Treaty of San Stefano was the agreement marking formal conclusion of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878. With Turkish forces soundly beaten in the field by the beginning of 1878, the two sides agreed to an armistice at Adrianople on 31 January, followed by formal peace negotiations at San Stefano, a settlement close to Constantinople. There, on 3 March 1878, representatives of Tsar Alexander II {N. P. Ignatiev and A. I. Nelidov) and Sultan Abdul Hamid II {Safvet Pasha and Sadullah Bey, with Mehmet Ali assisting) concluded a peace treaty that heavily favored the victorious Russians.
According to its terms, Montenegro, Serbia, and Romania received their full independence, along with substantial territorial cessions, including northern Dobruja for Romania. Bosnia and Herzegovina were granted autonomy, while a greatly enlarged Bulgaria {with a seaboard on the Aegean) became an autonomous principality, with the right to elect its own ruler, who would be considered a vassal of the sultan. Turkish troops were to be withdrawn from Bulgaria, while fifty thousand Russians remained for at least two years. In the event of future hostilities, neutral commercial vessels retained the right of free trade through the Turkish Straits. Russia received the right to transit ten warships annually through the Turkish Straits. Bessarabia, which had been ceded to Turkish-dominated Romania according to the Treaty of Paris in 1856, reverted to Russian control, while a series of locales along the Black Sea coast and in Asia Minor, including Batumi, Ardahan, Bayazid, and Kars, also went to the Russians. Finally, the San Stefano agreement obliged the sultan to pay an indemnity of 510 million rubles to Russia, to reform Armenian administration, and to grant self-government on the model of Crete to Albania, Epirus, and Thessaly.
This treaty greatly expanded and solidified Russian influence in the Balkans, especially after the creation of an enlarged Bulgaria with a substantial Russian presence. Conditions were now ripe to assure future Russian control over the Ottoman Empire, an eventuality that neither England nor Austria-Hungary was prepared to accept. Moreover, because San Stefano appeared to violate previous international agreements over the Turkish Straits and the fate of ‘‘Europe’s sick man’’ (as the Ottoman Empire was called), other European powers, including France, Germany, and Italy, saw their interests and the precarious Balkan balance at stake. Russia, diplomatically isolated and financially exhausted, now faced the prospect of contending with a gathering hostile European coalition. The result was Russian acquiescence to a great-power review of San Stefano’s provisions at the Congress of Berlin in June-July 1878, during which the more significant elements of Russia’s wartime gains and dictated settlement were nullilied. A tenuous peace ensued, but the arrangement outraged Russian and Balkan nationalists of various stripes, fostered mutual Russian-German distrust, and led indirectly to the secret Austro-German Dual Alliance of 1879.
See also Armies; Congress of Berlin; Russo-Turkish War.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Jelavich, Barbara. St. Petersburg and Moscow: Tsarist and Soviet Foreign Policy, 1814-1974. Bloomington, Ind., 1974.
Sumner, Benedict Humphrey. Russia and the Balkans, 1870-1880. Oxford, U. K., 1937.
Bruce W. Menning
SATIE, ERIK (1866-1925), French composer.
One of most influential and problematical composers of the twentieth century, Erik-Alfred-Leslie Satie was born on 17 May 1866 in the town of Honfleur, France, whose seascapes figure in many an impressionist painting. The family moved to Paris when he was four, but, after his mother’s death in 1872, Erik and his brother were sent back to their grandparents in Honfleur. Erik was an unruly student but showed some predilection for music. When he was twelve, he rejoined his father in Paris, and his formal schooling was never resumed. Within several months, his father remarried a pianist and salon composer, Eugenie Barnetche, who was determined that her stepson study piano at the Paris Conservatoire. Satie impressed his teachers with his fine tone, weak sight-reading, and general laziness. In fall 1882 he was dropped from his class for insufficient progress. A second stint (18851886), undertaken with a view to reducing his term of military service, was no more successful. But his father had meanwhile set up shop as a music publisher and sometime composer of popular songs and facile piano music. Erik soon followed his father’s example, writing piano waltzes and songs that may have benefited from his stepmother’s polishing. These began to be published in 1887, a crucial year that witnessed Satie’s first works of importance (because of their pathbreaking harmonic language), the Trois Sarabandes. Later that year, Satie left home and began frequenting the artists’ cabarets and cafes-concerts of Montmartre. After having himself announced as a gymnopediste in the Chat Noir, he wrote Trois Gymnopedies (1888), the haunting slow waltzes by which he is best known today.
