Toutes petites danses pour Le Piège de Méduse

Quadrille

Valse

Pas vite

Mazurka

Un peu vif

Polka

Quadrille

Le Piège de Méduse - “comédie lyrique en un acte de Monsieur Erik Satie avec musique de danse du même Monsieur” - is an absurd piece of theatre written long before anyone thought of the Theatre of the Absurd. It is true that Alfred Jarry, whom Satie almost certainly knew, was an even earlier absurdist precursor. Jarry’s Père Ubu, however, has nothing in common with Satie’s bumbling and myopic Baron Méduse (Baron Jellyfish). Bullied by his socialist servant, mocked by his daughter, perplexed by the telephone, Méduse amuses himself by miscalculating his income and by teasing a prospective son-in-law, Astolfo. He sets a trap for him. “Can you dance on one eye,” Méduse asks Astolfo, “…the left eye?” “No,” replies Astolfo. “That’s all right then,” says Méduse, “At least you’re honest.”

As it happens, the story of “The Trap of Jellyfish” has little or nothing to do with the music Satie wrote for his lyric comedy. There is another, peripheral figure in the cast - Jonas, the Baron’s “beautiful and gigantic monkey stuffed by a master’s hand.” It was for this “superb mechanical toy” to perform between the nine very short scenes of the play that Satie assembled these seven very short dances.

On the first (private) performance of Le Piège de Méduse, shortly after it was completed in 1913, the dances were played by Satie himself at the piano. It is thought that the present version - for clarinet, trumpet, trombone, violin, cello, double bass and percussion - might have been made for the first public performance at the Théâtre Michel in 1921. So, although the sound is not unlike that of pieces written for similar ensembles by Stravinsky round about 1918, it would be unwise to claim that Satie actually anticipated Stravinsky in this respect. On the other hand when, as reliably reported, Satie slid sheets of paper between the strings and the hammers in the 1913 performance, he surely became the first ever exponent of the prepared piano.

While the dances are all in the popular manner familiar to the composer from his days as a pianist in the artistic cabarets of Montmartre, there is a wittily miniaturised element of burlesque in the harmonies in each one of them. As for Jonas, although he is clearly not expected to have much stamina, he must be imaginative enough to perform the opening Quadrille “with kindness,” to “refresh himself” in the Pas Vite, and to dance “internally” in the Polka - which last is particularly problematic for a clockwork monkey required at the same time to “slap his thighs” and “scratch himself with a potato.”

Gerald Larner©