The Man Who Never Opened His Mail

Erik Satie wrote music that sounded like nothing anyone had heard before. His piano pieces were spare, strange, and quietly radical — the seeds of what would eventually become minimalism, ambient music, and inspire virtually every composer who decided that less might be more.

He also founded a church in which he was the only member, ate — or claimed to eat — only white foods, and walked ten miles to work every day carrying an umbrella and a hammer.

Satie titled his compositions the way other people title pranks. Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear. Desiccated Embryos. His performance directions included "with much illness" and "light as an egg." After a critic savaged his ballet Parade in 1917, Satie mailed him a postcard reading, "Sir and dear friend — you are an arse, an arse without music." The critic sued. At the trial, Satie's friend Jean Cocteau was arrested for repeatedly yelling "arse" in the courtroom.

The ballet prompted the poet Guillaume Apollinaire to describe the production in the programme notes as "a kind of surrealism" — the first recorded use of the word.

When Satie died in 1925, his friends entered his apartment for the first time in twenty-seven years. They found two pianos stacked on top of each other, both with broken strings. Over a hundred umbrellas. Lost masterpieces stuffed behind the furniture. And years of unopened mail.

The man who accidentally named surrealism never even read his reviews.