page_title: Ludions
section_title: The songs
hierarchical_section_title: Ludions / The songs
caption_attribution_description: Cartesian devil (or diver) from Lauscha, Thuringian Forest, Germany
context_page_description: The Ludions is a song cycle for voice and piano by Erik Satie, composed in 1923 to five absurdist poems by Léon-Paul Fargue. It was the last of his vocal compositions, completed two years before his death. The songs are brief and a performance of the set usually lasts less than five minutes.
  Songwriting occupied Satie sporadically throughout his life. He produced popular hits for the music hall as well as mélodies for more discriminating audiences. In the Ludions he fused both genres with the irreverent spirit characteristic of his later music.
  Biographer Pierre-Daniel Templier called the cycle "one of Satie's most successful works, due to the perfect correlation between the inspiration of the poet and that of the musician. The familiar playfulness of Fargue's poems, their childish rhythms, their humorous nostalgia, are all delicately rendered by Satie...the irony shines through very clearly."
context_section_description: A ludion, known in English as a Cartesian diver, is a tiny figurine used as a scientific toy. Placed in a water-filled container that is then made airtight, it can be made to rise, sink and spin by applying external pressure to the liquid. In Fargue's time ludions were often crafted in the forms of devils or imps.
  Robert Orledge observed that "Fargue's poems are as important for their sounds and word-play as they are for their literal meanings." Laden with puns, deformed words, obscure allusions and baby talk, they are almost untranslatable.
  1. Air du rat (Rat's Tune) - G major - Tranquille
  A mock dirge, set to a poem Fargue wrote at age 10 on the death of his pet white rat.
  There is a fragile tone of lament in the vocal line for the opening verses, hinting at the
  sadness beneath the author's juvenile terms of endearment for his little friend.
  2. Spleen - C minor - Modéré
  The most serious of the songs portrays a jaded blonde prostitute, sitting like "an ocean of
  ill-will" on a bench in a public square. Following a chorale-like piano introduction, the music builds by
  sometimes hesitant steps up to its emphatic climax on the concluding verse, "I'm bored in this
  cabaret of nothingness which is our life."
  3. La grenouille américaine (The American Frog) - A♭ major - Mouvt. de Marche
  Spry music hall march rhythms accompany this childhood vignette of Fargue being ogled by his pet
  "fwog". The poet calls it "A love scene."
  4. Air du poète (Poet's Tune) - F minor - Grave
  On the shores of Papua, the poet makes love to a Papuan and then wishes the
  person wasn't Papuan. A languid pentatonic melody suggests the exotic setting and lends an ironic
  gravitas to the text, a bit of nonsense in which Fargue spins variations on the French
  word "Papouasie."
  5. Chanson du chat (Cat's Song) - F major - Gaiement
  Fargue wrote this poem in honor of his obese cat Potasson, for whom his friends jokingly nicknamed
  themselves. Satie's setting is a cabaret-style parody, borrowing the tune of the traditional French
  children's song Compère Guilleri for the vocal line. Fargue's "Potassons" subsequently adopted the Chanson du chat as their anthem.
caption: A blown glass devil ludion
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