From singspiel to song contest –
160 years of dance music, music for the theatre, revue and film music

By Stig Mervild
The creative genius of Lumbye
In order to understand the concept of light music in Denmark, it is necessary to go back a century and a half and begin with the revolutionary achievements of H.C.Lumbye (1810- 1874), a musical genius whose idiolect was Viennese and down-to-earth Danish at one and the same time. Conventional chronology is not applicable here: we have to speak instead of the “pre-Lumbye" and "post-Lumbye" eras. The enthusiasm which he aroused among laymen and the respect which he won among the learned are unprecented and unparalleled to this day. Lumbye came like a bolt out of the blue - or rather, like a fireworks display which made high and low alike forget the unrest caused partly by military victories and defeats, and partly by developments in the social and technological spheres that were both exhilarating and frightening. Throughout Europe people sought refuge from national and social upheavals in new kinds of popular entertainment, and a centre of this development was Vienna, where Joseph Lanner and Johann Strauss the Elder had established a new idiom with their dance tunes. An echo of their music reached Denmark in 1839, when a so-called Steyrmark ensemble gave "Concerts à la Strauss" in Copenhagen. The 29-year-old Lumbye was wildly enthusiastic, and the Viennese had scarcely left town before he assembled an orchestra and started giving his own concerts "à la Strauss." For a decade or so, Lumbye as a young military orchestra player had been writing dance music in the traditional Viennese style. Now his career as a composer really got off the ground, and the results were altogether delightful. When Georg Carstensen opened his Tivoli Pleasure Gardens in 1843, Lumbye was the obvious candidate for the post of musical director. In between his Tivoli seasons he toured Europe with success; even the great Berlioz praised his Danish colleague effusively.			H. C. Lumbye was appointed musical director of Tivoli when the gardens opened in 1843
Lumbye has left us nearly five hundred compositions. In addition to his songs and dances there are works like his programmatic orchestral fantasy Drømmebilleder ("Dream Images') and his double concerto in one movement Concert Polka for Two Violins, which would surely be a hit for violin virtuosos. But above all (and above all other composers!) Lumbye was the writer of dance music par excellence, and he was one of those whom the choreographer August Bournonville (1805-1879) was not slow to recruit. In particular he was the tireless supplier of the ballrooms, a composer who wrote for and about his own time. Like the Viennese he raised monuments to contemporary events and personalities, writing marches for the princes of Europe and waltzes and polkas for famous artists. A mere bagatelle like Kjøbenhavns Jernbane Damp-Galop ("The Copenhagen Steam Railway Gallop") is actually "great" music in its genre, and another gallop, the Salute to August Bournonville, is of the same calibre. Although Lumbye has often been called "the Danish Strauss (the Younger)", he was every bit as distinctively Danish as Strauss was Austrian. For that matter, when Lumbye first popped the cork in his Champagne Galop the younger Strauss was not much more than a teenager.			The most famous composition by Lumbye is the Champagne Gallop
From 'singspiel' to  operetta and revue By an ironic accident, those composers who were regarded as most Danish in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries - Schulz, Kunzen, Weyse and Kuhlau - were all German-born, and from Germany the Singspiel was also introduced. Around 1780 the German J.E. Hartmann (1726-1793) had written music for Johannes Ewald's plays, while the Italian Paolo Scalabrini (1713-1806) had added his melodic commentary to J.H. Wessel's parody of tragedy. Not until c.1790, however, do we encounter the Singspiele which were to lead on in a roundabout fashion to the operetta. These were patriotic descriptions of idealised folk life, musically enriched by J.A.P.Schulz (1747-1800), and here we find the old ballads which were being piously revived all over Europe. The Singspiel entitled Sovedrikken ("The Sleeping Draught") with music by C.E.F. Weyse (1774- 1842) includes the oldest of our three best known and best loved Danish serenades, the ancestor of Lange-Müller's and Olfert Jespersen's "hits". Another foreign influence was that of the French opera comique, exemplified by the Royal Theatre's production in 1806 of Ungdom og Galskab ("Youth and Madness") by the Swiss-born Edouard DuPuy (1770-1822).
