The Sarabandes are three dances for solo piano composed in 1887 by Erik Satie. Along with the famous Gymnopédies (1888) they are regarded as his first important works, and the ones upon which his reputation as a harmonic innovator and precursor of modern French music, beginning with Debussy, principally rests.Rollo H. Myers, "Erik Satie", Dover Publications, Inc., NY, 1968, p. 19. Originally published in 1948 by Denis Dobson Ltd., London. The Sarabandes also played a key role in Satie's belated "discovery" by his country's musical establishment in the 1910s, setting the stage for what became his international fame.
French composer and critic Alexis Roland-Manuel wrote in 1916 that the Sarabandes represented "a milestone in the evolution of our music...pieces of an unprecedented harmonic technique, born of an entirely new aesthetic, which create a unique atmosphere, a sonorous magic of complete originality."Quoted in Alexander Carpenter's Allmusic review Erik Satie / Sarabandes (3) for piano
Background
The Sarabandes emerged at a point in Satie's life when he was beginning to assert his independence as a man and artist. In November 1886, the 20-year-old composer dropped out of the Paris Conservatoire and enlisted in the French army. His close friend and collaborator at the time, the poet Contamine de Latour, claimed Satie had persisted with his hated Conservatory courses only so he could qualify for a student exemption that would reduce his five years' compulsory military service to one year in the reserves.Robert Orledge, "Satie Remembered", Faber and Faber, London, 1995, p. 17.Frank Northen Magill, "Dictionary of World Biography: The 20th century, O-Z", Routledge, 1999, p. 3331. Satie was duly assigned as a reservist to the 33rd Infantry Regiment at the Citadel in Arras,Myers, "Erik Satie", Dover Publications, Inc., NY, 1968, p. 18. nicknamed La belle inutile ("The Useless Beauty") for its fine architecture and lack of strategic importance.Arras France Tourism Guide: The Citadel of Arras But even this comparatively mild duty proved too onerous for his liking. He sought to make himself ill by sneaking out of his barracks at night and strolling about bare-chested in the winter air, with the result that he came down with a severe case of bronchitis.Ornella Volta (ed.), "Satie Seen Through His Letters", Marion Boyars Publishers, London, 1989, pp. 22-23. By April 1887 he was back at his family's home in Paris on a two-month medical leave.Robert Orledge, "Satie Remembered", Faber and Faber Limited, 1995, p. xxiii.
During his convalescence Satie reunited with Latour, read Gustave Flaubert's Salammbô and The Temptation of Saint Anthony, and discovered the writings of Joséphin Péladan, the future founder of the Mystic Order of the Rose + Cross with which Satie would be associated in the early 1890s. In May he was thrilled by a performance of Emmanuel Chabrier's new opera Le roi malgré lui, with its daring use of unresolved seventh and ninth chords. As a tribute he visited the composer's home and left with the concierge a copy of one of his early scores, with an extravagant dedication inscribed in red ink. Chabrier never responded to Satie's gesture.Pierre-Daniel Templier, "Erik Satie", MIT Press, 1969, p. 11. Translated from the original French edition published by Rieder, Paris, 1932.In fairness to Chabrier he probably had more pressing issues on his mind. Le roi malgré lui was presented only three times at the Opéra-Comique's Salle Favart between May 18 and May 23, 1887. Its run was cut short on May 25 by a disastrous fire that destroyed the Salle Favart with a loss of 84 lives. Given the circumstances, Chabrier's failure to respond to an unknown fan (Satie) is understandable. See the New York Times, "Paris Theatre on Fire", May 26, 1887, at https://www.nytimes.com/1887/05/26/archives/a-paris-theatre-on-fire-the-opera-comique-burned-and-sixty-lives.html
On subsequent leaves from his regiment Satie began sketching two compositions, the Sarabandes and the Gymnopédies.Templier, "Erik Satie", p. 11. He finally focused his attention on the Sarabandes and finished them on September 18.The Gymnopédies would not be completed until April 1888. See Orledge, "Satie Remembered", p. xxiii. It was the last music he composed under his father's roof. In November 1887 he was discharged from the army, and the following month - with a gift of 1600 francs from his father to get him started - he set out on his own for a new life in Montmartre, the Bohemian center of Paris.Mary E. Davis, "Erik Satie", Reaktion Books, 2007, p. 27.
Music
The sarabande is a dance in triple meter that originated in the Spanish colonies of Central America in the mid-1500s. It had migrated to Europe by the 17th century, where in France it became a popular slow court dance. Satie's modern reinterpretations consist of three dances with a total duration of roughly 15 minutes:
No. 1 in A major No. 2 in D minor No. 3 in B minor In the original manuscript No. 1 was dedicated to Conrad Satie, the composer's brother, and No. 2 to Arthur Dodement, a musician friend from Satie's Conservatory days. These were removed prior to publication of the Sarabandes in 1911, when No. 2 was re-dedicated to Maurice Ravel, who first played the piece in public. See Orledge, "Satie the Composer", p. 270.
