La Diva de l’Empire (Bonnaud & Blès) (1904)

Tendrement (Hyspa) (1901)

When Satie wrote popular songs it was not, as it was for Poulenc, a matter of a concert-hall composer’s nostalgia for a misspent youth: it was a matter of making a living in the competetive arena of Parisian cabaret. He was employed for twelve years from 1888 as a musician in such Montmartre establishments as Le Chat Noir, the Auberge du Clou and the Café de la Nouvelle Athènes and then became pianist and composer to the poète-chansonnier Vincent Hyspa and the “queen of the slow waltz” Paulette Darty.

Both the songs in this programme were written for Darty who, to judge by    La Diva de l’Empire, was as provocative a performer of the marche chantée as she was of the valse chantée. First performed in 1904 in a music-hall revue by Dominique Bonnaud and Numa Blès, it is a clear indication, in its allusions to the Empire Theatre in Leicester Square, of the fashionable attractions of Edwardian London and, in its ragtime syncopations, of the vogue for the cakewalk in the early years of the 20th century (Satie published an instrumental cakewalk, Le Piccadilly, at much the same time). The sung waltz, which she is said to have invented, was Darty’s speciality however. Tendrement, written specially for her to words by Hyspa, is a particularly seductive example of the gently lilting slow waltz always associated with her and her “charming and supple” voice.