The Trois Petites Pièces montées (Three Little Stuffed Pieces) is a suite for small orchestra by Erik Satie, inspired by themes from the novel series Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais. It was premiered at the Comédie des Champs-Élysées in Paris on February 21, 1920, conducted by Vladimir Golschmann. Satie later arranged it for piano four hands and today it is more frequently heard in this version. A typical performance lasts about five minutes.
Background
Satie was well-read in humorous and imaginative literature, and the figure of Rabelais loomed large in his bohemian youth. The 16th-century French satirist was an idol of the early Montmartre cabaret scene. At the Chat Noir, where Satie played piano in the late 1880s, a drinking cup allegedly belonging to the author was on reverent display.Harper's Magazine, Volume 78, 1889, p. 702. Recalling those days in a 1922 essay, Satie went so far as to claim that one of his great-uncles used to "bend the elbow" with Rabelais at the legendary Pomme de Pin tavern in Paris.In his essay "Painful Examples" (Catalogue No. 5, October 1922). See Nigel Wilkins (ed.), "The Writings of Erik Satie", Eulenburg Books, London, 1980, pp. 121-122. Apart from a song about the Mad Hatter, Le Chapelier from his cycle Trois Mélodies (1916), the only comic literary characters Satie evoked in his music were the endlessly hungry and boozing giants Gargantua and his son Pantagruel.Among Satie's unrealized projects were ballets based on La Fontaine's Fables and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.
Food and eating were frequent themes of Satie's own extramusical humor. His poverty made him all too familiar with hunger at times,In letters to his brother Conrad during the spring of 1899, Satie noted "I haven't eaten for two days" and "an empty stomach, a parched throat, give me no pleasure whatsoever." In similar straits 20 years later, he wrote to Valentine Hugo, "I'm sick of this beggar's life." See Ornella Volta (ed)., "Satie Seen Through His Letters", Marion Boyars Publishers, London, 1989, p. 78, and "Erik Satie: Correspondance presque complete", Fayard, Paris, 2003. leading to his wry observation, "It's odd. You'll find someone in every bar willing to buy you a drink. No one ever dreams of presenting you with a sandwich."Renée Lanser, "Notes et souvenirs - Erik Satie", Matin d'Anvers, 9 July 1925. In a letter to his brother Conrad, Satie jokingly claimed his appetite was gargantuan on those occasions when he was able to eat to his heart's content: he could devour a 30-egg omelette or 150 oysters in one sitting.Robert Orledge, "Satie the Composer", Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. 15. His affinity for the bawdy, food-obsessed Rabelais is made clear in the Trois Petites Pièces montées.
Composition history
In November 1919, the young cookery historian Bertrand GuéganBertrand Guégan (1892-1943) was an editor for the publisher Éditions de la Sirène, which had Satie under exclusive contract in the early 1920s. His notable culinary works include La Fleur de la Cuisine Française (2 volumes, 1921), a collection of French recipes ranging from the 13th Century to the modern era; the first French translation of the Ancient Roman cookbook Apicius (1933), for which the Académie française awarded him the 1934 Prix Langlois; and Le cuisinier français (1934). He also edited a critical edition of Molière (7 volumes, 1925-1929). During World War II Guégan took part in the French Resistance and was executed by the Nazis. See http://data.bnf.fr/11906122/bertrand_guegan/ asked Satie to set a poem to music for his Almanach de Cocagne (Cockaigne Almanac), an annual publication "dedicated to true gourmets and serious drinkers."Guégan's Almanach de Cocagne appeared annually from 1920 to 1922. Along with classic recipes it featured essays, artwork and even music scores from prominent French creative figures. For the 1922 edition Satie contributed an essay, "The Table", in which he fondly recalled his weekly lunches with Debussy. See Ornella Volta (editor), "A Mammal's Notebook: The Writings of Erik Satie", Atlas Publishing, London, 1996 (reissued 2014), p. 121. Satie claimed the deadline was too short for him to do the job properly and instead submitted a brief fanfare-like march for 2 trumpets, giving it the title Marche de Cocagne. As musical fanfares had been used to announce the courses of luxurious French banquets since the Middle Ages, D. Eleanor Scully, Terence Scully, "Early French Cookery: Sources, History, Original Recipes and Modern Adaptations", University of Michigan Press, 2002, pp. 319-320. his offering was in keeping with the gastronomic and historical themes of Guégan's journal. It would appear as the frontispiece of the Almanach, with a woodcut illustration by Raoul Dufy, in 1920. This was the nucleus of the Trois petites pièces montées.
Jean Cocteau, who at that time was presenting himself as a propagandist for the esprit nouveau of postwar French music, then invited Satie to participate in a theatrical event he was organizing for the end of the Paris winter season. Enthralled with Darius Milhaud's new score for Le bœuf sur le toit, he had persuaded the wealthy French nobleman Count Étienne de Beaumont to book the Comédie stage of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées for a week of performances, and now he needed to fill out the rest of the program.http://daniellathompson.com/Texts/Le_Boeuf/boeuf.pt.15-16.htm. Quotes from Milhaud's autobiography Notes sans Musique (1949) in which he describes how Cocteau "improvised" the entire concert around Le Boeuf sur le toit. His original plan was to include Satie's yet unperformed Cinq Grimaces pour Le Songe d'une nuit d'été, composed in 1915 for Cocteau's unrealized Cirque Medrano production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.The Cinq Grimaces pour Le Songe d'une nuit d'été would not be performed in Satie's lifetime. It was published posthumously in 1929. Satie wrote to Milhaud with a different idea:
"My Dear Friend - I am so sorry: the Grimaces are written for too large an orchestra. If you like, I could write Trois petites Marches - including the Marche de Cocagne - for small orchestra, with a duration of 10 minutes..."Nigel Wilkins, "Erik Satie's Letters to Milhaud and Others", The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 66, No. 3 (Jul., 1980), p. 418. Wilkins gives the date of Satie's letter as "January 1, 1919", but this is clearly mistaken.The Cinq Grimaces were never performed or published in Satie's lifetime.
