page_title: Le Fils des étoiles
section_title: Premiere
hierarchical_section_title: Le Fils des étoiles / Premiere
caption_attribution_description: English: Cropped, adjusted version of PD image from Gallica
context_page_description: Le Fils des étoiles is an incidental music score composed in December 1891 by Erik Satie to accompany a three-act poetic drama of the same name by Joséphin Péladan. It is a key work of Satie's "Rosicrucian" period and played a role in his belated "discovery" by the French musical establishment in the 1910s.
  Satie provided some 75 minutes' worth of music for Péladan's play, apparently intended for flutes and harps, and this represents his longest through-composed surviving score. However, only his three short act Preludes were performed at the premiere in Paris on March 22, 1892. Satie subsequently arranged the Preludes for solo piano and published them in 1896. It is through these keyboard excerpts that the music for Le Fils des étoiles is primarily known.
  The Preludes have been cited as among Satie's most radical compositions, with their forward-looking explorations of quartal harmony and the composer's conception of theatre music as a "static sound décor", functioning independently of the stage action.
context_section_description: Le Fils des étoiles premiered at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris on March 22, 1892, as part of Péladan's first Salon de la Rose + Croix. The program note announced that Satie's three Preludes, "of an admirably Oriental character", would "prepare the spectator impatiently for the tableau he is going to see." The play was not a success and the audience greeted the unusual score with a puzzled silence. Writing of the chilly response to Satie's music, Robert Orledge mused that "Probably the only impatience it generated was for it to be over."
  The Rose + Croix salon, a high-profile event, marked the first time Satie's music was publicly performed outside the cabarets of Montmartre where he toiled as a second-string pianist. It also introduced him to the downside of notoriety. Only one critic commented on his music for Le Fils, but he was among the most powerful in Paris: Henry Gauthier-Villars, ubiquitously known by his pen name Willy.
  In his March 26, 1892 column for L'Écho de Paris, Willy dismissively identified Satie as the "ex-pianist of the ground floor at the Chat Noir" and described his Preludes as "nervous" because "one doesn't know which end to grab them by." He concluded with a pun on the composer's name, writing that this "faucet salesman's music" had only given him "indifferent Satiesfaction." The quarrelsome Satie had never been attacked in print before, and Willy's review instigated a sporadic war of words between composer and critic that lasted more than a decade. Over the years Satie would denounce Willy as a "dull-witted pen-pusher" and "dreary piece of literary garbage" in open letters to the press, private correspondence, and in his publications as leader of his own mock-religious sect, the Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor. Willy countered by ridiculing Satie in his widely-read columns as a "mystical sausage-brain," an "esoteric slut," a "penniless street musician," and "a Debussy who passed through Charenton". The hostilities climaxed in April 1904 when the two had a physical altercation during a Camille Chevillard concert. Pianist Ricardo Viñes—later one of Satie's most important champions—witnessed the incident and wrote in his diary, "Willy struck Erik Satie with his cane after Satie had intentionally thrown Willy's hat on the floor. The city police took Satie away."
  Satie's lifelong hatred of critics, whom he referred to as his "faithful enemies", likely dates from his protracted feud with Willy. Critics became a favorite target of his mature literary satire (e.g., the Mémoires d'un amnésique and the 1921 essay "A Hymn in Praise of Critics"), and his antagonism nearly landed him in prison during World War I, when he was convicted of criminal libel for sending profanely insulting postcards to a well-known reviewer.
caption: Catalogue of the first Salon de la Rose + Croix (1892)
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