Jeremy Denk on Erik Satie
| In the Review’s January 15, 2026, issue, the concert pianist Jeremy Denk writes about Erik Satie, “the truest bad boy of musical modernism in the hypercompetitive market of Paris before World War I.” For casual listeners who know Satie as the composer of, say, the Gymnopédies (as Denk characterizes them, “a concentrated wistfulness—essence of rainy Parisian café, possibly right after a breakup”), it may come as a surprise to learn that he was also the composer of a postcard to a critic he addressed as “Monsieur Fuckface…Famous Gourd and Composer for Nitwits.” Denk describes the profound aimlessness, the rebuke to excessively serious Romantic music, that can be found in Satie’s work: Here we are is always followed by Where are we? Satie displays an astonishing instinct for sapping any would-be narrative. The pianist seeking momentum to guide an interpretation is out of luck. You have the feeling that all the most beautiful, most French chords have wandered out of their cages at the classical zoo and, somewhat sedated, are now roaming free across the plains of art with no apparent agenda.… Music typically has a hidden agenda of filling you up, possessing you with its emotion and inspiration, but the circles of the Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes feel like they’re cultivating a void, an alternative emotional zone from which feeling is merely viewed.
Below, alongside Denk’s essay, are five articles from our archives about Satie, Dmitri Shostakovich, Arnold Schoenberg, Jeremy Denk, and playing the piano. Erik Satie took down the arrogance of late Romantic classical music, gently but ruthlessly taking up its vocabulary and removing all the excess, including authorship. “Denk writes feelingly on the artist’s self-dramatization, the formation of a self, sometimes manifesting as arrogance, the conviction that you have something special to contribute to the appreciation of what you are performing, grasping whatever gives you the audacity to present yourself before the public.” —April 21, 2022 “In March 1961, Shostakovich paid a three-day visit to Novorossiysk. My grandfather, by then elected the city’s mayor, was in charge of the composer’s visit. A well-known Izvestiya correspondent and a photographer were dispatched by their Moscow editorial office to cover Shostakovich’s contribution to socialist construction.” —April 8, 2019 “It may seem paradoxical that some pianists spend more time choosing a chair for a concert than an instrument; the piano technician at the Festival Hall in London told me that the late Shura Cherkassky decided on the piano he wanted in five minutes, but spent twenty minutes trying out different stools.” —October 21, 1999 “Who wants a sound to traverse his nose, or to stop in front of him? And would this really be music, or an experiment in physics?” —February 16, 1995 The eccentric cabaret-classical musician Erik Satie floated with the fragile equilibrium of a hang glider pilot through l’air du temps at the turn of the century. Just by staying in place he passed through a succession of seemingly contradictory periods and styles. During the Eighties and Nineties he combined piano playing in the bohemian night spots of Montmartre with exotic incidental music for Rosicrucian gatherings. In the fertile decade before World War I, reaching forty, Satie returned to school to study counterpoint. Soon after he was rediscovered as an anti-Wagnerian pioneer by his two old friends Ravel and Debussy. Parade, the ballet Satie dreamed up with Cocteau, Picasso, and Massine for Diaghilev in 1917, launched him into several years of collaboration with the Dadaists. His “furniture music” (“Don’t listen! Keep talking!” he instructed his listeners) displays a subtle relation to his writing in “Memoirs of an Amnesiac.”
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