“Le Pique-nique,” a piano composition about 30 seconds long, is one of twenty-one very short musical interpretations in Sports et Divertissement [Sports & Entertainments] devoted to the happiness of people at play.
Satie’s preface explains that two artistic elements of Sports et Divertissement, his music, and Charles Martin’s drawings, form an album, a whole, that is une oeuvre de fantasie [a work of fantasy]. Playfully, he admonishes musicians and readers that anyone looking for more will be disappointed.
Incredibly, Martin seems never to have listened to the music. He took his cues from Satie’s purposefully comic, if not absurd, annotations to the score of each composition. For “Le Pique-nique,” he wrote, “Le pique-nique. Dansant. Ils ont apporté du veau tres froid. Vous avez un belle robe blanche. Mais non: c’est un orage. –Tiens! un aeroplane. [Picnic. Dancing. They have brought very cold veal. You have a beautiful white dress. But no: it’s a thunderstorm. Look! It’s an airplane.]
Charles Martin. “Le Pique-Nique.” In Sports an Diverissements. Paris: Lucien Vogel, 1923
Featured Image: Erik Satie. “Le pique-nique,” in Sports et Diverissements. Paris: Lucien Vogel, 1914. The page is printed in black and red ink. The annotations appear as if they are lyrics (which they are not). Though Satie prefers the spelling Pique-nique, his illustrator Charles Martin prefers PiqueNique. http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k310981r/f58.image.r=erik%20satie%20sports%20et
PS: You can listen to “Le Pique-nique” and all of Sports et Divertissement on YouTube or Spotify.
See Robert Orledge. Erik Satie the Composer. London: Routledge, 1990; Helen Julia Minor. “Exploring Interart dialogue in Erik Satie’s Sports et divertissements (1914/1922),” in Music, Text and Translation, edited by Helen Julia Mino. London: Bloomsbury 2013