Of all these surprisingly well acclimatised musical immigrants, Friedrich Kuhlau (1786-1832) came to be the best known outside Denmark. He was a serious composer whose name is often mentioned in the same breath as that of Beethoven; his inclusion in a survey of light music is due to the fact that he wrote the score for Elverhøj (“The Elf's Hill"), the nationalistic theatre piece from 1828 by J.L. Heiberg (1791- 1860). No other work in the history of the Danish musical theatre has achieved anything approaching the popularity of Elverhøj, which has been performed nearly a thousand times on the stage of the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen. Every child in the country knows and loves - perhaps unconsciously - the many divertissements  which here received their final form at Kuhlau's hands: the ballad-like songs, the dance of the fairy girls, the children's dance, the minuet and the song of King Christian. Three years earlier Heiberg had launched yet another type of Singspiel, again French in inspiration, namely the vaudeville. There are several theories as to the origin of this word; one of them, which would derive it from the French phrase voix de ville ("the voice of the city"), is admittedly rather doubtful but reminds us in a Danish context of the street ballads which the musically gifted Heiberg wrote much later and set to music of his own composition. lt would be no great flight of the imagination to think of these ballads by Heiberg as the first seeds of the revue songs of the present day. A couple of generations were to elapse before another stage piece was produced that even remotely approached Elverhøj in popularity. This was Der var engang ("Once upon a Time") by Holger Drachmann and P.E. Lange-Müller (1850-1926), a version of Hans Christian Andersen's story about the swineherd and the princess that is both lyrical, funny, colourful and festive. Lange-Müller had tried his hand at opera a couple of times, but without revealing any real talent for it. What he did have a gift for was incidental music with its instant atmospheric effects, and in this work we have a whole series of memorable examples: the overture, the interlude, the kitchen music, the music for the banquet, the music for the hunters and the gypsies, the serenade (with its mysterious and surely quite unintentional quotation from Saint-Saëns second piano concerto), and the Midsommervise ("Midsummer Song"), which for a century has been the national anthem of Danish midsummer festivals.			Friedrich Kuhlau composed music for the extremely popular nationalistic play Elverhøj
A decade later the man in the street (and the better class of society as well) was exposed to another very beautiful serenade; and if this tune was even more difficult to hum than Lange- Müller's serenade had been, the ballad of the two knights Sir Rap and Sir Ro provided ample compensation. This ballad and the new serenade were both from the operetta Molboerne ("The Men from Mols"), whose composer Olfert Jespersen (1863-1932) played an influential role both directly and indirectly in the development of Danish light music. Olfert Jespersen had worked in his youth both as a variety pianist and as an orchestra director at several theatres in Copenhagen. As musical director at the Zoological Gardens he achieved a popularity reminiscent of that of Lumbye at Tivoli. But above all he became the leading, and in fact the decisively innovative, supplier of music to the new fad of the turn of the century - the revue. His music was joyful and touching by turns: it was sung in every parlour and whistled on every street corner. Molboerne is not the first Danish operetta, as has sometimes been stated. Heiberg had admittedly attached that label seventy years earlier to Et Eventyr i Rosenborg Have ("An Adventure in the Gardens of Rosenborg"), which was Weyse's experiment in the opéra comique style. Weyse's work was not, however, an operetta in the modern sense. For that the Danish public had to wait until the tale of the swineherd and the princess was used in 1886 (the year before Drachmann and Lange-Müller’s Der var engang) by the tasteful - and in some people's minds perhaps too tasteful - Johan Bartholdy (1853-1904).			Olfert Jespersen was a prolific composer of popular songs for revues
Before and after Bournonville
Should it be argued that light music and the ballet are artistically incompatible, there are plenty of facts to disprove it. The ballet may not be primarily intended to arouse the enthusiasm of the man in the street for a more "refined" type of entertainment; but the real beginnings of the Danish ballet can be traced to the year 1726, when the Royal Theatre, only four years after it had opened, hired a French dancing master to attract bigger audiences with his divertissements. Later the ballet element became an important ingredient in Schulz' Singspiele. Meantime Vincenzo Galeotti had become choreographer to the Royal Theatre, and it was he who discovered the young orchestra member Claus Schall (1757-1835), whom Galeotti and others regarded as "born to write ballet music." Only Kuhlau complained that "this Schall fellow can't write eight bars without breaking some quite elementary rule of composition." Technical deficiencies did not prevent Schall from being appointed official dance composer to the court and from laying, together with Galeotti, the foundations of the structure on which Bournonville was to build.			August Bournonville's famous ballets were created to scores which included popular tunes like the Wedding Waltz by  Niels W. Gade
