In the painting "La Bohème. The Poet of Montmartre" (1891), the artist Ramon Casas depicted his friend Erik Satie / Wikimedia

An ashen landscape with a fake mill of the Moulin de la Galette restaurant, against its background a lanky young man – in glasses, a top hat, dark trousers, hands in the pockets of a long frock coat – peers into the foggy morning. This is the Spanish modernist artist Ramon Casas who captured the image of the Parisian bohemia of the Fin de siecle, the painting is called "Bohemian. The Poet of Montmartre" (1891). In it is an acquaintance of the artist, his name is Erik Satie, he is 25, he plays his works on the piano first in the cabaret Le Chat Noir ("Black Cat"), famous throughout Paris, and then in Auberge du clou.

Mary E. Davis. Eric Satie. Publishing house "Ad Marginem", 2017

His modest earnings barely allow him to make ends meet, but he spends all day and night in the center of the informal cultural life of the capital among artists, actors, musicians, writers, and people of art. Here his very first ambitious work, "Gymnopedie", was born, immediately after the performance of which the local public dubbed him "the gymnopedist of Montmartre". And a year after writing the above-mentioned picture, Satie met Claude Debussy in a cabaret, who was a little older, but was already a famous composer. It was Debussy who helped his new friend enter the official musical circles of Paris. Until the end of their lives, these people were connected by a close friendship, which is surprising, given the complex character of Satie. An explosive temperament, a tendency to poisonous irony, eccentricity and isolation became attributes of his signature style, but also served as the source of many troubles.

Despite some successes and the performance of "Gymnopedie" in Parisian concert halls, the composer's name remained not very well known. Another French composer and conductor, Maurice Ravel, became the conductor of Satie's music to a wider audience, organizing a cycle of his concerts in 1911. And then there were avant-garde experiments, friendship with the Dadaists, the famous ballet "Parade", the premiere of which caused so much noise at the end of the First World War and in the preparation of which the talents of Picasso, Cocteau, Diaghilev, Apollinaire and Satie came together. At the same time, the composer continued to turn to classicist productions (for example, the drama "Socrates", which had a strong influence on Igor Stravinsky).

Admirers

Among Satie's ardent admirers were John Cage and the French New Wave star director Louis Malle, who used the Gnossienne in one of his best films, Will-o'-the-Wisp, based on the novel of the same name by Pierre Drieu la Rochelle.

Many research articles and books are devoted to the life and work of Satie. But their corpus in Russian is very limited and certainly does not correspond to the scale of the composer's personality. The publishing house "Ad Marginem" decided to fill this unfortunate gap, continuing the series "Critical Biographies" with a translation of Mary E. Davis's book about Erik Satie. This small, 170-page, aesthetically pleasing illustrated edition seems to be fully consistent with Satie's own minimalist preferences. Relationships with friends and colleagues, the circumstances of acquaintances, hobbies and searches of the composer in different periods of his life from the occult-mystical to the Dadaist are described in great detail, but casually. The gaze slides from Satie's native Norman town of Honfleur to the Paris Conservatory, from cabaret to cabaret in Montmartre. The composer's personality is revealed in its entirety: he is not only a musician, but also a master of words, the author of witty notes, memoirs and pamphlets, and the possessor of an exceptional sense of style. Living in a small room in a Parisian suburb, he would take long walks every day to the very center of the city. He would hold an umbrella in his hands and a hammer in his pocket in case of an attack by apaches somewhere in the working-class district through which he passed. Along the way, he would visit a café, where over a cup of coffee or an aperitif he would write down ideas for new works that came to mind, and then continue his walk through the city. Friends said that perhaps these endless walks were the source of the composer's musical rhythm. And this means that the heart of Paris itself at the beginning of the 20th century will forever beat in the music of Eric Satie.

Mary E. Davis. Eric Satie. Publishing house "Ad Marginem", 2017

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