The Grossvatertanz (Grandfather Dance) is a German dance tune from the 17th century. It is generally considered a traditional folk tune.
It is a tripartite tune:
The first part was sung to the words:
Und als der Großvater die Großmutter nahm,
Da war der Großvater ein Bräutigam
New lyrics to the first part of the tune were written by Klamer Eberhard Karl Schmidt in 1794[1] and August Friedrich Ernst Langbein in 1812,[2] both "lengthy and dull pieces of ornate poetry" (Franz Magnus Böhme, 1886).[3] Carl Gottlieb Hering [de] (1766–1853) in 1823 composed a new tune to Langbein's lyrics,[4] for which he has erroneously been claimed to be the real author.[5]
For many years, it was regularly played and danced at the end of wedding celebrations, and became known as the Kehraus ("finale", lit. turn-out).[6] It became so associated with marriage that when Louis Spohr wrote a Festival March for the wedding of Princess Marie of Hesse to the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen in 1825, he was required to quote the Grossvater Tanz in it.
Robert Schumann quoted the Grossvatertanz in a number of works, among them:
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky also quotes the tune in act 1 of his ballet The Nutcracker (1892). It appears at the end of the Christmas party. Tchaikovsky was a great admirer of Schumann's music, but it is not clear whether this was meant as some sort of tribute to Schumann or simply as an appropriate tune to use in music depicting the winding up of a happy family event.[7]
More recently, the German composer Jörg Widmann has used the Grossvatertanz in his Third String Quartet, "Jagdquartett" (2003), to evoke a hunt.[8][9]
