Le Fils des étoiles (The Son of the Stars) is an incidental music score composed in December 1891 by Erik Satie to accompany a three-act poetic drama of the same name by Joséphin Péladan. It is a key work of Satie's "Rosicrucian" period (1891–1895) and played a role in his belated "discovery" by the French musical establishment in the 1910s.Rollo H. Myers, "Erik Satie", Dover Publications, Inc., NY, 1968, pp. 22–23. Originally published in 1948 by Denis Dobson Ltd., London.

Satie provided some 75 minutes' worth of music for Péladan's play, apparently intended for flutes and harps, and this represents his longest through-composed surviving score.Dr. Christopher Hobbs page at Coventry University website, retrieved 03/18/16 at http://wwwm.coventry.ac.uk/researchnet/cucv/Pages/Profile.aspx?profileID=500Notes on Christopher Hobbs' edition of Le fils des etoiles from EMC Piano Catalogue, retrieved 03/18/16 at http://www.experimentalmusic.co.uk/emc/EMC_Piano_Catalogue.htmlIn terms of composed material Satie's second-longest work would be Socrate (1918), at around 35 minutes in performance. This does not include the repetitions "indicated" in the piano pieces Vexations (1893) and Le Tango from Sports et divertissements (1914). However, only his three short act Preludes were performed at the premiere in Paris on March 22, 1892.Steven Moore Whiting, "Satie the Bohemian: From Cabaret to Concert Hall", Clarendon Press, 1999, p. 147. Satie subsequently arranged the Preludes for solo piano and published them in 1896. It is through these keyboard excerpts that the music for Le Fils des étoiles is primarily known.

The Preludes have been cited as among Satie's most radical compositions,LaPhil.com (Los Angeles Philharmonic website), "Erik Satie: 'Le fils des étoiles – Prelude: La Vocation'. Retrieved 03/17/16 from http://www.laphil.com/philpedia/music/le-fils-des-etoiles-prelude-la-vocation-erik-satie with their forward-looking explorations of quartal harmony and the composer's conception of theatre music as a "static sound décor", functioning independently of the stage action.Patrick Gowers and Nigel Wilkins, "Erik Satie", "The New Grove: Twentieth-Century French Masters", Macmillan Publishers Limited, London, 1986, p. 130. Reprinted from "The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians", 1980 edition. In 1922 the American critic Lawrence Gilman heard in Le Fils des étoiles "harmonic inventions which sound for all the world like passages to which Stravinsky and Schoenberg, twenty years later, were signing their names with a noble gesture of revolutionary defiance..."Lawrence Gilman, "Music of the Month: Monsieur Satie and Mr. Carpenter", The North American Review, Vol. 215, 1922.

Background

Satie wrote the score for Le Fils des étoiles during his short-lived involvement (1891–1892) as official composer and chapelmaster of the Mystic Order of the Rose + Croix. This esoteric-religious-artistic group, led by the flamboyant Péladan, aimed to "ruin realism, reform Latin taste and create a school of idealist art" in 1890s France.D. Roberts, "The Total Work of Art in European Modernism", Cornell University Press, 2011, p. 126. Particular reverence was paid to Symbolist art and to the music of Richard Wagner, whom the Rosicrucians valued above all composers.Alexander Carpenter, Allmusic review at http://www.allmusic.com/composition/le-fils-des-%C3%A9toiles-chaldean-pastoral-3-preludes-for-piano-mc0002360865 After the Comédie-Française in Paris rejected the script for Le Fils des etoiles in 1891, Péladan gained financial backing from Count Antoine de La Rochefoucauld to launch the annual Salon de la Rose + Croix (1892–1897) for the promotion of his work and ideas. The premiere staging of Le Fils would feature prominently in the first Rosicrucian salon.

Péladan alternately subtitled his play a "Chaldean Pastoral" or a "Wagnérie Kaldéenne",Catalogue du Salon de la Rose † Croix (1892), PD document retrieved 03/18/16 from Gallica at http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5470406r/f82.item.zoom the latter a reference to the author's Wagner fixation. It is a Tannhäuser-like tale set in Chaldea around 3000 BC. A shepherd—the titular "son of the stars"—is chosen to join the Chaldean priesthood, but is faced with conflicts which force him to choose between the spirit and the flesh. Stage action is largely replaced by philosophical monologues which one contemporary critic described as "something like literary music":Pierre-Daniel Templier, "Erik Satie", MIT Press, 1969, p. 13. Translated from the original French edition published by Rieder, Paris, 1932.

Satie kept his thoughts on Péladan's play to himself, but he clearly had no intention of composing the kind of "Wagnerian" accompaniment the Rosicrucians would have preferred. In fact his remote and deliberately non-dramatic music is anti-Wagnerian in stylistic principle,Olof Höjer, notes to "Erik Satie: The Complete Piano Music, Vol. 2", pp. 12–13, Swedish Society Discofil, 1996. without resorting to parody.Steffen Schleiermacher, notes to his Urtext edition of Le Fils des étoiles, Boosey & Hawkes, 2015, at http://www.boosey.com/shop/prod/Satie-Erik-Le-fils-des-toiles-piano/2235569 When Satie broke with the Rose + Cross sect in an open letter to the journal Gil Blas in August 1892 he declared, "The good Monsieur Péladan... never influenced the independence of my aesthetic."Höjer, p. 15.

