Tuesday, March 22, 2022

We Critique Etsy's Mozart Commercial

Today I was looking over my Etsy statistics and saw a notice from Etsy telling me how they are working to find us as many customers as possible. There was a button you could click that said, "See what we've done."

I clicked it. Ask not what you can do for Etsy, ask what Etsy can do for you!

One thing they did was list commercials they ran, along with links so you could watch them. One of them, a commercial that ran in Germany, was titled "Mozart."

How could I resist?

That is the commercial up above. It's kind of fun. There is this kid who is playing the Andante from K. 545, the C major sonata for beginners that all kids play. Let me tell you this, I loved that sonata when I was little and I love it now, just as much, if not more. That Andante -- so beautiful!!

Keep in mind however, this is the, ahem, Music Critic web log. So I must criticize this commercial.

One, they go through all the trouble to let you glimpse the piano score, they should show us the right sonata. Instead they show us another Mozart sonata, in F. I forget the Kochel number but I played that as a kid too. I love that as much as I love K. 545. But show us the sonata the kid is supposed to be playing. Lots of people read music and they can tell.

Another criticism, they can't really give us the music Mozart wrote. You get a few bars over and over and eventually it lapses into this New Age-y thing.

Also in the commercial, maybe there is a language barrier -- it seems I understand German only when Thomas Hampson is speaking it. However I cannot quite grasp what makes this kid in the commercial so addled. He looks through the whole ad as if something is not quite right. You can play the piano, you're playing Mozart, life cannot be that bad.

Whatever, at the end you get the payoff -- he gets a Mozart gift! 



No comments:

Post a Comment