Evensong: Satie's Gymnopédies

Erik Satie's Gymnopédies 1,2,3.

Trois Gymnopédies, are three piano compositions written by French composer and pianist Erik Satie. He completed the whole set by 2 April 1888, but they were at first published individually: the first and the third in 1888, the second in 1895. Dominique Mondo's Dictionnaire de Musique, defines gymnopédie as a "nude dance, accompanied by song, which youthful Spartan maidens danced on specific occasions", although gymnopaedia is the ancient Greek word for an annual festival where young men danced naked. The first Gymnopédie was published in the magazine La Musique des familles in the summer of 1888 together with an excerpt of Latour's poem Les Antiques, where the term appears.

Oblique et coupant l'ombre un torrent éclatant

Ruisselait en flots d'or sur la dalle polie

Où les atomes d'ambre au feu se miroitant

Mêlaient leur sarabande à la gymnopédie

Slanting and shadow-cutting a bursting stream

Trickled in gusts of gold on the shiny flagstone

Where the amber atoms in the fire gleaming

Mingled their sarabande with the gymnopaedia.

It is suggested that the mood of the piece is evoked by Young girls by the seaside Pierre Puvis de Chavannes

Satie never married, and his home for most of his adult life was a single small room, first in Montmartre and, from 1898 to his death, in Arcueil, a suburb of Paris. He adopted various images over the years, including a period in quasi-priestly dress, another in which he always wore identically coloured velvet suits, (of which he bought several with a small legacy) and  his last persona, in neat bourgeois costume, with bowler hat, wing collar, and umbrella. He was a dedicated heavy drinker, and died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 59.

Satie had no interest whatsoever in innovations such as the telephone, the gramophone and the radio, despite being a musical iconoclast and modernist. He made no recordings and made only one telephone call. Although his personal appearance was customarily immaculate, his room at Arcueil was squalid, and after his death the scores of several important works believed lost were found among the accumulated rubbish.