Cannon Galop

H.C. Lumbye was Copenhagen’s one-man equivalent of Vienna’s Strauss family. As director of music at the Tivoli Gardens for just under thirty years, he conducted hundreds of “Concerts à la Strauss” and created a vast repertoire of dance music - mainly waltzes, polkas and galops - which, though clearly based on Viennese models, has its own Nordic personality and its own military-bandish sound. The Cannon Galop was written in 1853, after the end of the Danish-German Three-Years War, when cannon fire could once again be a source of as much amusement as the popping corks of the same composer’s even more famous Champagne Galop.