- After his death, Satie's friends discovered an apartment replete with squalor and chaos. Among many other unsorted papers and miscellaneous items, it contained a large number of umbrellas, and two grand pianos placed one on top of the other, the upper instrument used as storage for letters and parcels.
- Satie and Suzanne Valadon (an artists' model, artist, long-time friend of Miguel Utrillo, and mother of Maurice Utrillo) began an affair early in 1893. After their first night together, he proposed marriage. The two did not marry, but Valadon moved to a room next to Satie's at the Rue Cortot. Satie became obsessed with her, calling her his Biqui and writing impassioned notes about "her whole being, lovely eyes, gentle hands, and tiny feet". During their relationship, Satie composed the Danses gothiques as a means of calming his mind, and Valadon painted a portrait of Satie, which she gave to him. After six months she moved away, leaving Satie broken-hearted. Afterwards, he said that he was left with "nothing but an icy loneliness that fills the head with emptiness and the heart with sadness". It is believed this was the only intimate relationship Satie ever had.
- From the early 1880s onwards, Satie started publishing salon compositions by his step-mother and himself, among others.
- After being sent home for two and a half years, he was readmitted to the Conservatoire at the end of 1885 (age 19), but was unable to make a more favourable impression on his teachers than he had before, and, as a result, resolved to take up military service a year later. However, Satie's military career did not last very long; within a few months he was discharged after deliberately infecting himself with bronchitis.[.
- After years of heavy drinking (including consumption of absinthe), Satie died at age 59, on 1 July 1925 from cirrhosis of the liver.
- When Satie was four years old, his family moved to Paris, his father having been offered a translator's job in the capital. After his mother's death in 1872, he was sent (at age 6), together with his younger brother, Conrad, back to Honfleur to live with his paternal grandparents. There he received his first music lessons from a local organist. In 1878, when he was 12 years old, his grandmother died, and the two brothers were reunited in Paris with their father, who remarried (to a piano teacher) shortly afterwards.
- His work was a precursor to later artistic movements such as minimalism, repetitive music, and the Theatre of the Absurd.
- An eccentric, Satie was introduced as a "gymnopedist" in 1887, shortly before writing his most famous compositions, the Gymnopédies. Later, he also referred to himself as a "phonometrician" (meaning "someone who measures sounds"), preferring this designation to that of "musician", after having been called "a clumsy but subtle technician" in a book on contemporary French composers published in 1911.
- After his death, Satie's friends discovered compositions that were thought to have been lost or were totally unknown. The score to Jack in the Box was thought, by Satie, to have been left on a bus years before. These were found behind the piano, in the pockets of his velvet suits, and in other odd places, and included Vexations; Geneviève de Brabant and other unpublished or unfinished stage works; The Dreamy Fish; many Schola Cantorum exercises; a previously unseen set of "canine" piano pieces; and several other works for piano, many untitled. Some of these would be published later as additional Gnossiennes, Pièces froides, Enfantines, and furniture music.
- Le piège de Méduse (1913) had a unique position in Satie's oeuvre, as it was a stage work conceived and composed seemingly without any collaboration with other artists.
- A rare autochrome photograph of Satie exists that dates from 1911. It was reproduced on the cover of Robert Orledge's second book on the composer, Satie Remembered (1995), but where this autochrome was found has not been made known.
- Joined the Communist Party in 1920. He subsequently liked to shock high society people by introducing himself as "Comrade Satie of the Arcueil Soviet".
- Although he was never a pet owner, Satie's fondness for dogs was well known. Stray pooches were the only living beings he allowed inside his room in Arcueil, and for piano he composed two suites of "Flabby Preludes for a Dog". He once told Jean Cocteau, "I want to write a play for dogs, and I already have my set design. The curtain rises on a bone".
- Was noted for his quick, ironic wit. At an orchestra rehearsal for his ballet "Parade" a disgruntled flute player shouted, "Monsieur Satie, you must think I'm an idiot!" Satie replied, "No, I don't think you're an idiot. But I could be wrong".
- Founded his own religious sect, the Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor (1893 to 1895), with himself as high priest, chapel master, and sole member. It was primarily a satirical publicity stunt Satie used to publish a "church newsletter" attacking his critics, though it also prompted his only religious composition, the "Mass for the Poor" (c. 1895).
- Preferred the company of artists and poets to that of fellow musicians. He was such a perceptive devotee of new creative trends it was said he could've made a fortune as an art dealer. Man Ray called Satie "the only musician who had eyes".
