Erik Satie died on 1 July 1925 of cirrhosis of the liver, aged 59. He seems to have been rather surprised by his final illness, and his first instinct was to check himself into a hotel, the Istria, a favoured Bohemian haunt in Montparnasse. ‘Poor Satie! He had never been ill before and everything gave rise to dramas, from taking medication to having his temperature read,’ recalled his young friend and protégé Darius Milhaud. In a life of meticulous poverty, falling ill had been outside Satie’s price range.

Another friend, the painter Georges Braque, helped him pack for his last stay in hospital. It didn’t take long: the only toiletries Satie possessed were a scrubbing brush and a pumice stone. And after Satie’s death, Milhaud was among the first to enter his tiny bedsit in the odd, viaduct-crossed Paris suburb of Arcueil (the sculptor Constantin Brancusi would document the scene in melancholy, incredulous photographs). ‘What a shock we had upon opening the door!’ recalled Milhaud, decades later:

It seemed impossible that Satie had lived in such poverty. This man, whose faultlessly clean and correct dress made him look rather like a model civil servant, had literally nothing worth a Franc to his name: a wretched bed, a table covered with the most unlikely objects, one chair and a half-empty wardrobe in which there were a dozen old-fashioned corduroy suits, brand new and absolutely identical. In each corner of the room there were piles of old newspapers, old hats and walking sticks. On the ancient, broken-down piano with its pedals tied up with string, there was a parcel whose postmark proved that it had been delivered several years before; he had merely torn a corner to see what it contained… 

That torn corner was typical. Satie’s imagination didn’t require anything more. Over four decades at the centre of Paris’s musical and artistic avant-garde, he had made his art out of fleeting suggestions – words and ideas caught just long enough to provoke or tease the imagination. For Satie, an impeccable surface implied, as well as concealed, unspoken complexity. In fact, he had bought those identical suits in 1896, and had worn them daily for the next seven years (‘The Velvet Gentleman’ was one of his many nicknames in the cafés and underground theatres of Montmartre).

In 1905 – nearly two decades after he’d fled the Paris Conservatoire, where he was deemed a ‘quite insignificant pupil’ – he enrolled, aged 39, at the Schola Cantorum; the most traditional of Paris’ music schools. At that point he hung up his brown suits (some with unfinished scores still in their pockets) and adopted the bowler hat, umbrella and high starched collar of a junior clerk. This was the Satie that Milhaud knew – the Satie who had become an honorary creative uncle to the circle of bright young composers known as Les Six, though Milhaud acknowledged that Satie had worn other costumes and played other roles: ‘Satie had been so much one of us that we tended to forget that he had taken part in the activities of several generations, including the Rosicrucians, Sâr Peladan, Debussy and Ravel…’

Now the performance was over, the spectators could finally examine the backstage area, and there wasn’t very much to see. Satie was estranged from his family, never married, and had only one, brief, love affair (with the painter Suzanne Valadon). The music, the writings (which anticipate the postwar experiments of Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec), the eccentric public persona; these, it turned out, were the true centre of his life. He was an authentic Bohemian, living completely for and through art. If something did not seize Satie’s creative imagination, he lost interest, and that extended to generating a financial income from his music. ‘If I was rich, I’d be afraid of losing my money,’ he said. Unable to afford the train fare into Paris, he regularly walked the four miles from Arcueil.

Still, a century on, could anyone seriously call Erik Satie’s life impoverished? He swam in creativity, even at the expense of his own work; in fact, it’s hard to think of another composer whose legacy – and whose place in the wider cultural imagination – rests on so little actual music. His output is sizeable, but it still evades categorisation. His ballets Relâche and Parade and his ‘Symphonic Drama’ Socrate are occasionally programmed by orchestras, but they’re not remotely part of the standard repertoire. His piano cycle Sports et Divertissements features from time to time in recitals, though many of his works for keyboard – the Trois Pièces en forme d’un poire (Three Pieces in the Form of a Pear), Embryons desséchés (Dried Embryos) and the rest – are better known for Satie’s half-mocking titles than for their actual music.

No, for most listeners in 2025 Satie still means little more than ten minutes of music: the Gymnopédies (1888) and occasionally the first Gnossienne for piano (1893), whose eerie-austere piano textures have launched a thousand film and TV scores. But the influence of those few, haunted, sounds – and the personality behind them –  extends from the glassy piano tinkling that ends a Waitrose Christmas ad to the appearance of a character called ‘Erik Satie’ in Baz Luhrmann’s kitsch blockbuster Moulin Rouge (in an irony that Satie would have relished, the music attributed to him in the film is actually by Offenbach). Satie was admired by John Cage and it’s common today to hear him credited as the forefather of minimalism, with the piano chorale Vexations (c. 1893) as Exhibit A. This was the work which Satie headed with the instruction: ‘In order to play the motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities.’

Did Satie genuinely intend Vexations to be played 840 times (a process that takes between 16 and 20 hours)? Or is this another of the surreal red herrings, epigrams and paradoxes with which he loved to punctuate his scores and his published writings – such as his assertion that he ‘eats only white foods: eggs, sugar, grated bones’, or his instructions that certain pieces must be played ‘Like a lacquered Chinaman’ or ‘On yellowing velvet’. Satie lived his life around visual artists and the stage – playing the piano at Montmartre shadow-theatres and cabarets, and later collaborating with Picasso and Cocteau through Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. On one level, he’d probably have been flattered when the pianist Igor Levit and the performance artist Marina Abramovic staged a full cycle of Vexations at the London’s South Bank Centre in April.

It’s also hard to believe that he wouldn’t have seen the entire project – complete with fidgetting audience and solemnly-opining critics – as intrinsically comic. ‘The public worships ennui’, he observed, and one consistent theme in Satie’s life and work was a subversive relish in deflating pretension. His Conservatoire teachers proclaimed the sublime and ennobling power of art; but as Satie walked the Parisian suburbs, he witnessed music being talked over, played as aural filler, drowned by traffic noise and used to sell chocolate. He drafted a spoof advert for a firm that offered to ‘Make serious music cheerful: no more incomprehensible compositions!’ and in 1918 he created the genre of Musique d’ameublement – ‘Furniture Music’: repeating loops of background music which, he directed, must not be listened to.

He knew perfectly well that it would be – while across Paris, café bands and gramophones pumped out watered-down Gounod and Wagner as an innocuous background to flirtations and Canard à la presse. The problem (if it is one) has only intensified in this age of digital reproduction – whenever, for example, a Classic FM presenter enjoins their listeners to ‘Relax!’. Rather than fulminate, Satie queried, mocked and then quietly turned his observations into an art rooted in precisely his own time and place. Few composers of his generation were as free of delusion. This ‘gentle medieval musician’ (as Debussy described him) – this Montmartre dandy who swore a personal vow of poverty to his art – delighted in the contradictions and vulgarities of 20th–century life. For Satie, inspiration came in the most mundane, and unexpected, of packages.

He only needed to tear the corner of the envelope. ‘His was the inventor’s mind par excellence’, remembered Maurice Ravel. ‘Simply and ingeniously, Satie pointed the way, but as soon as another musician took to the trail he had indicated, Satie would immediately change his own orientation and without hesitation open up still another path to new fields of experimentation.’ In his youth, Satie affected the manner and dress of a Catholic priest, but in retrospect he looks more like a prophet: a poet of atrophied attention spans, mass-produced music, social atomisation and communication overload. Erik Satie saw it first, and cultivated strange and wonderful blossoms from the Waste Land of modernity. Like his hero Socrates, he asked awkward questions. We still don’t have any better answers.