One of the many factors which enabled August Bournonville to renew the ballet genre was his innate and well developed musicality. He handpicked his "own" composers according to their special gifts of expression, which is why we often find that the music for his ballets was written by more than one man. An example is Et Folkesagn ("A Folk Legend") to music by J.P.E. Hartmann (1805-1900) and N.W. Gade (1817-1890). And if Bournonville needed a sweeping gallop for a finale, he sent for Lumbye! Schall's successor as Bournonville's house composer was J.F. Frøhlich (1806-1860). His best known piece is undoubtedly the march from the finale of the ballet Erik Menveds Barndom ("The Childhood of King Erik Menved"), which in the composer's own rearrangement was (and still is) played all over the country under the title of Riberhusmarchen ("The Riberhus Castle March"). Simon H. Paulli (1810-1891) was a slightly younger contemporary who, alone or in collaboration with others, wrote the scores of some ten Bournonville ballets. Many Danish theatregoers (and in our days television viewers too) will nod their heads in recognition of the title of one of his musical smash hits, the tarantella from Napoli.			Napoli - the tarantella
When Bournonville died five years after Lumbye in 1879, the purveyor of dance music to the new generation was still a boy of twelve. This was Fini Henriques (1867-1940), whom all the world knew simply by his Christian name of Fini, a genuine child prodigy who retained his childlike - and prodigious - qualities all his life. Henriques was a violinist, or rather fiddler, of God-given talent. lt seems entirely natural that his best loved piece of musical theatre should be a fairytale ballet, Den Lille Havfrue ("The Little Mermaid'). The word "dance” recurs in many of his titles. After a concert he was rarely allowed to leave the platform without giving Myggedansen ("The Dance of the Mosquitoes") and Djævledansen ("The Devils' Dance") as an eneore. And the concluding gallop from Den Lille Havfrue is, as he himself entitled it, a true "Dance of Joy in Living." Henriques is surely the one composer who can be compared with Lumbye without suffering from the comparison. At the turn of the century the mythological, historical and nationalistic themes of the ballet were gradually replaced by new and more varied subjects. Young choreographers such as Børge Ralov and Harald Lander changed the style of the dance without repudiating or forgetting the Bournonville tradition. Emil Reesen (1887- 1964) was one of the new ballet composers who in his youth had been successful in the field of light music, but who later, as conductor of the Danish radio orchestra and other major orchestras, went over to the symphonic camp; at the beginning of the 1930s he wrote the ballet scores Gaucho and Gudindernes Strid ("The Goddesses' Quarrel"), and in 1950 he collaborated with Ralov on the first Danish television ballet, Video.			A selection of Fini Henriques tuneful orchestral pieces were recently  released on CD
Harald Lander collaborated with Knudåge Riisager (1897-1974) on a series of excellent ballets including Etudes, which is based on the famous (or, from the student's point of view, infamous) piano exercises of Carl Czerny and has been adopted into the international repertoire. Riisager also recreated the legend of Slaraffenland (“The Land of Cockaigne”), that marvellous land of milk and honey where roasted fowls fly into men's mouths; the scre of this ballet suite alternates between lyricaI sweetness and riotous humour, with Riisager mixing wit and seriousness in almost equal portions. Finally, the organist Bernhard Christensen (1906-2004), a true Jekyll and Hyde of the musical profession, made an innovative contribution to the ballet repertoire by introducing the rhythms and sounds of jazz. From the dance floor Lumbye's successors furnished both the popular d the more refined dancing establishments with a regular supply of new tunes that were serviceable and worth listening to, but they did not make the same lasting impression as their famous predecessors in the genre. One reason for this was doubtless that new rhythms and new dances were imported from abroad with music already attached. There is, however, one notable exception to this rule. Not since the "real" Johann Strauss gave the world the waltz to end waltzes, An der schönen blauen Donau, has a dance tune - often camouflaged, but always retaining the distinctive mark of its composer’s original inspiration - attained such international fame as the tango to end all tangoes, Jealousy by the Danish composer Jacob Gade (1879-1968).			Jacob Gade's Jalousie is one of the best known tangos ever written
From operetta and revue to film music and song contest
