The Satie problem.

Posted by Ahmed Anzaldúa on May 7, 2010. 0 comments

The music of Erik Satie presents some very difficult problems of interpretation, especially when you consider that it wasn’t long ago that he was considered a minor composer, an eccentric that really didn’t know what he was doing. There are two reasons why Satie is so difficult to play right: the very disparate extremes of character in his compositions and the amount of trust that Satie places in the hands of his interpreters. In other words, he does all kinds of crazy things, constantly changes everything around and doesn’t give you a single clue to what’s going on.

His music can evoke both classical antiquity and a smoke-filled dingy café. It can seduce the listener at one moment and thumb its nose at him in the next. He writes delicate, refined, Schubert-like melodies that were intended for the cabaret, to be belted out by a booze-soaked, raspy-voiced singer while, for a solemn, grand-scale work like Les fils des étoiles, he fills the dissonant score with eccentric comments and a huge dedication, poking fun at the seriousness of the event.

The tempi and articulation are up in the air most of the time and the music is completely devoid of expression marks, time signatures, bar lines or tempo markings. In place of standardized musical terminology you are faced with wacky comments, such as like a nightingale with a toothache or it’s finally going to end! (that in a piece which is barely two minutes long.)

I find that the biggest problem with Satie, much like eighteenth-century French harpsichord music, is in the characterization. The pieces are increasingly fragmentary, and one has to learn to give each passage its proper character (even if it means pondering long and hard on what a “nightingale with a toothache” sounds like) without falling into the trap of bringing it all together by playing everything in the same tempo. Another problem here is that most pianists approach Satie’s music with preconceived notions about his music, failing to take into account the wildly differing changes of style from one piece to the next. The two most common approaches are “this music is too boring for an audience, let’s speed it up!” –Aldo Ciccolini is a good example of this done well– and “this music is so pretty, let’s make it minimalist” –Reinbert DeLeeuw does this in a good way, with his six-minute Gymnopedies.

The fact is that a good Satie interpretation is a very delicate thing, there’s much more to it than just picking a tempo and trying to make pretty noise. It’s all about the little nuances in the phrasing, timing and timbre. Things you pick up by knowing the composer’s life and work in-depth and, most of all, by really loving the music and being truly convinced that what you are playing is a great work of art. But be careful, there is still a trap there. By giving the music the importance it deserves, that very seriousness undermines the spirit of Satie’s music, be it in his funny moods or in his “furniture music” period. See the problem? That’s why to play Satie, what you really need is a sense of humor.