Heritage Records has just reissued ‘An Erik Satie Entertainment’ recorded by Peter Dickinson with his sister, mezzo Meriel Dickinson, in 1975. Consisting of a recital of Satie’s songs, some solo piano pieces and readings, their programme was an important part of a wider revival of interest in Satie in the 1970s. Satie is a composer whose status we take for granted today, but as Peter Dickinson explains below in his fascinating recollection of that era, that only came about because of the pioneering work of so many who, like him, believed in his brilliance.   

The all-Satie recitals which my sister, mezzo Meriel Dickinson, gave with me started in 1969. The first ones were at festivals in Bromsgrove and Bath, where reviews were guarded or mildly dismissive. Then we came to the Purcell Room in London on January 22, 1970. The London response, with a more sophisticated audience, was more positive and the programme was repeated in the Purcell Room on October 15, 1971, presented by the Park Lane Group. Then it took off and was featured in many festivals here and abroad, with broadcasts, but not in France. Our first London Entertainment was promoted by Pears-Phipps Management who also represented Jessye Norman. Jack Phipps introduced her to Satie and that is how she came to record the Three Songs (1916) and the music-hall song ‘Je te veux’. Our pioneering work was anticipated by the rock group Blood, Sweat and Tears, when they included variations on the first Gymnopédie in 1968. It was the group’s second album with the first two tracks based on Satie. The release topped the charts, selling four million in the US alone and gaining awards, and must have brought Satie to a new public.

The British – and Americans – have had a special role in raising the profile of Erik Satie. The first book in English came in 1948 from Rollo Myers who worked for the British Council in Paris between the wars. In 1949 Constant Lambert gave a BBC talk and conducted three concerts of Satie. After that came James Harding’s book in 1975; the Canadian Alan M Gillmor’s book in 1988 was another landmark; and the detailed and often highly technical work of Robert Orledge took pride of place with his study in 1990, many separate articles, and a new catalogue of works in a symposium edited by Caroline Potter, another Satie specialist. The American Steven Moore Whiting, in Satie the Bohemian (1999), gives an amazingly detailed picture of Satie’s Parisian context. It seems as if Whiting was actually there. British composers such as Howard Skempton and Gavin Bryars, have acknowledged Satie’s influence. There’s also my orchestral work, Satie Transformations (1970).

In America both John Cage and Morton Feldman idolised Satie. Cage put on a Satie Festival at Black Mountain College in 1948. He caused a scandal by claiming that Satie was right, and Beethoven was wrong. Cage decided to stage 840 repetitions of the short piano piece Vexations with a relay team of pianists, at the Pocket Theatre in New York on September 9/10, 1963. On October 10, 1967 Richard Toop played it all on his own at the Arts Laboratory, Drury Lane. This gesture seems to be more Cage than Satie, who is unlikely to have expected his suggestion of 840 repetitions to be taken literally. It’s on the CD just twice.

Vexations brought Satie into the avant-garde, even the lunatic fringe, but our Entertainments were for a different audience. We were able to approach a whole evening of Satie by drawing on several media. There were the songs and piano pieces which included the suite called Sports et Divertissements. This set of short pieces was originally commissioned to go with an album of drawings by the French artist and illustrator Charles Martin and slides of his colour pictures could be projected for each piece. There are also little poems by Satie written into the score. These can be put into the programme book or read aloud as another dimension, although Satie disapproved of this. He was also an amusing writer, with a surrealist play Le Piège de Meduse (the dances from it are on the CD) so excerpts from his published articles were included in our recitals. This made it possible to put together a varied evening. We started with the more serious things and then moved to the café-concert items later on, all interspersed with readings. Further popular songs have become available since our programmes. At the time when we began there was nothing in the Gramophone catalogue by Satie. Gradually the Gymnopédies became known and led the way. Our LP came on Unicorn in 1976 and it has been possible to add unknown live recordings from the same period for the new CD. These include readings where the audience response is audible.

Recordings gathered momentum from the 1960s. In 1970 Frank Glazer recorded what was then a complete Satie. So did Aldo Ciccolini, the Italian pianist who took French citizenship. Jane Manning recorded many of the songs. Soon Satie’s Gymnopédies were appearing regularly on film and TV soundtracks. Spotify shows that my own recording of the third Gymnopédie, made in 1990, has now had 2,793,000 hits. Surprisingly the third and not the first, which registered only 500,000. The focus of Satie studies in France for almost half a century was through Ornella Volta, who died last year. She set up the Satie Foundation in Paris to build an archive and collect materials for publication, including a mass of writings not yet available in English.

Satie’s humour operates in a kind of Alice in Wonderland world. He even set a passage from the Mad Hatter’s tea party in the third of his Three Songs (1916). That song is dedicated to Stravinsky, who admired Satie and said that he was ‘the oddest person I have ever known’, but its melody was taken from an opera aria by Gounod. Before World War I Satie had become celebrated in Paris. Ravel had played some of his piano music; Debussy had scored two of the three Gymnopédies and conducted them. Satie worked with leading practitioners in ballet, notably in Parade (1917), with Cocteau, Picasso and Leonid Massine. But Satie’s journey from celebrity then to acceptance in the later twentieth century took some time after his death in 1925 when he became neglected. A generation of historians regarded him simply as an interesting historical figure; many found his inscriptions on his scores irrelevant or confusing, which they often are. Things began to change after World War II and gradually Satie has become accepted as a contributor to twentieth-century music somewhere between Schoenberg and Stravinsky and anticipating some aspects of minimalism.

Pianists may be confused by the proliferation of jokes in pieces like the Embryons desséché (1913), ostensibly about sea urchins, of all weird subjects. The first of the three pieces contains the famous instruction ‘like a nightingale with toothache’ and it ends with grandiose repetitions of the tonic chord, which happens again at the end of the third piece. In the second piece, Chopin’s funeral march is quoted but transposed, simplified and labelled as ‘the famous mazurka by Schubert’! In Embryons the text can relate to the music but in many other works it has no connection but operates in a parallel universe of private jokes.

Extracts from Satie’s article ‘In praise of critics’ are included on the CD:

‘The critic knows everything, sees everything, hears everything, moves everything, eats everything, touches everything, mixes everything up – and still goes on thinking. What a man!’

For more information about the album, visit Heritage Records