SATIE, KOECHLIN AND THE BALLET ‘USPUD’

Abstract

ERIK SATIE AND CHARLES KOECHLIN were almost exact contemporaries, Satie born in Honfleur on 17 May 1866 of mixed French and Scottish parentage, Koechlin in Paris on 27 November 1867 into a family of Alsatian anncestry. According to Koechlin they first met at the publishers Baudoux & Cie around 1892,' when Satie, aged 26, was in his Rose-Croix period and living in Bohemian poverty in Montmartre and the more orthodox Koechlin, aged 25, was about to enter Massenet's composition class at the Paris Conservatoire. The year 1892 also saw the composition of Satie's extraordinary ballet Uspud, which Koechlin copied out in 1927 as a tribute to a friendship that had lasted unmarred until Satie's death in 1925. Satie and Koechlin were united in their uncompromising attitudes to music and their relative isolation as composers. Both sought to preserve their independence at all costs, free from concessions and hypocrisy, even if it led to material hardship. Both observed strict self-discipline in their art as a necessary counter to their cherished freedom of expression, and both deliberately clung to a childlike naivety that allowed their music to stay young as they grew old. In his perceptive article in La Revue musicale in 1924 Koechlin praised Satie's 'instinctive and absolute independence', recalling Kipling's 'cat that walked by himself' and all that the feline parallel entailed in terms of 'supple elegance, sobriety of action, precise paw-thrusts in malicious play and the discreet sensibility that the common herd persist in misunderstanding'.2 And after the scandalous ballets Mercure and Rela^che of 1924, when most critics and even earlier enthusiasts had deserted Satie, Koechlin remained constant in his admiration, as can be seen from the lecture he delivered at the Sorbonne on 13 December 1927.3 However much others thought that Satie had perpetrated a betrayal of his art at the end of his life, Koechlin still supported the Satie he had known, who had preserved his 'moral dignity' to the end and was the living embodiment of the proverb that many a true word is spoken in jest. So Koechlin in 1927 reiterated his belief in the classicism of Satie's Socrate and predicted that Satie's music had a future of its own as well as great significance for the future of music. In the 1940s Koechlin's opinions still remained unchanged. He told the composer Francois Berthet in 1943 that 'Socrate will survive much longer than [Honegger's] King David or [Poulenc's ballet] Les Animaux modees'.4 'Quality ' Charles Koechlin, 'Erik Satie', La Revue musirale, v/S (1924), 194. The meeting may have taken place rather later than Koechlin remembered, perhaps in 1895-6. His first works to be issued by Baudoux were the Rondels to poems of Theodore de Banville (1890-94), published in 1896 (P1. No. 225). As the plate-numbers show, this was only a few weeks after Baudoux's publication of Satie's three act-preludes for Josephin Peladan's 'Pastorale Kaldeenne' Le Fils des itoiles, composed in 1892 (P1. No. 220). 2 'Satie', p. 193. 3 'Conference sur Satie et l'Ecole d'Arcueil', unpublished MS, 40 pp., in the collection of Madeleine Li-Koechlin, L'Hay-les-Roses. All material from this source is quoted by kind permission. I am indebted to Mme Li-Koechlin for freely providing me with original source material for this article. Letter of 9 May 1943 (Li-Koechlin collection).