The Musical Activities of Alfred Satie and Eugénie Satie-Barnetche, and Their Effect on the Career of Erik Satie

Abstract

Erik Satie is now thought of as a precursor and a man of ideas whose unconventional career took its direction from his continual rethinking of every aspect of contemporary music and aesthetics, largely as a reaction to nineteenth-century tradition and excesses. Eugénie Satie-Barnetche, whose ultimate aim for her stepson was a brilliant career as a pianist with an official seal of approval from the Paris Conservatoire, provided just one example of such a tradition, whilst her husband Alfred, the gifted and impulsive dilettante and a Romantic at heart, might well be seen as another. In fact, it is easy to conclude that Eugénie's academic approach helped to turn Satie into a left-wing revolutionary, whilst the uninspired salon music of both his parents made him determined to become a serious professional composer. But that is by no means the whole story, for Erik was very close to his father, even if he disliked his stepmother, and Alfred's love of the music-hall (whose songs he both wrote and published) was enthusiastically inherited by his son. Even after Satie abandoned his work as a cabaret pianist around 1911, the influence of this popular medium still ran as a thread through his later compositions. Similarly, he was often forced to resort to his stepmother's profession of piano teaching to make ends meet, and in the 1920s he delighted in moving in the exalted social circles that his aspiring stepmother had only dreamt about as she mounted her bourgeois musical soirées in the Boulevard de Magenta in the 1880s. Like Alfred and Eugénie, Satie also spent much of his composing time with short piano pieces that he hoped would reach a popular market, and dance music runs as another thread throughout his career, just as it did in their own compositions. Above all, Satie's parents provided domestic surroundings in which music played a substantial part, with the emphasis on the present rather than the past, though it remained for Satie alone to take music into the future.