The early 1890s also saw the blossoming of Satie's close friendship with Claude Debussy. Their youthful discussions about the future of French music—as recalled many years later by Satie and his propagandist Jean Cocteau—provide our only clues to his creative mindset of the period. In a 1922 public lecture on Debussy, Satie maintained: "When I first met him he was full of Mussorgsky, and very conscientiously was seeking a path which he had difficulty in finding.... At that time I was writing music for Le Fils des étoiles to a text by Joséphin Péladan, and I explained to Debussy the necessity for a Frenchman to free himself from the Wagnerian adventure which in no way corresponded to our national aspirations. And I told him that I was not anti-Wagner in any way but that we ought to have our own music—if possible without sauerkraut."Quoted in Myers, "Erik Satie", p. 32. And Cocteau related a conversation with Debussy in which he claimed the composer directly quoted Satie's ideas on the function of dramatic music: "There is no need for the orchestra to grimace when a character comes on the stage. Do the trees in the scenery grimace? What we have to do is to create a musical scenery, a musical atmosphere in which the characters move and talk."Myers, "Erik Satie", p. 32. The veracity of these statements, both made after Debussy's death in 1918,Cocteau's claim appeared in the March 1, 1924 issue of La Revue musicale. Satie authority Robert Orledge suggested that this purported reminiscence should be treated with caution, as Cocteau had been "intent on establishing Satie's reputation and influence, largely at Debussy's expense." See Orledge, "Debussy and the Theatre", Cambridge University Press, 1982, pp. 45–46. cannot be known for sure, as Debussy himself never openly acknowledged (in words at least) Satie as an influence.It is worth noting that Debussy's 1896 arrangements of two of Satie's Gymnopédies marked the only time he was moved to orchestrate the music of another composer. But they precisely define the modus operandi of Satie's music for Le Fils des étoiles.Templier, "Erik Satie", p. 17.

Music

Satie's original incidental score consists of three short act preludes and three substantially longer "Decorative Themes":

Prelude du Premier Acte: La Vocation (The Vocation) – Theme Decoratif: La Nuit Kaldee (A Night in Chaldea) Prelude du Deuxieme Acte: L'Initiation (The Initiation) – Theme Decoratif: La Salle Basse du Grand Temple (The Lower Hall of the Great Temple) Prelude du Troisieme Acte: L'Incantation (The Incantation) – Theme Decoratif: La Terrace du Palais du Patesi Goudea (The Terrace of Patesi Goudea's Palace)

The entire score is woven from 10 identifiable motifs, nine of which are variations or slight developments of the opening of the first Prelude.Robert Orledge, "Satie the Composer", Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. 107 and p. 347, Note 5. Biographer Steven Moore Whiting found in the three Preludes a self-sufficient interlinked structure that "forms a kind of palindrome", with the melodic ideas shifted about in a "compositional shell game."Steven Moore Whiting, "Satie the Bohemian: From Cabaret to Concert Hall", Clarendon Press, 1999, pp. 145–146. An exception in the overall motivic scheme is the little Gnossienne-style dance that appears in the "decorative" music for Act 1. Satie would later reuse this piece as the Maniere de commencement of his famous suite for piano duet, Trois morceaux en forme de poire (1903).Orledge, "Satie the Composer", p. 273.

Satie's lengthy "Decorative Themes" (accounting for 4/5 of the score) are aloof, heavily chordal and repetitive, with occasional reference to material from the preludes.Steven Moore Whiting, "Satie the Bohemian: From Cabaret to Concert Hall", Clarendon Press, 1999, pp. 145–146. They were apparently intended to serve as an unobtrusive sonic backdrop for the stage action.Whiting, "Satie the Bohemian", pp. 145–146. The pieces are not synchronized with Péladan's text and may have been omitted at the premiere for practical reasons.Orledge, "Satie the Composer", p. 347, note 4.

The brochure for the 1892 Le Fils des étoiles premiere states that Satie wrote his score for flutes and harps. Satie's manuscript exists only in his 1896 piano reduction, with no indication of how the flute and harp parts might have been distributed. In his book Satie the Composer (1990), Robert Orledge pointed out problems of tuning and intonation for the harpists which would have made the music impractical to play as written, so the nature of its first performance remains a mystery.Orledge, "Satie the Composer", pp. 106–107.

Premiere

Le Fils des étoiles premiered at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris on March 22, 1892, as part of Péladan's first Salon de la Rose + Croix.There had been a public dress rehearsal on March 19. Le Fils was the second-half of a program that also featured Satie's Sonneries de la Rose+Croix and Palestrina's Missa Papae Marcelli. See Whiting, "Satie the Bohemian", pp. 146–147. The program note announced that Satie's three Preludes, "of an admirably Oriental character", would "prepare the spectator impatiently for the tableau he is going to see."Quoted in Orledge, "Satie the Composer", p. 107. The play was not a success and the audience greeted the unusual score with a puzzled silence.Alexander Carpenter, Allmusic review at http://www.allmusic.com/composition/le-fils-des-%C3%A9toiles-chaldean-pastoral-3-preludes-for-piano-mc0002360865Templier, "Erik Satie", pp. 13–14. Writing of the chilly response to Satie's music, Robert Orledge mused that "Probably the only impatience it generated was for it to be over."Orledge, "Satie the Composer", p. 107.

The Rose + Croix salon, a high-profile event, marked the first time Satie's music was publicly performed outside the cabarets of Montmartre where he toiled as a second-string pianist.Whiting, "Satie the Bohemian", p. 147. It also introduced him to the downside of notoriety. Only one critic commented on his music for Le Fils, but he was among the most powerful in Paris: Henry Gauthier-Villars, ubiquitously known by his pen name Willy.