Erik Satie - Petite Ouverture à danser /

Erik Satie - Petite Ouverture à danser (Revision par Robert Caby)

The Petite Ouverture à danser (Little Overture to a Dance) is a piece for solo piano composed around 1897 by Erik Satie. Unknown for many years, it is one of the more popular works to emerge from his posthumous manuscripts.

The piece was one of many Satie left unpublished at his death in 1925, an untitled draft without bar lines, dynamic markings or phrasing. Musicologists usually date it to 1897 because the sketch is contemporaneous with those of Satie's Pièces froides, and very much in the early Gnossiennes style he was revisiting at that time. Beginning and ending with an ethereal A-flat major melody, the overture passes calmly through various seemingly unrelated keys; a subtle momentum is maintained with offbeat chords in the inner voices. There is harmonic ambiguity but no dissonance or drama to mar the placid musical atmosphere.

In the late 1960s Robert Caby edited several collections of Satie's unpublished manuscripts from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, for issue by Salabert. These included the first commercial edition (1969) of the notorious Vexations, but the bulk were sketches, drafts, and exercises the composer had reasonable cause to withhold. Critics have questioned the necessity for these volumes as well as Caby's editorial decisions, which included giving unnamed pieces romantic-sounding titles Satie would have hated. Nevertheless a few minor gems emerged from the odds and sods. Caby saw enough potential in the Petite Ouverture à danser (his title) to have Salabert publish it as a stand-alone work in 1968.

Though brief, the piece has become a small favorite among pianists and audiences - often programmed with the Gnossiennes or Pièces froides. Some argue Satie himself might not have considered it “complete,” but its charm and subtle atmosphere have earned it a quiet place in the repertoire.


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