Biographer Mary E. Davis wrote that "the Sarabandes introduce compositional approaches that would prove important not only in Satie's later work but also in the broader history of French music...they presented a new conception of large-scale form, in which groups of three very similar pieces, deliberately interlinked by means of motivic cells, harmonic events and recurring interval patterns, combine to constitute a unified work."Mary E. Davis, "Erik Satie", Reaktion Books, 2007, pp. 25-27. Satie called this tripartite structure he invented "an absolutely original form" that was "good in itself,"Robert Orledge, Satie's Musical and Personal Logic, transcript of lecture at Gresham College, April 16, 2010 a means of exploring a central musical idea from three different perspectives without resorting to traditional variation techniques. In place of continuous development we are given mosaic-like progressions of unresolved dissonances, shifting between movement and stasis, which imbue the stately dignity of the sarabande with a suspended, timeless quality.Joseph Smith, notes to "Erik Satie's First Sarabande", 2012, at
The possible influence of Chabrier on Satie's advanced harmonic language of the 1880s has long been noted, by Maurice Ravel in the 1920sMaurice Ravel, "Contemporary Music," Rice Institute Pamphlet, Rice University Studies, 15, no. 2 (1928). Transcript of lecture Ravel gave at the Rice Institute (now Rice University), Houston, Texas, April 7, 1928. and biographer Rollo H. Myers (1948)Myers, "Erik Satie", p. 68. up to the present, focusing on the similarities of the unresolved ninths in the Sarabandes and those found in the Prelude of Le roi malgré lui.Templier, "Erik Satie", p. 76. Yet there are signs Satie was already feeling his way towards a harmonic "no-man's land" in the unconventional ninths and even thirteenths that appear in his 3 mélodies (to poems by Latour) of 1886,Robert Orledge, "Satie the Composer", Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. 34.Olof Höjer's notes to "Erik Satie: The Complete Piano Music, Vol. 1", pp. 15-17, Swedish Society Discofil, 1996. and his tonal approach in the Sarabandes is radically different. Chabrier's dissonances in Le roi malgré lui enrich the musical color but function within a traditional dramatic framework; Satie's dissonances become musical events in themselves. Or as pianist-author Joseph Smith put it, "For Chabrier, the A.1. Sauce; for Satie, the steak."Smith, notes to "Erik Satie's First Sarabande". See Note 18. Robert Orledge proposed that Chabrier's real impact lay in "proving to Satie that the Wagnerian path was the wrong one for a composer of wit and originality to follow."Orledge, "Satie the Composer", p. 36.
In an early instance of Satie appending an extramusical text to one of his compositions, the score of the Sarabande No. 1 was originally prefaced by a stanza from Latour's poem La Perdition (The Damnation):
Suddenly the heavens opened and the damned fell, Hurtling and colliding in a gigantic whirlwind; And when they were alone in the sunless night, They discovered they were wholly black. Then they blasphemed.Quoted in Orledge, "Satie the Composer", p. 208.
These apocalyptic verses bear no obvious relation to the music, though they do reflect Satie's growing religious preoccupations, perhaps with a dash of humor. The sarabande was once ruled indecent and banned in Spain,Britannica.com article on the Sarabande causing author Miguel de Cervantes to jokingly claim it was a dance born and bred in hell.In Cervantes' one-act comedy La cueva de Salamanca (The Cave of Salamanca), first published in 1615. Satie's inquiring mind kept him well-versed in the history of the established musical forms he tackled, leading pianist-musicologist Olof Höjer to wonder if this knowledge accounted for both the otherwise arcane Latour quote and the "unmistakeable hint of decadent sensuality" he found in the Sarabandes.Höjer, notes to "Erik Satie: The Complete Piano Music, Vol. 5", p. 23. Three decades later Satie would overtly satirize the controversy over another "Dance of the Devil" from the west condemned by the Catholic Church - the tango - in his piano suite Sports et divertissements (1914).In the piece Le Tango. The phrase "dance of the Devil" is Satie's own. See Höjer, notes to "Erik Satie: The Complete Piano Music, Vol. 5", p. 23.
The Sarabandes also offer the first example of Satie the musical "prankster" with their odd enharmonic notation, which can cause needless difficulties for the performer.Patrick Gowers and Nigel Wilkins, "Erik Satie", "The New Grove: Twentieth-Century French Masters", Macmillan Publishers Limited, London, 1986, p. 140. Reprinted from "The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians", 1980 edition. Joseph Smith observed, "Pianistically, anyone who can play the Gymnopédies can play the Sarabandes; however, the modal Gymnopédies are easy to read, whereas the Sarabandes, with their unsightly globs of flats and double-flats, can cause the eyes of the most facile reader to cross and glaze over. Some believe that this discouraging note-spelling is Satie's way of teasing the player, and certainly it would be consistent with Satiean humor, which can be interpreted as self-deprecating, disarming - or hostile."Joseph Smith, notes to "Erik Satie's First Sarabande".
Performance and publication
Unlike the Gymnopédies and the earlier piano suite Ogives (1886), which he published at his own expense in the late 1880s, Satie initially chose not to promote the intermediate