Few composers have been as fascinated by the relationship between the spoken or unspoken word and music as the iconoclastic Erik Satie (1866–1925). His literary production was almost as important as his forward-looking compositions, and at least as extensive. While most of Satie's contemporaries, from Rimbaud to Joyce, were jealous of music's advantages over words and tried to recreate its emotive powers and even its forms in their poetry, Satie's main fear was that that printed music could ‘never achieve the same “published” qualities as literature’. His quest was to find new ways of linking words and music and his originality lay in his fundamental rejection of Romantic expressiveness and any concept of nineteenth-century thematic development or musical ‘direction’. The musical form in some of his Rose+Croix pieces of the 1890s was derived from literature, as we shall see, and on other occasions he adapted medieval models to the twentieth century in an effort to find solutions that would be entirely different in form and content to those of his contemporaries. On the relatively rare occasions when he set words to music, he went to extraordinary lengths to perfect his tiny settings of the most recent poetry available and his approach was completely at odds with composers of the bourgeois mélodie such as Gounod or Massenet, for whom the supremacy of the voice and the subsidiary role of the piano accompaniment were seldom challenged.

At the same time, Satie was a composer of paradoxes. While he remained acutely concerned with the ‘exteriorisation’ of his musical thought, especially when words were involved, he invented a genre of incidental music in the 1890s that was completely at odds with the theatrical texts it was supposed to accompany. While he introduced humorous texts into his piano music from the Gnossiennes of 1890 to the Sonatine bureaucratique of 1917, in 1914 he forbade them to be read aloud. And who else would have begun a literary career with an advert for an acrobat published under the pseudonym of Virginie Lebeau?