Erik Satie and the Rosicrucians: Composer to Péladan's Order
In 1891 Erik Satie became composer to Joséphin Péladan's Catholic Rose+Croix order: the Sonneries, the break with the Sâr and a church all of his own.
Before becoming the ironic father of the Parisian avant-garde, Erik Satie went through a mystical season as short as it was singular. Born in Honfleur in 1866 and soon moved to Paris, the young pianist of the Montmartre taverns became in 1891 the official composer of an esoteric order, the Catholic Rose+Croix of the Temple and the Grail. From that experience came suspended, solemn pages that anticipate many features of his mature style.
The Sâr Péladan and His Order
The founder of the order was Joséphin Péladan, a writer and art critic from Lyon, who called himself Sâr, a title inspired by the kings of ancient Mesopotamia. In 1888 Péladan had taken part with Stanislas de Guaita and Papus in founding the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Croix, but in 1891 he broke away to found an order of his own, Catholic and aesthetic in outlook, intended to promote an idealist and spiritual art.
The Rose-Cross recalled a tradition going back to the anonymous manifestos published in Germany in the early seventeenth century, the Fama Fraternitatis of 1614 and the Confessio of 1615, which announced the existence of a secret brotherhood founded by a legendary Christian Rosenkreuz. In nineteenth-century France the name had come back into fashion in various occultist circles, each with its own interpretation.
The Salons de la Rose+Croix and the Sonneries
In March 1892 Péladan opened at the Durand-Ruel gallery in Paris the first Salon de la Rose+Croix, an exhibition of Symbolist painting and sculpture financed by Count Antoine de La Rochefoucauld. The programme excluded landscapes, still lifes and scenes of daily life, favouring myths, legends, allegories and religious subjects. The opening evening began with music by Satie.
The Sonneries de la Rose+Croix, three short pieces named after the airs of the Order, the Grand Master and the Grand Prior, are built on successions of parallel chords that do not follow the rules of traditional harmony. The music does not develop themes or seek tension and resolution: it moves in motionless blocks, like a liturgy of sound. Satie also wrote incidental music for Le Fils des étoiles, a play by Péladan set in ancient Chaldea.
The Break and a Personal Church
His membership did not last long. In August 1892 Satie announced publicly, in a letter to a Parisian newspaper, that he was no longer tied to Péladan. A few months later, in 1893, he founded a religious institution of his own, the Église Métropolitaine d'Art de Jésus Conducteur, of which he was at once founder, priest and sole member. From this imaginary church he issued bulletins and anathemas against critics, in a tone halfway between devotion and parody.
The mystical period also produced the Danses gothiques of 1893 and the ballet Uspud, written with his friend Contamine de Latour. In these works one recognises the stillness, the simplicity of writing and the taste for enigmatic titles that Satie would keep throughout his life. The Gymnopédies of 1888, written before he met Péladan, show that this inclination already existed.
The Rosicrucian interlude was brief, but not marginal. It taught Satie that music could be contemplation rather than narrative, and this idea, freed from its esoteric context, would influence Debussy, Ravel and many twentieth-century composers. American minimalism in the later twentieth century recognised one of its ancestors in those motionless pages, and the Sonneries are still performed in their piano version.