Pièces froides

Biographer Rollo H. Myers placed the Pièces froides high among Satie's piano works, writing, "Only a born musician of the finest sensibility could have conceived these limpid and so essentially 'musical' pieces which ought to be in the repertory of every pianist who is more interested in music than virtuosity.

[3] In July 1896, he had been forced to move from his room at 6 Rue Cortot into an unheated ground floor closet (he called it a "cupboard")[4] in the same building, which the landlord offered him for 20 francs per quarter.

[5][6] The space was so small that Satie's camp bed all but blocked the door shut, and on frigid nights he kept warm by sleeping fully dressed with the rest of his clothing piled on top of him.

Satie's friend Claude Debussy had long lobbied the Société Nationale de Musique (SNM) to perform his music, even though the group's director Ernest Chausson reportedly "almost fainted" after looking through some of the scores.

They share with those early works clear textures and a tendency to present a single musical idea from a number of different perspectives,[14] but have greater rhythmic fluidity and technical assurance.

"[17] Another new element in the Pièces froides is the ironic, self-effacing humor that now began to creep into Satie's extramusical texts, which at the time reflected his feelings of destitute isolation.

[18] One could hardly call the warm, inviting Airs "Tunes to Make You Run Away", and some of the playing directions hint at hunger and deprivation: "Don't eat too much" (used twice), "Rock bottom", "Suck on it", and "Medium done".

The first two pieces, which were completed by April 22,[23] are contrapuntal settings of the same popular-sounding melody that also show Satie – perhaps with tongue-in-cheek – experimenting with the harmonic styles of Debussy and Gabriel Faure.

[28] Aldo Ciccolini (EMI, 1971, 1988), Jean-Joël Barbier (Universal Classics France, 1971), Jacques Février (excerpts, Everest, 1975, reissued by Essential Media in 2011), Reinbert de Leeuw (Harlekijn, 1975, reissued by Philips, 1980), Yūji Takahashi (Denon, 1976), France Clidat (Forlane, 1984), Jean-Pierre Armengaud (Le Chant Du Monde, 1986), Anne Queffélec (Virgin Classics, 1988), Pascal Rogé (London, 1996), Michel Legrand (Erato, 1993), Olof Höjer (Swedish Society Discofil, 1996), Jean-Yves Thibaudet (Decca, 2002), and Alexandre Tharaud (Harmonia Mundi, 2009), Alessandro Simonetto (OnClassical, 2016, 2021)