Bartholdy and Jespersen's operettas did not release a flood of Danish contributions to the genre. Examples were indeed seen in the theatres, but most of them were imported. Perhaps our composers were afraid of competing the great names like Suppé, Offenbach, Strauss, Millöcker and Sullivan, or from more cent generations with Lehár, Oscar Straus, Kálmán, Stolz and Kollo. Emil Reesen was one of those who presented foreign operettas; in the forties he himself wrote a couple of well turned pieces, Gadeprincessen ("The Princess of the Sreet") and Farinelli, of which the latter was an even greater success than the former. About 1950 Radio Denmark produced a so-called “radio operetta” entitled Livet er ingen Operette (“Life is No Operetta”). The term radio operetta had not been used before, and has only once been used since, namely in connection with Carlo Thomsen's Smil til Verden ("Smile to the World"). The first of these two examples of the genre had music by Poul London (1904-89) and was a successful though avowed experiment: in the opinion of the critics it was "not profound," which is hardly something one can expect of an operetta in any case, but "pleasant to listen to". What more could the listener expect? Like Reesen, London was an experienced theatre music director and a thoroughly competent arranger and composer.			A popular 1961 TV production of Reesen's Farinalli is now available on DVD
One of the most appealing personalities in.the light music field was Kai Normann Andersen (1900-1967), a natural musical talent who began his career as a bank clerk but soon began to pursue serious studies in musical theory, and eventually gave up his job in banking to pursue his calling as a composer and as musical director of revue productions in Copenhagen. In contrast to the bulk of revue music, which is written to be remembered for an evening or a season at the very most, Normann Andersen's melodies were not just striking, elegant and sober but sufficiently cultivated to survive as "Danish songs." From revue he progressed to film scores and music for straight plays. In the war years his music became steadily more serious, though without losing its good humour and immediate popular appeal. His theatre scores for works by Kaj Munk and Kjell Abell will retain their place in the history of Danish music. Hans Schreiber (1912-1969), who was more than twenty years junior to Normann Andersen, left us at the time of his early death with an extensive and versatile body of music ranging in sentiment from farce to tragedy. Elegance is again a key word, but it is elegance tempered with reserve: Normann Andersen had warmth but Schreiber was the master of wit and satire. Both composers wrote for the serious theatre, and for those who know their respective styles it seems natural that Normann Andersen did the music for Abell's Silkeborg, while Schreiber was responsible for the score when the Royal Theatre staged Shakespeare's Macbeth in 1943. If Olfert Jespersen had few followers in the operetta genre, he founded a virtual school of revue composers: in the history of Danish popular entertainment there seems to have been an unending supply of competent talent to provide a good tune with which to dot the i's and cross the t's of a revue text. lt is a matter of taste which individuals should be singled out for mention; names that would appear on the lists of most connoisseurs are those of Edvard Brink (1883-1970), Elith Worsing (1892-1925), Sven Gyldmark (1904-1981), Amdi Riis (1911-1965) and Aage Stentoft (1914-90).			Kaj Normann Andersen with Ellen Gottschalch.Like Hans Shreiber, Normann Andersen composed a series of evergreens
A special position is occupied by Bent Fabricius-Bjerre (b. 1924), who like many other revue composers has also written music for Danish films. He has achieved great popularity with his radio and television series: the signature tune Alley Cat quickly won international success in the same class as Gade's tango. But Fabricius-Bjerre's style is highly individual, and he is very much thought of as the quiet-spoken aristocrat of light music who has somehow stolen his way into the homes of both high and low with the help of the electronic media. One sub-genre within light music, the palm court style, is dying out through no fault of its own. Johan Bartholdy's little string serenade Strophe, has been called the prototype of this style in Denmark, and since Bartholdy's time such music has been played in fashionable restaurants by Steyrmark-type ensembles like Teddy Petersen's Orchestra, not to mention in more modest cafes and teashops by duos and trios and in private homes by two or four hands on the piano; one might even say that it has served as a kind of popular chamber music. Examples of composers that deserve to be listed here are Hugo Gyldmark (1899-1971), Bjarne Høyer (1912-91) and Erik Rostrup Bøyesen (1915-?). This kind of live music is disappearing for obvious economic reasons, and for perhaps quite other reasons it will scarcely be revived. One of the status symbols of the international popular music industry today is the European Song Contest. Denmark provided the winning song in 1963, when Otto Francher (1921-88) competed with his Dansevise ("I Love You"). Francker's song was an archetypal Danish tune, not at all a stylistic "compromise candidate" in a watered-down international idiom. That year at least the nations of the world seem to have realised that there is actually something quite respectable by the name of Danish light or popular music.			Bent Fabricius-Bjerre - composer of the piano hit Alley Cat and music for the 14 Olsen Gang films
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First published in 1987 in: Music in Denmark. Edited by Knud Ketting, Danish Music Information Centre. Published by The Danish Cultural Institute, Copenhagen 1987. - The text has been slightly edited for this web publication.