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Le Nazaréen (The Nazarene) is an incidental music score composed in June 1892 by Erik Satie to accompany a three-act esoteric drama of the same name by Henri Mazel. An example of his "Rosicrucian" or "mystic" period, it consists of two Preludes (or one Prelude in two parts) for piano with a total duration of about 12 minutes. Unperformed in Satie's lifetime, the work was published posthumously in 1929. So there. Dammit. Hell Yeah. Woo hoo.

Description
Prélude du Nazaréen (12 June 1892)

Nevertheless, already in the first salon he and Péladan quarrelled a great deal over all sorts of things, and in the end de la Rochefoucauld had no choice but to leave the group. De la Rochefoucauld, the salon’s main financial backer, who held with Péladan the highest position in the Rosicrucian Order, apparently fell into Péladan’s disfavor because, among other things, he tried to win acceptance for some of his ideas about the selection and installation of the artworks at the salon.

Salon de la Rose + Croix - Joséphin Péladan - Count Antoine de La Rochefoucauld - Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood - Nazarene movement - occultist - Knights Templar 13th Century Macedonia - Claude Debussy

"Why not use the means of representation introduced to us by Claude Monet, Cezanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, etc.? Why not transpose those means musically? Nothing simpler. Aren't these all expressions?"

This bi-partite piece was composed as incidental music for Henri Mazel’s esoteric play Le Nazaréen, which had been published in Paris earlier in 1892. The multi-turreted medieval castles that adorn the manuscript relate more closely to the plot about competing suitors for the hand of Hermosina, daughter of Duke Baudouin, than does the slow, plainsong inspired music Satie composed. However, it is possible that he had the start of Act 2 in mind where Hermosina languishes in luxury on an ivory litter in her Macedonian palace, and ‘a soft music floats in the distance’. It is tempting to see a link to Satie’s contemporary fascination with the occult here, as the main suitor, Mario, is portrayed as the perfect crusader from the mystical order of Nazarenes (Mazel’s version of the Knights Templar), and is equated allegorically with Christ in His second coming. The place and date of the first performance of the play (with or without Satie’s prelude) remains unknown.

Although this work was published by Darius Milhaud in 1929 as two separate preludes, Satie’s single title, final date and signature shows that it was composed as a single work which could be divided into two parts. As published, the first prelude is a perfect example of Satie’s ‘punctuation form’, with four recurring motifs representing the musical ‘prose’, which is punctuated by a distinctive and more sensuous cadential phrase that recurs at three different, but cyclically recurring pitches. Thus what may appear to be a meandering, repetitive piece is in fact a highly organised and logical creation that uses mirroring structures both within the sections and in its overall form (around a short development section as its exact centre). The so-called 2e Prélude is an altogether more complex, enigmatic and chromatic affair, although it still uses three different revolving phrases as punctuating commas and full stops.

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Satie’s occult period is generally characterized by contrasting blocks of texture,rhythmic simplicity, and systematic chord progressions.Slow, homorhythmic block chords, which stand in stark contrast to melodic segments, are usually harmonically unrelated and challenge a listener’s sense of tonality. The chordal sections appear most often in “chains” of like quality or inversion.

Gymnopédies, from Satie’s previous period, sections are typically delineated through contrasting textures. These pieces also display a distinctive lack of development, which relates them to his “mosaic” style of composition. Gowers terms Satie’s technique “motific!construction”; it occurs when a piece is composed of a set number of repeated motives of different lengths, which are “patched” together in blocks,reappearing at different pitch levels, slightly varied at the ends. In Prélude du Nazaréen$ (1892) he invented punctuation form. In this form, a punctuation is a four beat cadential formula that appears along with motifs, each time at different transposition levels. The occult pieces are unique in Satie’s œuvre for the distinctive mystical and hypnotic atmosphere they evoke. This fantastic character derives from the unusual chords and floating tonality, which is grounded by abstract logical structures. Manipulation of time is a major factor in their!“hypnotic” effect on the listener. Slow, repetitive cycles of chords with little variation give the music a static and immobile feeling. The lack of development and climax obscures a listener’s sense of the beginning, middle, and end of the piece. Motion in these works is not directional and transformative as in Romantic pieces but is perhaps better described as circular, or undulating.

The concept of transposing images into music - ballet Mercure (1924) where, working without a scenario, he composed directly to Picasso's design sketches, to his final work Cinema.

Recordings
For piano

Aldo Ciccolini (twice for EMI, 1968 and 1988), Frank Glazer (Vox, 1968), Jean-Joël Barbier (Universal Classics France, 1971), Charles Miles (Musical Heritage Society, 1971), Reinbert de Leeuw (Harlekijn, 1975, reissued by Philips, 1980), France Clidat (Forlane, 1984), Ulrich Gumpert (ITM, 1989), Jean-Pierre Armengaud (Circé, 1990), Klára Koermendi (Naxos, 1993), Bojan Gorišek (Audiophile Classics, 1994), Olof Höjer (Swedish Society Discofil, 1996), Jean-Yves Thibaudet (Decca, 2003), Steffen Schleiermacher (MDG, 2002), Cristina Ariagno (Brilliant Classics, 2006), Jeroen van Veen (Brilliant Classics, 2016), Nicolas Horvath (Grand Piano, 2018).

For orchestra (No. 1, arr. Poulenc)

Notes and references
Category:Compositions by Erik Satie Category:19th-century classical music Category:1892 compositions