Galops galore
The composer Lumbye and the Tivoli Amusement Park in Copenhagen belong together. He was the gardens' very first music director back in 1843, and his tunes were sung and whistled everywhere round town by all and sundry. Lumbye wrote a lot of music specially for the new Tivoli Gardens - at the beginning this amounted to one galop for each of the park's attractions: The Big Dipper Galop (Rutschebane-Galop), The Merry-Go-Round Galop (Carouselbane-Galop), The Tivoli Bazaar Galop (Tivoli-Bazar-Galop), The Tivoli Steam Merry-Go-Round Galop (Tivoli Damp Carouselbane-Galop) and a plethora of others. Galops were also composed later in honour of other innovations of the period - for example The Telegraph Galop and The Copenhagen Steam Railway Galop - the latter complete with the lifelike chuff-chuffing sound of a steam locomotive!
People were mad about Lumbye's melodies, which came to play a major role in Copenhagen life. His music was played everywhere - in cafés, dance halls and at concerts - as well as at home in the sitting rooms of the middle class, where it became normal to have an upright piano and tinkle Lumbye on the ivories.
Waltz - big dance craze
Lumbye's music was the height of fashion. A craze for the waltz spread all over Europe and everyone was wild about the dance form. Rarely had such abandon been experienced in the annals of music! You grasped your partner and cast aside all prudishness to indulge in the glory of the waltz. And Lumbye also wrote waltzes for some of the most famous women of his era: The Johanne Louise (Heiberg) Waltz (Johanne Louise-Vals) for the eponymous literary salon hostess, the Jenny Lind Waltz (Jenny Lind-Vals) for the famed Swedish singer and the Queen Louise Waltz (Dronning Louise- Vals) for the Danish monarch's much loved commoner wife.
In Lumbye, Copenhageners felt they had their very own orchestral conductor, a man capable of composing music "à la Strauss" - Vienna's immortal Johann Strauss, the great beau idéal.
Festivity, peace and quiet
Also the Danish king was happy about Lumbye. Revolutions were rumbling round Europe, but as long as the Danes had their Tivoli Gardens and their Lumbye, peace prevailed and there was no danger of domestic insurrection. And a few years later King Frederik VII voluntarily dropped the absolute monarchy in Denmark ...
Finn Gravesen is an author and editor, his latest work being "Who owns the music?" ("Hvem ejer musikken?") (2006) commissioned by the Ministry of Culture.
Tivoli by Stillmann, 1863. Photo: Tivoli.