Erik Satie
Erik Satie - Aldo Ciccolini

The night is silent

The melancholy is immense

A will-o'-the-wisp disturbs the quiet landscape

What a nuisance

It is an old will-o'-the-wisp

Did it really need to come?

Let's get back to our daydreaming, please.*

Sometimes you don’t feel like doing anything: suddenly, the differences between things fade away. In their place, a shapeless grayness. Sometimes you need silence. What seemed like music yesterday, today is noise and annoyance.

It's also possible to find, in Satie, the only sound that suits silence: his flickers, his slow nights, his children's games.

That bastard Satie sweeps everything away. But with delicacy. His magical touch swiftly cuts off all seriousness. His, a strange way of looking at the world and playing with it: a cheerful and gloomy mockery.

Who knows what he had in that merry-go-round head of his.

Certainly, he didn’t want to impress others with artifices. Or maybe yes, indeed definitely yes. But not to show off. It's as if his compositions, his nonsense, were the seismograph of his thoughts. Of his boredom, of his amusement and, perhaps, of his dreams. Yet, he notes in a notebook, man is made to dream as I am made to have a wooden leg**.

Boh.

Perhaps it is best to remain silent.

To let silence become music.

In this, the pages of Erik Satie and the fingers of Aldo Ciccolini succeed, believe me, more than anything else.

...

...

That’s all.

Did Satie's work deserve better analyses?

Stories of his life, anecdotes, fitting definitions?

I would not say so.

Satie, before being a man, is, by his own admission, a mammal.

A bear, a dormouse, a deer.

His forest is music.

His breathless run, a dance of fingers.

To describe him means to make him die.