This is the first CD in an interesting and needed new venture from the pianist and writer Steffen Schleiermacher of Dabringhaus & Grimm; the beginning of an Erik Satie piano music edition! The acclaimed John Cage Piano Edition from the same pianist puts high expectations on this new edition, and the first issue readily fulfils all those hopes.

Perhaps Erik Satie is mostly known for his shorter pieces, like his “Gymnopédies” and so forth, but Dabringhaus & Grimm gives us a packed full-length CD with one work; “Le Fils des Etoiles” (“The Son of the Stars”); based on a textual work; a drama by the same name by Joséphin Péladan from 1892.
The story behind this piece is well worth telling. It can be found in the CD booklet, where Steffen Schleiermacher goes more in depths, but let me dwell upon the background a little bit.

Satie was a person who took some joy in causing bewilderment among his contemporaries. In this way he could be said to be an enfant terrible of his time, but I think that his way of having his contemporaries wonder whether he was serious or whether he was joking served a purpose, which today can be found in artists like, for example, Bob Dylan or Woody Allen, and they do it partly to survive the stress in a world where everybody wants a piece of you and even feel they have the right to have a piece of you, and partly because this state of uncertainty and flux concerning your “real” self and your intentions tend to make people more attentive, more prone to enter an inner realm of creativity in listening, experiencing…
In another light, Satie certainly has me realize analogies to a semi-contemporary composer like Claude Loyola Allgén, who was equipped with all the insignias of mystique that Erik Satie sported, but in a late 20th century Stockholm, where he withdrew into a whirlwind of handwritten scores and finally a fire in which his house burned down and had him incinerated with some of his most interesting compositions…
Anyhow, the uncertainty surrounding Satie’s intentions can only be healthy. In this world of artists taking themselves too serious, a little mockery and ambuigity is just healthy.

Erik Satie went as far as founding his own church; Église Métropolitaine d’Art de Jésus Conducteur. Briefly he hung out with a gang of Satanists, but a more lasting – though not long-lasting – relationship was that with Joséphin Péladan and the Ordre de la Rose Croix. This was in the 1890s. The ideology of this grouping was closely knit to the philosophy and music of Richard Wagner, and strangely, Erik Satie became the order’s music director of sorts.
Joséphin Péladan, who had founded the order, mixed teachings of Catholicism with antiquity as well as grail mysticism. Strange as it may seem these days, Joséphin Péladan had a strong influence of artists and intellectuals of late 19th century.

Joséphin Péladan:

These statements, old-fashioned and overly dramatic – almost pretentious, partly owe their wording to the period in which written – but… the remaining core of meaning, left after the worn-down wording has been stripped off… is not out of place, not inaccurate. I believe too, like great people that I have come to know, like Karlheinz Stockhausen, for example, that art in its best moments is the essence of life, the essence of human and divine existence, focused in a piece of music, a painting or a poem… and you know when that is the case. The core, therefore, of meaning in Joséphin Péladan’s statements above, remains true, can you just ignore the pretentious formulations, so significant of his days.

About his drama “Le fils des étoiles” from 1892 Joséphin Péladan says:

The three acts – the Calling, the Consecration, the Conjuration – deal with the artist’s / magician’s / saint’s quest for his own self through the different trials and tests he has to submit himself to.

Schleiermacher states in his essay in the booklet of the CD that the language of the play is written in a poetic manner rather than a dramatic one, and that there is hardly any concrete action, but art, faith and beauty are praised in monologues and dialogues, a bit overly ornamented.

When the music by Satie (there are no words in his composition; it simply has its inspiration and its sequence from Joséphin Péladan’s play) was premiered in 1892, only the three Préludes were performed.
In another recording I have with music by Erik Satie, performed by Aldo Ciccolini in 1984, only these three Préludes are accounted for from “Le fils des étoiles”, together with a number of other works by Satie, collected under the title “Oeuvres mystiques”.

In his dedication when delivering his work, Satie didn’t hold back any, but wrote:

However, Satie rather quickly distanced himself from the Ordre de la Rose Croix, and made downright fun of them later. His affinities with dubious organizations duly noted, he still was his own man, and a very original one at that!
Later Satie told the newspaper Gil Blas:

Satie’s influence has justly grown, and perhaps this new piano edition on Dabringhaus & Grimm is a sign of that too. There is a Satie renaissance brewing, and maybe this time around the true significance of this basically unknown giant will dawn on us.

Schleiermacher’s John Cage Piano Music Edition is still in prolific production, also reviewed at Sonoloco Record Reviews, and there is a connection herein. John Cage wrote a piece in 1969 that he called “Cheap Imitation”, based on Erik Satie’s work “Socrate”. The reason for this work was pure necessity. We recall how Cage invented the prepared piano when he was in dire straits for a percussion ensemble, for which there was not room enough at the place of the performance-to-be, and so he altered the piano into a compact percussion ensemble! In the case of “Cheap Imitation” Cage was supposed to use Satie’s “Socrate” for a project by choreographer Merce Cunningham. However, the fee for using the copyrighted material was too high. The French publisher also refused Cage the right to arrange “Socrate” for two pianos, which he had wanted to do. The solution than came through Cage’s idea of putting Satie’s work through a metamorphosis that would fend of any grouchy holders of petty rights and issuers of ridiculous fees! Cage used the I Ching (explained in more depth in my review of “Cage Piano Music Edition Vol. 4” elsewhere on this site) to transform the work, albeit retaining the contour and other aspects and properties of “Socrate”; hence the title “Cheap Imitation”. I know there is a recording with Cage himself at the piano playing “Cheap Imitation”, on Cramps Records, recorded in 1976 at Mills College, California – because I own it… and there is another recording out on Wergo Schallplatten, with Herbert Henck at the piano, and on this recording there is also a very good recording of “Socrate” with Hilke Helling [alto] and Deborah Richards [piano].

The music of; “Le Fils des Etoiles” strikes me as very modern, much more so than Satie’s writings around the time of composing the music. Schleiermacher calls this “a model example of the building-block principle.” He goes on to explain – and which anyone can hear – that a few basic motifs are introduced in the Préludes. The uniqueness, though, is that the developments of the motifs that you’d be expecting in the acts following the preludes never appear. Schleiermacher notes that the elements from the preludes are placed in sequence, but never transposed or even modified! It happens that the motifs are cut short, and not heard in their complete original form. Occurrences from Act I do reappear in Act II and III. It is a mystery to me how Satie could construct a work in this laconic, Feldmanesque or Rühmian fashion way back at the end of the 19th century. It could well pass as some kind of modern trance- or meditation music, even instigating feelings of soaring weightlessness that you’d think be the result of minimalism, like Terry Riley’s “Persian Surgery Dervishes”! However, the modern piece that especially comes to mind is Gerhard Rühm’s “Das Leben Chopins und andere Ton-Dichtungen” (1978 – 1984), which I bought from Rühm himself at an event at Fylkingen in Stockholm in the 1990s.
Satie’s piece has the same progressive and stubborn, albeit sensual, repetition to it as Rühm’s works on that LP, and even the sound of the piano as Steffen Schleiermacher plays it has me associate to Rühm straight through. This is amazing, to say the least. What was in Satie’s mind back then? It is a mystery, which gave rise to this beautiful, crystal clear and shining gem of piano music!

It is with great and joyous expectations and feelings of musical adventure that I wait for the following issues in Steffen Schleiermacher’s Satie venture!