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Socrate is a work for voice and small orchestra (or piano) by Erik Satie. The text is composed of excerpts of Victor Cousin's translation of works by Plato, all of the chosen texts referring to Socrates. Commission - composition The work was commissioned by Princess Edmond de Polignac in October 1916. The Princess had specified that female voices should be used: originally the idea had been that Satie would write incidental music to a performance where the Princess and/or some of her (female) friends would read aloud texts of the ancient Greek philosophers. As Satie, after all, was not so much in favour of melodrama-like settings, that idea was abandoned, and the text would be sung — be it in a more or less reciting way. However, the specification remained that only female voices could be used (for texts of dialogues that were supposed to have taken place between men). Satie, at the time, probably did not understand why the Princess was so attached to female voices: it was not until 5 years later that a first (and all in all minor) press scandal would reveal the Princess's lesbian nature. Satie composed Socrate between January 1917 and the spring of 1918, with a revision of the orchestral score in October of that same year. During the first months he was working on the composition, he called it Vie de Socrate. In 1917 Satie was hampered by a lawsuit over an insulting postcard he had sent, which nearly resulted in prison time. The Princess diverted this danger by her financial intercession in the first months of 1918, after which Satie could work free of fear. The musical form Satie presents Socrate as a "symphonic drama in three parts". "Symphonic drama" appears to allude to the "dramatic symphony" Hector Berlioz had written nearly eighty years earlier: and as usual, when Satie makes such allusions, the result is about the complete reversal of the former example. Where Berlioz' symphony is more than an hour and a half of expressionistic, heavily orchestrated drama, an opera forced into the form of a symphony, Satie's thirty minute composition reveals little drama in the music: the drama is entirely concentrated in the text, which is presented in the form of recitativo-style singing to a background of sparsely orchestrated, nearly repetitive music, picturing some aspects of Socrates' life, including his final moments. As Satie apparently did not foresee an enacted or scenic representation, and also while he disconnected the male roles (according to the text) from the female voice(s) delivering these texts, keeping in mind a good understandability of the story exclusively by the words of the text, the form of the composition could rather be considered as (secular) oratorio, than opera, or (melo)drama (or symphony). It might be possible to think that Satie took formally similar secular cantatas for one or two voices and a moderate accompaniment as his examples for the musical form of Socrate: nearly all Italian and German baroque composers had written such small-scale cantatas, generally on an Italian text: Vivaldi (RV 649-686), Handel (HWV 77-177), Bach (BWV 203, 209), etc. This link is however unlikely: these older compositions all alternated recitatives with arias, further there is very little evidence Satie ever based his work directly on the examples of foreign baroque composers, and most of all, as far as the baroque composers were known in early 20th century , the "I eat only white foods: (...)" quote is from the period he was composing Socrate. To Valentine Gross Satie had confessed he wanted the Socrate composition to be white and pure like Antiquity (quoted in Ornella Volta, Satie Seen Through His Letters, Marion Boyars Publishers, London/New York, 1989). Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org"
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