Hans Christian Lumbye

The Strauss of the North, by common consent of his own century. Hans Christian Lumbye was born in Copenhagen in 1810 and died there in 1874, and from 1843 until 1872 he was the presiding musician of the Tivoli Gardens, where he conducted the orchestra he had formed and wrote the galops, polkas and waltzes that kept it in repertoire. The Champagne Galop and the Copenhagen Steam Railway Galop, with its whistles and hissing steam, are the pieces that outlived him; the Tivoli orchestra still plays them. His Concert Polka for Two Violins was heard in the concert for the Day of Varna on 15 August 2026 under Nayden Todorov. His training was done in Randers and Odense, and he was playing the trumpet in a military band at fourteen and had joined the Horse Guards in Copenhagen by 1829; the turn came in 1839, when a visiting Viennese orchestra played him the music of Johann Strauss the elder. In 1845 he wrote the waltz Souvenir de Jenny Lind for the Swedish singer.