Nocturnes (Satie)
There was the fallout from the scandalous premiere of his ballet Parade (1917),[b] including his conviction of criminal libel (from which he narrowly escaped imprisonment) for sending insulting postcards to one of its critics, Jean Poueigh; his bitter estrangement from longtime friend Claude Debussy, and Debussy's subsequent death; and the completion of the work which he believed represented the best of himself: the "symphonic drama" Socrate (1918).
Ridiculed by the French press and dogged by chronic poverty, Satie fell into a depressed state that reached its nadir in August 1918, when he wrote to Valentine Hugo, "I shit on Art, it has 'cut me up' too often.
By the summer of 1919, his creative energies had revived, though his spirits remained hard-bitten and gloomy: "I have changed a lot during these last months", he mused to singer Paulette Darty [fr; ja].
Satie's notebooks reveal that he initially intended to present the Nocturnes with the whimsical literary humor that the Parisian public had come to expect from him.
The first piece had the working title Faux Nocturne and was accompanied by one of those little stories he enjoyed writing for the pianist's private amusement:[f] The night is silentMelancholy is all-pervasiveThe will-o'-the-wisp disturbs the peaceful landscapeWhat a bore!
He also wrote them using conventional bar lines, a practice he had largely eschewed in piano music for nearly 30 years before returning to it—perhaps with a dash of irony—in his Sonatine bureaucratique.
[6]: 306–307 The Nocturnes caused no immediate stir, although at the Viñes performance, Jean Cocteau and Les Six members Darius Milhaud and Louis Durey expressed their enthusiasm.
John Cage championed them in the United States after World War II, and they inspired choreographer Merce Cunningham's ballet Nocturnes (1956), in which the dances were created using chance procedure.
"[2]: 92 The Nocturnes have never enjoyed the mainstream popularity of the Gymnopédies or other Satie piano works; although they have been recorded by such artists as Aldo Ciccolini, Pascal Rogé, and Jean-Yves Thibaudet, they remain—according to John Keillor's AllMusic review—"among the undiscovered masterpieces of the twentieth century.
[6]: 306 Six decades later, musicologist Robert Orledge examined Satie's notebooks from the period and discovered a single, full draft of a piano piece, missing only two bars of the left-hand part.
