Le Fils des étoiles

Le Fils des étoiles (The Son of the Stars) is an incidental music score composed in December 1891 by Erik Satie to accompany a three-act poetic drama of the same name by Joséphin Péladan.

The Preludes have been cited as among Satie's most radical compositions,[7] with their forward-looking explorations of quartal harmony and the composer's conception of theatre music as a "static sound décor", functioning independently of the stage action.

[8] In 1922 the American critic Lawrence Gilman heard in Le Fils des étoiles "harmonic inventions which sound for all the world like passages to which Stravinsky and Schoenberg, twenty years later, were signing their names with a noble gesture of revolutionary defiance ..."[9] Satie wrote the score for Le Fils des étoiles during his short-lived involvement (1891–1892) as official composer and chapelmaster of the Mystic Order of the Rose + Croix.

[16] When Satie broke with the Rose + Cross sect in an open letter to the journal Gil Blas in August 1892 he declared, "The good Monsieur Péladan ... never influenced the independence of my aesthetic.

"[18] And Cocteau related a conversation with Debussy in which he claimed the composer directly quoted Satie's ideas on the function of dramatic music: "There is no need for the orchestra to grimace when a character comes on the stage.

[23] Biographer Steven Moore Whiting found in the three Preludes a self-sufficient interlinked structure that "forms a kind of palindrome", with the melodic ideas shifted about in a "compositional shell game.

In his book Satie the Composer (1990), Robert Orledge pointed out problems of tuning and intonation for the harpists which would have made the music impractical to play as written, so the nature of its first performance remains a mystery.

In his March 26, 1892 column for L'Écho de Paris, Willy dismissively identified Satie as the "ex-pianist of the ground floor at the Chat Noir" and described his Preludes as "nervous" because "one doesn't know which end to grab them by."

Over the years Satie would denounce Willy as a "dull-witted pen-pusher" and "dreary piece of literary garbage" in open letters to the press, private correspondence, and in his publications as leader of his own mock-religious sect, the Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor.

Satie removed the bar lines from the score and added playing directions that further emphasized the music's non-dramatic nature: "White and immobile," "Pale and hieratic," "Like a gentle request," "Complacently lonely," "Watch from afar.

In 1911, when Ravel was established as one of France's leading composers, he programmed some of Satie's early piano pieces at a concert sponsored by his progressive Société musicale indépendante (SMI), which began to promote him as an important forerunner of modern trends in French music.

These works, unfortunately few in number, surprise one through their prescience of modern vocabulary and through the quasi-prophetical character of certain harmonic discoveries ...[45] In the years before World War I Ravel planned to orchestrate the Preludes but apparently never got beyond the first;[46] his manuscript is now lost.

[49] According to Jean Cocteau, Satie's early ideas of "musical scenery" represented by Le Fils des étoiles "determined the aesthetic" of Debussy's landmark opera Pelléas et Mélisande (1902).

Preludes (piano): Aldo Ciccolini (EMI, 1971, 1988), Jean-Joël Barbier (Universal Classics France, 1971), France Clidat (Forlane, 1984), Jean-Pierre Armengaud (Le Chant Du Monde, 1986), Bill Quist (Windham Hill, 1986), Satsuki Shibano (Firebird, 1987), Riri Shimada (Sony, 1987), Bojan Gorišek (Audiophile Classics, 1994), Reinbert de Leeuw (Philips, 1996), Olof Höjer (Swedish Society Discofil, 1996), Pascal Rogé (Decca, 1997), Roland Pöntinen (BIS, 1998), Peter Dickinson (Olympia, 2001), Jean-Yves Thibaudet (Decca, 2003), Cristina Ariagno (Brilliant Classics, 2006), Chisako Okano (Bella Musica, 2014), Noriko Ogawa (BIS, 2017).