Dance of the Hours

Dance of the Hours, musical episode from Act III, scene 2, of Amilcare Ponchielli’s opera La gioconda that is often performed as a stand-alone orchestral work. In its original context—as a balletic interlude to entertain a party—it (and the entire opera) premiered in Milan on April 8, 1876. The popularity of the dance scene greatly exceeded that of the entire opera, and it became, for a time, one of the most frequently performed ballets in the world. Dance of the Hours remains widely known, though chiefly through nonopera media.

Ponchielli was a master of many types of composition, from operas to band music to solo piano pieces. As a teacher of composition at the Milan Conservatory, he numbered Giacomo Puccini among his students, and he was no doubt the most admired Italian opera composer of the generation between Giuseppe Verdi and Puccini. If Ponchielli’s operas (about a dozen of them) were seldom performed in the early 21st century, that is attributable to their poorly structured librettos rather than his music. Nevertheless, some orchestral excerpts, such as Dance of the Hours, escaped the fate of his larger works and lived on.

Perhaps the best-known modern reference to Dance of the Hours occurs in Disney’s 1940 film Fantasia, in which animated crocodiles and tutu-wearing hippopotamuses danced to its music. The parodist Allan Sherman produced another noteworthy version when he used bits of its melody for his song “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh” (1963), an amusing take on the American tradition of sending children to summer camp. Despite the tune’s wide recognition, however, few listeners can identify Dance of the Hours by title or composer.