The Dance of the Hours

The Dance of the Hours
music by Amilcare Ponchielli

Welcome to Fun-Time Friday! You may be wondering how a piece of music without any lyrics can be the subject of this Lenten blog. A valid question, I’ll grant you, but Amilcare Ponchielli’s music was long ago repurposed into something far beyond what he could have dreamed of. First came the dancing ostriches and hippopotami in tutus in Walt Disney’s Fantasia. Then came the clanging pipes and honking horns of Spike Jones. Then came multiple lyric versions dealing with everything from homesick campers to processed cheese to fabric softener to cute little puppies without fleas. Still don’t know how we’re going to work all this into Lent? Well, let’s see what happens!

The original Dance of the Hours is a ballet segment in Ponchielli’s opera La Gioconda and has become one of the most popular pieces in ballet history. Those who know things about opera state that the 1880 version of La Gioconda is the most famous Italian Grande Opera between Verdi’s Aida (1871) and Otello (1887).

But that’s not what we all remember it for, is it? You have to wonder, when Mr Ponchielli composed his ballet within an opera, if he didn’t envision beautiful ballerinas en pointe, making lovely tableaux. Maybe that’s how it worked until 1940. But then, Walter Elias Disney and his team of animators changed forever how we think about Amilcare Ponchielli’s music, and gave us accompanying visual images that maybe only recently have been replaced (more on that in a moment).

Disney’s version was one of the eight classical pieces in Fantasia, an experiment in animating the works of Bach, Beethoven, Stravinsky, and other great composers. For Ponchielli’s Dance of the Hours, the Disney team gave us corps of ostriches and elephants before introducing the prima ballerina, a tutu-bedecked hippopotamus. When the villainous Ben Ali Gator and his troops show up, chaos ensues and the set eventually comes crashing down.

Disney had already put a crack in the dam of The Dance of the Hours’ respectability. Spike Jones made that crack wider in 1943 when he and his orchestra used Ponchielli’s music to accompany a parody of the Indianapolis 500. The musical themes are introduced by perfectly tuned car horns and pipes.

The dam finally broke in 1963 when Allan Sherman took some of his son’s letters from camp (including references to his real-life friends Joe Spivy, Leonard Skinner and Jeffrey Hardy) and reworked them into lyrics set to Ponchielli’s ballet music. Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah went to number 2 on the Billboard chart and launched Mr Sherman into celebrity – kind of the Weird Al Yankovich of his day.

Hello muddah, hello faddah
Here I am at Camp Granada
Camp is very entertaining
And they say we'll have some fun if it stops raining.

I went hiking with Joe Spivy
He developed poison ivy
You remember Leonard Skinner
He got ptomaine poison last night after dinner.

It’s obvious what’s going on here. His son is trying, obliquely, to raise enough concern that his parents will be on the next train to the Poconos. He turns up the heat a little:

All the counselors hate the waiters
And the lake has alligators
And the head coach wants no sissies
So he reads to us from something called Ulysses.

How I don't want this to scare ya
But my bunkmate has malaria
You remember Jeffrey Hardy
They're about to organize a searching party.

And now by the bridge, sublety is out the window. I’ve been one of those homesick kids at camp and I agree that there comes a time when you just pour your heart out:

Take me home, oh muddah, faddah
Take me home, I hate Granada
Don't leave me out in the forest where
I might get eaten by a bear.
Take me home I promise I will not make noise
Or mess the house with other boys.
Oh please don't make me stay
I've been here one whole day.

In case the honesty angle doesn’t work, he decides on an approach that would make Dr Kübler-Ross proud:

Dearest faddah, darling muddah,
How's my precious little bruddah
Let me come home, if you miss me
I would even let Aunt Bertha hug and kiss me.

But then, everything changes in a moment:

Wait a minute, it's stopped hailing.
Guys are swimming, gals are sailing
Playing baseball, gee that's better
Muddah, faddah kindly disregard this letter.

Hasn’t this happened to all of us? Just when things look their bleakest, the sun comes out. The Psalmist reminds us, in Psalm 37:5, of the importance of trust and patience:

Commit your way to the Lord;
Trust in Him and He will do it

And in verse 7:

Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for Him

I mentioned earlier that the Disney images that most of us now see when we hear Ponchielli’s music may have been supplanted recently. I was thinking about those cute puppies in the Advantix ad. The little Golden Retriever puppy writes home to his parents, and I think Allan Sherman would be proud:

Swimming hiking,
And tent pitching
They're not biting,
I'm not itching!
Can't wait to show you,
All my new tricks
Thanks again for sending me K9 Advantix!

I wonder how Mr Ponchielli feels about all these variations based on his music. In the Old Testament, we know of Joseph (of the Technicolor Dreamcoat story) who is betrayed by his brothers. He suffers hardship after hardship, but through it all, we are told that “the Lord was with Joseph”. And sure enough, Joseph rises to prominence. When he is reconciled with his brothers, they are worried that he will hold a grudge. He tells his brothers not to worry: “You may have intended it for evil, but the Lord intended it for good.”

We can be fairly certain the Amilcare Ponchielli did not intend his ballet music to be danced by hippos, honked by racecars, or used as a vehicle to sing about summer camp or canine flea preventative medicine. But when I was searching the internet for information about the music, I came across a YouTube file showing the entire ballet as seriously performed with the opera company in Madrid, Spain. And how many people would even have given it a look if they didn’t already know the music from Disney, Sherman, or Advantix?

Take delight in the Lord
And He will give you the desires of your heart.
- Psalm 37:4