all the musicians of the time who were intrigued by the mysterious presence of the other senses, sight, smell, touch, as overtones in the sense of hearing, and who dreamt of stirring all five senses at once, of composing perfumes, lights, textures—these appeared the serious performers. Satie, like the sly zanies of the circus, waltzed in at the conclusion of the acrobatics to burlesque them. Hampering impeding magnificence, ineffectual beauty and colour misplaced, he came to humiliate the excessive pride and complacency of the exhibitors by reminding the audience and them of the complete indifference of the universe to such human accomplishments and prowesses. He, too, in the region of music, lost his brilliant trousers while parading, and stumbled over his own feet just as he had succeeded in getting all six oranges revolving in air.

The Critic of Impressionism

INDEED, so delicious and biting was the clown-play that it is possible Satie has already, or will shortly, put a close for the present to impressionistic music-making. The partisans of absolute music found in him a champion, perhaps not of the sort they preferred, but one very serviceable, nevertheless. The bladder he wielded struck double blows always, one to the theory of program-music, the other to the practice of its votaries. The first he made ridiculous by forcing it to logically illogical extremes. There can be no doubt, of course, of the fact that tones, phrases, timbres, excite visual images in composer and auditor. And still, it is equally sure that the images evoked are by no means inevitably identical. The verdict of the lady who held that Beethoven's pianosonata opus 27 No. 2 is called the Moonlight for the reason that the second movement resembles so much the shine of the moon on Lake Lucerne, amply instances the rule. Music is too idealistic a thing to permit itself to be bound to concrete references. You cannot have a white horse in music. It was precisely the white horse that Satie mischievously pretended to make his music represent. In a series of burlesque "program" compositions for piano, Descriptions automatiques, Embryons desseches, Croquis et agoceries d'un gros Bonhomme en bois, and others, he joined some sophisticatedly banal and childishly absurd music to very detailed and concrete arguments. Several of these parodies, Sur un vaisseau, Tyrolienne turque, Espahaha, pretend to material much in favour with Debussy, Ravel and Albeniz. In all, the program is made ludicrous through the perfect meaninglessness of the music. One is reminded continuously of the powerlessness of music to be concretely narrated and depicted. The idiotic figures of Embryons desseches are supposed to describe minutely the habits of sea-slugs and other crustaceans. A sort of hunting theme of the kind that is given hapless infants to play in the first year of their pianism, is supposed to describe the manner in which the podophthalma pursues its prey. The mock-nautical figure of Sur un vaisseau has attached to it words that inform the performer that the music is to represent, among other things, a breath of wind, maritime melancholy, the captain's remark "Très beau voyage", a distant landscape, waves, and the landing stage. The allegedly "Spanish" music of Espahaha illustrates La belle Carmen et le peluquero, the Puerto Maillot, the good Rodriguez, the remark, "Isn't that the Alcade?", the Plaza Clichy, and the rue de Madrid.

Besides these particular slaps at the theory of program music, Satie, in all his pieces, mocks the descriptive, definitive music with burlesque and impossible directions to the performer. Even in his delicate lissome dances, Gnossiennes, Gymnopedies, as he entitles them, one reads continually suggestions such as "Arm yourself with clairvoyance", "Counsel yourself meticulously", "Carry this sound further off", and "Open the head". Otherwheres, one reads "In the manner of a nightingale with a toothache", "Epotus, Corpulentus, Caeremoniosus, Paedagogus", "from the end of the eyes and withheld in advance", "a little bloodily", "without blushing a finger", "on yellow plush", "dry as a cucu". The Prelude de la porte heroïque du del, that wicked amusing parody on the prelude to The Blessed Damozel by Debussy, is interlined with directions to the performer to play, "superstitiously, with deference, very sincerely silent, without pride, and obligingly". One is reminded a little of some of Percy Grainger's directions. The chief difference between the two types, however, is that these of the Frenchman are funny without being vulgar.

