Je te veux

Erik Satie’s most enduring commercial success came not with the musical eccentricities and enigmatically spare piano pieces for which he’s known today, but with the cabaret song Je te veux. This was composed some time in the 1890s (the date is uncertain) when he had failed to graduate from the Paris Conservatoire (twice over) and was scraping a living as a café pianist in Montmartre. It was written for a vaudeville singer, Paulette Darty, known as the “Queen of the slow waltzes”. He was her accompanist. And the song is indeed a slow waltz: sentimental in style but with words (by Henry Pacory) that are borderline erotic—from the directness of the title, “I want you”, to couplets like “Let your body be mine/And all my flesh is yours”. Achingly sad, the heart-on-sleeve appeal of the song would later be renounced as “vile” by its composer. But he nonetheless made several versions of it, including ones for brass band and full orchestra.