[COLOR WOODCUTS BY GEORGES BRAQUE]

SATIE, Érik
Le Piège de Méduse
Paris: Editions de la Galerie Simon for Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 1921

First edition. Quarto (pages 32.5 x 23.0 cm). No. 16 of 90 copies on Hollande Van Gelder, of the total issue of 112 copies. Three original color woodcut decorations by Georges Braque. Signed in purple crayon by both Satie and Braque on the colophon page. Original paper covers with printed title, in original glassine wrap. Collates 18 ll.: [1 l.], 1 l. (half-title and first public cast), 1 l. (title with Kahnweiler device), 1 l. (personnae), 12 ll., 1 l. (colophon), [1 l.]. Minor edgewear on top and bottom of spine, minor sunning and soiling on covers, small chips in glassine, offsetting and staining through last blank leaf from old cellotape removed from inside rear glassine flaps, slight offsetting of music onto facing text, otherwise fine, brightly printed, the text pages near pristine. In a parchment chemise and linen clamshell box.

Early in 1913 Satie wrote the text of Le Piège de Méduse (figuratively, "The Sting of the Jellyfish"), a "comédie lyrique" in one act and nine scenes with five parts, including "un beau et géant singe." Later that year he incorporated seven fragmentary sets of dancehall music, composed for piano solo (1913) or small orchestra (1921) for the part of the immense pantomime monkey. At the first salon staging of the Piège shortly after completion, composer and critic Alexis Roland-Manuel played the part of Baron Méduse, and Satie, sliding sheets of paper between the hammers and strings of the piano for a more mechanical sound, performed the toy-monkey music for the seven "toutes petites dances" in perhaps the first formal instance in history of prepared piano. (See Gilmore, infra, at p. 120.) The Piège finally had its public premiere eight years later in a special program by Pierre Bertin at the Théâtre Michel on May 24, 1921, among works by Max Jacob, Radiguet songs set by Auric and a shimmy written by Milhaud for Le Nègre Gratin. "But the hit of the evening," wrote Milhaud, "was without a doubt Satie's extraordinary play, ... in which his wit sputtered in every line; the unbridled fantasy of the play bordered on the absurd. Bertin, in the part of Baron Medusa, made himself up to look like Satie; he seemed to incarnate the man. A stuffed monkey on a pedestal interrupted the action from time to time to do little dance numbers." (Shattuck, infra, p. 136 fn.) Later life performances of the Piège would become rare, although a notable one, in an English translation by M.C. Richards, took place in the summer of 1948 at Black Mountain College in North Carolina: John Cage suggested the project and played the music; Buckminster Fuller played the role of the Baron Medusa; Merce Cunningham danced the part of the monkey Jonas; Willem de Kooning designed the set and Elaine de Kooning played Frisette; and the play was directed by Arthur Penn.

Satie wrote the Piège, the only play he ever published, a quarter century after his Sarabandes and Gymnopédies and some 15 years after Jarry's Ubu Roi had presented Paris with its first experience of surrealism in theater, later to blossom as the theater of the absurd. His dander aroused by revivalist efforts of Debussey and Ravel to rediscover his youthful "prescience of the modernist vocabulary," Satie counter-punched with the best of his "humoristic" piano works in 1913-4: the Piège, Croquis et agaceries d'un gros bonhomme en bois (1913), Chapitres tournés en tous sens (1913), Sports et divertissements (1914): spare, two-part counterpoint, as Shattuck observes (infra, at p. 114), complete keyboard compositions crafted from a paucity of materials with great economy and flexibility, a new genre that was as tongue-in-cheek as the elusive personality of the composer. And thus Satie contributed to that great emergence of the absurdist theater.

One of the six notable livres d’artiste issued by Kahnweiler and the Galerie Simon in 1921, the Piège is the first book with original prints by Georges Braque, Kahnweiler's first full-color illustrations. Stein, infra, p. 63, holds them "[a]mong the most beautiful and perfect examples of Braque’s later Synthetic Cubist style...." Chapon, infra, p. 110, praises them further: "Sans rien emprunter à la comédie lyrique de Satie, les exquises constructions de Braque, natures mortes aux instruments de musique, bois en couleurs, nous fournissent plastiquement une équivalence du tempérament du musicien." We are aware of only six other copies in the United States (Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Boston College, New York Public Library Spencer Collection, Cincinnati Public Library), none in England and a handful in Europe.

Selected references:

Chapon, Francois, Le Peintre et le Livre: L'Âge d'Or du Livre Illustré en France, 1870-1970, Paris: Flammarion, 1987, pp. 110, 284, ill. pp. 111, 120.

Garvey, Eleanor M., The Artist and the Book, 1860-1960, New York: Hacker Art Books, 1982, p. 28, no. 33, ill. p. 30.

Gillmor, Alan M., Erik Satie, Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988, pp. 182-3, 191, 238.

Orledge, Robert, Satie the Composer, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 120-1, 297-8, 349 nn. 22-23.

Shattuck, Roger, The banquet years; the arts in France, 1885-1918: Alfred Jarry, Henri Rousseau, Erik Satie, Guillaume Apollinaire, New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1958, pp. 114, 136.

Skira, Albert, Anthologie du Livre Illustré par les Peintres et Scuplteurs de l'École de Paris, Genève, Éditions Albert Skira, 1946, pl. 14; p. 12, no. 39.

Stein, Donna, Cubist Prints, Cubist Books, New York: Franklin Furnace, 1983, pp. 63, 81, pl. 69.

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