Erik Satie - Messe des Pauvres, I-IV

Описание: Messe des pauvres (Mass for the poor), for piano, chorus & organ (1892-1895)

I. Kyrie eleison
II. Dixit Domine
III. Prière des orgues
IV. Commune qui mundi nefas
V. Chant ecclésiastique
VI. Prière pour les voyageurs et les marins en danger de mort, à la très bonne et très auguste Vierge Marie, mère de Jésus
VII. Prière pour le salut de mon âme

Choeur René Duclos
Jean Laforge
Gaston Litaize

Considering the life Erik Satie led, he could perhaps have dedicated the Messe des pauvres (Mass for the Poor) to himself; the composer lived in poverty and obscurity, his music known only to a few close friends during his lifetime. Darius Milhaud commented that "our poor Satie, who died in poverty at the Hôpital St.-Joseph in Paris, could not have imagined the irradiation and diffusion of his work on the musical world of today."

Satie was not necessary a man of religious faith, but he did have loose affiliations with fin-de-siècle quasi-mystical cults. Immediately following his five-year appointment as the official musician of the confraternity Rose-Croix du Temple et du Graal (a splinter group of the Rosicrucian Order), which reinforced the influence of the symbolist writers, he became involved with a yet more unusual sect of his own creation. While living on the rue Cortot, in Montmartre, he founded the "The Metropolitan Church of Jesus the Leader"; he is thought to have been its only member. Contamine de Latour described the seat of the new Church as a "nondescript room, square and tile-floored, which was untimely crossed by the...ventilating pipe. No altar, no object which could be used for the cult, nothing that reminded one of a religious sanctuary: simply the unfinished furniture brought down from the attic where it had been rotting for months and which gave to the room an aspect both of a monk's cell and of an NCO's room." Within this "wretched" atmosphere, Satie composed his Messe des pauvres in 1895. This strange work for solo organ and unison voices is reminiscent of the Medieval chant and of the transcendental idealism with which the composer was fascinated. Like other works from the first phase of his career, the modal motifs of the composition were derived from plainchant and possibly from Eastern cantillation. Moving mainly stepwise or pentatonically, the hypnotic repeated slices of melody suggest devotional liturgy, and are placed alongside meandering, sensuous harmonies. The structured patterning of phrases follows a mathematical, geometric order. The work has been compared by Edgard Varèse to Dante's Inferno, and was unlike anything produced by his contemporaries, even those with similar styles such as Debussy, Massenet, Saint-Saëns, and Chausson. This disturbing, even slightly scary work takes its listeners deeper into the mind and philosophy of its composer, whose lifelong interest in the metaphysical was made manifest in his music. [allmusic.com]

Art by Sigmar Polke