Erik Satie

Satie first found his true self during the last two decades of the 19th century, when, reacting against established convention and received opinion, he thumbed his nose at the major aesthetic and artistic preoccupations of his day. With his acerbic and prickly humour, he distanced himself from fashionable forms and wrote music of great sobriety and purity crammed with eccentric ideas. After an undistinguished stint at the Paris Conservatoire, he took up composition in 1884. Early pieces, mainly for the piano, include Ogives, Sarabandes, and Gymnopédies. In 1890, he moved to Montmartre, where he adopted bizarre forms of conduct and dress and earned his living by playing the piano in nightclubs. From this period dates his long and close relationship with Debussy, whom he met at his favourite haunt, the Auberge du Clou. Of a mystical disposition, Satie joined various sects, including the "Rose + Croix" and the "Église Métropolitaine d'Art de Jésus Conducteur", of which he remained its one and only member. In 1898, he left Paris for Arcueil, where he lived until his death in a modest room that he called "Notre-Dame-de-Bassesse". Tired of being treated as an amateur, he resumed his studies in 1905 with Albert Roussel at the Schola Cantorum, but continued to be accused of exhibitionism, eccentricity, and megalomania. It was only after the outbreak of the Great War that he began to be taken seriously, when, following the scandalous first performance of his Cocteauesque collaboration, Parade, in 1917, he found himself thrust into the limelight and suddenly immensely famous.