The bohemian world of the Montmartre cabarets deeply affected Satie’s aesthetic priorities, which ran toward the esoteric and outrageous. His penchants for odd titles, notational puzzles, extravagant calligraphy, bizarre performance instructions, and harmonic schemes that had little to do with traditional tonality were manifest nearly from the start. He associated briefly (1891-1892) with the writer Josephin Peladan and wrote some pieces for Peladan’s Rosicrucian sect based on an ancient Greek scale. Soon Satie was imitating Peladan’s zanier pretensions, submitting himself (thrice) as a candidate to the Academie des Beaux-Arts, founding his own ‘‘church,’’ and publishing crackpot tracts. He also befriended Claude Debussy, who called him a ‘‘gentle, medieval musician wandered into this century for the joy of his friend’’ (Whiting, p. 111). The relationship was hardly an easy one, but it lasted until Debussy’s death. Off and on until 1909, Satie worked as a cabaret pianist and composer, writing songs for two prominent entertainers of the day, the satirist Vincent Hyspa and the chanteuse Paulette Darty. His work for Hyspa left an enduring mark on his compositional strategies, which perennially relied on parodic allusion. His work for Darty brought him into contact with the idiom of ragtime that was imported from the United States after 1900. A stylistic resume is provided by the Trois morceaux en forme de poire (1890-1903; Three pieces in the shape of a pear), a seven-movement anthology of short pieces drawn from his Rosicrucian and cabaret music.
In 1905 the determined autodidact entered the Schola Cantorum to study counterpoint. During the ensuing years, Satie honed his piano writing into a lean-textured, dissonant, but still whimsical style. In January 1911 sponsorship by Maurice Ravel drew him out of bohemian obscurity and into the limelight, a position Satie maintained for the rest of his career. While attention first attached to the harmonic audacity of his early works (the sobriquet ‘‘precursor of genius’’ would come to haunt him), the public soon caught up with the humoristic piano suites he was now writing. The Descriptions automatiques (1913; Automatic descriptions) and Embryons desseches (1913; Desiccated embryos) rely on techniques of parodic distortion of familiar musical materials learned in the cabarets, with a narrative overlay of fragmentary stories, which were not, however, to be read aloud in performance. The Sports et divertissements (1914; Sports and diversions) pose a daunting complex of musical, verbal, and visual imagery—for they add illustrations by Charles Martin and Satie’s calligraphy to the mix—a complex that challenges the very notion of the musical ‘‘work.’’ Satie became no less active as a writer of musical journalism, whimsical autobiography, and even an absurdist play, Le piege de Meduse (1913; Medusa’s trap).
In 1915 the poet Jean Cocteau took Satie under his wing. The high point of their several collaborations was surely the ballet Parade, which involved Pablo Picasso as set and costume designer, Leonide Massine as choreographer, and Sergei Diaghilev as producer. At its premiere in May 1917, Parade caused a stir (though not quite the riot touched off three years earlier by Le sacre du printemps [The rite of spring]). The noise-making instruments (sirens, typewriter, pistols) added to the orchestra made Satie notorious, even though they were Cocteau’s idea. Satie soon found himself at the head of a new ‘‘school’’ of young French composers (which included Darius Milhaud, Francis
Poulenc, Arthur Honegger, and Georges Auric) dubbed les six (by comparison with the Russian Five). Parade led to a string of further projects for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and Rolf de Mare’s Ballets Suedois, for whom he wrote his last work, Peldche (1924; No show today), with its cinematic interlude filmed by Rene; Clair. In these last projects, the solidity of Satie’s musical structure is in marked contrast to the absurdist scenarios. To those who bemoan Satie’s studied avoidance of the ‘‘serious,’’ one may recommend the ‘‘symphonic drama’’ Socrate (1918) and the gravely serene Nocturnes for piano (1919). Satie died on 1 July 1925 in Paris.
See also Avant-Garde; Debussy, Claude; Diaghilev, Sergei; Fin de Siecle; France; Picasso, Pablo; Ravel, Maurice.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Orledge, Robert. Satie the Composer. Cambridge, U. K., 1990.
Shattuck, Roger. The Banquet Years: The Arts in France, 1885-1918. New York, 1958. Rev. ed., published as The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I. New York, 1968.
Volta, Ornella, ed. Satie Seen through His Letters. Translated by Michael Bullock. London, 1989.
Whiting, Steven Moore. Satie the Bohemian: From Cabaret to Concert Hall. Oxford, U. K., 1999.
Steven M. Whiting
World History
