page_title: Sports et divertissements
section_title: Performance
hierarchical_section_title: Sports et divertissements / Performance
caption_attribution_description: Le Groupe de six, oil on canvas, musée des beaux-arts de Rouen, France. In the center&#160;: pianist Marcelle Meyer. From bottom to top&#160;: Germaine Tailleferre, Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger, Jean Winer. On the right&#160;: Georges Auric, Francis Poulenc, Jean Cocteau. (Only five of Les Six are represented; Louis Durey was not present: see "Jacques-Émile Blanche et le Groupe des Six".)
context_page_description: Sports et divertissements is a cycle of 21 short piano pieces composed in 1914 by Erik Satie. The set consists of a prefatory chorale and 20 musical vignettes depicting various sports and leisure activities. First published in 1923, it has long been considered one of his finest achievements.
  Musically it represents the peak of Satie's humoristic piano suites, but stands apart from that series in its fusion of several different art forms. Sports originally appeared as a collector's album with illustrations by Charles Martin, accompanied by music, prose poetry and calligraphy. The latter three were provided by Satie in his exquisite handwritten scores, which were printed in facsimile.
  Biographer Alan M. Gillmor wrote that "Sports et divertissements is sui generis, the one work in which the variegated strands of Satie's artistic experience are unselfconsciously woven into a single fragile tapestry of sight and sound — a precarious union of Satie the musician, the poet, and the calligrapher...At turns droll and amusing, serious and sardonic, this tiny Gesamtkunstwerk affords us as meaningful a glimpse of the composer's subconscious dreamworld as we are ever likely to get."
context_section_description: In his Préface to Sports et divertissements, Satie wrote only of its conception as a printed album and offered no suggestions as to how it might be presented in a concert setting. It is worth noting that in his next composition, the piano suite Heures séculaires et instantanées (written June – July 1914), he issued his famous "warning" to the players forbidding them from reading his extramusical texts aloud during the performance. His disciple Francis Poulenc confirmed this applied to all his mentor's humoristic piano music. However Satie was not averse to the music for Sports being played and there were at least three live performances before the completed album finally saw print.
  On December 14, 1919, Lucien Vogel and his wife held a private musical soirée at their Paris apartment which included "a few little novelties, entitled Sports & Divertissements, by M. Erik Satie." Details of this performance are lacking though it appears Satie himself was the pianist. The public premiere was given by Satie's trusted interpreter of the 1920s, pianist Marcelle Meyer, at the Salle de La Ville l'Évêque in Paris on January 31, 1922. It was part of a three-concert series in which Meyer presented Satie's music in historical contexts, from the early clavecin masters to the contemporary avant-garde; Sports was programmed with piano pieces by members of Les Six. This was followed by the United States premiere at the Klaw Theatre in New York City on February 4, 1923, sponsored by Satie champion Edgard Varèse through the auspices of his International Composers Guild. The pianist was E. Robert Schmitz. George Gershwin was in the audience and saved a copy of the program.
  Patrick Gowers, writing for The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians in 1980, described the multi-faceted yet intimate nature of Sports et divertissements as "a private art that tends to resist public performance." Steven Moore Whiting elaborated on this, citing the eternally self-repeating Le Tango as proof of the impossibility of performing Sports as literally written. He argued: "The music can be played, but not the pictures or narratives. The 'work' is the composite of (or contrapuntal interplay between) verbal preface, musical preamble, drawings, illustrative piano pieces (which seldom agree completely with the illustrations), stories, performance instructions, calligraphy, and titles (some of them with variants)...How to do justice to all of this in a public recital?"
  There has nevertheless arisen a debatable performance tradition which presents Sports as a multi-media concert experience. Composer-critic Virgil Thomson, one of Satie's foremost American champions of the 20th Century, began performing Sports as a work for "narrator and piano" in New York City in the mid-1950s. His translations of the texts appeared in the first English edition of Sports published by Salabert in 1975. Thomson continued to perform it in this fashion to the end of his life. "I feel a connection with the Satie piece", he said in 1986, when he was 90. "It turns me on. You know there's a song that goes 'I don't know why I love you, but I do, ooooh, ooooh.' Sometimes you know why you don't like something, but you don't know why you like it." 
  Since then performances of Sports for voice and piano have been supplemented by arrangements for "speaker and ensemble," including chamber orchestra versions by composers Dominic Muldowney (1981) and David Bruce (2008). A typical performance involves a narrator reading each of Satie's prose poems before the music is played; sometimes they are accompanied by background projections, either of Martin's illustrations, Satie's calligraphed scores, original artwork, or a combination of the three. Orthodox Satie scholarship has largely ignored this trend, observing Satie's stated prohibition against the reading of his texts aloud, and the majority of commercial recordings of Sports feature his music only. Pianist-musicologist Olof Höjer, who recorded Satie's complete piano music in the 1990s, found all the extramusical associations of Sports of secondary 
caption: Pianist Marcelle Meyer (center) with members of Les Six in 1921
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