Erik Satie

Born into a family of shipping agents, orphaned from his Scottish mother at the age of 2, Erik Satie received an eclectic upbringing. His father remarried Eugénie Barnetsche, a pianist-composer whom he despised. Gifted but extraordinarily lazy, he attended the Paris Conservatoire and began composing. Attracted by mysticism, he became a composer for the Rosicrucian association and pianist at the Chat Noir cabaret in Montmartre. In his private life, his friendship with Claude Debussy inflamed his complexes, and his stormy affair with Suzanne Valadon, mother of the painter Maurice Utrillo, destabilized him. Forced to work in the caf'conç' to survive, he took counterpoint lessons with Vincent d'Indy and Albert Roussel. Maurice Ravel performs his "Sarabandes"; Claude Debussy orchestrates his "Gymnopédies". Publishers are finally clamoring for him. Jean Cocteau makes him a star. Still wearing the same gray velvet suit (he owned twelve of them), he lived sparsely in Arcueil ("Je loge dans un placard") and walked to and from Paris; he was linked to Pablo Picasso and René Clair. He dies, already mythologized, of cirrhosis of the liver.

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