Salut drapeau!

Cavalcanti falls in love with the curiously androgynous Tonio, who uses the captain and his troops to seize Taranto independently rather than serve as a puppet ruler for the King.

[3] Royal retribution is swift and the defeated Cavalcanti lives just long enough to learn that Tonio is a woman, having been named and raised (at Ferdinand's orders) as a boy in a monastery for her protection.

[6] For his lone setting of the play Satie chose Cavalcanti's speech from Act 2, Scene 9, where the captain seizes the Taranto flag ("Salut drapeau!")

"As a result", writes biographer Mary E. Davis, "the music has a consistent texture, with no hint of tonality or progress, and anticipates the aesthetic that Satie would later describe as stemming from boredom, which was 'mysterious and profound'".

[8] Seven decades later Robert Caby unearthed the piece from Satie's manuscripts at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and edited it for publication under the title Hymne Pour Le "Salut Drapeau" (Salabert, 1968).

[9] Performances have been scarce, reflecting its status (in the words of Grove Music Online) as "an abstruse, intricately conceived curiosity" in Satie's oeuvre.

Voile gonglée par toutes les poitrines Orgueilleux laborum Ailes déployées des foules palpitantes Tu portes dans ton vol le destin d'une race!

[6] Meriel Dickinson, Peter Dickinson (Unicorn, 1975), Marjanne Kweksilber, Reinbert de Leeuw (Harlekijn, 1976), Nicolai Gedda, Aldo Ciccolini (EMI, 1987), Yumi Nara, Jill Cohen (Fontec, 1989), Jane Manning, Bojan Gorišek (Audiophile Classics, 1995), Anne-Sophie Schmidt, Jean-Pierre Armengaud (Mandala, 1996), Sabine Meyer (arrangement for clarinet), Marco Dalpane (Ants, 2007), Barbara Hannigan, Reinbert de Leeuw (Winter & Winter, 2016), Holger Falk, Steffen Schleiermacher (MDG, 2016).