Trois morceaux en forme de poire

Trois morceaux en forme de poire (Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear) is a 1903 suite for piano four hands by French composer Erik Satie.

[2] And the shock of hearing his friend Claude Debussy's landmark opera Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) led him to realize that experimenting with musical Impressionism was a dead end: "Nothing more can be done in this direction; I must search for something else or I am lost.

"[5][6][7] However the probity of this anecdote has been disputed in light of a letter Satie wrote to Debussy on August 17, 1903, when the suite was still in its early stages:[8][9] These original two pieces were probably Morceaux I and II,[11] and the work expanded outwards from there.

To the core group of Morceaux I-III Satie added two introductory and two concluding pieces, with headings that spoofed academic teaching of the kind he loathed during his studies at the Paris Conservatoire in the 1880s.

[12] The title Trois morceaux en forme de poire prefigures those of Satie's humoristic piano suites of the 1910s and reflects his fondness for puns and ironic ambiguity.

In the 1830s caricaturist Honoré Daumier satirically defined the reign of French King Louis Philippe by drawing the monarch with a pear-shaped head, and the insult became entrenched in the popular lexicon.

[20] The suite was Satie's first composition for piano four hands,[21] a genre he would subsequently enrich with original works (Aperçus désagréables, En habit de cheval) and arrangements (Parade, La belle excentrique).

Dispensing with a chronological scheme, Satie variously dips into the music of his youthful Chat Noir days, his "Rosicrucian" phase, and his gradual (if seemingly reluctant) embrace of popular influences, culminating in his "café-concert" style of the early 1900s.

[29] The pieces and their provenance are as follows: The Trois morceaux was first published by Rouart, Lerolle & Cie, which brought out several of Satie's old compositions in the wake of his much-publicized 1911 "discovery" by Maurice Ravel.

The most important of these invitation-only performances of the Trois morceaux took place at the Salle Huyghens located in the 14th arrondissement of Paris on April 18, 1916, with Ricardo Viñes and the composer at the piano.

Alexis Roland-Manuel introduced the program with a lecture on Satie and his aesthetic,[41] and some of his newer works were heard (the 1915 Avant-dernières pensées and two songs from the Trois Mélodies of 1916, sung by Jane Bathori).

He had long nursed the idea of an avant-garde ballet project with a fairground setting that he hoped would "astonish" Diaghilev,[43] and decided that the Trois morceaux, with its idiosyncratic use of popular song and dance idioms, was ideal for his purposes.

In the 1990s, pianist-musicologist Olof Höjer (who recorded Satie's complete keyboard music) maintained that the Trois morceaux was much better known by its title and reputation than by its presence in contemporary performance.

Other notable recordings are by Robert and Gaby Casadesus (CBS, 1963), Georges Auric and Jacques Février (Disques Adès, 1968), Frank Glazer and Richard Deas (Candide, 1970), Jean Wiener and Jean-Joël Barbier (Universal Classics France, 1971, reissued 2002), Yūji Takahashi and Alain Planès (Denon, 1980), Wyneke Jordans and Leo van Doeselaar (Etcetera, 1983), Jean-Pierre Armengaud and Dominique Merlet (Mandala, 1990), Christian Ivaldi and Noël Lee (Arion, 1991), Anne Queffélec and Catherine Collard (Virgin Classics, 1993), Philippe Corre and Edoudard Exerjean (Disques Pierre Verany, 1993), Klára Körmendi and Gábor Eckhardt (Naxos, 1994), Duo Campion-Vachon (Fleurs de Lys, 1995), Olof Höjer and Max Lorstad (Swedish Society, 1996), Bojan Gorisek and Tatiana Ognjanovic (Audiophile Classics, 1999), Jean-Philippe Collard and Pascal Rogé (Decca, 2000), Katia and Marielle Labèque (KML, 2009), Sandra and Jeroen van Veen (Brilliant Classics, 2013).