Trois petites pièces montées

The Trois petites pièces montées (Three Little Stuffed Pieces) is a suite for small orchestra by Erik Satie, inspired by themes from the novel series Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais. It was premiered at the Comédie des Champs-Élysées in Paris on February 21, 1920, conducted by Vladimir Golschmann. Satie later arranged it for piano duet and today it is more frequently heard in this version. A typical performance lasts about five minutes.

Satie was well-read in humorous and imaginative literature, and the figure of Rabelais loomed large in his bohemian youth. The 16th Century French satirist was an idol of the early Montmartre cabaret scene. At the Chat Noir, where Satie played piano in the late 1880s, a drinking cup allegedly belonging to the author was on reverent display. Recalling those days in a 1922 essay, Satie went so far as to claim that one of his great-uncles used to "bend the elbow" with Rabelais at the legendary Pomme de Pin tavern in Paris. Apart from a song about the Mad Hatter, Le chapelier from the 3 Mélodies (1916), the only comic literary characters Satie evoked in his music were the endlessly hungry and boozing giants Gargantua and his son Pantagruel.

Food and eating were frequent themes of Satie's own extramusical humor. His poverty made him uncomfortably familiar with hunger at times, leading to his wry observation, "It's odd. You'll find someone in every bar willing to buy you a drink. No one ever dreams of presenting you with a sandwich." According to his brother Conrad, the composer's appetite was gargantuan on those occasions when he was able to eat to his heart's content: he could devour a 30-egg omelette or 150 oysters in one sitting. His affinity for the bawdy, food-obsessed Rabelais is made clear in the Trois petites pièces montées.

In November 1919, the young cookery historian Bertrand Guégan asked Satie to set a poem to music for his Almanach de Cocagne (Cockaigne Almanac), an annual publication "dedicated to true gourmets and serious drinkers." Satie claimed the deadline was too short for him to do the job properly and instead submitted a brief fanfare-like march for 2 trumpets, giving it the title Marche de Cocagne. As musical fanfares had been used to announce the courses of luxurious French banquets since the Middle Ages, his offering was in keeping with the gastronomic and historical themes of Guégan's journal. It would appear as the frontispiece of the Almanach, with a woodcut illustration by Raoul Dufy, in 1920. This was the nucleus of the Trois petites pièces montées.

...
Wikipedia