Ex. 6-16: Spleen

No. 2 of Erik Satie's Ludions, a set of five short songs to poems by Léon-Paul Fargue, completed in May 1923, when Satie was 57 and two years from his death. The poem is only eight short lines: in an old square where bad weather has settled in like an ocean, a mean, curvy blonde sits on a rain-soaked bench, bored in "this cabaret of Nothingness that is our life." The whole song is ten bars: two for the piano alone, then eight for the voice, which grows louder and louder until it bursts out on that last line.

Satie and Fargue had been friends for years, and Satie had already set one of Fargue's poems to music in 1916. This cycle ended that friendship. The songs were first sung at a party in May 1923. The day before, Fargue saw that the printed programme did not name him as the poet. He was furious, and he blamed Satie, although the mistake was not Satie's. For weeks afterwards Fargue sent Satie insulting letters, one a day, and sometimes went out to Arcueil, where Satie lived, to push one under his door. According to the bookseller Sylvia Beach, who knew them both, Satie could only laugh about it. The two never spoke again, and Fargue did not come to Satie's funeral two years later.

The title Ludions is the French name for a small toy: a little figure in a bottle of water that sinks and rises again when you press the top. Fargue's five poems are just as light and odd — a pet rat, a frog, a cat — and in "Spleen," the great sigh about "this cabaret of Nothingness that is our life" comes from a mean, curvy blonde on a wet park bench. Years later, Fargue wrote of Satie as "a true master."

Satie was born in 1866 in Honfleur, on the Normandy coast. He is best known for the Gymnopédies for piano (1888), written when he was playing in Montmartre cabarets; in 1923, the year of this song, a group of young composers gathered around him as the "École d'Arcueil," named after the Paris suburb where he lived alone for the last 27 years of his life. He died in 1925, aged 59.

From the album Bijoux by Eva Lind and Jean Lemaire (2014)
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