ABSTRACT
In the third and last chapter, devoted to Erik Satie’s Socrate (1919) the author returns once again to the relationship between death and voice. The opera, devoted to the ultimate teacher of philosophy, is based on extracts from Plato’s dialogues (Symposium, Phaedrus, and Phaedo) and focuses on Socrates’s final moments. The chapter discusses in detail the work’s conception and the context in which Satie composed it, arguing that he chose the particular excerpts from Plato’s dialogue that he did because in each of them is hidden a myth of the power of song: The excerpt from Symposium refers to the contest between the satyr Marsyas playing the aulos and the god Apollo on the lyre, the selection from the Phaedrus to the myth of the cicadas’ unceasing song, and the excerpt from Phaedo to the beauty of the swan’s prophetic death song. In directing the work the author brings to life Satie’s imagination of Socrates as a philosopher-musician, thus problematizing the received image which stresses his cheerfulness and equanimity in the face of death.