But if Satie hit the theory of program music smartly in his "tone-poems" he smote the impressionistic musicians even more stingingly. For if his parodies adumbrate the cardinal disability of music, they declare very plainly the fact that the program had helped those who used it to make things fairly easy for themselves. The suggestions of titles and arguments had made it a simple matter to obtain effects with music without really making the music do all the work. Strauss, for example, had come to rely more and more upon elaborate programs to give point to a good deal of uninteresting music, and make foolish titterings of the violin appear to say something profound about the capriciousness of women. Debussy, too, had suggested by means of his jewelled and precious titles moods which the music either did not need or did not justify. And as we play over the marvellously silly music of Espahaha and Sur un vaisseau, and contrast music with the mock-local colour of the interpellations, Puerta Maillot, Plaza Clichy, it comes to us that we have been lending our imaginations a little too cheaply to the impressionists. At the command of titles and programs, we have set an elaborate stage in our minds for the musician; seen some sort of literesque Spain when he has spoken La soiree dans Granada or Iberia or Rhapsodie Espaghol; some sort of romantic sea when the word was Un barque sur l' ocían or La mer; and been a trifle overready to shed our own glamour over the strictly musical performance. No matter what the intrinsic value of the music of Debussy and Ravel and Albeniz is, and we do not for a moment question its greatness, it still seems to us that the attribution of romantic titles to compositions is an unfairness committed to the auditor. A sort of violence is done his imagination. One should be permitted to hear music as music, and create one's own images, if images one must create. Titles like those which Debussy strewed about so freely constitute a sort of assault, even when they do not assist the composer to gain illegitimate effects with his work. And one turns with relief to the humorous, modest, unpretending names, Trois morceaux en forme de poire, Airs a faire fuir, Veritables preludes flasques, Danses de travers, which Satie has given to some of his most diaphanous compositions. These little jokes, at least, make no pretense. They leave one be in one's voyage through the musical pages marked by them. And the voyage often leads one to the very soul of music.

The Delicate Wit of the Clown

FOR Satie, like his brethren of the circus, is a good acrobat. The clowning and parody of the zanies oftentimes conceal an art as delicate as that of the legitimate performers. And if Satie's talent is not a very rich or very powerful one, it is nevertheless exquisite and original and real. Even in his broadest pieces of fun, his horsiest horsing of Debussy and Ravel, a real musical wit points the satire. Debussy's complacent tristezza, his softly wailing arpeggios and consecutive minor triads, are very slyly taken off, reduced with no little artfulness to a comic banality; and though the song on the words beginning "Tell me, Daphinio, which tree is it whose fruits become the tears of birds?" burlesques the lachrimosity, yearnfulness, and pleasure-painfulness of Ravel's lyrics, a very limpid and gossamerlike music accompanies the fun. And Satie's less ironic work, his delicate, curiously simple, whole-tone-scale pieces for piano, are both poetic and interesting in form. They have the charm of things born in a medium. As one traces their gentle arabesques over the keys, one hears again the piano. One is really, once again, "playing the piano" for the sake of the play. His little suite Trois morceaux en forme de poire even makes four-hand music a delight both for auditor and performer, so pianistically and subtly are the movements written. It is particularly in his excessively simple and yet wavering gliding melodic lines that he has been most successful. Less fecund in harmonic and colouristic invention than some of his contemporaries, Satie has nevertheless created for himself a personal idiom through his inventions in melodic form. He is very adept in contrasting set periods and phrases of unequal lengths and different characters, and so obtaining curious and intriguing balances, pricking patterns. Satie has the gift of being utterly simple, tender and direct. The second of the three Véritables preludes flasques catches the attentiveness and sadness of the waiting dog with delicious sureness, and with an utter simplicity of means. The little piece is no more than a two-voice invention. One must go to Chopin's mazurkas to find piano music as nude in line, as simple in means and yet as graceful and charming and satisfying as Satie's nocturnes, his Morceaux and Gnossiennes. And the Frenchman is devoid of the cloying sensuality of the Pole. A sort of white and agreeably monotonous beauty pulses through these utterly unpretentious things, and calls to mind the impersonality and slowness and sleepiness of certain oriental dancers. Only, here one sees in the mind, if a momentary relapse be permitted one, a severe Greek temple-yard, and the athletic limbs of Dorian maidens.

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Satie's Limitation

THAT one perceived first, however, the more destructive side of Satie's criticism of musical impressionism, the clowning; and second, always the more constructive, is due chiefly to the fact that although the good man's talent was always a very real and exquisite one, it is only recently, roundly since Satie's fiftieth birthday, that it has attained maturity. It was within very sharply defined limits that he was able to work. Although he was younger than Debussy by very few years, and although he taught the Parisian magician much, the use of consecutive ninths, the use of certain church modes, and other refinements; weakness of musical science and perhaps, too, a lack of vitality prevented him, among other things^. from developing himself in any large style. He was always most successful in the smaller forms; his invention was far too thin to permit him to essay the long curve, the complicated pattern. There are even pure and limpid sketches of his that make us merely to feel that the composer deserves the name of artist chiefly because he knows when to stop; another few bars, and we might commence to grow a little weary.

