The Parade of the Wooden Soldiers

The Parade of the Tin Soldiers (Die Parade der Zinnsoldaten), also known as The Parade of the Wooden Soldiers, is an instrumental musical character piece, in the form of a popular jaunty march, written by German composer Leon Jessel, in 1897.

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 1911, Russian impresario Nikita Balieff chose Jessel's whimsically rakish Parade of the Tin Soldiers for a choreography routine in his The Bat vaudeville revue, changing the title to "The Parade of the Wooden Soldiers". Balieff's wooden-soldier choreography referenced a legend regarding Tsar Paul I: that he left his parade grounds without issuing a "halt" order to the marching soldiers, so they marched to Siberia before being remembered and ordered back.

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.

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