- Satie is known to have made only one phone call in his entire life, in 1923. It was to an important patron about a project. He was so irritated by telephones that when visiting friends, he insisted they take theirs off the hook.
- Igor Stravinsky was the one contemporary composer Satie admired without reservation. In 1922 he wrote a laudatory article about the younger musician for "Vanity Fair", his most high-profile piece of journalism. For his part Stravinsky thought Satie was "the oddest person I have ever known, but the most rare and consistently witty person, too".
- In 1900 Satie wrote a ragtime-inspired piano piece, the "Petit prélude de 'La Mort de Monsieur Mouche'". This made him one of the first European composers to explore early American jazz.
- Satie sported various looks throughout his life. As a young Montmartre bohemian, he had long hair and dressed in a frock coat, top hat and boots. He wore monkish robes as leader of his own fictitious church in the mid-1890s. During his "Velvet Gentleman" phase (beginning in 1895) he was seen only in suits made of gray velvet corduroy with matching cloth caps. Around age 40 Satie adopted his final look, that of an ordinary civil servant with bowler hat, conservative suits and detachable high stiff collars. Consistent features were his beard, the pince-nez glasses he always wore, and the umbrella he usually carried (but seldom used).
- After Satie's death in 1925, his brother Conrad discovered a cache of letters the composer had written to Suzanne Valadon after their 1893 breakup, but never sent. Conrad gave them to Valadon, who subsequently burned them and never spoke of their contents.
- Satie was an influential artist in the late 19th- and early 20th-century Parisian avant-garde.
- Satie's last compositions were two 1924 ballets. Mercure reunited him with Picasso and Massine for a mythological spoof produced by Count Étienne de Beaumont's Soirées de Paris, and he wrote the "instantaneist" ballet Relâche in collaboration with Picabia, for the Ballets suédois of Rolf de Maré. In a simultaneous project, Satie added music to the surrealist film Entr'acte by René Clair, which was given as an intermezzo for Relâche.
- Émile Decombes called him "the laziest student in the Conservatoire.
- Erik was born at Honfleur in Normandy; his childhood home there is now open to the public.
- From 1917 Satie wrote five pieces of furniture music ("Musique d'ameublement") for different occasions.
- Since 1911 he had been on friendly terms with Igor Stravinsky, about whom he would later write articles.
- He is buried in the cemetery in Arcueil. There is a tiny stone monument designating a grassy area in front of an apartment building as "Parc Erik Satie"; this was actually the pedestal of a bronze bust of the composer, which was later stolen. Over the course of his 27 years in residence at Arcueil, where Satie lived in stark simplicity, no one had ever visited his room.
- In 1879, Satie entered the Paris Conservatoire, where he was soon labelled untalented by his teachers. Georges Mathias, his professor of piano at the Conservatoire, described his pupil's piano technique in flatly negative terms, "insignificant and laborious" and "worthless. Years later, Satie related that Mathias, with great insistence, had told him that his real talent lay in composing.
- In addition to his body of music, Satie left a set of writings, having contributed work for a range of publications from the dadaist 391 to the American culture chronicle Vanity Fair.
- With Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, and Germaine Tailleferre, Satie formed the Nouveaux jeunes, shortly after writing Parade. Later, the group was joined by Francis Poulenc and Darius Milhaud. In September 1918, Satie - giving little or no explanation - withdrew from the Nouveaux jeunes. Jean Cocteau gathered the six remaining members, forming the Groupe des six (to which Satie would later have access, but later again would fall out with most of its members).
- Although in later life he prided himself on publishing his work under his own name, in the late 19th century he appears to have used pseudonyms such as Virginie Lebeau and François de Paule in some of his published writings.
- From 1919, Satie was in contact with Tristan Tzara, the initiator of the Dada movement. He became acquainted with other artists involved in the movement, such as Francis Picabia (later to become a Surrealist), André Derain, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Hugo and Man Ray, among others.
- In October 1905, Satie enrolled in Vincent d'Indy's Schola Cantorum de Paris to study classical counterpoint while still continuing his cabaret work. Most of his friends were as dumbfounded as the professors at the Schola when they heard about his new plan to return to the classrooms, especially as d'Indy was an admiring pupil of Saint-Saëns, not particularly favoured by Satie. Satie would follow these courses at the Schola, as a respected pupil, for more than five years, receiving a first (intermediate) diploma in 1908. Some of his classroom counterpoint-exercises, such as the Désespoir agréable, were published after his death. Another summary, of the period prior to the Schola, also appeared in 1911: the Trois morceaux en forme de poire, which was a kind of compilation of the best of what he had written up to 1903.
