Paris, July 1925.
Erik Satie died at the age of 59, leaving behind one of the strangest legacies in the history of music. He had been a celebrated eccentric, a friend of Claude Debussy, a collaborator of Picasso and Jean Cocteau, and one of the most original musical minds of his generation.
Yet when he died, he was still living in poverty in the Paris suburb of Arcueil.
And there was something else.
For 27 years, practically nobody had been allowed inside his apartment.
When his friends finally entered the place after his death, they discovered something that seemed almost impossible to reconcile with the elegant, meticulously dressed man they knew.
The tiny apartment was filled with objects, papers and forgotten belongings. There were two pianos, one placed on top of the other, with the upper instrument reportedly being used as a kind of cupboard for letters and papers. There were numerous unpublished manuscripts, clothing, handkerchiefs — and a remarkable collection of umbrellas.
Some accounts speak of around 100, others of hundreds.
The exact number has become part of the Satie mythology, but the umbrellas themselves were very real.
The strangest part was that this chaotic room belonged to a man who had cultivated an almost theatrical obsession with precision and repetition.
Satie owned several identical grey velvet suits.
He often carried an umbrella and cultivated the appearance of what became known as the “Velvet Gentleman”.
He could look immaculate in public while living in astonishingly poor conditions at home. His apartment, according to accounts from people who later saw it, was dusty and neglected, with manuscripts and objects hidden in places nobody would have thought to look.
Some of those manuscripts were works that had effectively disappeared.
And among them was one of the strangest pieces of music ever written.
It was called Vexations.
He apparently wrote it around 1893, when he was only 27.
The score is tiny: a short musical idea, accompanied by an instruction that sounds almost like a joke, a challenge or a threat.
The performer is told that, in order to play the motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare beforehand “in the deepest silence” and through “serious immobilities”.
Eight hundred and forty repetitions.
The motif itself can take roughly a minute or two to play, depending on the performer.
Repeated 840 times, the piece becomes an endurance test lasting many hours — sometimes well over 15 hours and, depending on the interpretation, considerably longer.
There is no evidence that Satie ever performed it himself, or even intended it to be performed exactly as later generations understood it.
He never published it during his lifetime.
For decades, Vexations simply waited.
Satie died in 1925, and the piece remained virtually unknown.
At least, until John Cage came.
Cage, who regarded Satie as a crucial predecessor, helped bring Vexations back into the musical world and, in September 1963, 70 years after it had apparently been written, he organised its first complete public performance at the Pocket Theatre in New York.
It became a marathon.
A team of pianists took turns playing the music 840 times, from the evening of September 9 until the following afternoon.
The performance lasted 18 hours and 40 minutes. Among the musicians involved was a young John Cale, years before he became one of the defining figures of the Velvet Underground.
Cage even turned the event into something resembling an experiment in human behaviour. A time clock was installed in the theatre lobby, and members of the audience received a small refund according to how long they stayed.
It was Satie’s sense of humour, decades after his death, coming back to life.
Because Satie had always been difficult to separate from his jokes.
He once invented his own religious organisation, the “Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor”, of which he was, naturally, the sole member.
He wrote mock-religious texts, insulted critics, created deliberately absurd titles and instructions for his scores, and constantly blurred the line between serious art and elaborate prank.
He also invented the idea of Musique d’ameublement — “furniture music”: music that was not supposed to demand attention, but simply exist in the background like a piece of furniture. When audiences actually stopped talking and listened to it, Satie was reportedly furious. He wanted them to walk around, talk and ignore the music.
It sounds like a joke.
It also sounds remarkably modern.
So does Vexations.
Its obsessive repetition, radical simplicity and refusal to behave like conventional concert music made it an extraordinary precursor to the experimental and minimalist movements that would emerge decades later. John Cage, La Monte Young and generations of avant-garde composers found in Satie something that musicians of his own era could hardly have imagined: a composer who could make silence, repetition, boredom and time themselves part of the musical experience.
And yet the man behind all this was not some glamorous bohemian living in the centre of Paris.
He lived alone.
He was chronically short of money.
He drank heavily and died from cirrhosis of the liver. His life in Arcueil was increasingly isolated, even though he remained connected to some of the most important artists of his time.
Friends such as Darius Milhaud would later help deal with the bizarre accumulation of possessions left behind in his apartment, even if there is something curious about the contradiction.
The composer who wrote some of the most delicate, spacious and apparently serene piano music of the early modern era lived surrounded by clutter.
The creator of the Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes — music that seems to float outside ordinary time — spent his final decades in a tiny room that almost nobody was allowed to enter.
His public image was controlled, but his private world was chaos.
His music could be extraordinarily simple, yet his personality was anything but.
And perhaps that is why the story of Satie refuses to disappear.
The umbrellas, the identical suits, the stacked pianos, the unopened letters, the unpublished music hidden in pockets and behind furniture — they sound like details from a surrealist novel.
But Satie really lived this way.
Then there is Vexations: a few lines of music written in 1893 and apparently left untouched for decades, waiting for someone to take its impossible instruction seriously.
Satie never knew that John Cage would turn it into an 18-hour event.
He never knew that experimental musicians would regard him as one of their ancestors.
He never knew that his seemingly modest piano pieces would become some of the most enduring works of early modern music.
And perhaps that is the ultimate Satie joke.
The man who spent 27 years refusing to let people into his home left behind music that, a century later, still invites everyone in!
Images from web – Google Research