Tuesday 29 June 2010
Tune of the Day: Waves of the Danube
aka “The Anniversary Song”
This waltz was composed by Romanian military band leader and composer Iosif Ivanovici, and is one of the most famous Romanian tunes in the world. The piece was first published in Bucharest in 1880; a few years later, composer Emile Waldteufel made an orchestration of the song, which was performed for the first time at the 1889 Paris Exposition, and took the audience by storm.
In the United States, “Waves of the Danube” became known only half a century later, when Al Jolson and Saul Chaplin published it in 1946 under the name of “The Anniversary Song” (“Oh, how we danced on the night we were wed”). Recorded by Al Jolson, the song first reached the Billboard magazine charts in February 1947 and lasted 14 weeks on the chart, peaking at #2.