- Satie's skills as a literary humorist are epitomized in his "Memoirs of an Amnesiac" (1912 to 1914, 1924), a series of short, zany "autobiographical" sketches that provide almost no factual information about the subject. These include the famous "A Day in the Life of a Musician" (1913) in which he claimed to subsist only on "white foods" (including moldy fruit). As a final joke the sketches are subtitled "(fragments)", which in French indicate they are excerpts from a book. That book never existed.
Coincidentally or not, Oscar Levant - who was very knowledgeable about 20th Century composers - called his bestselling 1965 autobiography "Memoirs of an Amnesiac". - Satie's grave at Arcueil Cemetery was to have been marked by a monument sculpted by his close friend Constantin Brâncusi. Funds were raised for this, but the composer's relatives objected to Brancusi's design and installed a standard-issue tomb instead. This was given a new base of gray granite in the 1990s, though the original top slab was preserved. A plaque on the wall behind the grave reads, "Here lies a great musician, a man of the heart, an exceptional citizen. Erik SATIE 1866 - 1925".
- Satie disliked recordings and made no effort to preserve his works in that medium, even though many of his piano pieces (including the world famous "Gymnopédies") were ideally suited for 78 rpm sides. His favorite keyboard interpreters, Ricardo Viñes and Marcelle Meyer, respected his feelings and never recorded his music either.
- Satie was miserable at the Paris Conservatory, but persisted with his studies so he could get a student exemption that reduced his compulsory five years of military service to one year in the reserves (1886-1887). He was stationed as a reservist with the 33rd Infantry Regiment in Arras, only to spend much of that time on medical leave after deliberately making himself ill.
- Satie never kept a bank account. He typically spent or gave away his money as soon as he received it.
- Satie's mother Jane Leslie Anton was Scottish, and he was conceived in Scotland during his parents' honeymoon in the Summer of 1865.
- At age 18 he began using the Scandinavian spelling of "Erik" for his first name, to reflect the Viking heritage of his Norman ancestors.
- Made only two short trips outside of France, to give lectures in Brussels, Belgium in April 1921 and March 1924. In 1916 Impresario Sergei Diaghilev invited Satie to Rome, all expenses paid, to work on his ballet "Parade", but he chose to remain in Paris.
- As a schoolboy the only subjects Satie excelled in were history and Latin. He became a lifelong history buff and drew on historical themes for some of his compositions, albeit for humorous purposes.
- Satie liked to compose in cafes or wherever inspiration struck, jotting down his ideas in pocket notebooks. Noise did not bother him. There is a photograph of Satie composing on foot during a walk, a cigar clenched in his teeth.
- In 1892, Satie forced the director of the Paris Opera to look at his ballet score "Uspud" by challenging him to a duel. The writer Contamine de Latour, who acted as the composer's second, said this was a practical joke that almost went too far. The ballet was ultimately rejected, but Satie punningly advertised it as "Presented to the Paris Opera" instead of "Presented by the Paris Opera".
- After moving to Arcueil in 1898 Satie walked to and from Paris every day, a distance of 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) each way. His route took him past La Santé Prison, so he carried a hammer in his pocket to ward off any sketchy characters.
- Despite a lifetime of heavy drinking and smoking, Satie experienced no serious health issues until his liver cirrhosis manifested itself in late 1924. Exercise equipment was found in his room after his death, but it is believed he stayed fit mainly through his long daily walks.
- Was a gifted amateur calligrapher. When his piano suite "Sports et divertissements" was published in 1923 it reproduced Satie's exquisitely hand-drawn scores, in black ink for the notes and words and red ink for the staves. Facsimiles of these autograph scores still appear in editions of "Sports".
- As a gesture of friendship, Claude Debussy orchestrated Satie's piano pieces "Gymnopédies Nos. 1 & 3" and had them performed in Paris in 1897. It was the only time Debussy transcribed the music of another composer. These orchestral arrangements would help spread Satie's fame.
- Satie read several newspapers a day. During his final hospital stay he insisted on stacking them up near his bed, and piles of old newspapers were found in his apartment after his death.
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