Erik Satie was called the laziest student in Paris, then rewired French music
A teacher at the Paris Conservatoire labelled the teenage Erik Satie the laziest pupil in the building, and another dismissed him as worthless. He was expelled, got himself out of the army by catching bronchitis on purpose, and founded a church with one member. Composers from Debussy to John Cage would still learn from him.
Satie was born in Honfleur, Normandy, on 17 May 1866, to a French shipping broker and a British mother of Scottish descent. After his mother died in 1872 he was raised by grandparents in Honfleur, where a local organist gave him a lifelong taste for Gregorian chant. His stepmother, a piano teacher, enrolled him at the Conservatoire in 1879. He loathed the place, likening it to a district prison, and was thrown out in 1882. Readmitted in 1885, he fared no better, and in 1886 he joined an infantry regiment to escape, then stood bare-chested on a winter night until illness got him discharged.
Montmartre suited him better. As resident pianist at the Chat Noir cabaret he reinvented himself as a long-haired bohemian in frock coat and top hat, the first of many costumes. The spare, drifting Gymnopedies date from 1888. At the Auberge du Clou he befriended Debussy and became house composer to a mystic Rosicrucian sect run by the self-styled Sar Peladan. After breaking with Peladan he dressed like a priest and, from his tiny room, used his one-man church to publish attacks on enemies. In 1893 he fell hard for the painter Suzanne Valadon; she left after five months, the only romance he is known to have had, and he was crushed.
He later went back to school as a mature student at the Schola Cantorum and did far better. From around 1910 young composers, including the group known as Les Six, gathered around him, and a meeting with Jean Cocteau produced the ballet Parade in 1917, with Picasso designing sets and costumes for Diaghilev's company.
His music favoured unresolved chords, simple melodies and pieces with no bar-lines, and he gave some works deliberately absurd names, such as flabby preludes written for a dog. He never married, lived in a single small room in Arcueil from 1898, and died of cirrhosis on 1 July 1925, aged 59.
Source: Erik Satie