This proposal was accepted and Satie began composition in December 1919. How the "Three Little Marches" evolved into a Rabelais-themed suite with an overtly satirical finale is a mystery, as Satie was secretive about what motivated him to compose. His intentions may have been the subject of a note he sent Milhaud on January 10, 1920, while the work was still in progress: "Come tomorrow, and...'Don't give anything away.' Not a word to ANYBODY, above all: 'Don't give anything away.' SERIOUS."Steven Moore Whiting, "Satie the Bohemian: From Cabaret to Concert Hall", Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 499. In his book "Satie the Bohemian" (1999), Steven Moore Whiting detailed Satie's uneasy relations with Cocteau and suspected that the concluding Coin de Polka, with its suggestions of Rabelaisian obscenity and "heavy-handed" music hall-style humor, was "a caricature of Cocteau's whole enterprise."Whiting, "Satie the Bohemian", p. 499. The short score for the pièces montées was completed on January 3, 1920 and the orchestration by January 24, when Satie informed Milhaud, "I have finished - Happy am I."Nigel Wilkins, "Erik Satie's Letters to Milhaud and Others", The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 66, No. 3 (July 1980), pp. 404-428.
Music and literary themes
The common English translation of Satie's collective title, Three Little Stuffed Pieces, loses much of the punning of the original French. A pièce montée is an edible patisserie sculpture made from sugar and other confections, and serves as a centerpiece at a formal banquet; "pièce" can also refer to a short musical composition, and the verb monter variously means "mount", "climb", "to stuff", or "go uphill".
The pieces differ in style and tone and no attempt is made to link them musically, although the bassoon plays a prominent role in Nos. 1 and 3. Yet there is a sense of "mounting" excitement as the music progresses from the gentle Rêverie and the more extrovert Marche to the raucous Coin de Polka. The titles of the outer pieces are chapter headings from Gargantua and Pantagruel, which serve as subtexts for those familiar with Rabelais; the music itself does not follow a literal program.
Satie scored the suite for a standard music hall ensemble of 25 players (excluding the tuba): 1 flute, 1 oboe, 1 clarinet, 1 bassoon, 1 horn in F, 2 trumpets in C, 1 trombone, snare drum, cymbals, bass drum, and strings (1st & 2nd violins, violas, cellos, and double basses). It is dedicated to Madame Julien Henriquet.
I. De l'enfance de Pantagruel In Book 2, Chapter 4 of Gargantua and Pantagruel, Rabelais describes how the enormous baby Pantagruel drank the milk of 4600 cows straight from the source at each feeding, and was chained to his cradle to keep him from shoving the animals into his mouth. Despite the restraints he figures out how to walk and follows his nose into the royal banquet hall, carrying the cradle on his back "like a tortoise climbing up a wall". Gargantua frees him and rules that Pantagruel is now big enough to dine with the grown-ups.
The designation Rêverie notwithstanding, Satie's music is quietly lyrical rather than dreamlike. It has a detached quality not far removed from his previous compositions, the piano Nocturnes (1919), a series he curtailed to write this suite.The Nocturne No. 5 is dated November 1919. Satie abandoned an almost complete draft of No. 6, along with a harmonic plan for No. 7 and sketches for other possible pieces in the series. See Orledge, "Satie the Composer", pp. 194-198, 317-318. Satie imbues it with a certain ponderousness by giving the main theme of the A section to the bassoon over an undulating string ostinato, and by what pianist Olof Höjer described as "a heavy-footed, bloated quality in its movement pattern."Olof Höjer, notes to "Erik Satie: The Complete Piano Music, Vol. 6", Swedish Society Discofil, 1996. In the recapitulation the bassoon theme is extended through repetition and a cadential phrase.
II. Marche de Cocagne
Cockaigne was a mythical land of plenty in Medieval and Renaissance literature, where the skies rained custard, rivers of wine flowed beneath mountains of butter and cheese, and laziness was rewarded. Rabelais does not mention Cockaigne directly but satirizes the premise at various points of Gargantua and Pantagruel,Robert Appelbaum, "Aguecheek's Beef, Belch's Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic Interjections: Literature, Culture, and Food Among the Early Moderns", University of Chicago Press, 2008, p. 136. notably in Book IV, in which Pantagruel visits an island whose inhabitants (called "gastrolators") worship the belly as their only god. The myth later became a metaphor for gluttony and excess. In Satie's time "Cockaigne" was a jocular nickname for Paris as well as London.Frank Moore Colby, Talcott Williams (ed.), New International Encyclopedia, Dodd, Mead, 1918, p. 532.Composer Edward Elgar wrote his Cockaigne Overture (1901) about London and Londoners.