As far as the gallop’s genesis goes, there is the following anecdote, which was handed down by Lumbye’s grandson, the conductor and composer, Tippe Lumbye:One evening, H.C. Lumbye had been invited to a fashionable party being held at the British embassy in Copenhagen. On his way to the celebration, though, Lumbye happened to pass by the tavern that was his familiar haunt. He then surrendered to his sudden urge to spend the evening in these more familiar surroundings. But when he got home later that evening and was confronted with his own family’s excitement, the composer felt compelled to offer an account telling of how, when visiting the party at the embassy – a place in which he had not so much as set his foot, as matters would have it – he had swilled down champagne and revelled in jubilation. In order for him to illustrate and enliven the story for the expectant family, he plunked himself down on the piano bench and summarily improvised his way forward into what later became the world famous Champagne Gallop.

Subsequently, Lumbye composed three more champagne gallops where he assigned, much like he does in his first Champagne Gallop, prominent roles within the symphony orchestra’s arsenal to the glockenspiel and even more especially, to the xylophone, featuring these percussion instruments in a way that pre-dates what other composers working on foreign soil did only much later on. None of these three pieces, however, ever came to attain anywhere near the level of popularity that his first stab in the genre garnered. One of Lumbye’s own day’s most cogent descriptions of Champagne Gallop stems, as a matter of fact, from the ballet master, Bournonville, who, among the “biographical sketches” found in the last volume of his memoirs, Mit Theaterliv (My Theatre Life) (1878, pp. 262-266), says of the work:

[...] although it is far from the case that I attribute the whole basis of Lumbye’s fame to his Champagne Gallop, I simply must dwell for a moment on the bubbling vinification that effervesces in the 1st part of the piece: the cork pops off with a resounding bang and the glasses are filled up in the 2nd part. The glass is raised, a toast is proposed, the sparkling nectar is imbibed to the last drop in the 3rd part and giddy transports of delight fill up the whole 4th part until the welcome “da capo” brings a new bottle onto the table and everyone joins in a tumultuous bacchanal!

In Bournonville’s ballet divertissement, Maritana, presented at the Court Theatre, the gallop was played in its entirety twice during the performance. As a consequence of its resounding appeal before the public, the divertissement was subsequently transferred to The Royal Theatre’s main stage, where it was presented for the first time on 9 May 1847.

The present edition of Maritana is based on Lumbye’s autograph scores from 1846 for the Bolero and the Jaleo movements as well as on the original orchestral parts for the ballet divertissement Maritana from 1847. The parts for the Champagne Gallop represent one of the oldest surviving sources of this famous composition, seeing that Lumbye’s original score and the individual parts used for the work’s premiere in Tivoli in 1845 were, in all probability, lost or destroyed in the conflagration that broke out in 1944 on the night between June 24th and 25th, as a direct result of counter-resistance sabotage reprisals perpetrated by the Peter group, whose members were also members of the Schalburg Corps. The most noticeable difference from the previously known sources is that the orchestration of Champagne Gallop in Maritana includes a cornet part, which does not appear in any of the other contemporary sources.