Léon Jessel - The Parade of the Tin Soldiers (1897)

Leon Jessel, or Léon Jessel (22 January 1871 – 4 January 1942) was a German composer of operettas and light classical music pieces. Today he is best known internationally as the composer of the popular jaunty march The Parade of the Tin Soldiers, also known as The Parade of the Wooden Soldiers. Jessel was a prolific composer who wrote hundreds of light orchestral pieces, piano pieces, songs, waltzes, mazurkas, marches, choruses, and other salon music. He achieved considerable acclaim with a number of his operettas — in particular Schwarzwaldmädel (Black Forest Girl), which remains popular to this day.

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Parade of the Tin Soldiers, Op. 123 (1897)

Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Sir Charles Groves

The Parade of the Tin Soldiers was originally composed for solo piano. Jessel later published it for orchestra in 1905, as Opus 123. Today it is also a popular tune for marching bands, concert bands, and small orchestras, and for extremely diverse alternate instrumentations as well.

Since the early 1920s, the piece has been very popular in the U.S., and has also been frequently performed and recorded worldwide. A song, "The Parade of the Wooden Soldiers", was also created from the piece in 1922, with English lyrics by Ballard MacDonald.

Recordings of The Parade of the Tin Soldiers were made in late 1910 and in 1911 and distributed internationally, and Jessel republished the sheet music internationally as well in 1911. In 1912, John Philip Sousa and his band played it at the Hippodrome Theatre in New York City.

In December 1920 Nikita Balieff's La Chauve-Souris (The Bat) revue reached Paris, to great acclaim, and in 1922 it was brought to Broadway. Balieff's entertainingly choreographed wooden-soldiers showpiece, with Jessel's popular tune, was a sensation, and a by-demand mainstay of his extremely long-running U.S. production.

Balieff's Chauve-Souris routine greatly popularized Jessel's music, and in 1922 multiple editions of the sheet music were published in the U.S. — in fox-trot, march, and concert arrangements, and for numerous instrumentations: voice and piano, with lyrics by Ballard MacDonald; male quartet; small orchestra; full orchestra; violin, piano, and cello; military band; mandolin solo; mandolin and guitar; mandolin and piano; and mandolin, guitar, and piano. In 1923, Lee DeForest filmed The Parade of the Wooden Soldiers, performed by Balieff's company, in the DeForest Phonofilm sound-on-film process. The film premiered on April 15, 1923 at the Rivoli Theater in New York City, and is now in the Maurice Zouary collection at the Library of Congress.

In 1922, the instrumental version of The Parade of the Wooden Soldiers was a hit single performed by Carl Fenton's Orchestra. Hit versions were also recorded by the Vincent Lopez Orchestra in 1922 and by Paul Whiteman and his Orchestra in 1923.

A Betty Boop cartoon, Parade of the Wooden Soldiers, was created with the music in 1933. Also in 1933, The Rockettes began annually performing their own choreographed version of the piece, based on Balieff's original, in their Radio City Christmas Spectacular. The melody was also used in the Disney cartoon Polar Trappers (1938) to accompany a scene where penguins march behind Donald Duck as he tries to lure them to a trap.

Though far less often heard than Jessel's original instrumental piece, Ballard MacDonald wrote English song lyrics for the tune, in 1922.

Jessel's operettas were popular, nationalistic, and very German: Schwarzwaldmädel was a favorite of Hitler and Himmler. Because of this, and because of his own conservative nationalistic ideology, and because his second wife Anna joined the Nazi party in 1932, Jessel expected acceptance in Germany even during and after the Nazi rise to power. Instead, he was rejected by the Nazi leadership because of his Jewish descent, even though he had converted to Christianity in 1894, and performances of his works were banned in 1933. Jessel's last major work was his 1933 operetta Junger Wein (Young Wine), and his biographer Albrecht Dümling believes that he was a victim of targeted boycott measures as early as 1927.

In 1937, he was forced out of the Reichsmusikkammer (the State Music Institute), and recordings and distribution of his works were prohibited. In 1941, a house search turned up a 1939 letter to his librettist William Sterk in Vienna, in which Jessel had written: "I cannot work in a time when hatred of Jews threatens my people with destruction, where I do not know when that gruesome fate will likewise be knocking at my door." On 15 December 1941 Jessel was arrested and delivered to the Gestapo in Berlin. He was tortured by the Gestapo in a basement of the Police Bureau at Alexanderplatz and subsequently died on 4 January 1942 in the Berlin Jewish Hospital. He was 70.