A course of study at the Schola Cantorum, taken in 1911, may of course have helped Satie, though the only immediate result, a prelude, chorale and fugue, entitled Aperques desagreables, scarcely suggests the author's admiration for the post-Franckian discipline. However, not until the time when, at the conclusion of the war, he composed Parade and Socrate, did Satie's talent commence to assume virile proportions. It is probable that the unreadiness of the time for his aesthetic hampered him quite as much as did his want of development in technique, and made him a better wit than poet. Impressionism had to run its course; and one classically minded like Satie, convinced that music was principally an interplay of sonorities, an agreement, must have been lost and unsure of himself in a day which found in Debussy its proper voice. But, during the years of the war, while the composer of Pelleas lay dying, and Ravel was driving an ambulance at Verdun, the world was better prepared for Satie. Cocteau constituted himself the prophet of the man he insisted on dubbing "le bon maitre d'Arceuil", and probably persuaded him to write the ballet Parade. The Group of Six, encouraged largely by Satie's aesthetic, brought him further understanding. The Princesse Edmond de Polignac ordered Socrate of him. And so his power, among men and in a time prepared for him, produced its brightest flower.

For Socrate is both the logical continuation of what Satie has been about in his music during the thirty years of his career, and the most massive of the forms he has created. Under the star of the one aesthetic he has been following all his life, he has managed to communicate a big feeling of life, a deep sense of beauty. There is no attempt at description, no attempt at fixing local colour, in his setting of the lines from Cousin's elegant Plato. In all three fragments he has left it to the words to realize the pathos and beauty of the incidents immortalized, and striven only to sustain with infinite reserve the emotion of the poet himself.

Where Debussy would have outdone himself in depicting the tranquil scene of the cold brook and plane-tree shade that opened itself to the senses of Socrates and Phaedrus during their unforgettable stroll without the walls of Athens, Satie has modestly contented himself with supplying a deeply tender, swinging piano accompaniment that merely intensifies the effect of the language itself, and does no more. The verbal. portrait of Socrates sketched by the drunken Alcibiades during the banquet is supported by a lightly moving rhythm in two-fo"ur time, broken at rare in^ervalsT by some rich brusque chords. The music of the third fragment, the narration of the incidents of the death of Socrates, does no more, with its piercing and simple and sad tones, than help communicate the grief of the beloved disciple over the end of the most sage and just of men.

The Spirit of Plato

BUT very rarely since the hour of La Mort de Melisande, has music more deeply touching and satisfying been produced. The deep pure sense of life that guided Satie in the selection of the three fragments for setting, remained with him when he penned his music. Those rhythms and chords and melodic figures that stir us at the very root of us stem from a clear simple humble feeling of what the beauty and tragedy of human life really is, what the grandeurs and sweetnesses of character really are. They interpret Plato for us indeed. They place us, without-grandiloquence or sentimentality, in some place a little above, a little removed, from the flow of life; and even in the broken contemptible world of after-war, make us to feel again the love of the ascesis, serenity, reserve, selflessness, undogmatism, playfulness, which the old Greek knew alone made good again the cruelties of human society. Indeed, one must go to Moussorgsky to find a simpler and truer statement of one who has eaten his bread in tears and knows the sad beauty of human life on this planet. Only, in the fine nude designs of Socrate one feels not so much the product of religious feeling, as of the wisdom of the philosophers, born again in the modesty and sanity and humbleness of a musician. In Satie, the Latin genius has found not the least lovely of its many marvellous rebirths.

So it is no longer the clown of music we perceive first when we think of Erik Satie. Life does strange and wondrous things to men at times. It takes from them for long years some faith and sweetness with which they came into the world; lets them wander disinherited of the strongest powers of their being; then suddenly brings them back again that which it stole, and grants them full play and enjoyment of their souls. So, in a way, has it done with Satie. The old diablerie, the old wit and spiritual bohemianism is still in him. But another side of him has waxed serenely and beautifully. So, when we gaze with the mind's eye out toward Arceuil, we see something that harmonizes entirely with Cocteau's epithet of "bon maitre". We see a grave and deeply-living musician. And we go richer for knowing that the world contains one more poet.