learned something today

There's a dog food ad that sometimes runs here. It is an edited version (I think) of a longer British ad:



I thought, in the edited ad, that the man was a pilot from the epaulettes but I guess he is actually a security guard/night watchman? (And the full version of the ad is even sweeter than the short one - he is actually having lots of fun with the little dog)

Anyway. The music in it. Is an actual, for-real piece that was written like 100 years ago, by Eric Satie, no less:



(And yeah, I know: he looks like he's leering at you. It gives me the creeps a little too).

It's actually a "popular" song of the time, called Je Te Veux ("I want you," and yes, "want" in the sense you are thinking, the lyrics are pretty obvious). It was originally written for Paulette Darty, a popular singer of the day, but others since have performed it. (There's a Jessye Norman version on YouTube but the sound quality is not that great and it's a little hard to understand the lyrics)

It is actually available (in .pdf form) as a free score online from
here (I presume its copyright has lapsed; it came out in 1902). Yes, I printed myself a copy, might want to try it some day.

It's actually interesting in that it's a much-less-brooding (at least to my ears) piece than much of Satie's work, then again, he was writing for a particular singer and using an existing text. (There are also some pieces by, for example, Edward Elgar, that "feel" very uncharacteristic of the composer, for example, Salut D'Amour. )

And yes, I like that piece too. In some ways I am very much a sentimentalist in the choice of some of the pieces I want to learn. I'm not sure what it says about me that my repertoire is about 1/2 very cerebral JS Bach and about 1/2 super-sentimental turn-of-the-20th C. (or early 20th C) things.

I would never have thought much about "Je Te Veux" but as I was coming home from running an errand it came across Sirius XM and a few notes in I was all "That's the dogfood ad!"